One of the slightly aggrivating problems I have at one of my jobs is that most of the employees are high school kids, and most of the high school kids are cliqueish (this might sound crazy, but I really wish there were more ‘loners’ at work. They tend to be much more easygoing, don’t complain excessively or gossip and just come in and do their job).
We are always having shortages of employees, due to the demographic (people quitting to go away to college/graduating college) so employees are always encouraged to refer their peers to work with us. Since that usually means friends/SO, what often happens is there are little cliques of people among the employees who keep to themselves.
I could care less about it on a social level, but there are some problems inherent in this. People will often only cover for someone in their clique. An employee might work there a year, and the only person they covered for was their girlfriend, regardless of the times/dates. This puts the folks who are isolated (either because of an age difference, lack of friends, go to a different school, etc) at a somewhat unfair disadvantage; people will rarely voluntarily cover for them, and they get so aggrivated that they refuse to cover for anyone else.
I’ve learned to deal with this as their coworker, generally by scheduling my availability to minimize the likelihood of having to ask for someone to cover for me. However I plan on being a manager soon, and I’m concerned that this behavior is more problematic from a manager’s point of view (i.e. making sure there are enough bodies every day).
Any advice on how to curb this behavior in employees?
Eh, If said what it is you do that would be more helpful.
Do you have any money to play around with?
One of the ways I used to get my folks together was to have “office outings” Like say maybe a picnic in the park, house party or what have you. Outside work activities creates bonding. Or set an overall offce goal such as: If we ALL acomplish “X” we all get “X” as a reward.
Since you said you employ mostly highscool kids I’m led to believe that you might be doing phone soliciting. And if THAT’S the case, I take back my advice cuz I don’t want to help no phone solicitors!
Eek, no. Enforced outings and together-time with my coworkers sucks eggs. I don’t think there is any real solution for this except to try and schedule the cliques breaks, lunches at different times, make them work away from each other, and if you can do team-building activities that have a work-related result, put non-cliquey people with cliquey people.
This is what I did for things like covering shifts, and all the other things employees weren’t required to do, but needed to do to make the shop run smoothly. I made up a list of all these things, covering for someone, running to the bank, taking a customer right at cut off time, cleaning up a really gross mess, etc, ( I had the employees help make the list).
Then everytime they did one of the things on the list, I would put their name in a jar. At the end of the week, whoever had the most in the jar got first choice of the the day they wanted off, or something similiar. The rest of the names were then drawn for prizes. I did some bartering with other shops near our store so the prizes were free lunches, lotterey tickets, haircare supplies (I ran a beauty salon) etc. Pretty soon I had them arguing because they all wanted to do the things that I used to have the hardest time getting them to do.
So maybe you can find some of “reward” that would appeal to your employees that would encourage them to do what you need them to do.
Actually, they were a great morale-booster when we had them. We would go to fun places like laser tag, bowling, etc. I really miss it, but their budgets are tight unfortunately
Its hard thinking of an incentive system that doesn’t unfairly punish people with tight schedules. I know we previously had contests that really favored the people who could come in every day.
