Part 3 - 28/10/2004

You’re an area manager… it’s your birthday (happy birthday!)… you, your area assistant and your family have just sat down at the campsite restaurant and opened a bottle of the finest red… when suddenly a courier of yours comes up to you and explains that one of your staff has been taken ill and needs to go to the local hospital. Do you…

A) Let the courier suffer. This site has been failing all season, it’ll teach them for messing you around and causing you to get an earful from head office on more than one occasion. Ha haha haha haha… BOARH! (In joke number 2… sorry!)
B) Tell your area assistant that he must go hungry and help the dying courier. Tell him to rush her to hospital and keep you informed of every development. Then quickly eat your meal and leave your family… you must be with your courier! Oh the humanity!
C) Explain that you’ve just sat down for your meal and as it doesn’t appear to be immediately life threatening, you’ll come after the meal. Ask your assistant if he doesn’t mind not drinking tonight so that he can drive her to the hospital. Make sure they know that if anything changes they should let you know.

Answers on a postcard to the usual address…

Rather worryingly that scenario did arise during the summer and what option did the area manager for a rival company chose? Well put it this way I wouldn’t be bringing this to people’s attention if it had been either of the latter two. Obviously we don’t know that the area manager in question thought that it was the chance to get revenge, but the couriers did not have a good relationship with her and the campsite’s scores hadn’t been good all season… you do the maths.

When informing the area manager (we’ll call her Louise) of the problem we were told that she was about to eat her meal and so could we look after the courier (we’ll call her Kim) until they had finished. This seemed reasonable enough, but when two hours had passed, Kim decided to sleep it out and hope it would be better in the morning. A colleague of Kim’s went looking for Louise to let her know. She found Louise sitting outside her mobile home getting drunk with her guests and with no interest in Kim’s condition whatsoever.

Now it turned out that Kim was ok the next morning, but to me the job of an area manager is to look after her couriers and maintain their welfare. No one expected her to drop everything, but you would have thought that some assistance would have been forthcoming.

Unfortunately this seemed to sum up the attitude of that company towards the staff of both of its onsite ‘faces’. Instead of the personal touch I received, the staff of this much larger company treated their staff as numbers. When we phoned up the office, we said who we were, had a nice chat – such as what was happening at Wimbledon and in the soaps – and basically felt valued. Whereas, couriers from the other company, the largest in the UK, had to state their number and were generally treated like a commodity. Being promised something in the morning but having a completely different thing happen in the afternoon.