I think my work ethic is pretty good. I'm not one to stand around doing nothing. There is always SOMETHING to be done. Even if there are no orders in my zone, I'll go clean up or go help in another zone for a couple of minutes, or look for empty trays to pull out to make room for full ones. And if it's REALLY dead, I'll just go ask a supervisor if they'd like me to do something else. I've had some of those "you're making me look bad!" comments, too. When I got the bad evaluation, I was worried they were going to fire me. I thought I had been doing a good job, and I WAS, but they weren't seeing it. So I tried to walk really fast and a few coworkers were like "Woah, slow down! You're going to hurt yourself!" and I said I couldn't slow down because of the evaluation. One of the gals basically said in not so polite words to ignore the evaluation. She said "You know what he told me? I came into the room, and he had a folder in his hands. He threw it on the floor and told me that's where I belonged. And he told Maartje that she was slow because she was fat!" and I burst into tears and told her that's what he'd said to me, too. Then a couple other coworkers happened to see that I was in tears and came to make sure I was ok, and all of them had had bad evaluations, too, and none of them were justified. They had all gone to complain to HR about the evals, so they escorted me straight to the HR person to tell her what happened. The manager who had done all the evals ended up having to redo a bunch of them. He didn't redo mine, but HR made him call and apologize for his comments. Legally, they have to give a person a chance to improve, so they couldn't fire him, just like he couldn't fire me. But there were so many complaints about the evaluations and half the people refused to sign them. I had my husband help me write a letter to sign that explained that while I HAD received my eval, I did not agree with it, and would therefore not be signing it. You have to sign it to show you have gotten it and understand it, etc...your signature implies that you agree. Anyway, the entire evaluation had been based on one thing: the average time it took to scan an item. Average in the company was 40 seconds (You were pushing a cart with 8 baskets, across the warehouse and scanning whatever item it tells you to get, so you have to GET to that item, scan it, take it back to the cart and scan it into the right basket, then go to the next item.) My average was like 54 seconds, BUT I worked almost exclusively upstairs where the setup is different and it takes longer. No one liked working upstairs because it takes longer, you don't have contact with many other people, and the temperature was terrible. In the summer, it could be 110 degrees up there and you were expected to walk your tail off in that. But there are also other jobs there...unpacking returns, putting returns back on the shelf, stocking new merchandise, packing orders to be sent out. My packing time was faster than average, and they don't time returns or stocking. He even based my subordination on my pick time, saying that part of what they want us to do is work fast, so even though I always did whatever they asked me to do without complaining, and I didn't make as many mistakes as other people, the fact that I was slower meant that I was insubordinate, so I got a "poor" on my eval for that. I work in a warehouse....there are no customers to deal with, and he gave me a "poor" for customer service because customers want their order as fast as they can get it. I was never once late, I hardly ever called in sick, I worked whenever they asked people to come in extra, but I got a "poor" for work ethic, because my picktime was too slow. There was a seperate category for speed, so that had already been evaluated, and he didn't take my packing time into account. The whole thing was just bogus. We did a test after the eval. I spent one shift working only upstairs, and one shift working only downstairs, and they checked my picktimes for each. When I worked upstairs, my pick time was like 57 seconds per item. When I worked downstairs it was 36 seconds....and average was 40. So I was actually faster than average, just that most people weren't working upstairs at all, and I was ONLY working upstairs. Then there was one woman who would stand and chat with other people for HOURS. I'd have finished several carts and she'd be standing in the exact same spot talking to the exact same person about their kids or about a spouse or whatever, 45 minutes later. Then I'd come back and she'd be gone, but I'd see her standing in a DIFFERENT spot talking to another coworker and she'd stand there for 20 minutes. They had to restrict her from packing, because she wouldn't get anything done, because she'd do nothing but talk to the people around her. But SHE got a good evaluation. She'd just log out of her scanner while she talked so it wasn't timing her. And I'm the one who got a "poor" for work ethic and subordination. They just weren't paying any attention to what people were doing at all and were basing everything on the average pick time, which doesn't tell you WHY it takes one person longer than another. If you stand there and talk for an hour and only log in to go scan an item, yeah, your pick time is going to be pretty good, but it doesn't mean you are doing a good job. But that sounds like the difference....Carolyn's bosses were paying attention to what she was actually doing, not relying on a single statistic to determine how hard she was working.
Fun side note: when that supervisor left the company, they put out a jar for donations for a gift for them....they always do that for longterm people who leave. His was almost empty. Everyone was so glad to see him go and no one was willing to give even a euro to buy a gift for him because no one liked him. He was also kind of a lecher. A lot of the younger gals found him creepy because he'd stand too close to them, or make comments, stare at them etc, which is probably why he didn't like me. I'm not a hot young 20 something.
It turned out to be a ransomware attack on the company Kronos
