you're fired
people lost their jobs in my work place today. it made me feel bad, more mad than sad. as i reconstruct hearing the news and sensing the rage welling up within, i am forced to confront what makes me so angry about the scenario. i know both of the people fired-they are from the group i formerly managed. they both had poor attendance and this is why they were terminated. i can't say exactly how bad the attendance was, but i know it had improved recently and of course, they always called and had explanations for absences and tardies. these are 20-somethings. they both have not only a lot of drama in their lives, they have had serious medical issues, (which is what is especially shocking about my company firing them considering the risk.)
the two workers who were sent to the dole both did high quality work, (above average and probably around the 90 and 75 percentiles.) (this estimation is meant to include the drawback that is their attendance record.) a coworker made some remarks about this situation, basically suggesting everything was just considering the burden poor attendance represents to our business, and i think it is fair to say, this is how the majority views this situation. this sounds like common sense.
"i don't care how good they are, they do us no good if they're not here to assist our customers," i remember one of our former managers saying.
is that true though? i mean, sure, they help no one when they are helping no one. but our society seems to adore the punctual automaton while i would much prefer a living, thinking, breathing, corporeal human being in my employ. if it were my business, (and that is exactly how i view my work every day,) i would rather have a team of people who do quality work, think and make sound judgments readily but have some attendance issues, than a group of perfectly punctual asses who don't read books in their free time. (okay, okay, i exagerrate, but you must remember this all happened today and i'm still pissed. i don't really think all people who do not occasionally read books are idiots.) (mostly.) let me run an identical company with my kind of employees versus a company of perfect attendance employees and i believe i will bankrupt that other company. quality shows through to the customer.
attendance shows too, although if you have an environment with one hundred-plus people taking calls from customers, you likely have some wiggle room with which to plan for a certain amount of attendance deviation. in this way, the problem practically comes down to a tug of war of management styles. as the manager of an environment like i have described, you can ask those who schedule and manage service level to plan for more "shrinkage," as they call it, recognizing that when things are slow there is always plenty of work to do that is not answering phones, or you can have a strict attendance policy, constantly fire 20-somethings and pay the price of constantly training new reps to take the place of those who crossed the line and reap no benefits of continuity or higher morale.
this job of customer service representative is an entry level position. it pays better than entry level fast food but not as well as an entry level construction worker, (or, "yard dog.") in order to obtain this entry level position answering phones in the holy name of customer service, you must pass a test to prove you have some basic typing and computer skills as well as show some experience in similar areas. (the pay range to start is about $11 per hour or less and ranges up to the mid-to-high teens.)
if you want this job, you have to be willing to work as a temporary employee through an agency. this allows the corporation to "terminate your assignment," at will.
in our day and age, the staffing agency acts as a buffer between the employee and employer by allowing a person to work for a company without the company making a commensurate commitment to the employee. (this is to say, the employee has to get up and go to work every day and perform the assigned tasks but the company avoids the due process normally involved in the termination of employment as well as providing for unemployment insurance. . .) the staffing agency is, for all intents and purposes, a concoction of the corporation.
as osha and various government regulations required corporations to provide for injured employees and the like, these agencies came into prominence having different laws that govern their responsibilities to employees. i'm guessing now but it makes sense these laws expected the agencies to supply seasonal labor and such as opposed to how they are operating today. now, they are booming businesses in their own right as they require a minimal amount of manpower to run but have their hands in the pocket of virtually every employee they link to an employer. the relationship is great for the employer and the agency.
it is true that the agency also allows the employer to get a sense of the employee, to know what kind of work ethic they have or how quickly they learn and adapt. having worked these 10 years in a business environment, i understand why the employer would need that. the people i have worked with over the years, (the actual employees of the corporation,) have had a truly low level of accurate intuition or insight into the people they manage. i assume corporations learned long ago they could not trust their employees to be intuitive enough to hire the right people, people who could be trusted, people who would reciprocate what a company offered and could offer. yet another reason the corporation devised the staffing agency.
in addition to a willingness to work through a staffing agency, an entry level csr must agree to abide by the letter of the law as it relates to breaks and lunches, etc. whereas if a person worked at the jiffy lube changing oil on automobiles, there is a staff and a certain amount of glad-handing and grab-assing that goes on. in a call center environment a csr must be responsible to anywhere from 8-20 customers per hour and in about 5 minute bursts. think about that. every five minutes the csr is introduced, (or rather, introduced themself,) to a new customer who expects the csr to be an expert on the business and an official representative of the same. considering the pay, that is a lot of responsibility.
