I had a situation in a previous workplace, where it became bullying, and I said nothing and I left the organisation, but, I wonder if this is something that I could have solved?
The project was audited by an internal auditor, and as it had not met it’s milestone targets, and the reporting to the steering committee was showing tasks on the project completed, when they were in fact, not yet completed, a political decision was made to push the schedule of the project years away, which meant that half the team had their contracts ended (as you now need less people).
One of the things audited was the expenditure.
There was lots of unnecessary spending on the project, by the management team.
A new process was put in place, where each invoice will go through a series of approvers,prior to approval.
Each manager would check only on a particular day of the week, and I would only process on a particular day of the week.
This meant that invoices with 30 days payment terms were never paid by their due date.
An issue I had was with passing the invoices along to another team.
Team members would loose the invoice, and blame me.
Team members submitting the invoices would get very angry at me, and I would be told to advise the team member,, to re-submit the invoice, and that it would need to go through the entire process again.
The team member submitting the invoice, is being pressured to get it paid, as soon as possible, and I am being pressured to tell them to resubmit and wait the entire process again.
I would receive angry comments by team members submitting invoices, and angry comments by a person in giving advice., that this is what they need to do.
At one stage, I tried to prove that the invoice was with a particular person, and just asked really politely to check their desks,
When I found the invoice on their desk, in front of another manager and team members,
They got very angry, and said nothing, but, within minutes some stationary that I had ordered had arrived, and they yelled and made a big scene about the amount of stationary ordered.
It was an excuse, due to the invoice being found on their desk, in front of others, when invoices were going missing consistently.
Another time, I had to get another team member to resubmit an invoice. It was resubmitted, after desperately searching everything on my desk for half an hour, in front of colleagues that said that blamed me,and not finding it.,
Then a week later, that same colleague that made me desperately search my desk, blaming me, in front of others, asked me to check my desk again, and said that I may find it, since there was a lot of paperwork on my desk.
The invoice was found.
She had basically found the invoice on her desk, and a week later planted it on my desk, then asked me to check again.
I don’t know what I should have done in this instance, and if I was ever in the same situation again, how I would solve it.
The issue was with being constantly blamed, when things were never my fault and I was constantly doing a great job, and being blamed for other people’s mistakes.
This scenario happens to me repeatedly and am not too sure how to solve.
