Phil

So Phil has left the building. Apparently he has decided to seek opportunities outside of Sitel. We all know this is corporate lingo for "doesn't have another job to go to yet and only left because he was pressured in to doing so." Usually when a high profile person leaves a gushing email is sent out thanking everyone for being such amazing friends. A promise to stay in touch and an undertaking to go and get drunk soon are also pretty much de rigueur. For Phil the fanfare was conspicuously absent and instead we get a terse email from the site director two days after Phil left. All a bit cloak and dagger.

Back at the start of the year I wrote a piece suggesting that Phil had chosen to fall on his sword for the very evident problems setting up the new campaign on the second floor. I was as surprised as anyone when he returned from his sick leave and assumed I had horribly misjudged the situation. Now it's become clear that he is being made the fall guy after all and in my opinion there are some good reasons to do this. That being said Sitel should not think getting rid of Phil will solve anything other than the head on a platter to offer our, understandably annoyed, client. He only deserved around half the blame for the state of affairs that led to his demise and thus the other half has to be shared around a few other people. On his good days Phil was a great manager and always seemed to be a natural with the glad-handing of clients on site. Unfortunately he was also prone to some lapses of judgement and has paid a heavy price.

There has been a real culture of mediocrity in the office at times. A quick fix fire-fighting approach rather than taking a longer view. Outsourcing is a funny business. Just because six months can be a long time in this industry doesn't mean we should give in to short term thinking. Hopefully the changes that are happening in upper management on site will mean the company starts thinking a bit more about the next year or two as well as planning the next couple of weeks.

Making constant changes. UPDATED

Sometime it's hard to understand why Sitel shows such a lack of clear direction. It's almost like nobody takes the time to step back and think about things from a different perspective.

A quick note here. When I started this blog I promised myself I wouldn't name any of the clients directly. After all this is about Sitel not the companies who use our services. However if I were to talk about a team on the first floor that handles calls for a major high street fashion retailer you would all know who I was talking about.

This team has had several changes of team manager over the past few months. Andy who took over the reins of that team some time ago was moved sideways to another position in the middle of last year. Sian was asked to move up from her senior agent role to manage the team. Then, as many retailers do, there was an increased workload over the Christmas period and Greg was brought in from another campaign to help with the managers workload. So far so good. So why have the company brought in a new manager from outside the company and moved Sian back down to her senior agent position?

Was it a mistake to move Andy off to the other team? He had been running it for a couple of years. Were both Sian and Greg unable to run the team  properly? That would show a worrying lack of diligence in selecting candidates to move up the career ladder. How about a clash of personality with senior management? A lack of ass kissing? The truth is I don't know the reasons for such volatility.

I'm not sure I would want to be the new team manager. If the team is on their fourth manager in less than a year then that would have me looking over my shoulder all the time. Either the team is a poison chalice or more likely Sitel dont know what they want and then complain when they don't get it. Hopefully we're now moving into a period of stabilty because constant changes are not good for the agents and are not good for the client.

Update 15th June 2011

Since I wrote this entry someone has been in touch anonymously. This person has suggested that Sian was removed from team manager duties due to a serious lapse of judgement. As I haven't been able to verify the allegation yet I wont repeat it here. Suffice to say if true then the decision to remove her appears justified.

One thing bothers me though. we have a Team Manager Track aimed at identifying candidates for promotion internally. Why not recruit a suitable internal candidate if they were forced to replace Sian?

One baby and a funeral

On Friday Paul Smith got his final send off from this world at a funeral held in Exeters Crematorium. Although I didn't attend I'm told both Sitel and our client from the second floor sent flowers. It's also nice to hear we had an "Official Delegation" in the form of Dan and Richard from management. Some agents who were close to him were allowed time off to attend the funeral and Sitel seem to have dealt with this with a good deal of sensitivity. Just goes to show that Sitel can do things properly when they try.

On a lighter note Phil the Ops Manager from the second floor has, Together with his wife Emma. welcomed a new arrival into this world. A baby boy. Welcome to the world of sleepless nights and no doubt all the other fun that goes alongside the joy of bringing up a baby. Congratulations to you both.

Paul Smith.

I had intented to write a piece poking some gentle fun at a couple of people from Sitel who were in the weekends Great West Run. I'm quite sure my jokes wouldn't have been that funny and in light of the sad news there seems to be little place for levity today.

Early Sunday evening the grapevine started to hum with rumour that the man who died on Sunday during the Great West Run was a Sitel Exeter employee. The name Paul Smith came up but that's not an uncommon name and the press were giving little away. On that basis I chose to wait until more concrete information was available. Sadly that rumour turned out to be terribly accurate.

