Rapscallion
09-15-2006, 08:41 PM
We get a bonus at the end of the year based on how much profit we make. We like this to be big, y'know?
We usually have a crop of casual workers - they are on three-month contracts, and it's rare that we have a problem finding enough folk to fill the places. We have more people during summer to cover for holidays in this grouping than at any other time of the year. They work almost exclusively in the picking team.
Please bear this in mind.
I was talking to the picking coordinator recently and asked that since we'd just said goodbye to all the casuals we had, how many more people would I have to train in the fridge? It's a major annoyance of mine - I seriously think that this is bad for the customer as less-experienced people make more errors. I am currently against the current policy of taking on no more contracted employees on a permanent basis on the simple grounds that we're losing out on some people who are very skilled in the warehouse.
His response was that the area coordinators had decided between them to keep this number skinny - very skinny indeed. This was in order to keep the bonus high at the end of the year. Also, summer was leaner than we anticipated and often had to try and find work for bored pickers (wasted wages in effect), so there was some backlash against that. The short version is that many more members are going to be dragged kicking and screaming from their desks and put into the picking team.
The upside is that we should have experienced teams out there with a better pick rate and packing skills. The downside is that we won't have as many people around who will respond to pleas for help and that I'm a sucker for overtime. The other downside is that it's already started to show, and a time or two I had intended updating the front of the site have made interesting wooshing noises as they zoomed by.
Bugger.
Rapscallion
We usually have a crop of casual workers - they are on three-month contracts, and it's rare that we have a problem finding enough folk to fill the places. We have more people during summer to cover for holidays in this grouping than at any other time of the year. They work almost exclusively in the picking team.
Please bear this in mind.
I was talking to the picking coordinator recently and asked that since we'd just said goodbye to all the casuals we had, how many more people would I have to train in the fridge? It's a major annoyance of mine - I seriously think that this is bad for the customer as less-experienced people make more errors. I am currently against the current policy of taking on no more contracted employees on a permanent basis on the simple grounds that we're losing out on some people who are very skilled in the warehouse.
His response was that the area coordinators had decided between them to keep this number skinny - very skinny indeed. This was in order to keep the bonus high at the end of the year. Also, summer was leaner than we anticipated and often had to try and find work for bored pickers (wasted wages in effect), so there was some backlash against that. The short version is that many more members are going to be dragged kicking and screaming from their desks and put into the picking team.
The upside is that we should have experienced teams out there with a better pick rate and packing skills. The downside is that we won't have as many people around who will respond to pleas for help and that I'm a sucker for overtime. The other downside is that it's already started to show, and a time or two I had intended updating the front of the site have made interesting wooshing noises as they zoomed by.
Bugger.
Rapscallion