since the csr is the person a customer actually reaches if they have a need to contact the company, the csr is tasked with answering for the mistakes of virtually anyone in the organization. if the marketing department uses a predictive dialer to contact a customer to the customer's annoyance, the csr hears about it. if the person who delivers the product and service, errs, it is often the csr who hears about it. if the ceo makes a decision to aggressively push a product on the company's customers, the csr is expected to empathize with the customer's indignation, proclaim the company's best intentions, (meaning the csr must in part be adept at acting,) and soothe the customer in order to retain their business. (all for $11 an hour, or so.)
as if that weren't enough, csr's must learn complicated computer programs, retain a great deal of information about regional or product variations, and recite a measure of scripted sentiment. i knew when i was a csr i wanted out of that job. i chose to move up and i have been rewarded with a less stressful position and greater compensation.
maybe what it really comes down to is how severe are the attendance issues? well, we are talking about people who are probably late to work about 1.5 times per week by about 10-12 minutes each time. Additionally, they likely average about three days out ill every two months. That's substantial but in the grander scheme i described previously, (where it could easily be planned for,) is it so severe you fire valuable employees of five-plus years? the coworker i argued with could not imagine herself wrong about this issue. she feels it is righteous to expect people to come to work every day and on time. she was as indignant that i might think something other than that as i was that she could not get outside of that paradigm of acceptable employee behaviors to see another view. she cannot see that taking 75 customer service calls per day is stressful and worth a lot more money than those who do it get paid, (be they in india or indio.)
i read once that the average american worker works about 5.5 hours for every eight they get paid for. i can see that. i think about the various jobs i have had and i can see it being more or less. the csr's in my office work about seven hours per day. they get two 15-minute breaks and i imagine on average they screw around for another half hour. (they are allotted about 10 minutes of personal time meaning we expect them to work seven hours and 20 minutes.
having fired these two, (three now as i write a few days post facto,) i wonder about whom is failing the organization in quantifying the costs associated with training new reps to take the places of those who have been terminated. it makes me think all that rhetoric i read in business books about training your employees and the value of retaining them is not at all how those who make decisions think on the subject.
it bothers me more that a coworker could not even bring herself to see another side of this issue. her righteous sense about her own perspective offended me, (and i pride myself on being nearly unoffendable.)
the day after this conversation my boss arrived early in the morning and asked me to come to his office. he said he was in possession of an email from my coworker which suggested i was not on board with our attendance policy. i explained that i need my job. (of course i'm on board.)
the two workers who were sent to the dole both did high quality work, (above average and probably around the 90 and 75 percentiles.) (this estimation is meant to include the drawback that is their attendance record.) a coworker made some remarks about this situation, basically suggesting everything was just considering the burden poor attendance represents to our business, and i think it is fair to say, this is how the majority views this situation. this sounds like common sense.
"i don't care how good they are, they do us no good if they're not here to assist our customers," i remember one of our former managers saying.
is that true though? i mean, sure, they help no one when they are helping no one. but our society seems to adore the punctual automaton while i would much prefer a living, thinking, breathing, corporeal human being in my employ. if it were my business, (and that is exactly how i view my work every day,) i would rather have a team of people who do quality work, think and make sound judgments readily but have some attendance issues, than a group of perfectly punctual asses who don't read books in their free time. (okay, okay, i exagerrate, but you must remember this all happened today and i'm still pissed. i don't really think all people who do not occasionally read books are idiots.) (mostly.) let me run an identical company with my kind of employees versus a company of perfect attendance employees and i believe i will bankrupt that other company. quality shows through to the customer.
attendance shows too, although if you have an environment with one hundred-plus people taking calls from customers, you likely have some wiggle room with which to plan for a certain amount of attendance deviation. in this way, the problem practically comes down to a tug of war of management styles. as the manager of an environment like i have described, you can ask those who schedule and manage service level to plan for more "shrinkage," as they call it, recognizing that when things are slow there is always plenty of work to do that is not answering phones, or you can have a strict attendance policy, constantly fire 20-somethings and pay the price of constantly training new reps to take the place of those who crossed the line and reap no benefits of continuity or higher morale.
this job of customer service representative is an entry level position. it pays better than entry level fast food but not as well as an entry level construction worker, (or, "yard dog.") in order to obtain this entry level position answering phones in the holy name of customer service, you must pass a test to prove you have some basic typing and computer skills as well as show some experience in similar areas. (the pay range to start is about $11 per hour or less and ranges up to the mid-to-high teens.)
