District Manager - Anonymous employee Valet Living Employee Review

I worked here for two years and NOT A WEEK went by where I did not have to throw trash at least once, whether it was in my district or a neighboring district (or in another state!) because of Service Valets not reporting to work. Keep in mind, you are managing a part-time workforce (who work full-time jobs elsewhere during the day) so when they don't feel like working, they will tell you at the last minute or they'll just quit completely leaving you holding the bag...literally. Why? Why not? They won't put this job on a resume so their next employer will never find out that they were constantly calling off or that they quit without giving notice. If you're lucky you MIGHT get a three day notice. District Manager turnover. The turnover rate for District Managers is astronomical. Look at the career section of the Valet Waste website. There is a good reason why there are so many vacancies for the District Manager position. But the high turnover rate isn't the actual problem. The problem is, when you have a district in your region that does not currently have a manager, guess who has to pick up the slack? Your usual workload of 14 properties just became 20 and it will stay that way until your boss gets around to hiring a new DM and by that time another DM will quit. Recruiting. There is one recruiter for half of the country. This means YOU are responsible for 90% of recruiting activities. Think you can do it? Well, you also have to meet with all of your Property Managers twice a month, you have to meet with each of your employees three times a month and you have to do a container audit on each property once a month, in addition to approving daily payroll, sending daily property reports, staying under budget, handling inevitable complaints and having to go pick up a missed doorstep (or building) during the day. This is assuming you haven't been throwing trash for the past two weeks so you can see how having to do all of the recruiting in addition to your normal workload is very cumbersome. And let's say you DO find someone who wants to work for you. Now they have to go through a background check which takes weeks to come back and they might not even pass it. And yes, Valet Waste requires all Service Valets to pass a background check because Valet Waste only wants the best and brightest people throwing trash into a dumpster for 2-3 hours a night. Begging employees to work. Remember what I just said about recruiting? Well your employees know you don't have someone ready to replace them and they also know that you will be throwing trash if they were to quit so they will basically say, "pay me more or I quit". So now you have to decide whether to let this guy quit and have to do the property yourself or pay this guy more and blow out your budget while you go weeks trying to find a new hire. Dealing with Property Managers. You will get blamed for everything that happens on the property whether it was your fault or not. Old lady tripped in the parking lot? Valet Waste's fault. Maintenance Manager didn't get the compactors emptied on time? Valet Waste's fault. Service Valet didn't collect a 60 lb. trash bag? Valet Waste's fault. Which leads me to my other point: if you have a Property Manager who is not educating the residents on the collection guidelines, you are going to have a lot issues at that property: residents won't know what time to put out their trash, they'll put out bulk items, they'll put out 7 trash bags, bags with broken glass, bags with needles, etc etc and everyone will blame YOU for it. All of this of course takes a toll on the Service Valet that works at the property and before you know it, they'll quit because no one is following the rules making the job even that much harder. Clueless Regional Managers. Your Regional Manager or Regional Director of Operations are so far off in la-la land, they don't know what is actually going on at the ground level. Whenever my Regional would get all the District Manager's together for a conference call or in-person meeting, based on what they would talk about it was obvious they didn't know what District Managers were dealing with and when you would try to bring issues to their attention, they would just tell you what you wanted to hear in order to get you out of their face. I'm sure some RDO's and RM's actually care and are proactive but mine were not.