this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2024
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Ok, so I get the “good intentions” of the procedures - sanitary, patient health and wellbeing, etc - sounds good on paper. It yeah, you’re right that it’s demoralizing and easily causes burnout. I’ve had jobs where management absolutely didn’t trust their employees to do the right thing. They even went so far as to herd us into a janitors closet and then walk us to our desks (floating desk arrangements at a call center) like we were children.
The managers were told to walk up and down the rows and look for people not doing their job and fire them. We were told if we weren’t on active calls, we were to sit in our chairs with our hands over the keyboard in ready position for the next call. No talking; no reading books; no nothing. I’m sure somewhere on paper it sounded like a good idea. But it was the absolute most toxic environment I’ve personally been in.
Anyway, y’all should unionize.
Fucking tech solutions to a manager problem. The manager should care about the metrics of wait time and client satisfaction.
If waits are low and satisfaction is high. Then who gives fuck all about what techs do in between calls.
Metrics like calls per tech or average length of calls could be used to better understand tech efficiency. Or even rings before pickup. A good pbx can help ensure calls are relatively equally spread between techs. This helps keep one tech from over working for another slacking off. You can have utilization goals so that you aren't under or over staffed (I'm of the opinion that a techs utilization should be roughly 75-80% and they should have downtime in their shifts to prevent burnout.)
It's stupid, inhumane, and impossible to expect an employee to track, bill, and work 100% of their shift.
I lost the only job I have ever left involuntarily on a helpdesk for a small system partly because of the tracking tools they used
I was top in the team by tickets closed. The person they kept was top by time per call (spent the longest time on each call/worst at efficiently fixing callers' issues)
Tech tools are not a solution for incompetent management
I bet scam call center have a better working environment that this.