if you want this job, you have to be willing to work as a temporary employee through an agency. this allows the corporation to "terminate your assignment," at will.
in our day and age, the staffing agency acts as a buffer between the employee and employer by allowing a person to work for a company without the company making a commensurate commitment to the employee. (this is to say, the employee has to get up and go to work every day and perform the assigned tasks but the company avoids the due process normally involved in the termination of employment as well as providing for unemployment insurance. . .) the staffing agency is, for all intents and purposes, a concoction of the corporation.
as osha and various government regulations required corporations to provide for injured employees and the like, these agencies came into prominence having different laws that govern their responsibilities to employees. i'm guessing now but it makes sense these laws expected the agencies to supply seasonal labor and such as opposed to how they are operating today. now, they are booming businesses in their own right as they require a minimal amount of manpower to run but have their hands in the pocket of virtually every employee they link to an employer. the relationship is great for the employer and the agency.
it is true that the agency also allows the employer to get a sense of the employee, to know what kind of work ethic they have or how quickly they learn and adapt. having worked these 10 years in a business environment, i understand why the employer would need that. the people i have worked with over the years, (the actual employees of the corporation,) have had a truly low level of accurate intuition or insight into the people they manage. i assume corporations learned long ago they could not trust their employees to be intuitive enough to hire the right people, people who could be trusted, people who would reciprocate what a company offered and could offer. yet another reason the corporation devised the staffing agency.
in addition to a willingness to work through a staffing agency, an entry level csr must agree to abide by the letter of the law as it relates to breaks and lunches, etc. whereas if a person worked at the jiffy lube changing oil on automobiles, there is a staff and a certain amount of glad-handing and grab-assing that goes on. in a call center environment a csr must be responsible to anywhere from 8-20 customers per hour and in about 5 minute bursts. think about that. every five minutes the csr is introduced, (or rather, introduced themself,) to a new customer who expects the csr to be an expert on the business and an official representative of the same. considering the pay, that is a lot of responsibility.
since the csr is the person a customer actually reaches if they have a need to contact the company, the csr is tasked with answering for the mistakes of virtually anyone in the organization. if the marketing department uses a predictive dialer to contact a customer to the customer's annoyance, the csr hears about it. if the person who delivers the product and service, errs, it is often the csr who hears about it. if the ceo makes a decision to aggressively push a product on the company's customers, the csr is expected to empathize with the customer's indignation, proclaim the company's best intentions, (meaning the csr must in part be adept at acting,) and soothe the customer in order to retain their business. (all for $11 an hour, or so.)
as if that weren't enough, csr's must learn complicated computer programs, retain a great deal of information about regional or product variations, and recite a measure of scripted sentiment. i knew when i was a csr i wanted out of that job. i chose to move up and i have been rewarded with a less stressful position and greater compensation.
maybe what it really comes down to is how severe are the attendance issues? well, we are talking about people who are probably late to work about 1.5 times per week by about 10-12 minutes each time. Additionally, they likely average about three days out ill every two months. That's substantial but in the grander scheme i described previously, (where it could easily be planned for,) is it so severe you fire valuable employees of five-plus years? the coworker i argued with could not imagine herself wrong about this issue. she feels it is righteous to expect people to come to work every day and on time. she was as indignant that i might think something other than that as i was that she could not get outside of that paradigm of acceptable employee behaviors to see another view. she cannot see that taking 75 customer service calls per day is stressful and worth a lot more money than those who do it get paid, (be they in india or indio.)
i read once that the average american worker works about 5.5 hours for every eight they get paid for. i can see that. i think about the various jobs i have had and i can see it being more or less. the csr's in my office work about seven hours per day. they get two 15-minute breaks and i imagine on average they screw around for another half hour. (they are allotted about 10 minutes of personal time meaning we expect them to work seven hours and 20 minutes.
having fired these two, (three now as i write a few days post facto,) i wonder about whom is failing the organization in quantifying the costs associated with training new reps to take the places of those who have been terminated. it makes me think all that rhetoric i read in business books about training your employees and the value of retaining them is not at all how those who make decisions think on the subject.
it bothers me more that a coworker could not even bring herself to see another side of this issue. her righteous sense about her own perspective offended me, (and i pride myself on being nearly unoffendable.)
the day after this conversation my boss arrived early in the morning and asked me to come to his office. he said he was in possession of an email from my coworker which suggested i was not on board with our attendance policy. i explained that i need my job. (of course i'm on board.)
posted by mj at 5:28 PM
1 Comments:
I came across your "You're fired" entry after reading one of your comments on another post..
