I work at a telecommunications store with four other girls and our manager. Over the last year or so, our manager has grown to be almost impossible to work with. The situation has gotten to the point that all five employees in our store, myself included, feel as if we can no longer trust the type of mood or personality we will receive from her when we come to work every day. We have all begun to quietly seek other employment to get away from the stress. We love our jobs and what we do but have come to the realization that we would rather find a job somewhere else and be paid less than continue to work in the environment we are in now.
Before I proceed with examples and anecdotes of the behavior and treatment we are receiving, I feel it pertinent to say that we have spoken to our District Manager in the past about these things, and rather than observe from a distance and investigate the situation, she immediately told our manager everything we said and who had said it. We no longer feel comfortable confiding these issues to the DM.
As it is difficult to weave each example into a full story, I will list them in bullets so they are easier to understand:
-Store Manager's attitude daily has become very sporadic and unpredictable. She often comes to work in a bad mood and then proceeds to vent her frustrations by finding things that she feels we have done wrong. She will frequently ask us to perform a task and then grow angry when we cannot finish the task because customers are our priority; we often have to let the tasks go to the back burner so we can help customers who enter the store. Generally, customer transactions will consume the rest of our shifts, so we do not have any time to finish any side projects we are given. SM consistently calls us lazy because we can't juggle 50 tasks and still take care of customers properly. She, however, is often ignoring the customers on the floor, including customers who have asked specifically to speak with her and only her, by sitting in our back room at her desk, eating, and watching movies on her cell phone or talking on the phone with her fiancé. These phone calls are a consistent part of her day, as he phones her at least 5 times a day just to chit-chat. If he is not calling her, he is coming into the store and pulling SM's attention away from the employees and any customers who need help. Her fiancé visits the store, on average, 2 or 3 times a day and stays for 20-30 minutes each visit. She allows him (and her 13-year-old son) to enter the locked back room of our store where we keep our inventory and cash safes. Her excuse is that he is a police officer so he is allowed to go into high-security areas.
-SM often leaves the store for hours on end to go to doctors' appointments, wedding dress fittings, and lunch with her fiancé. Frequently, she will leave the store to look outbound for either new employees or business leads, but what she is doing is walking into other stores in the city and window shopping for hours at a time. She will often come back to our store with bags of things she has purchased on these outings.
-SM grows irritated and huffy when asked to accommodate a employee who needs a specific day off of work in the coming weeks. All requests are made in our time system and on a tabletop calendar well in advance but are often either ignored or denied because SM has something she wants to do that day or she just didn't check the calendar or the time system for the requests. When this is pointed out to her, she reprimands the employee who made the request and complains loudly to other employees about how she can't depend on anyone because we have therapy or medical appointments we need to attend.
-SM frequently belittles the struggles the employees in our store deal with outside of work, calling us babies, saying we need to grow up, and telling us that she can handle things like what we deal with just fine and we should be able to as well.
-We have two LGBTQ+ employees in our store and SM often, loudly, and harshly gives her opinions on how trans-gender people are disgusting and shouldn't be allowed. This has made both of the aforementioned employees feel very uncomfortable and attacked several times. They feel as if they are not wanted or welcome.
-SM consistently comments on the weight and eating habits of a few employees in the store because we are overweight and she is not. She will constantly give out unsolicited advice about dieting and exercise in backhanded ways that make the overweight employees, who are already dealing with depression and anxiety and are in therapy, feel very bad about themselves. When SM sees anyone eating at the breakroom table, she will scrutinize what the employee has and will then comment and say something like, “Wow, do you think you need to eat that?” She has even gone so far as to take snacks and food away from an employee without permission and lock them in her desk or just throw them away altogether.
-If a mistake is made in any aspect of our operations, SM will grow irate and immediately start berating the employee who made the mistake, telling them they aren't dependable and chastising them for not knowing how to do something. Instead of showing the employees how to correct the mistake or teaching them how to do it correctly the next time, she will rip the task out of the hands of the person doing it, storm off, and complain loudly about how she can't rely on anyone and how stupid we are. Often, instead of letting an employee know they have done something in error, she will glare at them passive-aggressively and sigh loudly when they come near her or ask her a question. It has grown to the point that none of the employees want to ask her questions or ask how to fix a mistake because we feel as if we are being a burden to her and bothering her.
-When she's gotten extremely angry, she has thrown things and yelled. If she is already angry about something unrelated, she will shout at customer care agents over the phone or at an employee who just happens to be near her.
-We are often told that we aren't allowed to bother SM for any reason while she sits in the backroom, but are then berated and reprimanded if something is done incorrectly because we couldn't ask for her help. If customers ask to speak with her directly, she instructs us to tell them that she is in a meeting and goes back to watching a TV show on her phone. We are then shouted at by customers who have stopped into the store several times over a week or two to speak with SM and she is never available.
-If an employee needs to call out sick for a shift, SM will begin shouting and then proceed to complain about the employee to other employees for the rest of the day. She tells the other employees why the person called out of work and calls them lazy.
-When asked by an employee if they can clock out for their lunch, SM gets angry and shouts at them, telling them the workday doesn't revolve around them and SHE needs to take HER lunch first, but she will then continue to sit at her desk on her laptop for a few more hours without taking a lunch, leaving the employees unable to either to take lunches at all or to take them only an hour or two before the end of their shifts.
This is not, by any means, an exhaustive list of things that we have experienced or observed over the last year or two. These are just a few of the heavier instances. As stated before, we do not want to give up our positions. We love what we do and are very comfortable and talented with it; it is just very, very difficult to wake up and feel as if you want to go to work with a direct manager who has made herself impossible and painful to work with. There have been many moments when the five of us have just felt like standing up and walking out of the store because of the way we are treated.
When this was all reported to and investigate by HR, SM got a slap on the wrist and has, since then, been making snide comments and remarks about how we all hate her and are always trying to get her fired. We aren't sure whether we should report these comments and things to HR as retaliation or not. It's become such a frustrating and precarious situation.