Fun fact. I really like to do my best work. Period. And what I’ve learned over time is that sometimes that doesn’t fit with the “big picture”.
There was a time when I was an overnight manager at a call center. I worked from 6:45pm – 3:30am. I didn’t mind it. At that age, it actually fit perfectly ok with my life and I kind of enjoyed it. One of my best friends was the other overnight manager and we had a fun time.
But we also got our work done. Like… big time.
At this point, we had some of the best stats on the project. Our agents got coached, they had good metrics, and we were able to take on a variety of side projects that were a lot of fun. I created a platform for educating the team on new products. I was part of the training team developing new curriculum. I helped work on new reporting dashboards for the team.
Then one day I talked to my buddy, (let’s call him Ethan), about the work that we were doing and I proposed something. What if we JUST did our job. Not in a bad way. Like, let’s knock it out of the park. But let’s JUST do OUR actual job. Let’s do that for 4 weeks and monitor the heck out of it.
The experiment was basically designed to answer one single question; how long does it actually take to do our job? We obsessively measured the actual amount of time it took to do our work to the extent we were being asked. Not clock in/clock out numbers. If we monitored an agent for 12 minutes, we marked down on our reporting dashboard “12 minutes, agent monitoring.” If I used the bathroom I marked “6 minutes, bathroom.” Every. Things.
At the end of 4 weeks, we checked the data for quality. Were our agents still hitting their numbers? Were we hitting our various metrics? And the answer was yes. There was no statistically significant change in metrics. We looked at the data as it related to the previous month, quarter, and year and essentially we were left with the conclusion that the work had not changed.
And then we added up the hours. We were being paid salary for 37.5 hours a week. When we added up the time it took to do our job, we were sitting at 21.5 hours per week. There was a mystery 16 hours that we had, PER WEEK, that essentially didn’t need to exist. And it didn’t vary by much. The high was less than 25 hours and the low was above 18 hours. The evidence clearly stated that it took a call center manager 21.5 hours per week to do their job, and do it well.
We were so proud of this data. We felt like data scientists in a real-world laboratory. We had designed and executed a study and had come up with an important,ground-breaking discovery; our office was incredibly inefficient.
On our project alone, we had 8 managers. So, let’s do that math for a second.
8 managers x 16 hours a week x 52 weeks per year = 6,656 hours lost. Even at a paltry rate of pay, that’s almost a quarter of a million dollars in savings, for just our project. There were a variety of other projects and they were quite a bit larger. So, it’s a safe bet that there were about 50 OTHER managers in the center in similar roles. So, the TOTAL “lost time” in the center was closer to 50 thousand hours a year. Which translated to around $1.7 million.
We’d done it! We’d solved it! We knew something that they didn’t know that could save the company MILLIONS of dollars. We knew that they had inaccurately calculated the workload for a team manager and it was costing the center millions of dollars a year. So we told our boss. Who said the following;
“Don’t tell anyone what you just told me.”
Were we naive? Yes. We were. We thought that this information would be met with great applause. A statue? PROBABLY not. But some sort of commemorative pin or a gift card to a local coffee shop? Obviously. But this? Our academic and scientific research was being hidden, stashed away. And for what? Well, as it turns out, the job security for us, our peers, and our managers.
It wasn’t that people didn’t know that the system was inefficient (although they lacked the data to back it up). It was that people knew that being MORE efficient, as an individual contributor, had diminishing returns. As our boss explained, the two most likely scenarios if upper management discovered that their management teams could be more efficient by 42.66% would be to cut manager staffing (actual number of people) by 42.66% OR cut hours per manager by 42.66%.
In the end, the system that “was not working” was “working” to provide jobs for almost twice as many people. The cost to the company was enormous but individual contributors were reaping the reward.
And with that, we just shut up, did our 21.5 hours of work each week, and spent the rest of our time doing almost nothing. I still had an occasional side project on the go because that’s what I do BUT they were less enthusiastic. Mostly I read more, wrote some, played some games on my phone (this was brick-breaker and snake days, so not as much fun as it would be now) and we just carried on.
The moral of the story was that people knew that the system didn’t work. But people also knew that the system worked perfectly fine for them. Any adjustments to the system had to account for BOTH the goals of the individual AND the goals of the system as a whole or else they would be ignored by the individual OR poorly implemented by the system.
The second morale of the story is that due primarily to labour costs, the call center outsourced all of their work overseas and everyone who worked there lost their job and if you want to buy a sofa, you can shop at what used to be a call center than employed over 2k people…