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.