Well, let’s discuss the plethora of concerns I had about working for the call center in Knoxville. For starters the lack of coordinators to hospitals is dismal for all shifts. If someone called out you have to pick up an additional load of hospitals as management never made the effort to find coverage for last minute call outs- especially on the weekends when management was off. Coworkers were extremely stressed and left in waves over the course of my career. You are often harassed to make up for this lack of staffing by working doubles and a considerable amount of overtime with NO BREAKS. Hard work is rewarded with more work and picking up the slack. In order to avoid picking up shifts you had to ignore phone calls and badgering texts of bribery on your off days. Of course management team does not want to help run boards and would rather a shift of people be completely worn out by next shift relief.
There was also a matter of pto requests being over looked. For instance, in my own personal experience and another coworker’s experience we put our pto requests in for OUR WEDDINGS with a full month notice. As soon as we knew the date we immediately put in our requests. During the span of waiting in limbo for these requests to be approved we both reminded the management team multiple times via text message and email. My day off for the wedding was not approved until a week prior. There were multiple occasions where this transpired for other people. Additionally if you don’t use it by the end September it’s gone. You lose those pto hours and don’t get paid for them either.
I could speak in length about additional cons. The last that comes to mind which is most notable to me is the lack of consequences for bad employees. Let me elaborate. You cannot leave for the day until your hospitals are taken over by your relief. I have been at the mercy of people being almost an hour or longer late. That’s running extra boards, with no break for 8+ hours. These such people never received any sort of reprimand or write up. This spoke volumes to how desperate they were for people in chairs and how little they cared about their good dispatchers.
So I guess if you are unfortunate enough that you NEED to apply for this job know you’re going into an environment where you will get very little training, be hounded to work overtime, be completely under appreciated, and have almost zero breaks on your shifts. Don’t forget about those pto requests either.
