Supervision

We have a hierarchy at work, as most businesses. In the trenches you have the hourly employee, sorted by hire date. Next are the supervisors followed by assistant managers, sorted by store departments. Then the assistant managers who have multiple store departments under their umbrella. Followed by ancillary managers and the manager himself (in our case herself in others).

The cool thing is the overlap. You will never find any in management passing the buck or saying that is not my department. Instead they will deal with the problem at hand, within certain guidelines.

Supervisors are the more interesting animal. They are not management light, rather employee enhanced. So you get a wide variety of assistance depending upon which supervisor you approach and when.

My current supervisor, apparently, thinks he is upper management. He has taken upon himself the burden of scheduling my department. This means taking the hours available and placing the employees into those hours to satisfy the needs of the business, tempered by the needs of the employee.

To my way of thinking, once you have a schedule set up you just use that template for the next week and so on. Not so. Every week we have a different start time and days off. We are the only department without some static schedule. I further understand, that we are the only department in the corporation without some static schedule. Most of them shuffle working hours by quarter or every two months. Not weekly, or daily in some cases.

The needs of the employee seems pretty straight forward as well. In my mind you would ask for any preferences and then see how you can accommodate them. My supervisor assures me that he has worked out a wonderful schedule that will make everyone very happy (yeah, that is a flag right there). The thing is this... To date he has not approached any of us employees and asked us for any preference...

My c0-worker requested sequential days off, I have requested Thursdays off. Currently my co-worker has split days off and I work Thursdays... One of our part timers has classes in the morning and needs to submit requests to change her schedule weekly.

I have a macabre curiosity to see what this "wonderful" schedule brings.