Unrealistic Efficiency Expectations - GIS Analyst Tetra Tech Employee Review

My new least favorite word is “efficient”. This word was constantly thrown around in my department to imply you need to get tasks done within a set number of hours; however, the number of hours you are given is unrealistic. Although the job is salary, you are required to log your work hourly. This is brought up in the interview, but what you are not told is that you have a very specific number of hours to work on projects/tasks and if you can’t get your work done within this number, you have to finish them on your own time. Since budgets are always under-estimated, you will not have enough hours to do any of the tasks you are asked to do. This led me to log 40 hours, but then work anywhere from 60 to 80 hours a week to try to catch up. Such overworking leads to rushing through tasks on little sleep, which inevitably leads to mistakes. I also saw my coworkers online at all hours of the night/weekend and it became clear to me that this was a general problem with the department. However, when I brought this up with my manager, they were not understanding. Instead they told me that I needed to be more “efficient” and needed more training. Training hours were limited to begin with (only 20 in your first week), so of course this “solution” wasn’t followed through on. Management themselves are also busy so they don’t have the understanding to accept that changes are needed or the time to improve processes. They seem to believe that since they put up with extremely long hours, that everyone around them should as well. They are not open to constructive criticism in any way and will choose favorites based on who can put in the hours they need them to. All others will be forgotten about or deemed incompetent (aka inefficient). If you have time and motivation to put in such long hours, then this job is for you, but don’t expect to be compensated for it. On the bright side, you will learn a lot (albeit on your own time) and the work is interesting (See Pros). Good luck with taking planned PTO because whenever work is low (which seems to happen at least twice a year), you are forced to use your PTO to take off. Additionally, you may even be requested to use PTO to catch up on the underbudgeted work you couldn’t finish. In my last month, there was no new work, but I still had a bunch of un-logged work to catch up on. My manager told me I should spend my PTO to finish this up. I ended up going into negative PTO hours and by the time I left, despite working through PTO days, I OWED the company money back in PTO hours. No one should be put in this position.