One year over the summer I worked for a party services company where we supplied all kinds of party goods to customers, from popcorn machines to bounce houses. It was not a very good job. Management was poor, schedules often did not come out as quickly as they promised they would, and pay was not anything special. Employees who had been working there for years were still making low pay, but most were students who intended on moving on to better things after graduation, so they did not care all that much. However, there was at least one person who was not pursuing higher education and was getting very frustrated with her pay and was awaiting her next opportunity for a raise.
I worked with her the following day and she was furious. Apparently she got a 10 cent raise when she was expecting 50 because she had been there for years and never got a raise she thought she deserved. It ended up being a pretty high salience issue around the office and a handful of people took sides, which made some relationships that were formerly very healthy into negative ones. Both people were generally not very well liked, so I am not very sure how the sides were formed. I had only been there for two months at this point, so I cannot say for certain if past occurrences impacted peoples decisions. Since I really hate working in a workplace with that kind of tension and full of negativity, I could not wait until summer was over because I had no intentions on returning ever again.
I did not publicly take a side because I hate confrontation and I thought the way that the employee handled the situation was very immature and naive. However, I definitely agreed with the employer and his decision to only up her pay by a small amount. It was clear that she was not deserving of a substantial raise given the way she reacted. The job was heavily based on customer service and I have witnessed her get in arguments with customers, which just goes to show that she is always as hot tempered as she was when she didn't get the raise she wanted.
While our boss was not very good at what he did in my opinion, he was fairly accommodating. I feel that if my coworker took the proper steps to seek out a compromise instead of being so assertive, she could have argued her way up to a higher pay in a civilized manner. For example, she could have emphasized common goals by saying something like "I feel that the raise I received has negatively impacted my motivation because my years of experience in this job merits an increased wage." Both parties would benefit from this because her motivation to perform well would build a better relationship with customers and bring more money in to the business. I have never had to negotiate like this so my approach may not be perfect, but knowing how my employer operates, I feel that it would be effective.
By reacting the way she did, she broke off the ability to have healthy conversations and if I was the boss, I would already be looking to find somebody to replace her.
In some sense it is good to go through that experience in a job that is of no consequence for your subsequent career. You get to see the emotional issues at play without having that impact you beyond the immediate situation. It is certainly not fun when these things happen, but knowing that they are possible is an important life lesson. When you do have a real job that you want to keep you can then be proactive in ways to discourage something similar from arising with your peers and if you eventually have management responsibility of warding off such a problem before it is allowed to fester.
ReplyDeleteIt sounds like some of this resulted around ambiguity concerning pay and when raises would occur. This ambiguity might have some near term value by allowing people to maintain unrealistic expectations, but has to be harmful in the long term. People need to know where they stand. The way you told the story, I couldn't tell if raises were at all seniority based or not. I also couldn't tell if responsibility in the job changed with seniority. Frequently raises accompany taking on new responsibilities.
On the flip side of this, the labor market has been soft and somebody in this sort of job probably can't find another until they've quite the current one. This might make people feel trapped in their current work. That, in turn, can lead to the type of behavior you witnessed.
I agree that is it something important to experience, though I had not thought of that before you mentioned it. However, I would much rather observe it from the outside than be a part of it, but I assume that it is a more impactful lesson to experience first hand. I am interested in entrepreneurship, so it is important for me to know how to deal with employees having conflicts directly with me.
ReplyDeleteThe woman in my story definitely had unrealistic expectations of a raise. I do not know what her pay was before or after but I had the impression that this was not a company that would offer large raises. I do not believe raises were based solely on seniority, but also a lot in part of hours worked per week and performance. Raises did not generally come along with new responsibilities. Responsibility comes with age and experience.
I imagine she isn't very qualified for many other positions, so it is probably best for her to remain where she is, work hard, and adjust her attitude so the next time a raise is available to her, she can take the right steps to achieve it.