I can't believe how stupid Corporations are. It's so ****ing simple to run a good business, but people can't wait to get in the way to **** it up with inane rules and policies. :shake:

Me too. I work for one of the largest and widest reaching companies you can imagine. I flex my time however I want. Don't say ALL companies are bad just because you had a bad experience.

That is the only justification for some managers' existence. I know a lot of middle-manager types that do that. Their job is to define policy; problem is they have no concept of process improvement. The result, inane rules and policies.

Spoken like a person who's never done the work. It's takes a ton of skill to do these jobs. You just don't know what those skills are.

These rules and policies might seem inane to anyone who has not worked in a call center environment, especially if you haven't worked in one on the management/planning side of thing.

To stay open, a call center in the U.S. must do its job at a cost-effective level. If the costs spiral out of control, most companies look to foreign solutions (which everyone hates, right?)

To be cost-effective, a call center must (among other things based on the individual line of business:
1) Meet contractually guaranteed service levels (i.e. percent of calls answered in the first 90 seconds)
2) Meet service levels without large amounts of ongoing overtime
3) Keep turnover (or "burn") rate low enough that training costs don't skyrocket (only other solution would be lowering the amount spent on training, which leads to poorer performers and a higher burn rate. Nasty cycle).

There's an incredibly difficult amount of planning and forecasting that call centers must do. To be effective at forecasting, schedule adherence - what Ms. Rifkin ran into - must be maintained and enforced. Here's an example:

Company A's workforce management department forecasts that 9 calls will come in at 10 am today, and 9 more will come in every ten minutes thereafter. Let's just say this call center has an average handle time of 9 minutes (which is long). It has an 80 percent service level. To meet that service level, it needs to have 8 people on the phone at 10 am, and 8 people at 10:10, so on. Accordingly, it schedules 8 people to start at 10, and 8 more to start at 10:30 (to handle the overflow of calls and catch up to the deficit).

If everybody is there and on time and adheres to the schedule - and nothing unexpected happens - Company A will remain within service levels. Most companies cheat to the high side (have too many people on the phone initially to prepare for unexpectedly high call volumes) and offer voluntary time off if they end up having too many people scheduled. But that doesn't always work, and starts to break down as people call in sick, take extra time off the phones, etc.

But let's say Ms. Rifkin is one of the 8 people scheduled to start at 10 am. She's late getting to work that morning because she had to stop and use the restroom on the way to the office. That means one call that should have been answered at 10 is not, and the call center starts falling behind. Every time Ms. Rifkin has to use an unplanned bathroom break, the call center falls behind.

That's what is at play here. It all comes down to the nature of the work. If it's extremely timely and every second LITERALLY counts (like in a call center), the company must have strict adherence rules. If it is less timely and critical, the company can afford t have less strict guidelines about bathroom usage/time away from the desk.

meh - middle management doesn't get to decide that much in my opinion. I fault executives and investors that are looking for a short term windfall when companies are run that poorly.

I work for a decent sized company myself and sometimes I loathe that the executives have been such old fogies, but they do seem to be truly looking at the long term interests and genuinely care about their employees. Right now it's a very good place to have a career with a good work/life balance, but that will probably change in the next 10 years as they retire and are replaced by external execs that have been trained to think of people as expendable resources. We already have a new CEO that's instituting Jack Welch's fire the bottom 10% every year bullshit. That will be fine for a few years as we have some dead weight, but then we will start cutting into good people.

I won't pretend that, not having kids, it doesn't irritate me that having kids is basically an excuse for anything at work. Late? Kids. Out today? Kids. Can't work this weekend like everyone else is? Kids. Need your vacation request to take priority over someone else's? Well, its cause of the kids. Oh, you don't have kids? Then obviously you have no excuses for any of the above.

Spoken like a manager at a call center. :shake:

While I'm in this boat with you, I still don't think it's right to discriminate against her due to being pregnant.

**** that. You know what kind of people that people who answer phones have to deal with?

I don't think they are discriminating. She's being held to the same standard as everyone else.

Man, it's been a long time since I've worked for a big corporation. I don't miss it to be honest. But I will say that not all big companies are bad and evil. And we do work in a free market environment. If you don't like it, go get a different job. If you can't get a different job, you better sack up and do your work.

Reasonable accommodation.

"Bitch should have never got pregnant. Her choice. I say, let her and the baby starve to death. Entitlements are killing this country. Leech!" - The CP DC Section

Meh.

No shits given.