Thursday, March 09, 2006

Reap what you sow

The huge amount of hiring and training that happened over the summer and fall was not only a desperate attempt to bring our staffing levels up to address the increase from the new Financial Services clients, but also playing catch-up for having been understaffed for years. Finally, we were told, we were up to the proper staffing levels for our call volumes. Huzzah!

Except that this week they started cutting the hours of our part time staff. It would seem that they discovered that having a full staff spends too much money. Oh, and there are simply too many people sitting idle waiting for calls.

Today, there was the pop-up message that we had a queue and that people should stay available because "we are short-staffed."

And who's fault is that? We can be fully staffed and when something goes wrong there will be a queue because hundreds of people are affected and they are all calling the help desk. If you want to be prepared to handle those problem times then you are going to have to accept that there are going to be times when people are doing nothing because nothing happens to be broken. Management is going to have to decide whether we are going to be fully staffed and have people idle or be understaffed and have queue problems.

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