That’s what life at the Empire has been recently. Sometimes it seems like one piece of news can be both at the same time, depending on how you look at it.
The main bad news, at least for me, is that the Tulip, is moving on to build a second-level technician team in Auric Support. We’ve never really had classic second-level techs here; our level-2s have combined a technical go-to role with having to coach the level-1s, doing metrics analysis, approving certain dispatches, and whatever else got pushed down from management. Our new area manager (the Tulip’s boss, and my grandboss) looked at that and at a business improvement pilot project that was run in another call center, and decreed that the level-two role would be split into two parts. One half will stay with the teams they’ve been with all along, and keep the coaching and metric roles. The other half will be renamed Resolvers and become the new go-to and incident resolution team, turning into a more classic level-two role. That’s the team the Tulip will manage.
I’m a good deal less than enthusiastic about the reorganization, because it builds an organizational hierarchy in what has, until now, been a very flat and accessible organization. If I, as a level-one tech, needed to talk to an L2 I walked down to his cube at the end of the row. If I needed a technical account manager to approve something out of scope, I walked down the aisle to his cube, explained what I wanted, and generally got it. (Around here you soon learn what to say no to out of hand, and what to take to a TAM to argue for bending the rules, which we get to do some around here in the interest of customer service.) Two months ago, the TAMs were moved away from the teams and into a contiguous “corral” of cubes. Doing so made it easier to find a TAM when one was wanted, but it also means the TAMs now don’t work directly and intimately with their teams’ L1 techs, nor know nearly so much about whom to trust implicitly and who needs watching not to give away the store.
The bad part of building this new level-two team, to my mind, is exactly the same problem. Instead of having an L2 at the end of my row to whom I can walk up and who already knows me, my capabilities, and my style, I’m forced to use a chat application to get access to an L2 in another call center that may be a thousand miles away, who may not know beans from split peas himself, and who CERtainly doesn’t know me from Adam’s off ox and whether my judgement can be trusted or not.
The Tulip has proved, with our team, that he can take an already-good team and manage not to screw it up—which is admirable. Not Doing a Lot of Harm can be one of the hardest things for a new manager to learn. Having done that, though, he wants to try on the challenge of building a working team from scratch, and he’s wanted to manage a team of L2 techs since before he came to us.
The good news came in my annual performance review. My productivity measures increased radically over last year, in part because I didn’t lose half the year to managing workload for the SLA team and in part because I worked on cutting my average handle time and keeping up my astonishing case resolution rate both. I succeeded at both goals, so well that I got a seven percent equity raise (meaning the Empire was paying me significantly below average market wage for my job) and a two percent merit raise. The Tulip said he’d put in for a larger merit increase and smaller equity, but higher-up management rearranged it for fiscal reasons. Still, however I look at it I get a nine percent raise (that works out to nearly $2.00 an hour) for the coming year, which is very welcome after getting no raise whatever last year.
