I work for a huge payroll company, and my job is currently work from home due to the pandemic. Because of COVID, we lost a HUGE chunk of our staff. Because of that, they are overworking the crap out of all of us. Now, that sounds normal, right? Well, it isn’t. We are being overworked because corporate keeps bringing in new clients, knowing damn well that they don’t have enough employees to keep up with the huge volume of clients.
Wouldn’t the solution be to hire more people? They claim “hundreds of employees will join us by March.” However, neither myself or my coworkers ever see job postings anywhere for our company. Ever.
You may ask why they can’t keep employees. Well, we are being paid $16.50/hr to literally run around like chickens with our heads cuts off. They force us to take care of other employee’s clients simply because there are not enough employees. We are swamped with hundreds of phone calls and pages of emails a day, a lot of which are not for our own clients. We skip breaks, come in early, stay late and even hold our pee just to attempt to stay afloat. For $16.50/hr. We are given so many tasks, that there is no possible way we can get it all done in 8 hours. A lot of employees are pulling 10 hour days just to keep up. We are screamed at and disrespected by clients all the time, because they are not understanding of our staffing issue in the slightest.
In October, I was t-boned by a pickup truck and fractured my back, right wrist, left big toe, and my right heel. The heel had to get 2 plates and 15 screws put into it in November, so I was ordered to stay off it for 10 weeks. I am now in physical therapy, literally re-learning how to walk.
Because of my surgery and my back fracture, I was on a medical LOA until beginning of Feb. In December, I had a phone meeting with an HR rep from my company and a leave of absence accommodations specialist. I was told on this phone call that, when I return to work, I can start off working a few hours a day and they will keep my workload light so I can ease my way into it. They said that about a week before I’m scheduled to return to work, an accommodations specialist will call me and go over anything I may need/requests I have in order to perform my job better. I was planning on asking for a laptop so I can work from my bed, since the desk chair can be hard on my back, which isn’t fully healed yet.
Well, fast forward to my return to work. Nobody ever called. I never heard from an accommodation specialist. Nobody ever offered to start me at a few hours a day. The workload is not light, it is astronomically worse than it was before my LOA. They threw so much work onto me, that it is impossible to get it all done in an 8 hour shift. They don’t check in and ask if I’m okay. My back hurts by the end of my shift. It’s causing a lot of anxiety, and I’m not an anxious person. Even when I finally clock out, I can’t enjoy my evenings because I’m worried about tomorrow’s shift. I’m worried about the emails that I didn’t get a chance to answer, and the voicemails that I couldn’t even listen to. This isn’t just me, it’s all the employees on my level. We openly speak on the company’s chat service about being hungry but not able to take lunch, having panic attacks, being harassed and screamed at by clients, the list goes on. This all comes down to the fact that corporate doesn’t want to pay a better wage, and they don’t want to hire more people. They’d rather overwork us to the brink of a breakdown.