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An Anonymous Soylentil 'Connor the Kicking Cog' writes:
Under two months ago I started working at a massive incumbent telecom company in their regional call center. From the start it has been a draining experience. The orientation lasted two days, alternating between how much the company loves us, especially veterans, and how unions are awful things. The first real day of training included a bunch of inane policies such as:
- In the first 90 Days no time off is allowed, even sick time, unless it was brought up during the interview process.
- During the 90 Days, missing a day of work for any reason causes a demerit which is given as a "verbal written warning".
- During the 90 Days, two demerits goes to "final written warning".
- During the 90 Days, three demerits is an automatic firing.
- At any time being more than 10 minutes but less than 2 hours late is a half demerit.
- At any time being more than 2 hours late is a full demerit.
- Time off can be used to counteract a demerit, but only if incurred after 90 days.
- Demerits incurred during the 90 Days do not "wash off" but the warnings do, and the threshold increases before warnings start.
- You cannot be promoted or make a lateral move before one year of service. This is repeated endlessly.
- You cannot be promoted or make a lateral move if you have any warnings within the last six months.
- If promoted after a year there is another new 90 Day period where no time off is allowed. Even if you have more than a decade of service this policy remains.
- The company does not hire for many positions from the outside, so you must do one year in a lower role before being considered. This is true even if you have done work at that level or even higher elsewhere.
- The shift you accepted during the hiring process cannot be changed for one year.
- If you change your shift after one year, you must wait another full year before you can change it again.
Call centers are regimented things, but these policies are so worker-hostile I am surprised staff turnover is not an issue already. The training completed before the 40 day mark, but was longer some time ago, yet the 90 day period remains.
Thankfully another company has hired me and all background checks have cleared so I will be departing from the soulless mega-corporation. Being a professional I would prefer not to needlessly burn bridges, but I am not going to give the customary two weeks notice. Based on the above policies I believe it is likely I will be immediately escorted out should I do so without any compensation for the two week period. Does anyone reading this believe they would "recoup their investment in training me" by keeping me on for those two weeks?
Is it worthwhile to state in my resignation email that these policies were major motivating factors in departing as soon as possible? Or would such an email only be cathartic for me at best? Or even a risk at worst?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bradley13 on Wednesday August 31 2016, @06:50PM
To take the side of the employer: shift planning in call centers is a nightmare, especially if they are open 24/7. It's a tough business with thin margins, and many (sometimes most) employees are working part-time on schedules that mess with other jobs, or child-care, or school, or some other special need.
You know how many calls you get on Mondays between 08:00 and 12:00, and you staff the right number of people. Then one person calls in sick, another has a child-care problem, and a third arrives 20 minutes late because they ran out of gas. The backlog that builds up will take the rest of the day to clear, and you'll get dozens of complaints about the long wait.
Add to this: employees too often abuse sick leave. Hung over? Call in sick. Had an argument with your SO? Call in sick. Prefer going to the pool? Call in sick. Need to study for your final? Call in sick.
Sure, their policies are worker hostile, but there is another side to the consider. Give your two week's notice. Avoid bad-mouthing them in your resignation letter. It costs you little, and avoids burning those bridges. If you need to vent, vent here on Soylent...
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 31 2016, @07:08PM
One popular strategy is to either schedule on-call operators or offer an operator to be on-call in exchange for something. You also over-schedule since you can always send people home. There's always some kind of offer if they have to start calling operators at random like a gift card (makes me wonder if some of the operators collude about this).
Backlogs don't really happen even if understaffed. People will hang up. So you'll still get complaints, but nobody waits on hold for more than a few minutes. If you've worked in a call center, it sounds like it was a different kind from the one I worked in.
I'll add one thing that sick days are used for: putting off quitting on the spot for another day.
On the other hand, call centers are experts at creating stupid policies, shitcanning 3 or 4 people per week over them, and then wondering why they're understaffed and can't keep "good" people.
