Guidelines: there are none. Well, there are, but you will have no idea what they are, and they change all the time. There is NO procedural documentation...in a call center...that handles payroll and taxes for small business owners. How much sense does this make? (None. The answer is none.) They kept saying they were getting around to it. The way they want things done changes, not just day to day, but sometimes literally (not figuratively) hour to hour. If you ask 2 different supervisors and 3 different team leads the same question about how to do something, you will get 5 different answers. And then if you do it incorrectly, you will get docked in your monthly evaluation. So good luck determining whose answer to follow. It is very frustrating. There are 3 weeks of training at the beginning, and they are useless. Nothing you learn in them will help you do your day to day job, and what you do learn, you'll forget right away because you don't use it.
You will not be able to use the bathroom when you want to, only on your scheduled breaks and lunch, and you will be hassled and berated if you are not on the phone or available for a phone call at any time when it is not your break or lunch. Sometimes (actually, lots of times), you will get a call about discrepancies in reports, or a tax notice they've received, or something else equally complex, and you need to research it; but you can't, because as soon as you get off the phone, you have to be available to take another call. So things don't get done until the end of the day, or they're forgotten about, and then you get to take the screaming call from an employer whose issue wasn't solved by the person they originally spoke to because they let it go undone. And management's view on this? "Well sometimes other people have slack and you have to pick it up, but then somebody else will pick up your slack." No; we don't all leave slack. And maybe it would be smarter for them to foster an environment with no slack. But that would take organization, and they don't have any.
