Rethinking the Relationship

By On August 30, 2010 · 3 Comments

Since their inception, call centers have been infamous for high turnover (especially in the outsource world). While this is no revolutionary statement, I recently had the realization that by my mid-twenties I had personally fired, or overseen the termination, of over 1,000 people (an average of about 200 people a year). I believe my personal record was 14 people fired in one day. Most of these terminations were executed in the name of “attendance policy violations” or other seemingly direct violations of ill-thought-out policies. At the time, I tried to detach myself emotionally from the situation and rationalized my actions as ‘just doing my job’. Yet in retrospect that part of my job just plain sucked. While its been roughly a decade since I’ve been in such a position, the gut wrenching feelings that naturally come along with taking someones source of livelihood from them are, perhaps above anything else, the part that still hangs around still today. So much for emotional detachment.

The point of this post, however, is not some weird soul cleansing apology or confession, but rather the beginning of a new conversation. In the coming days and weeks I’ll be tackling the issue of employee turnover through a new lens and attempt to offer some fresh perspective on the age old problem. High levels of attrition negatively impact the often forgotten individuals involved, the local community as well as the companies that foot the bill. Personally, I think its time we start to introduce new ideas into the broken equation and begin to rethink the relationship between employees and employers. Comments welcome.

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3 Responses to Rethinking the Relationship

  1. scott says:
    August 30, 2010 at 6:03 pm

    Croz-

    Great topic. Pick up “The Great Game of Business” by Jack Stack. We’re implementing Open Book Management as we launch our first call center here in TX. It opens up great discussions on challenging how a company should treat it’s employees.

  2. Jason Kolb says:
    August 31, 2010 at 12:54 pm

    Funny you should bring this up, look at this article I just found about Netflix and their vacation policy: http://views.washingtonpost.com/leadership/post_leadership/2010/08/its-late-august-a-week.html?hpid=smartliving. They have none, crazy huh?

    Something that radical may not work for contact centers, but someone needs to write a book on HR policies for grown adults I think.

  3. Linda Carr Carrion says:
    August 31, 2010 at 3:02 pm

    Very interesting topic…I found your website via a mutual friend. While I agree that some corporate policies can be “ill thought”, there are many that serve a purpose and when you are talking about non-exempt employees, who are managed and paid by how many hours out of the day they work, you need an accountability system to track this. Thus the plethora of attendance policies that are out there. They serve many good purposes: They help companies remain in compliance with FLSA regulations, pay employees correctly, drive personal accountability on the employee side…and the list goes on. I think your real focus should be on improving the manager-employee relationship through improved leadership skills and finding ways to drive employee engagement and committment. I know that when I have had managers who cared about my development and had an open line of communication and helped me clearly understand the bigger picture, those were jobs where I was (and currently am) very engaged, committed and willing to go the second mile from a productivity standpoint. Then the attendance polices become secondary and you will find that you are addressing far fewer attendance issues.

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