1.08.2005
“The person that sticks their neck out is generally the one that gets their head chopped off.” That is a saying that Old Navy has shown me to be true on several occasions. Since my head is getting chopped anyways, I figure I’ll verbalize the shortest part of the list of things that are wrong with this store.
We spent the majority of the slow season hearing about how we don’t have the people to cover the hours, yet despite the fact that I had open availability, my hours never changed. I’m fairly certain that the same could be said for every non-shipment part time worker on the schedule. If it was essential to hire more people to cover the day shifts, then the people with availability during the day should’ve seen an increase in hours during that time.
Every employee has either been directly told, or shown on paper in some way: “If you wish to be/stay on our team, don’t tell us, show us.” This attitude should be reciprocal, because the management has ‘shown’ us that it is okay, for example, to stay in the office for the largest percentage of their shift, to the exclusion of other things such as back-up on registers or helping customers when they’re needed. This isn’t particularly inspiring to a team of workers who are under the impression that they are vying with other people for their job, when the person who is supposedly evaluating them needs to be persuaded to even step onto the sales floor.
Our management team seems to be incapable of inter-office communication. Often times, a plan of action has to go through one or several associates before it is passed on to another manager, who is just as often completely surprised, or even in disagreement with the decision. We don’t have a team of several dozen managers; we have four and a small team of supervisors. I believe that it’s not unreasonable to ask that they communicate with each other in some way regarding the decisions about running the store.
Recognition should be easier to obtain. On top of the fact that the people who are supposed to be evaluating our on-the-job performance are rarely in the ‘right place at the right time’ they also don’t seem to be willing to offer recognition for anything other than ONC production. Possibly because that’s just numbers on paper that they can examine at their leisure, while evaluating customer service would require them to actually walk the sales floor and observe their employees. It would also require that we have employees on the sales floor to observe in the first place. The FAQ board in the back room seems to be nothing more than lip-service in order to have something else for Raquel to focus on when she comes to visit, and it would only be more obvious if you were to take it down when she left and put it back up when she’s coming.
The store needs to adopt a constant stance on seniority. When I was ‘passed over’ for the Stock Supervisor position, the only straight answer I could get out of any manager as to the reason is that Michelle had been there longer. Her seniority seemed to be enough of a factor to overcome the fact that she wasn’t even on the shipment team, hadn’t been for quite some time, and that I had been running the crew during the interim since Amelia “left.” However, when I approached any manager about my lack of hours and cited that I had fewer hours than many people who hadn’t been employed as long as I had, I was told that ‘seniority doesn’t matter.’ I lack tangible words to exclaim how hypocritical this stance is, and how disgusting it is that you’re willing to adapt your stance to fit your current situation.
The store also is in need of honest communication between the management and the associates. The clandestine manner in which firings especially are generally handled in our company is downright pitiful. Mild harassment in the form of “constructive criticism” followed by dramatic cuts in hours in order to attempt to cause the associate to quit is a technique that has become commonplace. It is especially evident when there are no true grounds for firing an employee other than the fact that it is “their time to go.” Moreover, if there is actually a performance issue with an associate, they are never informed or given any clue that they are not performing properly until formal discipline is enacted against them, leaving them deflated and curious as to why this is the first time they’ve heard a complaint against their work.
In closing, there is only one bit of solace I can take from this entire experience, and it is this: After all of the heads have been chopped and Kevin has completed his duty of giving our store an employment enema to restore our turnaround and average hourly salary to company standards at the expense of the work ethic of our store, the corporate front-office that he is often seen bending over backwards to please will realize that, though he’s an outstanding sycophant, he is inept in all ways at the day-to-day operation of the store and he’ll quickly take his place in the unemployment line next to the employees he was so cavalier about firing.
posted at 13:45
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Lies were told instead.
1.07.2005
It appears that, when I go to work tomorrow, I will be fired. Isn't that great? Luckily, in a rare act of foresight, I had already commenced the job hunt and should hopefully have something lined up within a week. True, it'll be out of town, and our required gas budget will increase dramatically, but the pay and hours will also be dramatically above what I'm making now, so it should all even out in the end.
Happy fuckin birthday to me. I'm drafting my walking papers as we speak.
posted at 11:09
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Lies were told instead.