Pros
Colleagues were lovely and were what kept me going through the day. If I didn’t love the people I worked with so much I would left a lot earlier than I did.
Kontras
- NOT ENOUGH BREAK TIME. I personally was only allowed 45 minutes of break entitlement for a 9 hour shift and although this follows the minimum break required by law it’s still a very mean amount of for somewhere that you could be standing around for 9 hours. There were times I would work 5+ hours without a break and then only be able to have the first half hour before I have to go back because of staffing issues. - UNDERSTAFFED. At my branch we just always seemed understaffed. This was especially bad on weekday afternoons and evenings. There was more than one occasion where we would have only 4 people to do the work that 8/10 people should be doing. Because of this were times you felt like you had to stay back because sometimes by the end of the day only 2 people would be working to be able to see the day to a close. - MANAGERS AREN’T HELPFUL ENOUGH. They would come down and do the jobs they wanted to do but never what actually had to be done (e.g. tills were always understaffed and they would not offer any help there). You would have to bring something up more than once before something got done (if it ever did get done that is). I found that apart from a few, most of my managers just didn’t seem approachable or around whenever you needed them. They would also like to come down and complain how “messy” everything is and tell us to tidy up and then proceed to go back up to their office when we don’t have enough staff to do our job at its most basic level, let alone have time spare to tidy all the time. - NOT PROPERLY TRAINED. I found that in this branch we would be left with jobs we were not comfortable with because we were being left alone to do a job we weren’t properly trained to do. There were several occasions I was left at the customer service desk on my own without any formal training at all. As a result of this I couldn’t properly deal with half the complaints/queries that were told to me. It just made me and the branch as a whole seem incompetent. - BORING AND REPETITIVE. Not an inspiring job at all. I would spend all day thinking about leaving and going home. Yes we all look forward to going home at the end of the day but from the minute I would step foot in there I just had such a strong urge to leave. - NO DEVELOPMENT OF SKILLS GIVEN. For around 6 months I was told that I would be trained on the shop floor and would be spending less time on the tills. It was part of my “personal development programme” but nothing was ever done about this when I feel there were several opportunities that could have been given to me to do this. It just makes it feel like a dead end job when it has the potential to actually be more than that, especially seeing as I am a young person that they could have trained more and kept on to eventually do more leadership work within the company.