Poor training, long hours, slave driver management. - Autoglass Technician Safelite AutoGlass Employee Review

This section is exactly why I sat down to write this - While the starting wage is higher than the average place, you will quickly see that the work load is absurdly high. Safelite expects you to be a master of all cars in a short training period, by having you work on only a FEW cars that are considered “easy enough for a trainee”. What they don’t show new people is the old delaminated glasses, glasses that have had a body through them, glasses that have been shot a dozen times, and how there is virtually no good way to get them out without power tools (which are ILLEGAL at Safelite, and if they are found in your van, you are fired on the spot). So a new tech, thinking they are equipped for the road, will quickly realize their only option is to learn how to either hide tools or just get home at 8 o’clock every single night because of the sheer volume of work each car can be. The shops I have worked at (I worked at 4, in 2 different markets) gave new technicians 5 jobs a day and when their aptitude was proven, that quickly jumped to 7 jobs a day. By no stretch of the imagination am I a lazy person - nor were the vast majority of people that I had both the pleasure and displeasure of working with - but there is a point where 7 jobs a day in the heat and sun becomes impossible to reliably do a quality job on. To add to this, Safelite implements “add ons”. Add ons are an entirely new work order that you do not foresee coming, and is oftentimes not even near you. Which doesn’t matter anyway, as you have to go back to the shop if you are going to get the part to do the job anyway. This ALONE makes up for a LARGE number of the rescheduled jobs that Safelite deals with. So you end up getting people who turn into hacks. They become hacks because the volume is absurd, and they have a life or a family and they start to just put glass in the hole to get home and do something other than wear a thick red shirt and drive a van full of tools and get yelled at by customers who have been rescheduled 2-5 times because they got the short end of the stick in a day where every tech that was assigned their car on a run had their car last. To add to all of this, Safelite uses 3 Key Performance Indicators. OptiFit (which is how long a car should take you, generally in the ballpark of an hour), Net Promoter Score (a collective of surveys that sway heavily in the direction of negative surveys, even when far outweighed in volume), and WIPERS THAT THEY SELL FOR $60 A SET. So consider this - you go out as a Safelite technician on the road, GRIND through challenging jobs that absolutely no one has ever given you any idea how to complete, and if you aren’t doing the jobs in the window of time that is theoretically allotted (again, bullet holes, bodies, delamination, etc.) and selling wipers to at least 5% of your customers (imagine doing all of this, and then having to ask a customer who just shelled out $500 for their deductible to buy $60 wiper blades…), your pay is reevaluated every 6 months based on those KPI’s. In the time I was there, I watched people who had been there 20+ years lose as much as $13/hr based on this. These people were DOING GLASS, and a survey that had NOTHING to do with them (even some surveys being along the lines of “Safelite was impossible to get out to me, the manager was rude, they needed my card info ahead of time” - absurd things that were completely out of the technicians control while in the same line saying “but the technician was great” or “the install was excellent”) or not selling $60 wiper blades cut their pay DRAMATICALLY. Safelite also randomly implements “indefinite 6 day work weeks” that they expect grown adults with lives and families to adhere to, otherwise they are written up, or let go. This is COMPLETELY random, happening in the winter at the start of the year, and during the summer when the heat and volume are BRUTAL. This is a cautionary tale. I was with Safelite for a year and a half, taking the job very seriously and working very hard to be the best that I could be. After showing aptitude, I was given extremely challenging cars, to the tune of 7 a day, EVERY day. This job is something I am thankful to have had as a stepping stone, as it gave me some skills that I’m thankful to have which allowed me to move forward in my work life - however, I would NEVER advise someone who is not in a hard place financially, someone who has a young family, someone who NEEDS time away from a job to recooperate their mental health on a normal scheduled basis, or someone who can’t handle a place that TRULY does not care about your general physical, mental or psychological well-being. I watched this place mentally break some really strong people, intelligent people with skills. If you are considering working here, understand that they are hiring en masse because the company is hemorrhaging technicians because they ABSOLUTELY DO NOT know how to treat people who work HARD for them.