December is usually the season when number of calls peak. And with the increase in calls, the pressure on the agents and the team builds up. Tensions mount and instances of irate agents increase. There is also the increase in requests for leaves on specific days, which leave the teams scrambling for agent loading as well as schedule revisions.
Our Team Leader has been noted to be late in submission of schedules. He has been known to release a week's schedule on the week itself, and not on the prior week as he should have done. Now he goes on and changes the schedule wholesale during the middle of the week. He asked the day-shift to do a double shift, coming to the floor for the graveyard shift. And then he sent one guy (me) from the graveyard shift, to the day shift. With the changes, I went to the day shift with two trainees. In short, I suddently got a half-day off during the mid-week because of the change in schedule. I continued the day off during the weekend, having the graveyard shift on the Sunday. Good thing I did not have any plans for my days off. If I had any, I would have been more irate than I already was. I sent an email asking for the succeeding weeks' schedules. I also, with all civility, mentioned that I did a lot of cussing and swearing during the two days I was on day shift.
The reason for the change in sched was because of the "low performance" during Monday and Tuesday shift. The TL conveniently forgot that one reason for such performance was that we have been cheating for some time now. The cheat method had him, the TL, answering queues, and telling the caller to call back later. This method lessens the number of abandoned calls and effectively manages the queue. This is not illegal, but it is not cricket either. Now he is sent to the day shift and loses this tool. Afterwards, during the week of the "low performance" he is not on the day shift, and not on the graveyard shift either, but on the evening shift, or, rather, part of the evening shift. He comes in past 6:00pm and leaves before 1:00 am. Because the cheat is dependent on his being on board, if he is not onboard, the abandoned calls pile up.
On top of that, one of the trainees, who has not yet passed the final verbal exam was sent to the following week's (this week's) day shift. And yet, I need him to be on the night shift to take the final verbal exams. Great! I need him to take the verbal exams and pass those exams. If he does not pass, we are one person short. And at this point I don't think I'd like him to pass. He does not have a sense of urgency when it comes to coming on time or on going on breaks either. He almost always goes over the allotted time for breaks.
What's even greater is that the team is vying for a team incentive: if all the members of the team qualify for the individual incentive (total of 3,000 pesos for each qualifier) due to minimal absence or late on non-critical days, and complete attendance on critical days, then the team gets 5,000 pesos. The funny thing is that the Team Leader is not even attending eight hours a day! Because he is too busy doing eight hours during the day on his sideline! Great!! Stupid git!
One of the evening shift people is going to do a total of four half-shifts on weekends so that she qualifies for the incentive. She hasn't gotten on board yet and she's already irate. That's 6:00 to 10am, Saturdays and Sundays (or Sundays and Mondays) on two successive weekends. This is to offset two leaves she filed for during the first week of the incentive program. She did not really want to offset these leaves, but since the incentive was still available for her, and since it will have an impact on the team incentive, she agreed to offset her absences, to put it mildly, with a heavy heart.
This should be a fun three weeks. I can't wait to see the scheduling problems piling up. In fact, I also applied for a resched of days off as I need to have some time during the middle of the week to accompany my wife to her errands. The bad news? I'm doing the clean up, because I'd be spending the critical days on shift, as well as the days between Christmas and New Year. We have two agents already listed for leaves during that period. Now isn't that nice.
This will be a Merry Christmas indeed.
--andoy
13 December 2004
No comments:
Post a Comment