(Score: 2) by Capt. Obvious on Wednesday August 31 2016, @07:21PM
That seems way worse than the draconian attendance policies. If you ask me to budget 8 hours of my time, you better be prepared to compensate me for 8 hours.
It sounds like the company wasn't doing that to them, as the shifts were iron-clad.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 31 2016, @08:36PM
If you ask me to budget 8 hours of my time, you better be prepared to compensate me for 8 hours.
That's not how any service job I've ever done worked. The reality is that you get scheduled 4-6 hours. You may be asked to leave early if it's a slow day (though usually only if you were scheduled 8-10 hours that day). You may be asked to stay late if it's a busy day. While you may leave when you were scheduled out, that's not exactly how to get more hours.
I had to work shit jobs when I was younger. The only advancement you're going to get is whether you're scheduled 20, 30, or 40 hours per week. Usually within 3 months or so I'd find myself working "part time" around 40-45 hours per week. Would change jobs when they rotated in an insufferable manager or such.
I see a lot of people posting as though call center is a job for professionals. Maybe some call center jobs are. I understand if you want to be a professional operator, 911 dispatchers get fairly decent pay. The vast majority are the shit of shit jobs. No job for professionals has the kind of bullshit in TFS. Call centers do, though.
(Score: 2) by Capt. Obvious on Wednesday August 31 2016, @08:59PM
I'm not saying the OP isn't also subjected to this. I'm saying, that seems worse than "if you skip 3 days in the first 3 months of employment, you will be terminated"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bradley13 on Wednesday August 31 2016, @07:42PM
You're right, there are different kinds of call centers. The ones I've been involved with had customers who really would hang on the line until it was answered, even if that took an hour minutes. Worse was when the call center started offering a "call back" option, because that actually took more personnel time. Hence, the complaints. Sure, you have people on call, but it's not instant, and sometimes it's just too little, too late.
I was only an external IT consultant, so I wasn't actually directly involved. But I did see the problems with the shift-planning, and the disasters when it went wrong. Monday mornings were the worst, the first Monday of the year was...remarkable. And the time that the first Monday of the Year was also the first business day of the year? No one predicted just what a record-breaker that would be, and once the snowball started rolling...
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday August 31 2016, @11:37PM
In Holland, when you're put into a queue, instead of just getting music and ads, you get a recording repeatedly telling you how many are in the queue ahead of you. You can give up immediately without wasting much of your time. Or you can wait and see how fast the queue is diminishing, and make a decision based on that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 01 2016, @12:05AM
> ... but nobody waits on hold for more than a few minutes.
Well, maybe most people. When I want to get through I put the call on speakerphone and go about my business until I hear someone answer. Might be an hour on hold. Sometimes this gives me an opening to break the call center worker out of their script, "I've been on hold for an hour, I hope you can help me."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by sjames on Wednesday August 31 2016, @07:45PM
By the same token, "have ebola? Come in anyway" is effectively demanding an assault on your coworkers. One day, it'll probably cause a pandemic.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 31 2016, @09:01PM
Do not care. The employees are expendable.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by tbuskey on Wednesday August 31 2016, @10:54PM
By the same token, "have ebola? Come in anyway" is effectively demanding an assault on your coworkers. One day, it'll probably cause a pandemic.
A sick Chipolte employee sickened ~ 80 people in Boston in December 2015. I wonder if they had a similar sick policy or an intolerant manager
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mechanicjay on Wednesday August 31 2016, @07:56PM
Add to this: employees too often abuse sick leave. Hung over? Call in sick. Had an argument with your SO? Call in sick. Prefer going to the pool? Call in sick. Need to study for your final? Call in sick.
If you're a company who has separate Vacation and Sick time pools, sure you should probably pull vacation time instead of sick time for "Fuck work" days. I'd argue that being cotton-headed and nauseous from a bad hangover is a legit sick day. Regardless, time off is a legit part of compensation. If your company gives 10 vacation days and 5 sick days, they should be staffed to the point where they can still operate when ~6% of the company is out on any given day. If not, that's poor resource management.
