In my considerable time with this company, only a handful of employees were ever promoted to the position of Area Manager. As there is no process in place to mentor employees, the majority of the Area Managers were recruited from other outsourcing competitors.
In addition, rarely, if ever were employees promoted out of the ranks to the Site Manager position. The low paying jobs force managers to hire employees that are bottom of the barrel in quality and train them. Meanwhile the customers are the ones that deal with service issues.
There are rarely raises. No bonuses to Site Managers. Meanwhile Area Manager and above goes for week long all-expense vacations in the Caribbean provided they make their mythical "numbers".
There has been a lot of change over of senior management over the past few years with the focus going from operations to sales with sales team members taking over key operations positions. So when you think your area manager is there to support your account, they're more likely just sniffing out new leads with your clients.
It was my experience that the Area Manager was adversarial towards the site management and did not respect the client, the employees or clearly understand the work being performed by the site staff.
The Area Managers bull-in-a-china-shop management style of bullying, harassment and intimidation made this a unpleasant work experience. The Area Manager in question uses these same methods to insure that there's little oversight of the Area Managers ethical behavior by upper management or Human Resources.
