Your Company Doesn’t Give A Fuck About You
It’s “State the bloody fucking obvious” Day, sponsored by Violent Acres.
Now, I loves me some VA. In fact, it makes my crummy day just a little bit better when I see “Violent Acres” in bold on Google Reader, because I know V has posted something new and (usually) interesting and I will most likely enjoy reading it quite a bit.
In a strange turn of events, she posted today about the fact that Starbucks really doesn’t give any sort of tangible reward to someone who is complimented by a customer. This seems like such a blatant Captain Obvious moment I’m going to break my moratorium on posting about work and… well, post about work.
Honestly, if I got a reward for every time I’ve gotten a customer letter in the last year, and then invested that reward properly, I could retire 5 years earlier. I don’t mean to toot my own horn (ask my friends, my self-esteem has been MIA for decades now) but I’ve gotten quite a number of them lately. And they have to date netted me precisely not a goddamn thing, outside of the senior manager “Way to go! Now get back to work!” note.
If you work in a job where terminating you on the spot would cost less than paying you a year’s wage, then you are disposable. This is the way it is. I work in a job like that. I’ve got no illusions - the managers that e-mail me every time I get a customer letter didn’t give a flying fuck about me 5 minutes before they sent that e-mail, and won’t care about me 5 minutes after. And if you’ve somehow disillusioned yourself to the extent that you think customer’s compliments matter, to steal a phrase from Die Hard 3 - either you’ve got some serious personal issues, or not all your dogs are barking.
(If my manager was here, he would undoubtedly spout out a crudely-worded 45-minute lecture about the fact that anybody would kill to do my job, so I shouldn’t bitch about the fact that I don’t get anything special for doing it. He’s such a heartwarmer. With a bedside manner like that, he really should have been a doctor.)
Customer compliments matter to me, though. In fact, I might go so far as to say that customer compliments (both in-house and directly customer-facing) are the only reason I can drag my heavy ass out of bed and go to work. Having a tech tell me “You rock, Mav” or a customer say “You saved the day!” is the only reward that I get. I know that sounds really sappy, but hey, I’m a sappy kinda guy.
Here’s the important part. Pay attention, dammit, because here’s the part about the article I really like.
If you are one of the zillion or so people who call, e-mail, or otherwise interact with some large corp’s customer-facing staff, and you get some sort of “On a scale from one to nine” type of survey afterward, fill it out. Please. Corporations live on statistics, and the job of the person you spoke with is very likely directly related to the numbers they turn up every month. Those managers who don’t give a fuck about your letter will sit entranced looking at your stats. Those actually are worth money - at least where I work, even though it’s not very much.