Posting this on a throwaway account so I don’t accidentally dox myself.
So I work for one of my country’s biggest banks as an escalations agent for their call center. I work from home, which is nice, but the position is very stressful as a lot of the calls I’m fielding are from people who are angry and/or desperate. I’m not here for a lecture on how evil the bank is, I already know.
Long story short, our workload is about to increase tenfold due to our department being assigned the bulk of the difficult and complex calls that will be coming through from customers of the newly acquired bank. We recently had our annual reviews, and the pay increases offered to top employees in the department were around 3%, and for employees just below that they were less.
Now, how is it that you’re expecting us to do significantly more work than what we agreed to do when we were hired, but you’re not willing to acknowledge that additional work in any meaningful way? I’m not asking for an extra $6 / hr or anything, but maybe a 6% raise considering what expectations are being thrown onto me and the extra stress I’ll be under for at least the next 3-4 months, likely followed by an average workload that’s still 15-20% more than before the acquisition? They aren’t even bringing on more employees to help with the already absurd workload we have.
Truth be told, even if the acquisition weren’t a factor, I’d be very disappointed in my pay raise due to how well I’ve done in the past year. On paper, Im one of the best employees the department has, yet Im being paid as though Im only 3% better than when I was hired on and they knew nothing at all about how I would perform.
TL;DR Corporate America shockingly increases workload without just compensation