How do you make sure you finish on time in your workplace, and don’t go over the time you are due to finish with any tasks you need to do?
Personally I work in a virtual call centre, and if I get to the end of the call and I see there’s only a couple of minutes before the end of my shift, I deliberately extend the summary of the call and take longer explaining the app we promote called Airtime Rewards so that I finish bang on time.
What do you do to ensure you leave at the right time in your workplaces?
Most days I work from home, and so there isn’t even a distinction between being at work and not being at work. Most of my work life there hasn’t really been an “end of the workday”, not since laptops came along.
Even when I’m in the office, I try to make sure I leave by a certain time, but all that entails is stopping at that time and picking up again when I get home.
Well, I have a flexible schedule, so I can flexibly decide when to arrive and leave. The main working time is supposed to be between 8.15 and 16.00, but you can arrive at 7.00 and leave at 18.00. So, sometimes I like to sleep a bit longer and arrive later and then work past 16 to make up for the time I lost. Sometimes, I arrive at 8.15, but I deliberately work past 16.00 to gather up overtime. We can have a maximum of 20 hours of overtime, which we can then use to leave earlier or arrive later if we want to. So, I usually gather enough overtime so that I can work a very short day before my summer vacation and leave early.
Not applicable any more, but yeah, taking a little longer with the last call, or if I get off of it, staying in after call work for a few minutes, taking longer to finish up logging.
Or generally you could apply to get off work early, and if there was availability, they’d start going down the list of people and let them go home/sign out for the day.
Yeah, overtime does seem to be very popular in most jobs. I don’t do it in my current one because I feel like eight hours is enough for me in my current job, and I think I’d struggle with any more than that, because we deal with a lot of complaints.
Used to do this one myself, but we were told it would go down as call avoidance in my workplace if we continued doing it.
There was a point where they considered it call avoidance where I worked, but it’s one of these areas where different management and supervisors cared about different things, and it was also a matter of how long you were in it.
Also, eventually, there was a second desk in india also taking the calls on my desk, and they were always doing that at the end of their shift very noticeably, so it was rather hard to go after us about it at that point.
The most annoying thing I find when you do call centre stuff is when you need to transfer someone to another department, but the person you reach in the other department is about to finish their work shift. They then refuse the call and deliberately hang up. Had that happen to me once when the lines were about to close, and it was so awkward explaining to the customer what had happened, and how they’d have to ring back the next day because the lines were now shut.
Fortunately, most of the desks I had to transfer to were 24/7, even if the individual person I got might be at the end of their shift. Most of the ones that weren’t weren’t actually ones I transferred to, but gave out a number to.
It was definitely annoying when I was trying to transfer to a desk and the call got dropped instead of picked up, though, especially if it happened again when I tried again.
I know it’s harsh to say, because everyone needs a job to survive, but anybody who refuses a call and ends it because their shift has ended should receive a warning, and if they do it multiple times, they should be sacked.
Yeah, depending on the desk, you were either supposed to stay on the call and do overtime until it was over, or hand the call over to someone else… but not while I was still on the line.
Oh, another fun one is when you are staying waiting for next level to pick up for long periods of time with a case that you know very well is an outage, but there isn’t a master case for the outage yet, and the wait time is because everyone else is also calling next level. Especially fun if it goes past the end of your shift.
Yeah. Once I get them on the line, I’d give them the case number, briefly describe the issue, transfer the customer in and be off, but no blind transferring.
Though if it isn’t an emergency, I could just drop a case in their queue and not connect the user.
Of course, now that I no longer have that job, don’t really have to worry about that at the moment. (Though I do have to worry about not having a job, but that’s a different topic…)
You get enough work to fill a full day? Can’t relate. I’m the opposite. I have so many spreadsheets in my computer because that’s what I do to kill time, make spreadsheets for nonsense.
I’m the manager of my store, so my task list can never get empty. I end up staying longer than my shift should be, but it balances by the end of the week.
I tend to have a mini-notebook in my back pocket at work with the ever-changing tasks that crop up day-to-day. I have set tasks too, but I know them by heart and don’t need to keep track of them.
Advice I’d give to anyone is just to concentrate on the day-to-day. I think ahead a little for my weekly tasks, but generally I just try to focus on the immediate, and not let the weight of the upcoming paralyse me. Flapping and worrying about the future won’t help with what is in front of you.
But I also get flexibility, somewhat, about when I do the non-teaching stuff. Many of my colleagues get in early - about 7.30am and do stuff before the children start. I prefer to stay late - usually 5.30pm (the children finish at 3.10) and do my stuff then (and yes, I know I’m often waffling away on this forum at that time too…). Before having kids I would take work home but I try to avoid that where possible now.
And I always have things I should have done but haven’t yet.
Right there with you. I used to get overtime last millennium, but since 2000, I’ve been in salaried positions. Not in teaching, but like you I generally have some flexibility in when I put in the extra hours.
not a trick as such, but i worked in an office where i rarely missed deadlines, and would stay back if there was an urgent, pressing matter (which sometimes there was) but asides from that, i would always leave bang on 4.30 or 5pm (my end time changed over the years). i had several older colleagues, some only even a decade older than me, joke when i was even a minute or two late cause they found it funny i left at my exact time. used to drive me insane as like? i’ve done all my work? i’m not getting paid overtime? eventually when other people that were around my age joined they were all the same so i felt a lot happier lol.
