I am sorry to hear about your situation. I can offer empathy and understanding around the injustice of your situation, but I am not qualified to offer a legal opinion.

It is interesting that what spurred this blog post was a situation surrounding a financial institution that I believed was inappropriately holding front line employees accountable for a higher level of work than what should have been expected of them.

All the employee engagement research shows engagement sits at about 20%. These kind of situations explain why.

Best wishes,

Michelle

I work for a large corporate bank as a low level mgr responsible for several “front line” people.

I believe in being held accoutable for concrete things; things that can be measured and reflect on your performance. Anything else is a form of deflective management; something that too many corporate managers do to save their own backsides. They blame their employees to avoid the blame landing on them.

Our customer surveys that are reported, often times reflect the customers attitude toward the company as a whole, or a specific department that I have no control over. Thus rendering me powerless to impact any positive change. I found out today that I will be terminated in two months if I do not improve these survey results to “minimum standards”.

How legal is it for my employer to fire me for something that I can have no impact on?

Thanks for stopping by. I agree that broad surveys can be appropriate, as long as there is clarity around accountabilities.

Regards,

Michelle

For example a question on a survey such as, “How satisfied are you with our company?” should not factor into the customer service reps performance.

Thanks for the comment. I think you should question this accountability. I absolutely think front line employees should be accountable to treat customers well, but if the systems make for angry customers, we’re scraping burned toast instead of fixing the toaster.

Team accountability sounds appealing, but leads to tremendous difficulties within organizations. I wrote about that here: http://www.missionmindedmanagement.com/when-everyone-is-accountable-no-one-is-accountable-the-team-accountability-fantasy

Thanks for stopping by. Please continue to be a part of the MMM community.

Regards,

Michelle

Most companies do hold their front line staff accountable for customer satisfaction scores, and they are coached when scores do not meet administrative standards. However the scores are impacted by every person the customer comes in contact with. If the customer is treated poorly at their first experience, the customer will then be looking for what else will go wrong. It really is the team that creates the customer?s impression, and not one individual.

Thanks,
Ron Edmondson
http://www.RonEdmondson.com