I find this interesting for many reasons. First of all 3 years ago when I got out of school I was 24 at the time and tried working for the "temp agency" and became very frustrated with the way the whole thing works. I knew I could do lots of great things but no one would give me a chance. They kept trying to put me in bs positions where I had to conform to "due process" or whatever you want to call it ...aka corporate america. I had just moved to Orange County CA 2 days after graduating from UNC Charlotte in North Carolina. I had no money and everything was different, more expensive and I had no job and no money.
I went through doing a bunch of bs jobs for this agency and that one. I went to probably hundreds of interviews and seemed to get nothing. I finally got a job for 3 months traveling on the road doing marketing promotions for Pilsbury.
I suppose what I learned in this very short yet agonizing time was that if you want something out of life you have to do what it takes to get it. I learned that the entire time I was out there knocking down doors was that I was trying to make my case to some staffing agent or human resource manager that was so full of mediocrity (not to mention they had no expertise for the positions they were hiring for and therefore could not properly market my skills to the "decision maker")that my personality came off to people as being "above them" or something along those lines.
The fact is that (as you stated in the title of your blog) is that people are full of mediocrity and they are offended and are threatened by someone who holds a sense of hire being.
This being said... how could "status quo" employees hire "not status quo people"?
So this becomes a pinnacle point of management. ...What comes first the chicken or the egg? Should fire people who show traits of mediocrity or should we create rules and standards that all employees are expected to abide by. The point of these rules is simply a means of managing human resources.
Or from another paradigm should a company spend extra resources to motivate employees and encourage them? ..many companies do this. Marketing calls them "internal branding campaigns".
The bottom line is.... "the bottom line" Remember that in capitalism.. at least pure capitalism companies are not liable or responsible for anything except survival and increased shareholder wealth. You simply cannot expect the "institution" to have the same conscience and heart that people do.
Something that you do see more and more these days is companies being subject to public scrutiny.. much of this is from todays technology and the flow of information via internet. So this brings me to my main arguement.
Companies will always have the bottom line at point. If companies bring grief upon them by their actions the public will respond and profits will decline (baring politics, etc). But as a man looks into the world he has to keep this in mind. That companies will always make decisions based on this. That the reality in life is that PEOPLE run companies and people have their own self interests at heart.
If you are the manager of a company's division and you keep or advance in your job based on the bottom line your division makes you are going to make decisions based on your goal and objective. Isn't that why manager write business plans, marketing plans, mission statements, goals and objectives, and perform situation analysis, etc?
based on your description of these workers they were not strong enough to make it in this company. The powers at will decided that (probably based on a statistical analysis of some sort) that people that do not show up on time ever day are not fit for this company. It really comes down to supply and demand. Everything in this world comes down to supply and demand. When rodent populations are high then snake populations grow. As snake populations grow, rodent populations decline. In reality Karl Marx had the most honest view of our society.
Now.. from the employees that were fired paradigm. well first I'd like to say that I sense you are a big socialist working in a capitalist world.. which is ok but I'd really like to offer another perspective.
It seems that when anyone mentions the likes of Karl Marx there is a bad connotation or perhaps mis interpreted connotation about him...being known as the father of communism. In fact he is a brilliant man and as much as we claim capitalistic and socialistic values in this country the fact is that it is that his manifesto is proving to be true.
taken from wikipedia...
"Just as capitalism replaced feudalism, capitalism itself will be displaced by communism, a classless society which emerges after a transitional period in which the state would be nothing else but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat."
isn't this becoming obvious as we see ever increasing mediocrity and we see a rising "middle class" that in fact is becoming lower and lower class in regards to the upper class .. the fact is that our institutions teach and perpetuate this agenda. Universities teach men how to invent technologies and how to make corporations tons of money... but never really teaches them how to increase their quality of life.
So I could go on and on about social movements and why things are the way they are... but I want to focus once more to situation you described.
I don't feel at all bad for the employees being fired. It is a shame but patronizing them only perpetuates mediocrity and gives more power to "the man"
You said "If I were to run a company just like this one but do it my way" ....well this is what we call capitalism. If you don't run your own company and yet you sit and continue to make judgments on the way things ought to be then that is mediocrity in itself. Of course there are excuses to why you cannot have your own company.. costs to start a company etc... but in the real world they aren't excuses. Everything in this world does come from people... they are the most important asset. They are however impressionable. If what you propose to the world is so superior to what they have then shouldn't it be easy to get people on board with you?
Why did your coworker not sympathize with your cause?
