Well it seems odd to say that this week has been much worse then last week.... unfortunately there is no way that it wasn't. Wednesday we learned the company is letting a lot of people go in call centers in other states. There goal is too move all service into a few main centers and not have so many centers. A lot of people found out Wednesday that they will be out of a job soon. Let me tell you that even with 5 months notice, losing your job sucks. The horrible thing is I understand why they are doing it. If you can pay less money and still provide service you have to provide why wouldn't you. So what will happen is service level may drop for a while as the new employees learn how to do the job and the old employees that are jobless soon lose motivation. Plus change sends ripples as I was reminded during the last few days when I spoke to agents that call from the field for help. Some have lost faith and worry that the company has forgotten that they provide a service in exchange for money and to continue to grow you need to provide competent and quality service. Word of mouth can make you big.... of course so can good marketing. So trust is lost but you are hiring and building a new community of service people so it will just be a little while until you get completely on track. The new employees will be far more malleable and they will be considerably cheaper then the 20 to 30 year career workers you just left behind. Then you just built in a place that costs less to do business in and perhaps the starting wage is also lower (I can not confirm this since I am not applying for a job in these cities because the cost to do business is low for a reason.... it's a crap place to live). The only potential losers are your customers while the change over is in progress and the new hires get up to speed.
I think in a job like I do paying more intelligent people to do the work is good because they can think and be creative. Sometimes a problems solution requires you to look through the lines and see the reality of the situation. What is getting a disputed 5 bucks versus keeping a customer? So why would you be looking for the way to save money on employees? You get what you pay for right? The people that are not able to see past the rules will always follow the rules. Which is good but also very dangerous. So maybe there is an even steeper learning curve because you are saving money on your work force. You could always give out super long walking papers which will help you continue to train your new window lickers. Intelligent people will leave you one day anyway, the new breed of employees just use the company back. Get what you can and jump to a better gig when you can. So it's a big win right?
Anyway in other news my roommate is having all kinds of drama.... his son is moving across the country without him. So it has been super stressful at home too. It isn't fair to either my roommate or the little guy to separate them even more but what can you do but hope it ends up being just for the short term. Until his son leaves I told my roommate to make sure he took the little guy as much as he could. I will help as much as I can. This is way more important then anything I have going at the moment.
So send us some good vibes up here in the NorthWest... We need it. Stress is at a high level right now and we could always use the love.
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