I was raised very traditionally: “work hard, respect authority, get straight A’s.” So I apologize if this sounds naive or silly. I’m still working on breaking out of these habits of fitting into society’s idea of work.
I’m brand new to the full-time workforce, after working lots of part time jobs through college. These jobs were mostly customer service based, teaching, 1-on-1 counseling, or assignment-based. I did pretty well at these jobs and always considered myself a good employee. At the bare minimum, I always showed up on time, improved on mistakes, and communicated well. In my personal life and hobbies, I am told that I’m very reliable, consistent, and hard-working. So to have such a tough time in my first full-time job has been surprising.
A few years back, I decided to switch to healthcare to make a bit more money. I’ve been working at my current job for about 2 years. It’s a highly production-based job – we basically address cases of varying complexity and do as many as possible within the 8 hour work day.
I have been struggling with this since I started working here – my work comes in ebbs and flows, I have a hard time focusing for 4 hours straight twice a day.
My supervisor has brought me in several times and told me that my production is low, and that many people get twice the number of cases done. Due to this low production, she has started running time surveillance on me. She emails me any time there is a 20 minute gap in work, or when there are a couple hours where I’m working slowly. This has made it even harder to keep my numbers up, because it makes me panic throughout the day.
I tried to fix all this. I was able to focus better last month, improving my case count by 50%. Slow improvement, but I thought it was better than nothing. She told me it was still too low, that I didn’t seem like I was cut out for this job, nor ANY corporate job, if I could not focus for 8 hours straight per day. This is when my BS alarm went off, because from what I hear, there are some jobs where a full 8 hours of focus is not required. She then said something else that I thought seemed unethical: she referred to two specific employees by name who had quit within the past year, and in a mocking voice, talked about how they couldn’t handle it because “they got easily ‘frustrated’ and ‘overwhelmed’” like I did. It really rubbed me the wrong way because I worked with these people personally, and it felt mean-spirited to mock them to my face.
I was planning to move away anyway at the end of the month, so I’ve put in my 2 weeks in this job a week earlier than planned. But I’m looking for perspective on her comments, which have really stuck with me. I’m discouraged – maybe there’s something wrong with me, but I really haven’t been able focus in the way that they want me to focus. I like working in spurts. The statement that I won’t be able to handle any 8-5 job was scary to hear.
I think in some sense, she may be right. This specific career is not playing to my strengths (teaching, helping people, talking/writing, analyzing things in-depth). So that’s valuable to know. But still, I’m discouraged when it comes to holding down any corporate job and being able to support myself.
Does anyone have any perspective to offer, any advice or words of wisdom in this realm?