She was willing to clock out in order to go to the bathroom. They fired her for a 12 cent error. I don't know that whole story, if she had priors and whatnot, but, according to the facts as presented, it just sounds like there was retaliation on the company's part. Of course, I don't know what the company policy is on having errors.

http://ts2.mm.bing.net/th?id=H.4689903422015261&pid=1.7
Problem solved.

This seems a little more classy.

I work for a major media company that is hugely profitable but isn't really growing their core business. So naturally they are trying to squeeze more $$ out of their employees by offshoring a bunch of development work. But they're also trying to implement new technologies and innovate at the same time. It's squeezing the life out of the few good developers we have left.

And good companies allow their managers freedom to bend the rules when it obviously makes sense. I'm going to take a wild guess that a chunk of her manager's bonus is directly tied to 'adherence' metrics.

Yeah, or she actually was a crappy employee that caused problems before this and the manager just decided to dump her.

That is kind of what I'm thinking.

Sometimes they look for reasons to can someone.

The bottom 20% of all performers should be seen as expendible. If they know what is expected and choose to not change and be more productive then out they go. 80% of problem employees are in that group as a general rule. You also have some top performers who create issues as well. Management has to make tough decisions that some employees will never agree with or attemt to understand. Those who do and perform do well in most companies.

I feel like nobody that has posted after Duncan's extremely well stated post actually read Duncan's extremely well stated post.

We have a call center in my office. The job looks like it sucks something terrible but those time standards exist because they have to exist.

"Well just let her work more later..." isn't a viable answer - someone needs to be there to take those calls and if the calls don't get taken timely, call centers default on time-standards and end up fired.

Yes, it's only one person and 5 minutes here and there may not be the end of the world, but the rules exist for a reason and the rules in these instances are not arbitrary and mean-spirited. They're generally built around the requirements put in place by the people that have contracted out with these call centers.

The alternative? Everyone gets fired when the contract gets cancelled.

Sometimes your boss has a reason to do what he does. In fact, most times that's the case.

But by all means, continue raging against the machine.

Here's the context I'm using: running or staffing efficiently for a call center is about ability to answer the calls you're supposed to answer in the time frame you're supposed to answer them.

You can staff efficiently even with bad planning and having too many people on the phone. It's called voluntary time off (VTO) and they NEVER have a problem finding volunteers. Cutting hours from a day is easy.

You can't staff efficiently without good schedule adherence expectations. If a center's schedule adherence is consistently BAD, you will consistently be UNDERstaffed. And there is no efficient way to recover from that. Adding employee hours back is almost impossible.

Almost all call centers allow supervisors/managers to use some leeway for employees that deserve it. But that has a limit, and you are typically limited in how long you can cover for someone.

It sounds to me like the exception they offered her - clocking out each time she needed to use the restroom beyond her break periods - was an extremely fair and lenient one. That's more than most centers will do (legal departments have nightmares about exceptions like that).

Saying "just have her work extra" would work just fine in a different setting. In a call center, her willingness to work an extra hour at the end of the shift to cover for an extra 5 or 6 bathroom breaks is nice, but it only works if the center needs extra staffing at that time.

Just to set the scene, here are a few things that happen when a call center is run inefficiently (not answering calls in timely fashion):

1) Queues build up, and customers wait longer.
2) Employees have no time between calls (no more than 3-5 seconds) to catch their breath/clear their head before the next call comes in
3) Those customers that were waiting longer? They're pissed off about waiting forever when they DO get someone to help them, and more difficult to deal with.
4) Breaks are shortened. People with hour breaks are reduced to 1/2 breaks to compensate and help catch up the queue.
5) More bodies are thrown at the queue in an effort to stem the bleeding. Often, these are employees with less experience or expertise, and they have difficulty providing the same level of service (each wrong answer given creates 2-4 more calls down the line)

An inefficient call center makes the lives of its employees a living hell (short breaks, 8 hours a day talking to angry/annoyed people on the phone, no time between calls) and makes the customers of the call center unhappy.

This is one of the reasons the call centers in India are so popular. They work for less money and the workers are much, much more reliable (in general) in terms of schedule adherence, which makes staffing much, much easier.

This could be more simple it just depends..

<a href="http://photobucket.com/images/depends" target="_blank"><img src="http://i231.photobucket.com/albums/ee225/joerider777/Depends.jpg" border="0" alt="depends photo: Depends Depends.jpg"/></a>

I really hate articles like this because they're so desperate to paint the picture of the big bad corporation vs the helpless peon (helpless pregnant peon). I do think letting her make up the time is a viable solution in theory, but 1) it's not rocket science and I'm sure they could have come to the same conclusion, and 2) we have no idea if she's worth those 5 minutes lost during peak times.

Where I worked, the top 10% were incredibly valuable to the overall metrics, because the bottom ~30% were pretty terrible at their job. If she was one of the best employees there, she's probably worth the extra 5 minutes every hour or two. If she was already dragging down the metrics, having her clock out so her metrics didn't tank the averages even further was probably their only option.

Most of the anti-corporate stuff in these types of threads is just another example of Dunning Kruger... big meanie bosses with multiple degrees who busted his ass for years don't know anything while the hourly guy who's been there 3 months has it all figured out.