Do I work for Sprint and just not know it?

Business Week published an article yesterday that talks about how Sprint went to shit after the Nextel merger.

To paraphrase the article, it talks about how Sprint merged with Nextel, then everything went to shit because the company became focused on numbers instead of customer satisfaction, and blah blah blah.  Sounds strangely familiar…

Employees like Paula Pryor saw the merger’s impact firsthand. The 38-year-old, who worked in a call center in Temple, Tex., says the numbers-driven management approach implemented after the combination led to poor morale and deteriorating customer service. Even bathroom trips were monitored. “They would micromanage us like children,” says Pryor, who was fired last year after taking time off when her father died.

Micromanagement almost never works for improving productivity.  This does nothing but make employees miserable.  It’s worse than being treated like a child...even my own mother never bitched at me for slouching…

Pryor remembers the conditions in her Texas call center, originally a Nextel facility, shifting dramatically in the first months after the merger closed in late 2005. Managers began tracking what she was doing on her computer. Overtime pay became much harder to get. Most puzzling for her was the pressure to keep customer calls short. At Nextel, she was judged only on the number of customer problems she solved each month, however long they took, and she would occasionally spend 30 minutes to resolve a thorny issue. But after the merger, speed was the priority, she says. “They would say, Your calls need to be shortened,’” she says.

Deja vu.  The only reason we’re getting overtime now is because they fired more people, and more people quit, so now we’re shorthanded.

When our company laid off 30% of the staff, they said we’re “re-shifting our priorities”.

Apparently, by “re-shifting”, they meant abolishing free will and independent thought.

And by “priorities”, they meant cut back the staff so far so that the owner can make up for the lost of the $200K car he sold because he was making a “big sacrifice” for the sake of the company.

When I read things like this article talking about large corporations like Sprint...I think back to when I first started working here.  The owner was always going on about “not turning corporate”, and how he hates large corporation policies…

Fucking asshole hypocrite.