I’ve been a lurker for quite some time and I feel that now it’s to share my frustrations to anyone who will listen, because the higher ups at my company sure don’t (go figure).
I want to start by saying that I work in sales at a senior level position for a company and I’ve been here for over 3 years.
Now, allow me to vent lol. Most, if not all, all of my coworkers across the sales team have been dealing with numerous concerns/ frustrations and no one seems to want to listen to us nor do anything about it. We’ve brought this up to a few different managers at different levels, we’ve brought it up to HR, People Operations, and a coworker even sent an email to a top level director to see if anything can be done. What happened? We’ve been gaslit and dismissed. Mangers change the subject, don’t follow up with us, and tell us that this is just how it is.
Some of the concerns we had that our quotas were too high for the end of the year/ beginning of the year and it didn’t set us up for success because the entire team is now on an LOE, which isn’t normal. If the whole team is doing everything they can to succeed, yet they’re still being put on a LOE, is that our fault or the company’s fault for not listening to us when we say business is slow and the quota needs to reflect that? How is putting us on a LOE going to help us? Well, it’s not and everyone is stressed, anxious, and panicked about job security and I’ve taken on the role of the therapist because I care about my coworkers more than HR and our managers. It’s just a huge to slap to the face when we work so hard to succeed but the systems in place don’t benefit us.
Aside from that, we’ve been begging for more company perks to better help our emotional/ mental well- being like a gym membership discount or access to free therapy. We have 6 free life coach sessions, but after that you have to pay for it. So many other companies offer more company perks and they can’t even give us what we’re asking for. I’ve spoken to management, HR, and even filled out a request to have this idea implemented and my request was marked as “solved”… no one got back to me.
There’s no healthy work- life balance because if you want to go on vacation/ a trip, there’s 0 quota relief. Many of us have accrued a lot of PTO and are afraid of using it because if we take too much time off, we’re still expected to hit our quota for the month unless we take an unpaid leave. Even if we do take the time off to go on vacation, we are stressing about hitting our metrics and making quota- how is that healthy?
We have been begging management to advocate for us so we can have these policy changes so our overall wellbeing can be improved, but instead, we’re told that this is how it is and if we can’t play the game then we should just get a new job.
I’ve had coworkers take a medical leave due to stress/ anxiety, I’ve had corkers crying on the phone with me because they’re so depressed, and I’ve even had a coworker tell me their hair started falling out due to stress.
All we want is to be valued, respected, heard, advocated for, and to have better policies/ systems in place to better support us- the employees who carry the company on our backs.
I’ve been applying to other jobs, but it’s been hard, which is why I’ve been so adamant about implementing these changes so me and my coworkers can have a better time here since we don’t know when we’ll land a new role elsewhere.
Anyway that’s all lol