I work for a relatively small company that works in the grain industry. On my team there is myself and one other person. The other person is quitting. My company is expecting me to pick up the responsibility of a job that has required two people all by myself, with no intention of replacing anyone but they have invited me into the conversations of how the job should look going forward.
With this new direction I would be taking on more responsibility whether it just be general duties I am picking up day to day or potentially training coworkers within the company to handle work.
My boss asked me to come up with a plan moving forward and send it to him. Well I kind of feeling like I am doing his job for him in that regards but okay I will do it I am a team player but I want to be compensated fairly.
So I basically comprised what I plan on saying to my boss and I was just hoping some of you guys could help tell me if what I am saying is coming across as too much or if I need to come across more assertive.
Per our conversation on 6/13/22, I am reaching out to you with what I think is necessary for this transition with me included.
Going forward this is a brief synapsis of how I would envision this position working to its max potential.
- Status Quo – If we wanted to keep things the same then this position definitely requires at least two people to function properly. We could just divide the elevators up between two of us like we have been doing and all the tasks involved with each elevator, i.e. billing, traces, rates, invoices, releasing equipment, ordering equipment, etc is handled by the person who is assigned that elevator.
- Just one person, me – I could train someone at each elevator to handle how to do some of the tasks if they happen outside of this offices normal hours of operations (M-F 8am-5pm) and then I could be an emergency backup for them or contact if issues arise.
- Houston would need their own person on site covering as the facility is 24/7.
- Traders will need to have info on if cars are being billed that day and where cars are going in a timely manner. They would need to let me know hopefully as cars are loading so if patterns need to be built or an elevator is loading a significant amount of cars I would have the ability to get things set up during work hours instead of outside of work hours. If no info is given to me during hours of operations then nothing will get done until the next business day.
I am a team player as I stated in the meeting, it is in my nature to make sacrifices to help others. Since starting in this position in October of 2021 I have continued to show my team player characteristics by booking over 171 trucks while still working in this new position (please see Silkie’s TH Booking Report attachment), spending many weekday evenings working until 8/9pm or later and on Saturday’s and Sunday’s billing/releasing cars or sending out the info required for customers to bill/release their equipment. I also still talk with old customers who I purchased/sold from when others (Joanne, John P, etc) were unavailable and the customers would call me because they couldn’t get ahold of anyone else. I also know how difficult it is to work with some of our strong willed traders, too often I try to get info necessary to do my job during our hours of operations to be told to “chill out” “relax” etc when I am just trying to do my job and make sure it is done correctly and timely.
I have tried my best to make sure this company does not lose money based on my positon. I tried to stop cars from being billed overweight out of Superior before I was told to bill them and 5/7 cars got stopped for being overweight which cost us about $2500/car. I have released cars after hours and on weekends to save demurrage, and successfully disputed a lot of demurrage with the railroads. I keep a record of every car that gets placed, when it got placed, when it got billed and everything else that goes with it. Every detail of every aspect of this job since I have taken over this position has been saved and stored.
I also created a google sheets doc as an alternative to GrainWorx to keep track of all cars that have HM as some sort of party to billing. The sheet is linked below. I am also in the process of creating something similar but with all historical data as our traders often have questions in these regards. In addition to that sheet, I also created a lot of the sheets that traders are still using (Corn Sheet, SD Bids, etc).
I would be glad to go into more detail of all the duties I perform and what the training for others would look like once I know officially the plans going forward. For me to be a part of that I would need to be compensated fairly. I would be taking on more responsibility regardless of what direction we go whether it be training, or just general coverage of elevators. Based on the amount of time I have spent in this company, the knowledge I have from both a logistics background and trading background as well as the additional responsibilities I would be taking on, higher compensation than what I am at currently only seems fair.
I'd like to not I removed the link to our sheet from this post because that is just for my company so some stuff in regards to that may not make sense.
For some context I am definitely overworked and underpaid regardless of my coworker quitting and it was high time I stood up for myself and at least tried for what I deserve.
Any thing helps. Thank you all.