I made a post about this a while ago here. It’s not necessary to read to understand this post, but it gives more context.
Background info: I work at a sports clothing store, and we use Dayforce for scheduling. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s a website where you view your schedule, set up your availability, request time off and swap shifts, among other things. Our store manager doesn’t have anything to do with the schedule, this is the assistant manager’s job.
2 weeks ago, the schedule for this week (8/29-9/4) came out, and it was a complete mess. I was scheduled in the middle of 2 of the shows I’m directing, and ALL of my coworkers were scheduled during their classes and other jobs. And considering this week is the week school starts, everyone was insanely thrown off by this and stressed out of their minds (understandably). In every person’s case, the things they were scheduled over were approved as time off in Dayforce, but got scheduled anyway.
When this schedule came out, the AM was out sick with covid, the kind with very severe symptoms. She wouldn’t answer anyone, even though everyone was trying to get a hold of her, even the store manager. I have to commend my store manager though (to a certain extent), he was working really hard to try and fix everyone’s schedule. It was a nearly impossible job given that literally everyone was scheduled incorrectly. He did the best he could, and he actually made sure I didn’t have any shifts during my shows. I can’t say the same for everyone else though.
On Monday, the first day of schedule hell week, I was at school and I ran into one of my coworkers in the bathroom. I had work with her on Tuesday, and she was pissed. She told me that she repeatedly let our managers know that she couldn’t work on Monday because she had class, the one she had just gotten out of when I ran into her. She said that despite that, they no-call no-showed her, and our store takes that really seriously. Even just a few of those will get you fired. She told me that 4 people have already quit because they weren’t able to fix their schedule, and due to the strict rules about missing a scheduled shift, they would’ve been fired anyway if they didn’t show up. She said “get ready to work a shit ton.”
None of us have any idea what’s going on. I worked on the day the schedule came out and chaos was ensuing, and I asked the store manager why this happened. Since he wasn’t able to reach the AM, he gave me a vague answer along the lines of “I can’t speak for [AM] since I haven’t spoken to her yet, but it seems like some sort of technical issue.”
Our AM has come back to work since then, and is practically acting like none of this went down, even though it’s her job to make sure stuff like this doesn’t happen. Despite this not being the fault of any of the lower level staff, they’re seemingly putting the blame on them for not showing up when they genuinely can’t. It’s just a part-time retail job, it’s not like the store or corporate will suffer if someone has to go to school. We haven’t been given any answers as to why or how this happened, and it hasn’t been addressed whatsoever.
To add insult to injury, the AM is the type of person you don’t want to come to for help because she’s naturally intimidating. You kinda feel like she’s annoyed you’re even asking questions because it’s supposed to be obvious. I requested a partial-day time off in Dayforce for a doctor’s appointment with unpaid vacation time, since it was the only option that had hours available, and she rejected it because “I should only be using vacation hours for vacation.” She told me to email that time to her instead and she wouldn’t schedule me over it. If you haven’t predicted it already, it was scheduled over and I had to reschedule the appointment. I see a lot of doctors for various reasons pretty frequently, so I reached out to ask her how I should ask for time off for appointments in the future. She told me to request the entire day off using unpaid vacation hours. What?? I only have a limited amount of them, and I lose 8 of them if I block out the entire day. Why should I have to block out the entire day if I only need 3 hours off? I have time to work outside of just that small time block. I’m afraid to push her for more answers because, like I said, she’s hard to ask for help.
None of this is making any sense. It doesn’t make sense to me that I’m not allowed to use unpaid vacation time for a 3 hour block because “vacation time is for vacations,” but at the same time, I’m supposed to block out the ENTIRE day with unpaid vacation time for a small part of my day. It doesn’t make sense that it’s completely the fault of the AM that the schedule got messed up, and yet it’s somehow the staff’s fault for not showing up to work when they’re in class. It doesn’t make sense that you can screw your employees so badly that they mass quit, and not offer some sort of apology or make up for it in any way. They’re acting like it never happened. I absolutely love the job itself, it pays great and I love the people I work with. But it is seriously so messed up how all of this went down. No one knows how to handle this and it’s insanely frustrating.
I needed to vent to people who get it, but if anyone has any suggestions of how to rectify this for me and all my coworkers, I’m eager to hear it.