wherein Liz muses about employee cultures
Jul. 21st, 2008 05:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
edenfallingApropos of nothing in particular...
When I first started working at the store, back in February '06, it would take us all day to put up the new magazine shipments on Monday. We'd start at 11am or noonish, and we'd often still be shelving things at 5 or 6pm. Sometimes we'd even run to 8pm, and a couple times we even left a tote or two to be shelved on Tuesday morning.
These days, we're almost always done by 2pm, 2:30pm at the latest.
We're not getting fewer magazines. We just have different employees, which has bred a slightly different store culture -- leaving mags pending all day is no longer implicitly tolerated.
What's interesting is that it's not a total employee turnover; PM, MS, ET, and I are all still here. But we lost GS, DB, and AO -- and while all three were great people, DB was constantly running on too little sleep and dealing with family issues; AO was frequently distracted by customers who wanted to socialize with her, and also often running on too little sleep and dealing with family issues; and GS was the sort of person who'd stay out drinking until 3am, sleep in his car, and come in at 7am to open the store, still drunk and halfway into a fullblown hangover. Then he had about three life crises all at once, which didn't help anything.
These days we have JM, who's crazy efficient without ever seeming to hurry; BW, who is just as stressed out as AO was, but channels it into obsessive work instead of conversations; and AD, who just generally wins at life. :-)
When I first started working at the store, back in February '06, it would take us all day to put up the new magazine shipments on Monday. We'd start at 11am or noonish, and we'd often still be shelving things at 5 or 6pm. Sometimes we'd even run to 8pm, and a couple times we even left a tote or two to be shelved on Tuesday morning.
These days, we're almost always done by 2pm, 2:30pm at the latest.
We're not getting fewer magazines. We just have different employees, which has bred a slightly different store culture -- leaving mags pending all day is no longer implicitly tolerated.
What's interesting is that it's not a total employee turnover; PM, MS, ET, and I are all still here. But we lost GS, DB, and AO -- and while all three were great people, DB was constantly running on too little sleep and dealing with family issues; AO was frequently distracted by customers who wanted to socialize with her, and also often running on too little sleep and dealing with family issues; and GS was the sort of person who'd stay out drinking until 3am, sleep in his car, and come in at 7am to open the store, still drunk and halfway into a fullblown hangover. Then he had about three life crises all at once, which didn't help anything.
These days we have JM, who's crazy efficient without ever seeming to hurry; BW, who is just as stressed out as AO was, but channels it into obsessive work instead of conversations; and AD, who just generally wins at life. :-)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-22 07:06 am (UTC)Ah, it'd be great to be one of those people.
As for the time differential, it is astonishing how slowly one can work without realising it.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-22 06:36 pm (UTC)Work will -- always, always, always -- expand to fill the available time. We just seem to have adjusted the definition of 'available time'. :-)