Being in Middle Management Can Suck
One of my new employees stopped coming in to work earlier this week without letting me know why. I knew that she had been having trouble tagging her materials as quickly as everyone else, but I was unsure exactly why she had stopped coming in since she did not answer her cell phone or my email.
That changed this morning, when she finally emailed me to say why she had quit. In the email she did say I was a nice manager and a decent person, but then she began to list all of her accusations. Here are a few samples:
"I feel that I was being constantly checked, and put under too much pressure to perform the quota you were requiring without pre-disclosure of the full job duties."
" I thought that slavery was abolished in this country but I found out that it was just to converted to corporate America's need to be efficient regardless of a workers state of well being."
"I was constantly reminded that we would need to be producing 1000+ records per day by Friday and even more records per day after that (your quota, which is based on a computer model that is unrealistic anyway)"
"Regardless of the fact that you were being nice and providing us all with a company paid lunch on the first day-during day 2, I was told that I may "want to trim my nails" to make production easier."
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Her complaint of being "constantly checked" involved me speaking to her at the end of the day when she input her work into our online timecard. My concern was that she was constantly labeling 400 - 500 tags less per day than all of the other employees.
As for her nails, I did mention to her that trimming her nails might help, as they were longer and I had seen on past jobs that they could impede finger dexterity for this kind of work. I was just trying to help her think of ways to improve her work flow, since it was obvious something was drastically slowing her down.
Even though I have been trying really hard on this job to be nice and not stress anyone out unduly, I still feel like a heel. It's just hard to make some people understand that production line jobs have to have goals, or they can never finish on time. Sigh....