Keeping Your Poker Face at all Costs

I don’t have the world’s best poker face. My emotions tend to be obvious. If I think you’re a fool, it shows.

As a people manager, I’ve had to temper my natural responses. With good employees I don’t need to worry. With my problem children, it takes a lot of effort to keep a neutral countenance.

I’ve gotten better over the years. I can think of one example in which I did a marvelous job of keeping my feelings to myself. I had one horribly high-strung employee I’ll call Mara. She freaked out at nothing and had a temper like a bulldog with an oozing toothache.

Her boyfriend also worked for us, and keeping her happy was almost a full-time job for him. Watching them reminded me of an old song by the Canadian band the Northern Pikes called, “She ain’t pretty, she just looks that way”. I could see the physical attraction, but I have no idea how any male could put up with her antics. I digress.

Mara yelled at customers and coworkers alike. She cried a lot. I couldn’t stand her. She sucked people of their energy.

One morning after a particularly bad phone call, Mara walked up to my desk and announced, “I’m leaving.”

“Are you leaving for the day?” I asked.

“No, I am never coming back.”

This is where the poker face practice came in. I wanted to grin like a Cheshire cat, but I was afraid I would jinx her leaving. Normally, when you put a lot of money and time into training an employee, you want to get your money’s worth. That means you try to talk them into staying, particularly when your call centre has high turnover. With Mara, I felt like I’d just hit the jackpot.

I had to at least pretend that I cared, especially since we were in the middle of the call centre floor surrounded by other employees. So I asked what happened and was there anything I could do to make her stay?

This started sobbing and screaming on Mara’s part. I was smart enough to get her the heck off of the floor. Crying panic doesn’t do much for the rest of the troops. I herded her to a quiet corner while she yelled about how awful the job, the people and even the city were. She wanted to leave all of them and she was never coming anywhere near the place again.

I wanted to dance a jig, but I kept my serene manager face plastered on. I told Mara I understood her feelings, wished her luck, then whisked her towards the front door. I made sure to take her security pass. If she changed her mind, I didn’t want her getting back in the building.

Only when she was gone did I skip back down the hall to my desk. I went straight to my computer and did the electronic processing required for her termination in record time. It was a good day.

Facebook Follies at Work

Technology can be a pain in the workplace. When I managed staff in a call centre I struggled to keep them off their smart phones and Facebook and have them answer calls instead.

You wouldn’t think this would be difficult, considering that we paid them to answer calls and not to chat. But if I turned my back on some of them, they would type away at Facebook updates and ignore the ever-growing queue of phone calls. (Yes, it you’ve ever had to wait a long time to talk to a company you’ve just called, it may be caused by employees screwing around. Of course the companies will never admit that to you.)

The other Facebook struggle you might experience is employees bad mouthing their company, boss or co-workers online. You can get away with this only if you are not friends with colleagues on Facebook. I had one employee who was too silly to remember this rule. We’ll call her Tracy.

Tracy was a walking attitude from the day she started. She thought she was too good for the job and too good for everyone around her. She began missing work right after training and was often rude to customers or provided them wrong information. A real treat. Why didn’t we get rid of her, you might ask? Sadly, in the call centre world, she was far from the worst employee we had. We needed to have someone answering the phones.

I had spoken to her a couple of times about attendance and attitude with clients, to no avail. One week, we had an employee quit in frustration (also happens a lot in call centres).  He posted a tirade about the company on his Facebook page. Tracy decided to add a comment that said, “Yeah, I hate that place and that witch of a manager.” She actually used a less-nice word than witch, but I’ll try to keep the blog clean.

They both were friends with other employees on Facebook, including one of my junior supervisors, who felt the need to tell me about the post. The HR rules around dealing with cyberspace infractions are a little grey, especially since this is relatively new territory. I decided to bypass HR and have a little fun instead. I realized I could make her squirm without “officially” getting her in trouble.

During her next shift, I called Tracy off the floor and asked her how she was doing. She said fine. I asked her if everything was ok at work, and she said yes. I told her I was asking because of her recent Facebook post, and I quoted it back to her, not censoring out the curse.