I only spoke to Paul a couple of times in the break room and he came across as a likable guy. The impression  from people who worked alongside him is that he was the sort of person who got on with his job and got on with his colleagues. Always willing to roll his sleeves up and pitch in. This made Paul just the sort of person we could do with a few more of in our office.

To check out after a just quarter of a century sucks. A tragic admonition to take each day as it comes because you can never be sure when it will be your last. I hope everyone will spare a thought for Paul, his family and his friends.

A reminder then that it's not just how long you live but also what you do with your time here.

This ones for you

I'm raising a glass to you and hopefully I'll catch you on the other side.

Pay.

I hope everyone is enjoying the May Bank Holiday weekend. Shame the lovely sunshine of the past couple of weeks hasn't really continued.

The pay is in for April and the observant among you will notice that your basic pay is exactly the same as it was in March. For those of you who have been with the company on the same payscale for long enough then it's the same basic pay as would have been on your payslip over three years ago. Despite running around 10% inflation in the UK over those three years the company is still pleading poverty and refusing to increase our salaries. This means effectively we are taking a pay cut for the third year in a row. Without question this is hitting some people fairly hard.

I want to look at something that might help those who do feel the pinch and also benefit the company. Performance related pay. As contact centre employees we all have a long list of metrics that we're supposed to conform to. AHT, call quality scores, absence and lateness targets, etc.

As things stand at present there is no differential in pay or rewards between the best and the worst performing agents. This means you can come in to work every day on time and do an excellent job exceeding all your targets and you still get paid the same as a rubbish agent. They may fail every call and be late or sick a lot. Maybe they have a warning or two on their record but don't do enough to get fired. They still get what you get. There is the possibility for a bottle of wine or something similar for great performance but a lot of that depends on blind luck.

Some might argue that a poor record would exclude you from advancement in the company to senior agent and management positions. This is not true. Sitel have recently promoted a few people with serious questions over their attendance but that's a discussion for a another blog. Likewise some people don't want advancement. I know of an excellent agent who has repeatedly refused advancement on the first floor. They simply want to come in to work and be a good agent.

Bringing in performance related pay is a simple way to give a boost to the efficiency of most agents. It would allow the company to target what matters to it the most. The agents benefit with a few extra pounds in their pay and the company can make savings in time off and late or boast about improved quality to the clients. There must be a caveat though. If the company doesn't measure your performance then you get the benefit of the doubt. i.e. There are lots of examples of agents not getting call quality monitored for months so it would be unfair to not pay them for any quality based incentive just because they weren't monitored.

Another one bites the dust.

I see we've lost another team manager on the second floor. That campaign must have some sort of record now. Over the few months that they have been running they have lost a lot of team managers.

Greg. Went within days of the campaign starting.
Sarah. Moved into real time CMS watch.
Alan. Was moved on to the campaign against his wishes and promptly went looking for a new job.
Alina. Moved down to Alans' old post so possibly doesn't count.
John. Apparently sacked.
Rafferty. Moved down to being an agent.

And just a few days a go we had Aaron, who was an external candidate, leave after just a few weeks saying this was not what he signed up for.

Team managers come and go like any other group of employees but to have around 50% turnover in 9 months is shocking. I had one of these former team managers, Alan, explain to me while he was still here that he could not do his job in anything like his thirty-seven and a half hour working week. He said it took between forty-five and fifty hours. Now I know this is not because Alan was a slacker. Quite the opposite he was a hard grafter and in my, totally unqualified, opinion he was operations manager material. The other thing I have gleaned is that the team managers spend a lot of their time not managing their teams and instead dealing with large numbers of customers and dealing directly with the client too. What's more is I understand that despite it being impossible to do their job in their standard hours they are not able to claim overtime either. I don't suppose anyone is going to cry at two or three hours here and there but ten hours a week every week? No wonder they drop like flies.

New Late Policy

Right after I last posted there was an announcement to the site that the late policy was to be revised. As of a few days ago we are no longer getting paid for being late. Previously you could be up to two hours late and still get paid for it. It should come as no surprise that having little penalty meant there was no great incentive to be punctual every day. Obviously as per my previous post if you were regularly late then you could expect to be warned and eventually fired but for the occasional "shall I run for the bus or finish my breakfast?" moment. Then it comes as no surprise that some people would be catching the next bus.

Now we are, apparently, going to be docked pay for every minute we are late. This is a good move and I congratulate Sitel for taking the common sense route. The flip side of this is that if we're stuck late on calls then as you can dock our pay by the minute now we expect to be paid for every minute late we have to stay through no fault of our own. It has to be a two way flow.