tick . . . tick . . . tick . . . .

When it came time for the end-of-year evaluations this year to determine whether we got merit increases or not, I missed out.  One of the reasons I did was that my “stack ranking” for the year was lousy.  Stack ranking is calculated by a number of metrics, but among the biggest are average talk time—the time I was actually talking with customers—average time I left customers on hold, and average time in wrap-up.  The Tulip said I was something like number 185 of 211.  This wasn’t surprising; with all the time I spent on the SLA team, I took almost no live calls from the queue for eight or nine months, and metrics are calculated only on incoming live calls.  Some months of last year, I took no live calls at all so there was no way to calculate my metrics.  No metrics equals bottom of the stack for that month.  Even if I took three or four live calls one day, that might be the only three or four live calls I took that week instead of the normal 17 to 25 a day I take now.  And at that point, all I needed was one long, bad call to kill my talk time for the week, or even the month.

I avoided being classed as “performing below expectations” because the Tulip factored in all the extra work I did for the SLA team, and that brought me up to what the Empire calls “valued contributor.”  That means I’m doing my job and maybe a little extra in some places, but I’m not Exemplary—and Exemplary is the evaluation level where you get merit raises, which is the only kind of raise that is given at the Empire.  So no merit raise for Sam.

In my annual eval meeting, the Tulip frankly said that the item killing me in evaluation was my stack ranking, and the thing killing my stack ranking was my lousy metrics, and if I hoped to have a better evaluation—or even to tread water between now and mid-year evaluation in August—my talk, hold, and wrap times all had to come down.  It now also appears that at the same time I was quietly put on a list of techs to “watch and see whether they need some extra coaching to improve their call handling.”

They didn’t really need to.  Today one of our team’s level-two techs stopped me and showed me that my metrics, taking on a full normal call load, were right back in acceptable ranges.  I could have told them all that would happen, but no one would have believed me without the data to back it up. Now they do.  And I have to keep working to maintain or even improve the times if I’m gonna move up the stack and be eligible for anything better.

A mauve carbuncle envelops the glass locomotive wheel.  Fnord.