I work for an IT firm, as I may have mentionned before. There are about 300 of us on contract, working as wage-slaves, plodding away answering e-mails, phonecalls, managing tasks, and generally getting as much as humanly possible done with a supply chain management system befitting a third-world country's ordering system. So when The Upper Management come up with these bright ideas to motivate us and increase productivity, it really causes waves of (usually) resentment, amusement and befuddlement. Ever since the split from Idiot's Business Mammoth firm last year, the Managers (that's managers with a capital EHM because they don't normally deal with us hoi polloi but with second or third level managers), have been scrambling to find new and inventive ways of squeezing every last penny's worth of value from us - without investing in wage rises, a newer and better automated system to improve task performance, hiring more qualified managers, or improving working conditions. All we've been hearing since last spring was how they expect more, faster, better but we hear little of what they would offer us in return.
The laughable element in all of this is while Management holds Great Expectations, the reality is that staff turnover in the trenches is spinning in an alarming rate. The average span of employment of contractors is about a year. Factor in that people need to be trained and thus are relatively unproductive, in hard terms, until about three months, that leaves nine months' worth of useful productivity of your average contractee.
Customer satisfaction, depends on a large part, which customers getting what they want. Since we are working for a major IT firm and not Ryanair, the expectations for customer service are rather high. Stuff needs to be ordered, delivered on time, in tact and within budget. Would it surprise you that the majority of people who work behind the scenes to make sure that Widget X ordered off Site Y are largely underpaid, undervalued and understaffed? Mais, non, that's what drives the price down on your widget. And instead of either spreading the profit a bit more fairly (I hear that the sales reps who work in country for my customers sometimes work from the poolside of their country homes, from their mobiles) across the company, the fat-cat Managers, aided and abetted by The Sneering Liars Division (i.e. Sales Management), look to the meek masses of customer agents, the claims analysts, the order entry clerks, the order managers, the delivery reps, the truck drivers, the builders and shakers, movers and makers of their precious commodities and crack the proverbial whip.
So it is with this in mind, that Management, in their Infinite Wisdom, has actually stepped outside their Hallowed Golden Halls, to put us under the microscope to see if we could work any faster. And they came up with the latest in a series of moronic presentations aimed at improving worker productivity.

The presentation was sent around to us and I quote from it:

§"To effectively manage a 4 hour response time organisation is the key! The following are some hints and tips to get you started.

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§Voicemail

-Ensure your voicemail message is up to date, and messages deleted regularly. This will reassure the caller that you regularly check your voicemail, encouraging them to leave a message.

-Listen to the voicemail message clearly, noting the following.

•The callers name and telephone number.

•The company they work for.

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•Record the time of the call, and also the targeted response time."

Now, I realise that most managers have barely grasped the concept of using something as sophisticated as voice mail. You'd think that us "contact centre pros" would have gotten the hang of this already.

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-"At 09:00 check what outstanding queries you have received the previous afternoon, that are still to be actioned. If need be, create a list of the order your are going to action them in.

-At 12:00 check what outstanding queries you have received that morning, and work to reply by 13:00.

-At 16:00 what outstanding queries you have received in the early afternoon that have to be replied to by 17:00.

-Finally, before shutting down and leaving for the day, make a note of all outstanding queries from the afternoon that need to be responded to the following morning. This will give you a good place to start from"

This is how management views a four-hour response time. Now, I don't know if I have no work, or if I'm blindingly faster than anyone else. I suspect I'm no better or worse than most of my colleagues. I took a straw poll to ask how long it takes for them to answer emails and the general response was "2 minutes".

So the news bodes well for us. We've been working far too fast! We can now work 100 times slower than how we normally work

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