I'm reminded of the ancient philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli in his work known as "The Prince".
From wikipedia..
"Machiavelli emphasizes the need for the exercise of brute power where necessary and rewards, patron-clientalism etc. to preserve the status quo."
The word "preserve" is much like the word "conserve" or conservitism. Do we not associate the conservative party with these techniques?
The fact is that if a man doesn't want to be a slave of "The Man" he has to become "The Man" himself.
All men must fight for their rights and freedoms. One must always be aware of our situation and do what is best for us. If we are not doing that then we have only ourself to blame. "The Art of War" by Sūn Zǐ another an ancient chineese philosopher describes this idea in great detail and outlines strategies and tactics.. many of which are used by business managers.
The bottom line is that if you are not willing to work for the man then don't. If you have a better Idea then lets see it. If you are not willing to do either then you must abide by The Man's rules.
__________________________________
All that being said I want to finish my story of my own personal experience.
After returning from the 3 month Pillsbury tour I came back with "a new philosphy" I took the Machiavellian approach and decided that I would have to exercise every power that I have in order to control my realm... or as its said.. have a strong sense of "internal locus of control".
I got a job working for Heelys.. those kids shoes with wheels in the heel. I got paid 29,500 and had to roll around on kids shoes in malls and other places around southern california. It was a huge hit to my ego but I knew that it was a means to get what I wanted. During my tenure of a year and a half I learned every little bit I could and went 10 times above and beyond what was required of me by "The Man" I never really received any recognition for anything.. a little I suppose but no one would really listen to me or take advantage of all the extra things that I did because I was only " an entry level field rep". I could have made that company another 100 million dollars had they listened but they didn't.
Not only did I learn that "If you want something in life you have to what it takes to get it done yourself. I believe in this case my boss whom was a female about 5-7 years older then me felt threatened in some way or another that I may perhaps "show her up" at her new job as director of marketing. She certainly wasn't going to promote my hard work... again back to the mediocrity...
Taking from this job that idea I went out and found a small company that was not full of the corporate bs. ..in fact called "Leisure Time Marketing". They are a layed back small company that has been in business over 30 years. They don't have the huge budgets that companies like yours have so they really can't afford to pay a whole lot.
When hired I recieve a 47% raise from my previous job. I knew this was a small enough company that I could "sell" myself too and get some guys on my side for what I believe in. In my first year I accomplished all sorts of great things. I learned skills in programming and built 2 websites for them, produced print materials and developed systems to evaluate my marketing initiatives and provide intelligence to management about the business. Toward the end of my first year I took on a project of implementing an enterprise level CRM system in which I would have to learn how to set up and program and become the system administrator for.
This bring me almost up to my present time...
########
And this is where your blog really hits home with me....
Throughout my entire time with this company I have been late nearly every day. At one point I was as much as an hour and a half late every day. I would probably average 30-45 minutes late every day for the entire time I've worked there... just over a year now.
For my annual review I wrote a lengthy proposal to my boss for what I would do for them the following year and what I wanted in return. I asked for a 28% raise over the previous year as well as 1% of all sales from new customers my marketing campaigns brought in. My boss had no objections to my proposal and only asked that I write out and accomplish the things I promise to fulfill my obligation.
I later learned that during the same week the company laid off another worker...as our business has been down lately in part due to the slagging economy.
So in closing I have to say.... Rule or be ruled.
I have worked tremendously hard for my freedoms and hope that one day I will own my own enterprise and that my family will be free from "The Man" And when I do I will preserve my enterprise just as any other man would.
I'm a man of honesty and integrity. If I go and work for a man and agree to follow his rules then thats what I do... else I give him a reason to change his rules. And when the time is right I will write my own rules.
And when I have an enterprise I will shun away mediocrity. I will seek people who have a desire to make the best of themselves and to make the best of others. If they cannot do that then they are not the vital link of my enterprise. Of what is "Our" enterprise.. aka "Company" isn't the meaning of the word company comprised of the type of people and interactions one surrounds himself with?
To be honest I believe any man that is content to rule under the rule of another man lives in mediocrity. Ancient war strategy will teach you to keep company with the enemies and learn their secrets and built "intelligence" but if one never goes to war then he has become his own enemy.
I really found your blog interesting and would be interested in chatting sometime.. I certainly would be interested in your response to my comment!
Send me an email sometime if ya like..
ocsalesgroup@gmail.com
-Brian V0n
Director of Marketing
Leezsure- Tine Marcketing, Ink
(to throw off indexing engines)
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