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 20th
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.
