Is was a manager of a help desk for a while and dealing with PTO shit was one of the main reasons I quit. We had 60 people working which was already insufficient to handle our call volume and they only allotted 2-3 slots on weekdays for PTO. We pretty much always had one or two people out for medical shit so in reality there was maybe one slot per day which basically made it impossible to get an actual vacation approved. On top of that it was hard to get OT approved so I couldn’t get someone else to cover it. I used to remind my people that consecutive absences only counted as one point on their attendance when I was telling them I couldn’t approve their requests. We ended up even more short staffed by people just going anyway then we’d have our executives barking at us about why we couldn’t meet the metrics they set. I built a report that showed how many people we would actually need to staff ourselves properly, even though we had a person whose job it was to do scheduling who should have been doing it, but when I presented it I was more or less ignored because it didn’t fit the narrative they were spinning to their bosses.
Yeah, I’ve worked places where I could tell exactly how many more man hours we were short, and I knew the managers were doing it deliberately for a bonus. It’s not for the workers, it’s not for the customers, it’s for shareholders.
Is was a manager of a help desk for a while and dealing with PTO shit was one of the main reasons I quit. We had 60 people working which was already insufficient to handle our call volume and they only allotted 2-3 slots on weekdays for PTO. We pretty much always had one or two people out for medical shit so in reality there was maybe one slot per day which basically made it impossible to get an actual vacation approved. On top of that it was hard to get OT approved so I couldn’t get someone else to cover it. I used to remind my people that consecutive absences only counted as one point on their attendance when I was telling them I couldn’t approve their requests. We ended up even more short staffed by people just going anyway then we’d have our executives barking at us about why we couldn’t meet the metrics they set. I built a report that showed how many people we would actually need to staff ourselves properly, even though we had a person whose job it was to do scheduling who should have been doing it, but when I presented it I was more or less ignored because it didn’t fit the narrative they were spinning to their bosses.
Yeah, I’ve worked places where I could tell exactly how many more man hours we were short, and I knew the managers were doing it deliberately for a bonus. It’s not for the workers, it’s not for the customers, it’s for shareholders.