An Age of Doing the Bare Minimum at work…

Anymore one is almost hard pressed to get good customer service.  Politeness and smiles and a thank you for shopping/doing business with us are almost impossible to get anymore.  It would be easy to blame the employees.  One could say they are too demanding or that they are self-centered or even that they have no respect for this world anymore.  It’s easy when you get bad service in a restaurant to automatically blame the waitress or when you’re shopping to assume the cashier could care less about you as a customer.  Although some of this may be true I blame the leaders of this world and of the companies.  A company is a compilation of its employees and its employees are a reflection of its management, plain and simple.  Let me explain.  In the eighties as I was a young woman coming into the working world I watched as managers and coaches alike tried to help their employees improve and get ahead and move on up the ladder.  The management then understood that if your employees succeed so did they.  Managers then also cared enough to know their employees.  There was a vice president in the one company of over 300 employees I knew that knew every employees name, their family’s names, how many children they had, and a lot more.  It was very impressive and yes he was above average, but it made you respect him.  He always had a smile for you and he actually cared if you as a person were doing well.  It made one want to work hard for him and make him proud of you.  In those days your ideas, even if not good ones, were accepted to consider and you were thanked for them.  If you saw something you felt was wrong and you voiced, it to management they tried to help you work through those feelings.  Fast forward to today.  Upper management is lucky if it knows it’s direct employees names and could care less about your family or if you have one.  They don’t want you to get ahead because they are afraid you will take their jobs.  Well this is most of the ones I’ve known recently.  If you voice your opinion they accuse you of being crass or of being offensive and non-company supportive in your comments.  You are treated like and feel like a nameless number.  After a while it starts to beat down even the best employees till they are just doing what they have to in order to make their numbers and make their paycheck.  Instead of being a place you enjoy going to, it’s a mundane existence of let’s get this day over.  True there are employees that are not doing what they are supposed to just because they are bad employees, but other employees that were once good employees fall into a non-caring let me make it to Friday existence.  When one employee fails now instead of taking that employee aside the company feels a need to take the whole group into a room and tell them what went wrong without naming that person or pointing a finger at them (let’s face it we all usually know who it is) and tell everyone that they need to do a better job, which only beats down the good employees even farther.  Then companies are in a cycle of let’s fix what is wrong instead of let us maintain and try to prevent things from going wrong in the first place.  Companies want to hire fewer bodies for more work.  Employees leave and instead of replacing them they simply send it on to the already over worked employees who have few instructions and little training.  Employees call off a lot due to one not caring and two fatigue and frustration.  It’s a vicious cycle that just goes on and on.  Me?  I get beat down and I do get discouraged, but unfortunately for me I am not a person who cannot care.  I care whether my company succeeds.  I care how we are perceived in the community.  I care about my fellow co-workers.   What does this get me?  Usually not much.  I recently marked my 20^th anniversary with my company and not one piece of paper saying way to go.  Not one supervisor in our department who said way to be there; although I took in donuts and informed them thus that it was so they knew.  No value felt by me as an employee of twenty years.  What did they do.  Put my name on a list that you have to look up on their internal web page saying congrats from a generic person whom I’ve never met with 200+ other people that someone would have to really be looking at to ever see.  I still love my company but it isn’t hard for me to see looking around why so many employees have no respect for them.  Respect is earned, it doesn’t just come with a title.  That has always been my belief.  Either way most people these days are just doing the bare minimum at work and I can’t help but believe it could be better but it starts at the top, not the bottom.