Maybe it's just the wrong sort of environment for me.
I don’t have to do a lot of soul-searching either to figure out why it bothers me – I’m an anxious person that tends to over-fixate on the fear that other people who know nothing about me, are judging me with incomplete information.
Like I said, it's not so much that performance is tracked, as it is that everyone's performance is publicly tracked in a way that everyone can pair my full name with my exact numbers every single day and it’s emailed out first thing in the morning, so it’s the first thing we all look at, at the start of shift. Days that I performed better, yes, it did still bother me a lot. Regardless of how I perform, I don't like that kind of attention, good or bad (And yes, attention – in meetings, metrics would be pulled up and presented and they would talk about specific people or hold people after the meeting – it felt really public for a job mainly performed on a very individual level) I, personally, just want to do my work and have a number to say "ok, how can I do better" or "ok, looks like I'm getting the hang of it."
I don't think tracking metrics is bad or useless to me. I do find motivation in having a target to hit. I’ve even been in other work environments where, on a surface level, one might say that metrics were even more on display: I had a processing job a few years ago where we would track numbers on a laminated sheet, marking down, in dry erase, how many documents we processed at the end of every hour, and hang them up on the corner of our desk in the isle for supervisors to come down the line every couple hours and check them off. That didn’t bother me so much because I knew almost nobody was stopping and looking at other people’s sheets – like it was public but it felt different, in a way that’s a bit hard to articulate. I guess it also helps that in the older job, the whole department felt very warm and friendly, whereas the more recent assignment felt a bit too short and siloed off for people to get to know one another.
In the more recent job, it was hard to NOT know everyone else’s numbers if you wanted to know your own. It’s still bothering me because I guess more than anything, I don’t know how to prepare myself for something like that going forward. If I wanted to avoid an environment like that, how would I go about doing that? If it was unavoidable, and it came up in, say, my next assignment, what could I do to alleviate some of that stress for myself? It upset me enough to be afraid of encountering it again in the future. If it was something that I would just need to talk to a supervisor about it, how would I go about doing that without like… getting super anxious trying to talk about it?
Like there’s times when something upsets me, that it’s hard to figure out how to communicate AND keep my emotions in check so I can remain professional. I mean saying it like that makes it sound like I’m asking for therapy, but I know I couldn’t get that in a public forum and I have a therapist anyway – I just – urgh… it just felt like the perfect storm, where all the pieces fell in just the wrong way, to make it sort of a miserable job, where I felt like I maintained a high level of anxiety almost all day every day.
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