lost 60% of work force

[dragon]

I work for the IT (Information Technology) here on army depot serving 6000 plus civilins employees and 200 or so soldiers. well my office contains 40% federal employees and 60 % contractors. Well after 5 years of exemplary performance their contract is not being renewed meaning we are losing 60% and they are not being replaced. . so we are falling behind on our tickets for customers and they are complaining.

Well management calls us all in and tells us that we are doing a poor job and that if we didn't correct it we would all receive bad evaluations. So I decided to speak up telling him that its management fault not ours as they got rid of our people especially s7nce it was his recommendation to the contracting office to not renew. well he gets pissed and tells me he is going to write me up for insorbination.
I tell himif he does I am going to he union and have them file an appeal on my behalf.
I then point out that as I am a 90% disabled vet so I don't really need to work.
I also point out that getting a memorandum for record only stays on my record for a year then is removed.
So he decides that we will have quetos which in my office wont work as some trouble calls take a few minutes while takes days.

Ajnyways its pretty bullshite.

[Borgholio]

Ah, the typical "Let us in management make a dumb as shit decision and then blame our underlings."

[Raw Shark]

This is why I flamed-out at the office job. Me and one other guy were doing the work of a team of five that had three useless dipshits who just wanted to sit around and talk about lunch and check Facebook all day, and they fired that guy because one of the managers saw him as a better fit for her job than herself and thus a potential threat. I complained that I was being asked to shoulder the work of five people while simultaneously training his replacement, got told I wasn't being a, "team player," and the mutual choruses of go-fuck-yourself started soon after.

[biostem]

This type of story is one of the reasons why I feel all management should be required to know how to, and actually perform the various jobs that their subordinates do, so as to at least have the perspective of being "on the front lines".

On a simple logical level - how can they get rid of 60% of the workers and *not* expect things to go to hell? I mean, a smart manager knows what their typical workload and throughput are, so how can they expect you to do more with less? Sure, you can press people to get a bit of extra performance out of them - but only for a little while - then your good workers get burnt out, and you're left with no one left...

[Joun_Lord]

The things I've found in working is much of the time alot of managers are the antithesis of intelligent. They tend to get their jobs by being brown nosing suck-ups who are just smart enough to sound good and usually have people working for them that make them look good.

Invariably though they bite off more then they can chew and create a mess. The most usual way they fuck-up is of course firing people in the name of efficiency. In their minds all the "bottom feeders" are lazy undisciplined slackers who barely do any work. They have a what is I believe called a confirmation bias of workers, they see workers around the water cooler or not working and assume that is all that goes on, kinda look anti-welfare people will only see people with food stamps buying seafood and steak. They believe themselves to be incredibly hard workers that the company would fold without and think all their ideas are golden, ususally because of their own ego and their surrounding themselves with yes men.

Because all the workers are so lazy it ain't going to hurt the company if they fire a portion of them. Of course that will just force all the other workers to take up the slack and they can considering they are so damn lazy, now they can't take hourly coffee breaks and spend half their workday chatting, now they gotta actually work.

And when that plan of "fire everybody" doesn't work its of course the workers fault for not working hard enough.

Other "winning" ideas managers have is hiring only their friends and it doesn't take a genius to figure out why that would wind up being a problem. Firing skilled workers and hiring unskilled and possibly non-english speaking foreign labor that can be trained on the job, an especially bad idea for jobs that require people to understand the worker like customer service or telemarketing (the reason the telemarketing job I used to work at closed down, they tried to import labor with very bad results) or just outsourcing the jobs completely.

Thats not to say all managers are bad, my current manager is actually a pretty cool old broad that recognizes and rewards hard work and talent (like my talent of being the only person working in my building under 40) but alot of managers are shit.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

I've worked for precisely 2 truly good managers in my entire career out of at least 20. Happily, one is running my current office, but I've chosen the "leave me alone and let me do my thing" route and am not willing to go to back to taking direction even for a good manager. This is partly due to previous bad experiences and partly because methods that work for other salespeope don't work for me and my methods don't work for others so there's no point putting in time at the office and trying to be part of the team. I don't get paid unless I find clients and clients can't be found by hanging around the office unless a person is good on the phone, which I am emphatically not.

[Bedlam]

The main management fault I've see recently is the idea that 'things will work this way' and then ignoring anyone who says that there will be problems. We've recently had a huge legislation led shake up on how we do things and it was decided that all customer interaction will be via the phone to the extent that if they write to us we now write back to the telling them to call us. It sounds great, it should be quicker and easier to explain complex issues to customers.

