Turnover And Out
The Reports Department at FalStaff has a relatively high turnover rate. By the time I was six months in, I was already in the upper-rung of seniority.
The problem is that while our job is largely a thankless and monotonous one, it's also a rather important one. Reports that we make go to the IRS, EEOC, and government agencies of local, regional, and national levels. They are contracts dictating the terms of employment and unemployment. Small mistakes can have a pretty significant impact, even if they're just in the employee handbook. And the longer we do this, the better we become at it and the less errors occur. But then people move on and someone new takes over and makes the same mistakes all over again.
The company has been rightfully concerned about mistakes being made. Concerned enough to supply training? Well, not exactly. But honestly this really is a learn-as-you-go kind of job. Concerned enough to pay us more than $9.50 an hour? Honestly, you could pay someone $19.50 an hour, but if they have a college degree with training in XHTML, VB, C-language, and SQL (as many here, including myself, have), they're going to go absolutely nuts doing nothing but report generation day in and day out and eventually quit.
Don't get me wrong, giving us more than 4x2' desks in 4x4' cubicles with a bump in pay and a little more respect would help, but the ultimate problem of turnover would exist.
That leaves the company only a couple of options. They can keep their employees by offering them a ticket out of Reports or they can keep them there so that they have more experienced people making the docs. In the case of the former, they lose the experience. In the case of the latter, they'll still lose the experience, albeit not quite as quickly. Additionally, in the case of the latter, you lose knowledge that would be helpful in higher up positions.
It really is a catch-22. So far the company's response is to continue to hire rookies, get irate when they make rookie mistakes, and push them out the door for the next set.
I use FalStaff as an example, but it honestly applies to a lot of different employers. CMG, a contracting company that handled tech support for a large satellite company, accepted the fact that most people can only take getting yelled at by customers day in and day out before they burn out. So they pay just enough to get them in the door and automate the process as much as possible. But the same problem exists. You either take them off the phones or they'll eventually leave the phones and the company on their own accord.
Weimarcorp, another former employer, made an art of the turnover rate. Benefits kicked in at 4 months and the average turnover was 3.5. They'd overstaff the entry-level with overqualified individuals. Those that made it nine months looking at blinking lights in the middle of the night would then get moved out. But they had the process so automated that someone new could do the job in their sleep. They lost very little whenever they had to replace employees and they were able to seperate out the employees that would literally do anything for a paycheck, so it worked out extremely well for them. And it lead to boredom that would make just about any employee quit, which meant they never had to pay out benefits.
But for the most part, there are a lot of unpleasant jobs out there that you can't pay people enough to do. With that reality, unless you can automate it to the degree that Weimarcorp did, I'm not sure much of anything can be done. You have to accept a lot of mistakes and, to a degree, you have to accept a customer screaming in your ear cause a rookie made a rookie error.
Which FalStaff has. Except that they reserve the right to chew us out whenever that happens.
Which leads to a higher turnover rate.
The problem is that while our job is largely a thankless and monotonous one, it's also a rather important one. Reports that we make go to the IRS, EEOC, and government agencies of local, regional, and national levels. They are contracts dictating the terms of employment and unemployment. Small mistakes can have a pretty significant impact, even if they're just in the employee handbook. And the longer we do this, the better we become at it and the less errors occur. But then people move on and someone new takes over and makes the same mistakes all over again.
The company has been rightfully concerned about mistakes being made. Concerned enough to supply training? Well, not exactly. But honestly this really is a learn-as-you-go kind of job. Concerned enough to pay us more than $9.50 an hour? Honestly, you could pay someone $19.50 an hour, but if they have a college degree with training in XHTML, VB, C-language, and SQL (as many here, including myself, have), they're going to go absolutely nuts doing nothing but report generation day in and day out and eventually quit.
Don't get me wrong, giving us more than 4x2' desks in 4x4' cubicles with a bump in pay and a little more respect would help, but the ultimate problem of turnover would exist.
That leaves the company only a couple of options. They can keep their employees by offering them a ticket out of Reports or they can keep them there so that they have more experienced people making the docs. In the case of the former, they lose the experience. In the case of the latter, they'll still lose the experience, albeit not quite as quickly. Additionally, in the case of the latter, you lose knowledge that would be helpful in higher up positions.
It really is a catch-22. So far the company's response is to continue to hire rookies, get irate when they make rookie mistakes, and push them out the door for the next set.
I use FalStaff as an example, but it honestly applies to a lot of different employers. CMG, a contracting company that handled tech support for a large satellite company, accepted the fact that most people can only take getting yelled at by customers day in and day out before they burn out. So they pay just enough to get them in the door and automate the process as much as possible. But the same problem exists. You either take them off the phones or they'll eventually leave the phones and the company on their own accord.
Weimarcorp, another former employer, made an art of the turnover rate. Benefits kicked in at 4 months and the average turnover was 3.5. They'd overstaff the entry-level with overqualified individuals. Those that made it nine months looking at blinking lights in the middle of the night would then get moved out. But they had the process so automated that someone new could do the job in their sleep. They lost very little whenever they had to replace employees and they were able to seperate out the employees that would literally do anything for a paycheck, so it worked out extremely well for them. And it lead to boredom that would make just about any employee quit, which meant they never had to pay out benefits.
But for the most part, there are a lot of unpleasant jobs out there that you can't pay people enough to do. With that reality, unless you can automate it to the degree that Weimarcorp did, I'm not sure much of anything can be done. You have to accept a lot of mistakes and, to a degree, you have to accept a customer screaming in your ear cause a rookie made a rookie error.
Which FalStaff has. Except that they reserve the right to chew us out whenever that happens.
Which leads to a higher turnover rate.
posted by trumwill at 10:00 AM
1 Comments:
Life out here is absurdly cheap compared to what I'm used to, so $9.50 goes a lot further. I'm blessed to have a car that's paid for (and a significant other that makes more than I do!).
Even though you don't work 40 hours a week, are you considered full time (eg benefits)?
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