Even though you may love a job, there may be some major drawbacks to it. NDC was no different. Some of these (dealing with disciplinary issues) didn't really apply to me because I was a good employee. But if you were a mediocre to bad employee, some of these could be devastating. Here's a list of reasons why:
1. Turnaround was rampant. Judging by the number of people in my training class, it shouldn't have come as a surprise that there were as many people leaving as there were coming in. It was hard to make connections with other people at work because you didn't know from one day to the next if someone was going to be sticking around. People got fired more often than they quit. But even those who quit really weren't very happy with the company on a whole. One of the main reasons for the turnaround will be discussed in #6.
2. There weren't a lot of choices for lunch. We were in an area with a lot of office buildings, but not a lot of restaurants. And we only got 30 minutes for lunch. It took about 10 minutes to drive to the nearest fast-food place (with a lot of stop lights along the way). So you were left with bringing your lunch from home or buying food out of the vending machines. (And bringing your lunch from home created a risk if you had to use the refrigerators. There were too many people who had no problem with taking someone else's lunch.)
3. You had to wait more than six months for your benefits to kick in. Yeah, it was great to finally have a job with benefits. Unfortunately, HR had trouble keeping track of who had been there how long and made no effort to reach out to those who hit their six-month anniversary. (And keep in mind that agents did not have access to internal e-mail. This was a perk only enjoyed by Supervisors and Lead Dispatch Agents.) When I finally got my six-month review (at the seven month mark), I asked my Supervisor when I was supposed to get my benefits. He said he'd have to look into it. Two weeks later, he told me I had to attend a meeting to go over the benefits. At the meeting, I found out it would take at least two more weeks before the benefits would kick in. This meant that NDC got two extra months in which they did not have to provide benefits. (And I have a feeling that if I hadn't said anything at my review, I never would have gotten signed up for benefits!) A few months later, the company tried to reduce its turnover by allowing employees to have benefits after working for only three months. JUST LIKE EVERY OTHER COMPANY IN THE US!
4. There were issues with the way reviews were handled. It was great that we got a review and a raise at three months and six months and every six months after that. However, as will be discussed in #8, some employees never got those reviews. I found out that there were several employees who had been there a couple of years and never received a review or a raise. How did that happen? How did HR let that happen? This probably meant they never started receiving their benefits, either. Even though they all received retroactive pay in a lump sum, this had to have made things difficult for the payroll department to calculate how much each of those employees should have made. I guess I should consider myself lucky.
5. There was inequity in sending agents home early. The woman in charge of the scheduling for the call centers (I'll call her Mond) was the one who would make the call to send people home early if call volume was low. Her office was at the Chesapeake location. When I worked at the Balboa location, I found out that she almost NEVER contacted the Supervisors over there to send people home. She only went to the Supervisors at Chesapeake (because it was apparently easier to talk to them than to call over to Balboa). The problem with this is that everyone at Balboa could tell that call volume was low and would keep bugging the Supervisors to find out if they could leave. That call from Mond just never came. And the Supervisors were not permitted to call her. ("If I'm going to send people home from Balboa, I'll call you!)
6. The attendance policy was very strict. This was the number one reason for the turnaround. When I first started, you were not supposed to get more than two absences in a three-month period. If you did, you got a verbal warning. Three more absences would mean a written warning, followed by a 2nd written warning. After that, you were fired. That three months was a fixed period of time based on your date of hire. It wasn't uncommon for me to see agents call out on the first day of their fixed three month period. I couldn't help but wonder about the logic in this. I could understand it if they were sick and were just holding out for that, but I almost never saw these agents showing any symptoms the day before they called out. I couldn't imagine that they would risk getting one third of the way toward a warning on the first day they were eligible. Later, the fixed period was changed to a rolling period, but we still were handing out the written warnings and terminations just like before, so that didn't really make a difference. The stupid thing is that the same Supervisors who were lax in completing reviews in a timely manner seemed to have no problem dishing out the discipline when it came to attendance. In fact, it was so bad that I saw that they had issued a written warning for attendance to someone who was working the last day of his two-week notice. I felt that was unbelievably petty and uncalled for. He also felt that way and let that be known in his comments.
7. If your Supervisor (or Lead Dispatch Agent) didn't work on Sunday, you were out of luck. This only pertained to the low call volume on Sundays. If I signed up to go home early that day, I would usually get to go. The problem was that other Supervisors would hold team meetings on Sundays to help increase call volume. A group of ten people would get taken off the phones at one time for about an hour. And the meetings weren't really about anything in general. They just featured everyone talking about anything and everything. It didn't even have to be related to work. So, if you didn't have your team's Supervisor or LDA there on Sunday, there was no one else to call you in for a meeting. I always got furious at this and there was nothing I could do about it.
8. Some Supervisors had no clue what they were doing. In the previous post, I explained that NDC prided itself on promoting from within. However, this led to people moving up the ladder much faster than expected or than what they were prepared for. It appears that a lot of people became LDAs and Supervisors simply because they wanted to get off the phones and make more money. This is what led to reviews, raises and benefits being late. (There were also people who had been there for years and never received their Welcome packets.) I was fortunate in that the Supervisors I worked for were somewhat on the ball (but as I discovered later, still behind the curve).
A lot of these issues could have been solved by having upper level management work harder at their jobs, instead of treating their positions like lifestyle enhancers. I was looking to help be a part of the culture that changed that. I'll go more in detail in a future post.
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