The problems are that no matter how good dealing with us on the telephone is, there are still going to be some people who want to write and repeatedly telling them to call us because there literally are no more paper forms will get them angry. Also dealing with people on the phone takes more time and requires a better level of training than using a pre-written letter, neither of these factors were considered resulting in us blanket offering call backs to anyone who calls us... in a month or so. It was eventually decided that there would need to be some way to provide written answers but this was literally designed after hours the day before the change was to be put in place and resulted in grabbing some totally unsuited processes and throwing them at the line teams and telling them to fix them.

Also training seems to be a dirty word in the corporate world, its time your staff aren't actually doing their job! Its giving something to your staff which they could then take somewhere else and save a competitor money! I think it was late 80s then this started to become the mind set, that it was easier to poach a competitors staff rather than train your own, which works fine, as long as there is someone out there training their staff. No no-one does so that most staff have no idea how to do their jobs and have to learn everything by trial and error.

Ah, it feels good to vent!

[Purple]

Also dealing with people on the phone takes more time and requires a better level of training than using a pre-written letter,

Sorry for singling this one out but I have to. Have you ever gotten a reply in the form of a pre-written letter? Those things look like they have been assembled by lawyers for the explicit purpose of finding the most passively aggressive and yet polite way of telling you to go fuck your self because you won't be helped.

[Simon_Jester]

The problems are that no matter how good dealing with us on the telephone is, there are still going to be some people who want to write and repeatedly telling them to call us because there literally are no more paper forms will get them angry. Also dealing with people on the phone takes more time and requires a better level of training than using a pre-written letter, neither of these factors were considered resulting in us blanket offering call backs to anyone who calls us... in a month or so. It was eventually decided that there would need to be some way to provide written answers but this was literally designed after hours the day before the change was to be put in place and resulted in grabbing some totally unsuited processes and throwing them at the line teams and telling them to fix them.

Plus, I imagine there's an inherent sleaziness attached (in the eyes of your customers) to your company's refusal to put anything in writing...

Also training seems to be a dirty word in the corporate world, its time your staff aren't actually doing their job! Its giving something to your staff which they could then take somewhere else and save a competitor money! I think it was late 80s then this started to become the mind set, that it was easier to poach a competitors staff rather than train your own, which works fine, as long as there is someone out there training their staff. No no-one does so that most staff have no idea how to do their jobs and have to learn everything by trial and error.

I speculate the problem is this:

The managerial culture in the English-speaking world itself does not need to do any training. Because they don't actually need to know how to do anything- or so the cult-of-the-MBA assures us.

They need to know how to 'make decisions,' but if there is any specific skill they need (like correctly operating their own computer), they can order someone else to do it for them, or order everyone else to contort themselves so as to accommodate the manager's lack of skill.

So, I speculate, you've got a lot of managers who haven't learned how to do anything in twenty or thirty years, who no longer truly grasp that other people need to have actual skills and knowledge about how to perform tasks, and can't just improvise or force the world to coddle their inability.

Also dealing with people on the phone takes more time and requires a better level of training than using a pre-written letter,

Sorry for singling this one out but I have to. Have you ever gotten a reply in the form of a pre-written letter? Those things look like they have been assembled by lawyers for the explicit purpose of finding the most passively aggressive and yet polite way of telling you to go fuck your self because you won't be helped.

A lot do- but there is a reason for that, because those form letters are sent to people who won't be helped.

So instead, Bedlam's company decided it would be much better to tell all those people they "won't be helped" over the telephone. Which means Bedlam now needs to be able to deal with customers throwing rage-fits at him over the telephone every time. Which, in turn, requires special training and also takes personality traits most people don't have.

[Purple]

A lot do- but there is a reason for that, because those form letters are sent to people who won't be helped.

So instead, Bedlam's company decided it would be much better to tell all those people they "won't be helped" over the telephone. Which means Bedlam now needs to be able to deal with customers throwing rage-fits at him over the telephone every time. Which, in turn, requires special training and also takes personality traits most people don't have.

And that's a good thing . If I wont be helped I at least deserve the minimal decency of being told that by a human being and being allowed to give an appropriate response. This is especially true if its a paid service.

