Absenteeism is a huge problem in most call centers, because – frankly – of the poor quality of the employees. Because call centers have such huge staffing needs, they tend to lower their hiring standards, which then creates a loop. Worse hires → more problems → more firings and MIAs → even worse hiring. That was our basic problem.
When I did interviews, it wasn’t so much to determine if someone was good enough or not; it was to determine if I could give a good reason not to hire them. Not hiring an applicant who passed the temp agency ‘screening’ required me to fight with someone over it on several occasions. The screening was if they had six months of customer service experience and a high school diploma.
The only exceptions were if a) there was a good reason to believe that they would fail the required background check anyway; b) if they admitted to a crime of dishonesty, prosecuted or not (e.g. a guy admitted he was fired for theft of cheese, and yes this actually happened to me); or c) if there was some huge red flag that might make us liable for ignoring (e.g. became very hostile, violated anti-discriminary policy, etc.).
On many occasions, I dug in my heels, saying, “This person WILL be a problem. Do not hire this person. If you do, it WILL be trouble.” The managers insisted that these were not significant enough to not hire someone:
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Showing up for a job interview in a tube top, miniskirt, and flip-flops, and chewed gum the whole time. Spent the interview staring at the wall and couldn’t really answer my questions. The six months of customer service experience was babysitting (informally). My manager claimed we should “give her a chance” and that babysitting “deals directly with parents, the customers”. Yeah, she didn’t even make it through training.
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Was being hired for a technical project and was not sure what a mouse was. The manager claimed we could teach this person all the computer skills needed to be a good tech support rep by the end of the then-reduced-to-one-week-due-to-hiring-crisis training class. Made it less than a week out of training before quitting in tears because we didn’t have the resources to train the person basic computing. (Trainers weren’t allowed to flunk people out.)
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Admitted to being fired for the last few jobs for absenteeism. Had no particular plans of how to do things differently now. Manager: “We should give her a chance, she has good experience.” (She had six months customer service, all right – at about four different jobs.) She was fired for no call no show within the first month.
I repeatedly went to managers and said, “Look. We need to raise our standards. People leave training and see what a madhouse it is and run screaming if they are good employees. If we crack down, we might run into a contract penalty for a month or two for not meeting service levels, but we can turn this around; right now we are not meeting service levels anyway over half the time because people don’t show up. Let me put together a team of interviewers from our management pool and train them, and work with trainers to spot problems before they hit the floor, and if you crack down on supervisors and make them deal with the most visible problems, we can turn this center around. There are good employees coming in, we just scare them away!” Of course, my plan was too expensive… because paying for training, hiring, recruitment, background checks, whatever for classes of which we usually kept 1/3 past the first 2 months wasn’t a huge waste of money.
I hear things changed after I left after they put in some managers who knew what they are doing. Turnover is still high but not shockingly so – more in line with the industry (we were doing three times that).
Absenteeism is funny, though. There are a surprisingly high number of people – even very intelligent and capable people – who think that a job should, you know, let you come in whenever you feel like it. This would make a lot more sense if we weren’t a call center. It’s not like the calls will magically come in when we have staff. Even then, I often had the chat with people to explain why following their schedule was so important, and why attendance is the number one thing, and why if they didn’t shape up, they’d get fired. Very very seldom did people work it out. Even people who literally cried and begged for their job, and how badly they needed it, would fuck up within like a week. I was astounded.
I especially “loved” people who thought having kids meant a free pass at life. Look, I know raising kids is tough and doing it as a single parent is even worse. But if you honestly don’t think you can show up on a regular basis, and you go to a job where in the interview, one of the questions is, “The most important duty you have in this job is to be here consistently. As a temp, we expect you to show us that you can do this by absolutely no absences and no tardiness in the first 60 days. Is there any reason why you believe, barring something unforeseeable, that you could not do this?” Of course they’d assure us they could do it… then miss two days out of their first week, show up late the rest of the time, etc.
I understand if your kids get sick, I really do. But if your response is “You guys hate families! My kids were sick and they come first! It shouldn’t count if you miss work 'cause of kids!” and not “Look, I’m really sorry. This doesn’t normally happen, but I was really stuck, the kid got an ear infection and daycare wouldn’t take him. I promise this isn’t typical for me”, well, this means that you will be fired for absenteeism sooner or later. This is a business, and showing up half the time – not okay. So many people don’t get this.
