How do you compensate continued field errors?

[Charles Wesley Browning]

We are battling the same problem today, that many company owners have delt with in the past and that is continously paying your staff when things go wrong. I am not above making a mistake or screwing something up by no means. Repeatedly we have instructed crews to download filed information on a daily basis. But today the phone rings and the field time spent for the past 4 days at the raw cost of $1800.00 per day per crew the data decided to leave its comfortable world inside of the data collector and go to data heaven not leaving a single trace of its existence behind. Now I did not witness the actual departing but my wallete did. Project is due this Friday and just estimating the recop time puts us behind.

Any thoughts

[Chris Root]

If they are continued, your repeat offender should be fired. A 4 day ($7400) screw up like this when they consciously decided to go against company policy is unacceptable and should result, in the least, days off without pay. In this market, they will not quit like they would any other time, and will pay the punishment and hopefully learn from it. If they have done this before, I'd say it's time for them to find somewhere else to ruin budgets.

[Charles Wesley Browning]

Thanks Chris!

[Eric Colburn]

I've been there and I feel your pain. I know that doesn't help you out very much but you're not alone in this. Unfortunately education is expensive and when you have a situation like this you have no choice but to let the responsible employee(s) go immediately, if not sooner. What I've found with individuals like this is that they don't change, only getting worse with time, and that money is no object to them -At least not your money. As long as they get a paycheck every week they could care less about anything or anyone else. And, they know an easy "mark" when they've got one. In better times they could get away with this and float from business to business like a plague on our profession- good luck to them in today's world.

Firing someone is very difficult, no one likes doing it (and if they do there's something wrong with them) but what I've learned over the years is to do it sooner than later. The longer you wait the worse things get. I doubt you can do it, but wouldn't be interesting if you could garner their wages or submit a bill to them for $7,200! Doesn't matter, hopefully you've already let them go and you'll not have to deal with them ever again - Now that's priceless!

The moral of this story may very well be that while there are some "bad apples" out there, you just have to pick them out of the barrel, dispose of them appropriately, and search for and replace them with a few "good apples". They are out there.

[John A Thompson]

Fire them..don't fire them. What I want to know is what sort of data collection are you using?? I have had boss's harp on and have harped myself on this subject, for other reasons though. I have NEVER lost data !!!! EVER!! How can this happen?!? are you sure the guy isn't going to the bar during the day and then telling you the data is lost?

[Mark Ware]

This is grounds for dismissal! If you let them get away with it, it will happen again. I now from experience that it is very difficult to get things done the way you need them to be done, but this is over the top. There are plenty of qualified field hands out there right now - get some that listen!

Just my opinion,

D. Mark Ware, PLS
President
Ware Enterprises, Inc.