Not much about dealing with employee problems is enjoyable. A lot of it is just as uncomfortable for the boss as it is for the employee, but it was good fun watching the wheels turning in her head and her face getting all red as Tracy realized she was caught. What was her reaction?

“You didn’t think I was talking about you, did you?” she asked, all innocent.

“Well, you did mention this company by name,” I replied.

“Oh no, I was talking about my other job!”

“Your other job at a company with the same name as ours?”

She kept trying to convince me it wasn’t me she was talking about when I finally said to her, “If you ever have any problems at work you would like to discuss with me, my door is always open. But if you really hate it here, no one is making you stay. You know where the door is.”

She skulked off back to her desk, still red-faced. Since she was such a pest of an employee, I actually felt glee at the end of this conversation. (I promise that’s been a rarity in my employee management career.)

I did talk to Human Resources afterwards and they wanted to give her official heck, but I told them not to bother. I assumed she’d either smarten up or quit. And quit she did a couple of weeks later.

For any other managers out there struggling with employee social networking issues, I feel your pain. Feel free to comment if you’ve got doozies of your own to share.

Am I Supervising Recess?

As a people manager, there are times when I feel like a referee for grade three kids. You don’t just get normal work problems to handle. Sometimes you mediate odd disputes.

On one of my admin teams, my employees sat with their desks in rows and no cubicle walls in between them. This allowed everyone to just turn in their seat when they wanted to ask a co-worker a question or shoot the breeze. Sometimes this made my employees too close for comfort.

One morning an employee, Terry, came to my desk to complain that Dave, the employee who sat in front of her, kept pushing her in-trays back when he turned to talk to her. She said each time she’d move them back he would turn around and push them when he started conversation. She was very upset and wanted this to stop.

Really, this was the expert managing they hired me for?

I asked Terry if Dave was moving them on purpose. She said no, he just seemed to lean against them when he talked, but it drove her crazy and could I please ask him to stop. I then asked Terry if she had ever said anything to Dave about this. No, she didn’t want to start an argument. Clearly not one of my more assertive employees. Dave was a pussy cat.

I decided this was just too silly a dispute to have an actual conversation with Dave. Some employees feel that any “talking to” means they are in trouble and that wasn’t the impression I wanted to convey. He might have also been annoyed that Terry bypassed him to tattle to me.

I thought about it briefly and came up with a solution. I gave Terry an entire pack of sticky tack from our supply cabinet and suggested she use it along the bottom of her trays. She did. It worked like a charm. When Dave leaned over her desk, he could no longer move the trays without giving them a good shove. Terry was overjoyed. Sometimes managing people really is that simple.

Supervisor as Nursemaid

So there I was, on a Saturday morning, standing watch as one of my employees vomited into the garbage can by her desk.  I wish I could say this was a strange occurrence in my people management career, but sadly it wasn’t.

No one told me when I became a “boss” that I would occasionally have to play nursemaid to sick employees.  Or in this case, a hung over employee.  Dealing with ill staff is just part of the territory.

In every job I’ve held, I knew how to find the sick rooms, the first aid kit and the taxi slips for sending people home.  I knew because I needed to use all of them.

In this case, a colourful employee who I’ll call Julie had spent a hard night of partying on Friday. Our call centre opened at 6am, so she might have still been drunk when she arrived to work. With her it was hard to tell the difference.

A few hours into the day I heard retching from my desk and got up to investigate.  I located the source of the vomit and supervised Julie in her endeavours. There isn’t much you can do until the retching stops. The funny part was in between her heaves, Julie would look at me and loudly yell, “I swear I’m not hung over!”  Her protests might have been more believable if the garbage can hadn’t smelled like gin.

When Julie was done, she was conscientious enough to take her own garbage can to the bathroom to clean it out, saving me the hassle.  This event turned out much better than it could have. I didn’t have any cleaning to do. We weren’t always so lucky.

My unfortunate partner, Jason, worked a different morning that involved an employee projectile vomiting all over her desk and the carpet.  She was in no shape to clean up after herself and there was no janitorial staff around at 5am. That left Jason with clean-up duty.  I think I got the better end of the sick deal.

I guess the moral of this tale is that managing people is not for the squeamish.  Two job requirements for any supervisor: the ability to handle the unexpected and an iron stomach.