[FaxModem1]

Another restraint is how much a telephone operator is allowed to say. Often, they'll have rehearsed scripts and pages in front of them, which they are not allowed to deviate from, so the person cannot have a conversation with the person, instead, they just receive a pat response from a page, that the operator isn't allowed to deviate from at the risk of being fired, due to legal reasons.

[Purple]

That's the same sort of garbage than. Basically, I find any sort of stock response that tries to say things without saying it to be garbage and frankly offensive. If you ain't going to help me just tell me that openly.

[Bedlam]

Also dealing with people on the phone takes more time and requires a better level of training than using a pre-written letter,

Sorry for singling this one out but I have to. Have you ever gotten a reply in the form of a pre-written letter? Those things look like they have been assembled by lawyers for the explicit purpose of finding the most passively aggressive and yet polite way of telling you to go fuck your self because you won't be helped.

Our biggest issue is that the offshore staff can only use pre-written letters, they aren't allowed to write one word of their own and it takes a huge amount of time and money to write or change the letters, and unfortunately the majority of customers aren't robots who write things in one particular way or ask one of a few dozen specific questions. So either the answer is the pre-written one which is the closest to what they asked of the case gets moved onshore to the team that was stripped to the bone because the offshore team was cheaper.

So instead, Bedlam's company decided it would be much better to tell all those people they "won't be helped" over the telephone. Which means Bedlam now needs to be able to deal with customers throwing rage-fits at him over the telephone every time. Which, in turn, requires special training and also takes personality traits most people don't have.

And that's a good thing . If I wont be helped I at least deserve the minimal decency of being told that by a human being and being allowed to give an appropriate response. This is especially true if its a paid service.

I'm glad that I'm in a position where mostly process requests rather than have to take calls, I doubt I'd be in my job for very long if I did.

The main point of the calls at the moment is people wanting to claim their pension policies, recent legislation changes mean that they can take the whole policy as a lump sum. For a lot of people this is very tempting and looks great, I get all this money now, I can buy a car or go on holiday. However, this is the money to last them their whole lives, once its gone its gone. Now in my opinion this is going to cause a huge problem in 5-10 years when suddenly a bunch of people realise they have no money and that is was a bad idea to just take it all. Then they'll all be back saying that they didn't know that by taking all their money they wouldn't have any more money and we should have told them it was a bad idea. This is the primary reason for the phone call move, we will have recorded that they said they knew what they were doing, in writing they will just say, oh I didn't read that bit, or I didn't understand what I was doing, you should have made it clearer.

Now from a legal point of view this makes more sense, however, from an actually doing it front you have hundreds of people who just want to say, give me my money and have it then straight away, instead there is a rather long script to go through everything else they could do with the money and to confirm do they want to do this? Do they really want to do this? Are they really sure?

Again seems a great idea from the management perspective, less from the front lines.

[Purple]

Again seems a great idea from the management perspective, less from the front lines.

Why? It's not like anyone is going to hunt you down personally for not warning him enough. Sure you spend more time on it. But that just means you are earning your wage instead of doing something that can be automated by an email spam bot.

[Bedlam]

Again seems a great idea from the management perspective, less from the front lines.

Why? It's not like anyone is going to hunt you down personally for not warning him enough. Sure you spend more time on it. But that just means you are earning your wage instead of doing something that can be automated by an email spam bot.

Mostly because it makes the customers angry, they don't want to have a half an hour script removing any blame on us, they want their money now! The extended call times going through everything means that far less cases can be done and the solution in the form of call backs in a month are, not surprisingly, not going down well.

[Purple]

Mostly because it makes the customers angry, they don't want to have a half an hour script removing any blame on us, they want their money now! The extended call times going through everything means that far less cases can be done and the solution in the form of call backs in a month are, not surprisingly, not going down well.

Are you paid or evaluated by the caller? If yes, I can understand why you'd care.

[Bedlam]

Mostly because it makes the customers angry, they don't want to have a half an hour script removing any blame on us, they want their money now! The extended call times going through everything means that far less cases can be done and the solution in the form of call backs in a month are, not surprisingly, not going down well.

Are you paid or evaluated by the caller? If yes, I can understand why you'd care.

Not exactly although the number of cases dealt with each day is part of our performance figures which control any pay rise / promotion. We care because we don't really want to be dealing with people angry about the system which we have no control over and can do nothing about.

