This is going to be quite long. I'm a work-from-home crisis counselor and have been in this job for over a year. I handle both calls and texts, mostly from drug and gambling addicts. My job boils down to assessing callers and giving them referrals.
Initially, I was very excited to finally have a job that involved what I went to college for. However, I am now jaded. The job is very hands-off yet extremely critical of counselors at the same time. My supervisor literally disappeared for six months (we all thought she had quit). During that time, I had no supervision. Then, she reappeared out of the blue and asked me with a straight face why my quality had dipped during that time.
The Quality Improvement people are the worst. They set you up to fail. They expect you to ask a million personal questions before you can offer any assistance, but then scold you for a call running too long. They want all calls to be about 15 minutes or less, but it's impossible to get the assessment done in such a short time. In fact, QI will exclusively review your shortest calls, where you don't get a chance to ask everything. They never grade you on the intense hour-long calls where you have to call EMS and potentially save someone's life. To make matters worse, the list of questions that we use on the platform doesn't match the questions that QI grades you on. It's as if the set of questions were written by two people who did not coordinate with each other.
They coddle people with severe addiction and/or mental health problems to the point where it does more harm than good. They will let frequent callers call as many times as they like. We have to humor abusive callers and obvious pranksters. There was one prankster who texted multiple times saying he was dying without elaborating. He gave us multiple fake addresses. We all knew he was just messing with us, but management made us call 911 and sent EMS on a wild goose chase.
They also lie to your face about what to expect. They said I could get 30 days of vacation days, but really it was 10. They said I could have flexible work schedules, but instead they gave me the worst possible graveyard shift and denied all my requests to change it.
The benefits sound great, if you actually had access to them. When they onboarded us, upper management was so vague about how to sign up for the company's health insurance that everyone in my training cohort missed the deadline to sign up for it.
They also have strange policies that seem to hurt the company more than anything. For example, they have a dedicated Spanish line without dedicated Spanish-speaking counselors. Even if you don't know Spanish, you're expected to handle the call. You are not allowed, under any circumstances, to transfer to a Spanish-speaking counselor even if one is available.
The platform used to give you five-minute breaks between calls to do the write-ups and then automatically put you back on available. Management thought five minutes was too much downtime, so they got rid of it. Now you have to manually log yourself back in. As a result, a lot of people forget to do this and will be inactive for hours instead of just five minutes like before.
They tried to enact this policy where if you were more than 10 minutes late to your shift, you would not be paid for that day. They had to quickly backpedal when they became short-staffed because people who were a little late for work just didn't show up at all.
They constantly gaslight you into believing everything is your fault. I wasn't able to clock-in one day and told my supervisor about it the same day. She scolded me for not bringing it up sooner.
There are pointless mandatory meetings that are scheduled without any consideration to people who work the night shift.
Everyone in management speaks in an oddly stilted way. They use a lot of SAT words to sound smart, making everything difficult to understand.
I've basically quiet quit. I use Chatgpt to do a lot of my work, like coming up with responses and writing call notes. My supervisor's been praising me for how well-written they are. I literally tell the AI to “rewrite this call note to include an obnoxious amount of buzzwords that dumb people use to sound important”. And they just lap it up.
I can go on and on. The only positive things about this job are that I work from home and the pay is surprisingly competitive.
TL;DR: My job is miserable and I'm thinking about quitting. I don't know. What do you guys think I should do?