The two stars I gave this company were for the benefits, regular hours, and the fact that I actually did enjoy the specific work I was doing. I walked into work every day with a smile on my face, and ready to do the best I could. But the reality was I was never sure if that day was my last. This company hires and fires people all the time.
When I was offered the job, I was told I would be working a 9:15-6:00 shift for the first six months, and after that they generally like to let the employees pick their own hours. So I waited for management to bring this up after 6 months, but they never did. Not once did they ask if I wanted to change my hours. After talking to a couple co-workers later on, they said, Yeah, that's just something HR tells people.
Training is lacking. When I first started I had an 11 day training program and then threw me into the fire. I was transferred to a different department after working at the company for three months. I got little one on one training and then was thrown into the fire again. They spend time training when the work is slower, so we see fewer examples of difficult work. Management and my trainers / fellow employees were never on the same page. My managers would give me pieces of work that I hadn't even been trained on yet.
You are expected to work fast and with no mistakes. Sometimes you were emailed when you made a mistake and other times you would find out that you made one when you had your review. When I started with my department, we didn't have reviews each month, just whenever they felt like pulling us in to a meeting. There you would find out how much work you finished and how long on average it took you to do each piece.
Sometimes my managers would say I made a mistake, but when I went back and looked at the piece of work they were referring to, I hadn't made any mistake. This happened so many times that I started to document these examples. It made me think that I was going crazy, or that they just didn't like me and wanted me to leave, or that I was a part of some social experiment. I will never know why they took the time to write down 'examples' of my mistakes that were simply false. Sometimes one manager didn't even know why something was counted as an error on my review, and they had to ask the other manager. Once I set up a customer's account a certain way based on an email that a manager sent to me, and then I was told I did it incorrectly. They claimed something changed. Since we had about 3 department meetings a year, we were never on the same page. It was so confusing and made me have no trust in management! They changed their minds whenever it suited them.
There were also several times where management didn't know how to do a procedure in our work, but they would tell me I did it wrong. If I wasn't trained on how to do it correctly, and they don't know how to do it, how was I supposed to know how to do it? They never seemed to see this was an issue. You are held to the same time and quality standards as a co-worker who has been there 20 plus years.
I became so scared that my time for completing work was too high and they were going to let me go. Sometimes I would hear my manager leave for the day and I thought, 'I can't get fired right now, I made it another day'. Sometimes I had an itch on my nose while I was typing and I thought to myself, just finish your work and scratch your nose after, so I could keep those extra two seconds off my time. Ridiculous, right? But this is absolutely what I did and thought.
We started having a rubric for the last six months when I was at the company that was designed to recognize the good work that we did. Five pieces of random work were chosen and we would look at these with management in our reviews. This was great for the first few months, because it really was random. However, the last few months, the five 'random' pieces of work were suddenly all from the 10% of the more difficult, decision making pieces of work that we did. That allowed management to nit-pick the work and say that they would have done something different. One time I received a 0.00% error rate for the month, but my manager tore apart the five random pieces of work. I didn't do anything incorrectly on those pieces of work, but since my manager said she would have dome some things different, my score went down, and I left the meeting feeling defeated. That is when I realized that it doesn't really matter how hard I work or how hard I try to do better and please management. If they want to say I made mistakes, they were going to find ways to do it. They finally let me go due to my performance.