[Gaidin]

Also training seems to be a dirty word in the corporate world, its time your staff aren't actually doing their job! Its giving something to your staff which they could then take somewhere else and save a competitor money! I think it was late 80s then this started to become the mind set, that it was easier to poach a competitors staff rather than train your own, which works fine, as long as there is someone out there training their staff. No no-one does so that most staff have no idea how to do their jobs and have to learn everything by trial and error.

Sad part of this one is that my first real job after graduating pretty much told me my degree made me trainable. Nothing more. And now the companies are like this, mostly. I got so lucky with my last job. My manager was like, "In a year we're doing a project with X technology, just play with this protocol, experiment, have fun, and learn about it."

World needs more people like this.

[Simon_Jester]

Mostly because it makes the customers angry, they don't want to have a half an hour script removing any blame on us, they want their money now! The extended call times going through everything means that far less cases can be done and the solution in the form of call backs in a month are, not surprisingly, not going down well.

Are you paid or evaluated by the caller? If yes, I can understand why you'd care.

Normal humans find it unpleasant when stupid people get irritated with them because they are legally required to read through a long script and get the stupid person's consent to each individual piece.

Bedlam, in this regard, is a normal human.

[salm]

The things I've found in working is much of the time alot of managers are the antithesis of intelligent. They tend to get their jobs by being brown nosing suck-ups who are just smart enough to sound good and usually have people working for them that make them look good.

Invariably though they bite off more then they can chew and create a mess. The most usual way they fuck-up is of course firing people in the name of efficiency. In their minds all the "bottom feeders" are lazy undisciplined slackers who barely do any work. They have a what is I believe called a confirmation bias of workers, they see workers around the water cooler or not working and assume that is all that goes on, kinda look anti-welfare people will only see people with food stamps buying seafood and steak. They believe themselves to be incredibly hard workers that the company would fold without and think all their ideas are golden, ususally because of their own ego and their surrounding themselves with yes men.

Because all the workers are so lazy it ain't going to hurt the company if they fire a portion of them. Of course that will just force all the other workers to take up the slack and they can considering they are so damn lazy, now they can't take hourly coffee breaks and spend half their workday chatting, now they gotta actually work.

And when that plan of "fire everybody" doesn't work its of course the workers fault for not working hard enough.

Other "winning" ideas managers have is hiring only their friends and it doesn't take a genius to figure out why that would wind up being a problem. Firing skilled workers and hiring unskilled and possibly non-english speaking foreign labor that can be trained on the job, an especially bad idea for jobs that require people to understand the worker like customer service or telemarketing (the reason the telemarketing job I used to work at closed down, they tried to import labor with very bad results) or just outsourcing the jobs completely.

Thats not to say all managers are bad, my current manager is actually a pretty cool old broad that recognizes and rewards hard work and talent (like my talent of being the only person working in my building under 40) but alot of managers are shit.

I think this has to do with the way the company is run in general. There are two ways to do that. The first is to exploit employees by having them work under very bad conditions, low pay, threat of being fired for petty nonsense and generally relying on cheap people with a high turnover. New employees will be very motivated and do decent work. After a while they are worn out from the crappy working conditions, fired and replaced by a new highly motivated person. A system like this can work for some companies but is very destructive for the employees. Management in companies like that tend to be like the ones discribed in the opening post and a general atmosphere of bullying, deceit and deception.

Then there are companies who invest in their employees, have generally pleasant managment, satisfied employees and people who actually stay at the company for a long time. Employees and their opinions are respected and used by managment to improve the company.
This type of managment can work very well, too.

Obviously one shouldn´t touch companies like the former with a ten foot pole. I am not sure how accurate company rating sites like glassdoor.com are but I´ve gone through several of such sites and compared my personal experience and the statemnts of friends about their jobs with the ratings and comments on these sites and so far it has matched up pretty often.
If I was looking for a new job I´d read such sites and steer clear of any company which appears to run their business on an atmosphere of fear and intimidation.

I´ve never had the displeasure to work for an asshole company but I´ve seen several people getting ground up by such management systems. If you work in such an environment you need to get the fuck out and find a new job even if it pays less. Companies like that destroy people.

[Simon_Jester]

The biggest problem I see is that companies that chew people up and spit them out wind up hiring several times more often for the same opening than companies that don't. If you treat your employees well enough that they want to stay for ten years, you don't need to hire replacements as often.

This may help to explain why so many people have the experience of working a string of 'grind you up' jobs, even if the total percentage of such jobs is not so high.