By: Stephanie Diana Eubank
So, a few years back, I was consulting a financial institution that was having difficulty keeping workers. They have a high turnover rate. I was there to figure out why. The team was made up of a mix of industry leaders and novices. The whole team was remote due to the pandemic, and only the top two leaders had been there for over seven years. All other hires were there for six months or less. These workers were all specialized auditors who make a low amount compared to other organizations, and there are only about 100 specialists in this field in the workforce today. This means the high turnover made it so the company was burning through the whole industry’s employee pool and scraping the bottom of the barrel.
We conducted a productivity stress test to see how many files this team could process in a day. Competitors of this company I have consulted for, on average, with specialists who have significant experience, get about 5-8 files per day done. This company that I was consulting for had a mandated 17 files per day for everyone in the organization, including managers. Which had to be completed between 8am -5pm PST; no wiggle room or overtime allowed. Strict performance review processes were implemented for all workers under these guidelines. However, the stress test showed that each employee fell into the industry average of 5-8 daily files.
When I sat down with the manager who oversaw this process, I asked her how she calculated the quota. Fun fact that you learn in business school that quotas and productivity are mathematically calculated; they are not philosophies. (For accuracy’s sake, I should inform you that before she said this next statement, she started the conversation glowing about her master’s in business from ITT Tech and that she had worked in the industry for 30 years and didn’t need me there to review her team. But rather, management wanted a fresh perspective.) She told me, and I quote, “People don’t know their limit until you push them beyond it”.
Yeah… that’s not how that works. That’s not how any business works effectively. I had to explain that to her, and in my assessment, I had also sat down with all employees one on one and found that that they were all beyond burnt out, and since it was such a small community, they were working with a lawyer to file hostile work environment and emotional abuse as a class action suit.
I sat in a few team meetings with this “Leader,” and I could see why past and present employees were working on suing. I observed her in remote meetings where close captioning was on calling her team names based on age, and race, and said several gender-based names calling to the point one employee cried in the meeting because this person called them names and yelled in such an unprofessional manner.
I spoke with this manager on these items; not only was she defensive, but, she did not believe she was a toxic leader. Instead, she said, “You young people are all just a bunch of entitled children who don’t want to work anymore”. She called me a few slurs, and I told her I would not be spoken to in such a way. I told her we could continue the conversation when she calmly discussed it and apologized. A few days later, she called me up, and before I could say hello just screamed at me in all sorts of colorful language that most social media would block me from repeating. Once she was out of breath, she commented on how the pandemic was taking a toll on her; she was going through a divorce and had some really negative political views to share with me. I sat and listened. She cried and said she was not a toxic person, but everyone seemed to agree, and now work is mirroring her home life, and she can’t seem to get a break from either. I told her I understand the isolation remote work brings, especially during lockdowns, as it is part of my dissertation research. And I have worked from home for over 10 years prior, so I get some of the changes are hard. I asked if she had started to talk to anyone about all that, and she said no. Her reason is textbook recession fears, though.
Her reason for not seeing a therapist and addressing these issues is that she was so scared to lose her job that she worried taking time to invest in herself would be a weakness. She explained that was her experience getting her degree during the crash of 2008, and she was afraid to relive that, especially with a pandemic.
I reported all this to upper management and put it into my final report. I recommended removing this person from a person-facing role until retraining in a remote modality was completed. I also pushed that extra hiring should be done to help level the workload and not sacrifice the turn times. Also, I encouraged more of what I call Digital Coffee Breaks. These are meetings with team members individually and as a group to reconnect with one’s team and build a more positive communication style.
People are just people, and that’s not an excuse; it is a fact. But the lessons I took from this experience weren’t just that this person needed some training on calculating quota and productivity. But toxic leaders do not always know that they are toxic and thus sometimes just hurt and scare people. With remote work, toxic leaders will have litigation and behaviors highlighted. This hurts companies and requires review as risk mitigation. Not to mention major damage to the overall workforce and the economy.
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Dr. Stephanie Diana Eubank DBA Remote Team Research (AKA Dr. Bear) 