This happened to me, and so I played the ol - "Its my site, I have rights of free speech and if you want an apology/me to beg for my job then you can fuck right off." Needless to say the Corporation that I worked for took a dim view of me slating there products, their service, and taking the piss out of the corporate wankspeak that permiates the place.
Now as an employer it did not cross their minisule minds that I may be in some tiny way be actually right. All they were concerned about was the ol corporate image. Hears news for you guys everyone may wander around with a fixed grin and spout the corporate rubbish, but deep down they know its just that - rubbish fit only for the bin.
So the long and the short of it was that after being halled in for an "interview", I use that word loosly as the Gestapo could have taken lessons from the managers in question. I was sent home for the day and told not to tell anyone why I was going. Now you can imagine the scene I come out of there and get told that - "Ve vill continue ze torture ze next day", and so after a sleepless night ended up takin a sick day.
Needless to say being put on the spot and getting the corporate threats against myself, bringing the company into disrepute(whatever the hell that means) and being informed that there legal bods were considering what action to take, the ol nerve did waver a tad.
So I then got in an wiped the site in question off the interweb- something I now regret but there we go, and after a lot of pondering I have decided that my free speech is more important to me than the company line - and have taken some time off to chill out before handing in my notice. After all if they wanted an open and honest work environment, we would be able to raise a complaint without fear of being fired.
Well fear my friends is beast that grows ever bigger if you dont face up to it, and so I am in the process of finding a new employer, a kindly chap or chapette who will hopefully have a respect for the rights of the individual to free speech and pay me a wage to keep the wolf from the door.
Now this brings me to the next bit: REVENGE...
As I only said what I thought, right or wrong that is my right and I ended up having to leave before getting fired, I figure that some payback there way is in order. A few ideas are mulling about but will get back to them at a later date.
Finally in this rant bit I have to add that thanks to the wonders of posting cv's on the internet I have another interview with a local company tomorrow and so may be back in work soon. As for my last employer, I have hardly spoken to them since the nazi style interigation the other week, oh and found this on the shit that gets thrown at call centre staff(linky thingy: Found it on the workblogging site::)
** As an aside, now that I have escaped the corporate bullshit that passes for a callcentre, I have noticed that I am a lot more relaxed and unwound and other people have noticed this as well. My better half has even commented on the fact that my snoring has decreased! So all in all this may have worked out for the best and without getting all spiritual maybe everything does happen for a reason.
www.observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,,1499306,00.html/
(also copied and pasted below)
The lengths to which companies will go to avoid drawing the right conclusions in favour of the self-serving and expedient never ceases to amaze. A spectacular - and sad - example was highlighted in an article in this paper last week ('Indian call staff quit over abuse on the line'), describing how increasing numbers of employees were abandoning their jobs because of abuse, often racist, from British and US customers.
According to the article, irate customers were a major stress factor contributing to rocketing turnover rates at Indian call centres, in some cases touching 60 or 70 per cent a year. Some organisations were employing psychiatrists and counsellors to help employees to cope. Their conclusion: anger and fear about offshoring were to blame. 'When you move jobs away from a country, there's going to be a lot of pent-up frustration which gets let out on Indian workers,' one analyst said.
There is zero excuse or tolerance for the kind of abuse documented in the article. But to blame the anger on racism and the effects of offshoring is to ignore the glaring fact that belligerent customers are a major stress factor for UK and US call centres, too. Does that cause a dim light to go on somewhere? It should. The important thing is nothing to do with where the call centre is located; the important thing is that customers have had it up to here, everywhere, and the reasons are everywhere the same.
At bottom, companies are still producing to suit themselves rather than the customer. 'We don't care about the colour of the person we're talking to,' says Professor Harry Scarbrough, director of the Economic and Social Research Council's Evolution of Business Knowledge programme. 'But we do care about being fobbed off with people working to a script. Call centres don't have the knowledge available in a local bank branch or shop. What customers get is knowledge that is pre-packed, shallow, mass-produced and inflexible. People don't like that.'
It was Albert Einstein who defined madness as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Tragically, but predictably, this is what is happening in India and elsewhere as supposedly advanced companies export toxic western management techniques to countries that can be excused for imagining that there is no alternative to what they are told is 'best practice'. 'Best practice', of course (like 'solutions'), is rapidly becoming a warning sign of meaninglessness or complacency ahead. And in the case of contact centres, charges John Seddon of Vanguard Consulting, conventional 'best practice' is a large part of the problem, embedding in the work the very things that earned centres their sweatshop reputation and harming competitiveness rather than improving it.
The problem starts with the distance of the call centre from the rest of the organisation, metaphorically as well as literally. It ought to be the company's window on the world, a vital and sensitive two-way connection with customers; instead, all too often it is a bolt-on cost centre, a lowest-cost sponge for mopping up the mess of the initial product inadequacy. As such, it has no influence on, and therefore precious little chance of changing, the conditions that caused the customer aggro in the first place.
So most call centres start off with high stress factors - angry customers and lack of influence over the problems they deal with every day - built into their workload. This is the company's fault, not the customer's.
'The distance is induced by the organisation, not geography,' says Scarbrough. Offshoring the call centre is a perfect symbolic statement of the peripheral importance of customer concerns versus production efficiencies. The factors are compounded many times over by the way call centres are internally designed and managed.
The 'sweatshop' analogy is well-founded. Vanguard notes that the measurements on which staff are judged are equivalents of the time-and-motion measures used in factories pilloried by Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. Time to answer the phone, time spent on calls, numbers of calls per hour are derived from the need to meet production targets set by management rather than from the purpose of serving the customer.
The result is a double alienation, of both employees and customers. 'It's very routinised, high-surveillance work,' says Scarbrough of the Economic and Social Research Council. 'There's low motivation in skill and small rewards, backed up with the big stick: surveillance and controls applied through technology.'
Under the new-fangled (often excessive) technological façade, what's happening is actually a long-hallowed configuration. Aided by technology, companies are going offshore to play the low-cost production option. But in services they still haven't twigged that it is quality rather than quantity or price that's important; and quality, just as it does in manufacturing, requires reversing the whole cycle of production, starting from the customer, not the output target.
Meanwhile, the remedies proposed for the Indian call centres will, like most 'best practice', make matters worse. Call-centre workers don't need psychological counselling or anger-management courses; they need a better system and, failing that, a tough trade union.
As for letting staff hang up on abusive customers, as some firms are doing - one entirely sympathises, but it's so far from approaching the underlying issues that it's hard to know where to start.
As the costs of the customer revolt begin to mount, companies will eventually have to rethink their low-cost production logic. But sadly it is too late to stop the export of their nineteenth-century management principles, which cause vast amounts of alienation, exploitation and needless misery to emerging countries - truly worst practice.
As Scarbrough says, given the low-skill, low-value of the jobs created in India on one side and the destructive hidden costs for customers and companies on the other, offshored call centres may be a remarkable example of an international exchange, freely entered into, that benefits neither party: 'That's quite rare.'
** Update 7th June - Had an interview today so who knows I may be working elsewhere soon(ish) - should be getting a callback today as to the results of the interview.
0 people have spoken:
Post a Comment