Audit Week & Ellenfoot Food Place

The low frequency of my posts this week has been, largely, due to it being audit week at work. It's not that I had to work overtime or anything. It's just that your brain gets fried when you have to spend hours analysing your own work - on top of actually continuing the work. By the time I've finished work, every night this week I've been practically in a coma with boredom.

They've had a system in place for two years now, which allows us to self audit. All the department leaders have to fill in a questionnaire about how their department is operating. When the store manager approves it, you type it all onto a digital version of the questionnaire, which gives you a percentage score and sends it off to the audit team for them to check. If they find you've been naughty and told fibs, they send somebody into the store to re-audit everything. So it doesn't pay to lie.

There's some questions you won't get away with lying about. For example: "Have at least three random till-checks been carried out each day?". The records on the computer answer this question. Lie, and the audit team will notice immediately. But there's some questions that rely on trust: "Do you empty the entire contents of the cash office safe and count everything back in when performing a safe count?" They can't prove either way if you do or don't. And this is where Terry and I differ. I would rather tell the truth. That way, if you're doing something wrong, the audit will highlight it and an 'Action point' is added. So you can improve. Lie, and within a few hours you forget that you're actually doing things wrong, and nothing will improve.

I carried out each audit before consulting Terry and I got scores of 76% for cash office and 68% for personnel. By the time Terry had finished tinkering and telling porkies the scores had inflated to 91% and 88%.

Ellenfoot Food Place, naturally, scored 95% or higher on all departments. I know as fact they're lying. Whenever I've gone in there for shopping, even without my critical eye on, I've picked up on literally tons of things they're doing wrong. Like POS with no prices on. POS with different prices to the one stated on the shelf ticket. And LOTS of missing prices. How do they get away with it? Because they're a blue-eyed store.

You might wonder why I get so irritated about Ellenfoot's lack of compliance with company policy. At the heart of the issue is the fact that I know how hard certain people work in my store to do things correctly. And still we get knocked down by auditors and never praised. Yet the Ellenfoot lot take the piss (in general, they do have some very good team members). Our EPOS team spend three hours each week sorting out the new shelf tickets when they arrive and getting them out to keep the prices correct. Ellenfoot throw them in the bin. They have supervisors for departments we operate using only basic-grade staff.

Ugh, they irritate me so much.

On a brighter note, I have two days off now. If I'm feeling sunnier tomorrow, I might be able to write something vaguely entertaining. Perhaps a new Hall of Shame addition.