Imagine you are a corporate trainer.
Imagine teaching back-to-back new-hire classes, which always means overtime hours (you’re salaried so you’re not paid for them, and comp time is not allowed). It also means working through almost all of your lunches and breaks, and occasionally working on your days off as well.
Imagine having to “perform” from 8:30am - 5pm M - F, talking and entertaining classes and teaching complicated policies and processes, and doing this pretty much without a break for months on end, while still having hours of job responsibilities other than your in-class training. And when your students are on their lunch break, you’re furiously scrambling around making sure handouts are ready for the next day, researching questions, answering the 20 pieces of email that came in in the past hour and a half (at least some of those have extra work for you to do in your “free time”).
Now imagine that, from that moment on, as the years pass any mistake the employee makes on the job will always be your fault because their boss claims you didn’t “teach them good enough” in the 2 or 3 weeks you had them in new hire training back in 2006.
If a productivity policy is finally enforced 6 months or a year after a person is on the job, and that person doesn’t like the fact they are finally accountable for the work they do, imagine if the director of the entire office blamed you for the poor staff morale because you didn’t “prepare” the new employee that this might happen, despite the fact that you DID prepare the employees for this, except they have forgotten because the productivity policy was not enforced for the past two years and now suddenly it is.
If an employee who has worked for the company three months, six months, a year, is caught breaking a rule (like talking on their personal cell phone at their desk), imagine if nothing is said to the employee but you get told you didn’t train the rules well enough, even though this rule was repeated at least a dozen times during new-hire training.
Now imagine all of that, and then imagine that, after almost 2 years at the company, the new-hires you are training today make at least $500/month MORE than you, and that’s after you’ve had two yearly raises at the company, AND A PROMOTION! Keep in mind you have at least the skills the new-hires have - that was a requirement before you were hired. Plus you have more skills which qualified you to train them. Add in there that they can get paid overtime (you can’t), and they will continue to make exponentially more than you as time passes, since their raises will always be bigger.
Speaking of raises, now imagine that your boss is in another state and has never bothered to come out and observe your job performance. Imagine that your boss admits she’s never bothered to read even one of the post-class surveys to see the glowing reviews your students give you. In fact, you’ve probably only talked to your boss on the phone about four times in the past nine months: two of those times are because you called her repeatedly and insisted on a call back, one of those times she was required to call you to do your yearly performance review, and only one of those times did she call you to check in and see how you were doing.
Now imagine if that boss gave you a merely average performance review, citing the score on the basis that you had “personality issues” because you reported problems with another trainer - problems that were also being complained about and reported by dozens of other managers, coworkers and students LONG before you even worked at the company.
Then imagine if you found out that other trainer - the one with multiple complaints about them, and who is currently on a “written warning” 90 day probation (denoting serious concerns about job performance… it’s the last step before someone is fired) - got the SAME PERFORMANCE REVIEW THAT YOU DID, and the same raise.
Wouldn’t you want another job, despite the fact that when it comes to the actual work, you love what you do and are very good at it?
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