Pros
* Colleagues in your team are great and helpful * 1-hour paid break * remote opportunities
Cons
There are so many it's hard to choose where to start. Firstly, training for the position was too quick and not in-depth. The training usually lasts about 3-4 days in which you are expected to learn all the backend systems, the support software, and how to engage with customers through email, live chat, and phone calls. Safe to say, you are not ready at all by the time you start your "normal shifts" and so your colleagues end up having to train you on the job themselves while also handling an incredible amount of workload. Secondly, management does not communicate with the wider team about any changes they want to make. I understand that as a manager you have the final say but you are only there because of your team, if you don't talk to the team you are likely to make decisions that are going to negatively impact the team. For example, making the decision cut down employee’s shifted hours and essentially just letting them know that this is happening without actual discussion taking place. The ideology was that there is only going to be a weekday and weekend team in order to "make sure we are able to find cover easier" was flawed from the beginning as I also pointed out during my meeting with my manager and HR. People working on the weekdays are unlikely to be able to cover weekends as they already work a full 40-hour week and weekend people are likely to be either students or have another job during the week and so are unlikely to be able to cover a lot of the shifts during the weekdays. Nevertheless, I was told that [the management] has looked at the data and this would be a good move. Let me offer some advice, looking at data and understanding data are two very separate things, something that you learn with experience. Additionally, by doing this change you have forced 3 of your employees that were regularly working overtime and covering most of the shifts to resign. This left the weekend team without any senior employees which has led to increased waiting times for customers as well as an increased workload for the new hires as they are poorly trained and not knowledgeable about the systems. Since then, the management has been forced to disable phone call support during the weekends in order to balance the workload (at least something was done about the workload here, shame that 3 employees had to resign for this to happen). Thirdly, the overtime compensation is terrible. In essence, when you are doing overtime you are working for less money than your normal pay rate. For non-London employees, the pay rate is £10.90 per hour and the overtime compensation is £11.00. So the rate is only £0.10 more and you also do not get any holiday in lieu or holiday pay on those hours which is where the pay cut comes from. I’d like to add that if you are a weekend employee you basically get none of the bank holiday benefits and only your weekday colleagues are positively affected by them. If a bank holiday falls on a weekend - there is no additional pay or benefits, you work as if it is a normal day and the weekday colleagues get a day off. In my opinion, if you are operating a team that works 7 days a week it is imperative to consider your weekend team and how they are affected by bank holidays. Requests to HR to look into the compensation have been met with a general “I will forward your feedback to the Finance manager” and this was never followed up on. Fourthly, the workload… Overwhelming does not begin to cover how stressful this job is. You are expected to handle emails, live chats, and phone calls (phone call support was removed for the weekend employees and shortened from 9am-6pm for weekday employees sometime in end of June - again mostly due to experienced employees resigning and the team being very new and so it was impossible to handle everything) altogether as well as handle backend operations and administrative tasks. On average, you would be doing at an absolute minimum 110 conversations per shift (it’s a 7-hour shift) and it would not be considered “overwhelming” unless your hourly conversations reach 20. In comparison, most other companies aim for ~10 conversations per hour to make sure you’re not overexerting yourself. So on top of doing all of these conversations you are also expected to maintain the active fleet, search for abandoned rides and end them and refund the customer, search through rides ended in inappropriate areas and warn/fine users… the list goes on. Furthermore, just to tie in with the lack of communication from management, new products/strategies get implemented without alerting employees and giving them appropriate training/knowledge of how to handle enquiries for the new service. This just leads to a more stressful environment and feeling unsupported in your role. This also ties in with the inappropriate compensation for this role as you are handing so many tasks but are compensated £10.90 per hour. This would’ve been fine if you were only responsible for handling communications but this is not the case in this company. For a company that hugely relies on the support team to deliver their service you need to be prepared to spend money on your support team. When your support employees tell you it’s too much, it’s time to start hiring more people and not cheap out on that. Again this is something that was mentioned during the management’s decision to “shake up” the shift pattern. If your answer to this is that the support team is the largest team in the company my answer to you is “I wonder why”. Maybe if you pause and think you’d understand. Let me propose a “Manager in the life of their subordinate” day so that you get an understanding of what’s going on in your team. Fifthly, toxic micro-management. Not only is the workload immense, you are also constantly under observation and being asked why you’re offline whilst you’re handling 2 chats and a phone call. Reviews of conversations generally expect you to break down everything for the customer and predict any future questions they may have but at the same time expect you to answer all incoming communications which is simply not feasible. You either get quality or quantity. When you push yourself to deliver both you just end up burned out wishing for anything but to go back to work the next day which is a horrible feeling to have. Sixthly, not the worst but also a problem, be prepared for there to be errors with your payslip. I would encourage you to note down your overtime shifts and check the payslip for any errors once you receive them. Seventhly, remote employees are hugely disadvantaged in this company. If you are joining as remote, please do not expect progression opportunities. Lateral moves into other departments also happen only if you are at least hybrid. Eighthly, there is no standardises plan on when app updates are pushed out. There were a few instances when a bad update was pushed out right on Friday and the support team had to struggle through a weekend of very angry customers as we could not solve the issue until a patch was made but of course, the tech team was off on the weekend. On another occasion, someone from the tech team decided to alter the search query settings/scripts on the platform we used to manage our customers on a Friday. This alteration made the system super slow as the search request to the backend jumped from a few hundred to thousands and the backend could not cope. This meant that the weekend team were working with the backend BARELY loading which meant we couldn’t do our jobs properly. No one made the effort to help this situation and the weekend team was left alone to deal with this. I could ramble on and on but I think these are some of the worst parts about being a Support & Community Champion at (Human) Forest and before these are resolved the team will continue struggling and the employee turnaround will remain high.