I’ve worked for this particular company for a little over a year now, but been in the industry I’m in for around 2.5 years and this is the 3rd company I’ve worked for in the industry. I’m a field engineer for a telecommunications company, my job requires me to stay away from home and work long hours, both of which are fine with me as it’s part of the job and I knew this going in and I actually enjoy my job. However the company I currently work for have absolutely no idea how to treat their employees.
So for starters our work contracts state we work and get paid for 42.5 hours/week and we all had to sign waivers that state we will sometimes work over 48 hours in a week, which as stated above is fine. What is not fine is that if we manage to work less than the 42.5 hours, we do not get paid for it, which effectively means we’re on 0 hour contracts as we only get paid the hours we work even though we’ve all signed 42.5 hour contracts. This is just a little bit about how the company is run.
Now the other day I arrived at the site I was meant to be working on, to be called by someone in the office telling me a coworker had called in sick and that I had to go and cover their site as it was more valuable to the company than the site I was currently working on, this happens every so often and I don’t mind helping out by covering other peoples sites. However this particular day the site I was asked to attend instead of my own was a 2 hour drive in the opposite direction to where I was heading after I had finished the job i was doing as I had booked a hotel for the night close to my job the next day. Then the job that was required at site that needed covered always ends up being a long shift, I had already been up and out of the house since around 6:30am and it was around 9:30am when I got this phone call, meaning I didn’t get to this other site until about 11:30. I then stayed on that site until 8:30pm to ensure the job was completed and I then had to drive 3.5 hours to the hotel I was staying in for my job the next day, meaning I didn’t get there until 12am. I had ended up driving around 400 miles in total this day.
My manager always sends an email on a Friday with “award nominations” for people who’ve gone above and beyond during the week, the prize is a fantastically pointless label printer (we need to use label printers for work) as every engineer already has one. I thought to myself “surely I have to be included in it this week” I couldn’t care less about the printer, I just expected some kind of recognition for completing this job, never mind the complete shit show the rest of the week was but I’ll not get into that.
I wasn’t included in the nominations, I didn’t get a ‘thank you’, I didn’t get a ‘well done’, I got absolutely zero recognition for ensuring this job was completed successfully.
Thankfully I am awaiting a job offer from a new company and I can put my notice in at this place soon.
TL;DR went above and beyond for the company I work for, helping out a colleague who called in sick, worked a 17/18 hour day to not even receive as much as a ‘thank you’ from my manager.