So we have this manager at work who does absolutely nothing all day. He's been in his position for four years. I've been around a couple of years now, so this is a battle I've seen over and over again with my coworkers. My frustration came, went, and it's back again. Here's the rundown:
He's an expert at looking like he's working. He'll pace the shop floor, look at some product, go to the bathroom, go to a different department and chat it up with other employees, stand around and check his phone, and then repeat. When something comes up that he actually can do, he delegates it to someone else who already has stuff on their plate. We are frequently getting in trouble for the crap this guy leaves around for us to do and the managers don't care he's not helping out, just that we aren't picking up his slack.
Examples:
There was a small pile of clothes on the floor next to a shelf. He yells “there's a mess here! Someone better pick it up.” Before walking off. We're talking like, three shirts that just need to be folded, with a small stack that could just be picked up and put on the table.
Dude brought out a bottle of windex and washcloths, then left them by a window for someone else to see and start cleaning.
We had a stack of clothes that needed to be prices. He looked at it for about 20 minutes, asked me if I was going to get to this, said they had to go take care of something in a different department, then left. Another manager came by and asked why I was pricing the stack when they told problem manager to price it.
We were in a customer rush and the other check-out worker and I watched him talk to his buddy instead of helping us out with change, money drops, or opening another register.
He's friends with the other three managers on the same level and the big department manager. Multiple people, including myself, have gone to the store manager to submit a complaint about how this guy handles everything. The store manager usually blows things off and makes it sound like it's our fault. One person was almost fired. One person was soft fired. That person was a floor manager hired before the most recent one that's friend of the other two and hiring manager.
One person went to HR to submit a complaint as an anon, the HR manager went to the store manager and said “Hey, [name] has a complaint about this manager. What do you know?”, to which the manager covered for him and then wrote up the employee that fired a complaint. Someone else went to HR and the same thing happened, but that person almost got fired.
The store manager doesn't want to get rid of him because he's been there for a decade.
Obviously no action will ever be taken by anyone higher up in this store. We can't trust HR to keep the identity of anyone that submits a complaint secret. There was a mass walkout when that one manager was soft fired. There have been other mass quittings, but staggered from people getting fed up all at the same time.
What can we, this current batch, do?