If you're one of the Soul-suckers who puts all time into a central Paid Time Off pool, (Then dings you 8 hours when the office is closed on a Natl. Holiday), fuck-em.
Sorry, vacation time is one my pet peeves. Especially employees who don't take their vacation due to some weird sense of loyalty to their company. To which I say to them, how did it just feel to gift $(hourly rate x hours forfeited) to the company this year? Some better companies will pay out at the end of the year for unused time.
My VMS box beat up your Windows box.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by meustrus on Wednesday August 31 2016, @09:23PM
It's important for everyone to remember that "the company" is mostly a collection of employees, most of whom are subject to the same time-off policies as you. When you don't take your vacation time, you cultivate a workplace where others are expected to do the same. Since "others" is "other employess", which is the rest of "the company", when you don't take your time off, you are actually hurting "the company". Especially when you consider productivity boosts from everyone being happy and well-rested.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Wednesday August 31 2016, @08:02PM
To counter your counterpoint, as someone who has worked as a manager, and also worked with call center management and staff writing software for them:
As the boss, it's your responsibility to have a pretty good idea of who on your staff is reliable and who isn't. So when you're scheduling people, you should be planning based on that knowledge. If you know, for instance, that you need 12 people to staff a shift, and you have 10 basically reliable people and 6 people that have about a 65% chance of showing up if you schedule them, then you should be at least considering staffing 3 of the unreliable people instead of 2, so that when one of them flakes out on you you're in fact fully staffed. Oh, and yes, that makes it so your reliable people get more hours, which encourages the unreliable people to clean up their act.
Having to deal with that complexity doesn't excuse treating your 10 basically reliable people badly. And what this company is actually saying, with their overly complex personnel policy here, is that not only do they not trust their grunts (which makes a certain amount of sense), they also don't trust their supervisors (which makes very little sense). We know this because their supervisors are barred from, according to the policies stated by the OP:
- Promoting good people too quickly.
- Shifting staff to other departments (i.e. a "lateral move") as needed.
- Adjusting shifts to accommodate good employees, even if there's a way to do it that doesn't affect overall staffing levels.
- Firing bad people who haven't yet accumulated enough "demerits".
That they also have their 10-year veterans still going through 90-day probationary periods suggests that they really really really don't trust their people, even the ones that by now they should have every reason to trust (or should have fired years ago).
What's the point of having supervisors if you aren't trusting them to make decisions affecting the personnel in their departments? About the only time this should be happening is if there's a union contract governing this shop, which I doubt there is because unions aren't likely to agree to such a stupid set of policies.
As for how to leave, I agree that OP should give notice and be prepared to not work for 2 weeks. Explain that s/he found another position. If asked why the other position is better, I don't think it would be out of line to say something along the lines of "My new employer makes it easier for my supervisor to reward my reliability and quality of work."
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 31 2016, @08:13PM
> What's the point of having supervisors if you aren't trusting them to make decisions affecting the personnel in their departments?
Look who you are responding to. Someone whose sum total conception of human behavior is the completely reductive idea that people are cogs in the wheel of life. Good judgment is a concept that doesn't exist in his world.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday August 31 2016, @11:04PM
It's a tough business with thin margins that needs to stand up for its employees, and thicken those margins up enough that somebody who is really sick can take time off without fear of termination. Sure, the kind of employees you get there aren't very good, but if you treated them a little better you might actually be able to get more good ones.
As for the call center marketplace, if you've got better employees, they'll give better service, and that can actually be a value add proposition for the customer. Unless the customer is Comcast, in which case, f-it all, there's no hope.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 01 2016, @01:16PM
So if they are relying on their staff so much to be able to run things smoothly (or as smooth as can be) then they should treat them a little better shouldn't they? Seems obvious to me, but then I don't have an MBA.