Learning Activity 8.1
The practical problems that I will be addressing below all relate to my second job as a tutor at a company (which I will not name). I believe there are several issues that hold them from doing much better both for their staff and students, but the following are just four of them:
1. Staff are not being valued. They are expected to show up ten minutes early and often stay ten minutes afterward. However, they are not allowed to put .5 on their time sheet. This shows a bad reflection of how staff are seen. When asked about these issues the directors simply said that the time to clean up should only be five minutes. However, this is wildly unrealistic and clearly shows how out of tune the directors are with the teachers.
2. There is no teamwork atmosphere. There are no meeting times for staff to come together and discuss their challenges/victories. The staff members come in, sit at their desk, and prepare for students to arrive. At the end of the day, staff write notes on how the sessions with students went, and then clean-up before they leave. There is no time for chatting being that many of us know we are being overworked and do not wish to stay a moment longer. As a result, many of us hardly know each other.
3. There is no positive feedback for staff. The only times we are brought into the front offices are when we are being reprimanded. The one staff meeting we had was to go over issues. In addition, at one point I was told I had a performance review. However, the director said she wasn’t too concerned about giving me one because if there was something she had issues with she would have said so earlier. This leads me to believe that the director only sees performance reviews as an opportunity for negativity.
4. There are no reviews given to staff, students, or directors. Nobody ever knows how well they are doing or what could be done better being that there is little contact between us. Likewise, students often say they aren’t seeing results or don’t know why their work is relevant.
I believe that there is a major difference between running a smart business versus running a servant leadership business. For example, while it is smart to rush staff to finish their shift to save money it is not putting their needs first. The tutoring center is only as good as its staff being that they are the ones that do sessions. I believe it would make a great positive impact if some of these concerns were addressed as all staff I have asked believe there is much room for improvement.