I have read so much about this kind of controlling behaviour and at times experienced it during summer jobs. But I have a question.
Why do they do this?
Why do they do this?
I started my career in one for a popular multi-national consumer electronics brand whose devices might be in your pocket right now, also as a T-1 IT person for about four years.
It's soul draining. One thing I'll never forget were the amount of EMS visits we got due to people having heart-attacks. Young people too.
Source - I wrote internal software for a large call center outsourcing company right out of college. Back then the company I was a part of was actually pretty progressive. They let employees work split schedules, WFH way before it was cool, factored in things like reasonable breaks, etc...
The amount of data that comes off of automated dialers and inbound CMS systems can make for fun tech work, but it's still a pretty crummy industry which is why I left.
There's the old adage that as soon as a metric becomes a goal it ceases to be a good metric because it starts to be gamed. It's probably not universally true but it shows up again and again in things like NYC's COMPSTAT program where a decent idea becomes a goal without measuring the right thing and you wind up with police just harassing people because you've gotta get the number of arrests up or you'll look bad at the next COMPSTAT review.
Thankfully most of the time the queue wasn't ever ridiculously long (10 minutes wait time at probably the 95th percentile) customers, with 3-50 agents available depending on the previous year's traffic.
It was a good environment for a high school student. When it got super busy no one in the office was above getting on the phones.
There's a reason why you experienced it at "summer jobs", too.
well, frankly, the obvious is going to happen. You're going to get people outright lying to you about being present. It won't take long before you start tracking time.
And so on for most of the other practices there.
But jerf...
I'm only talking about the other side of the complex of forces that inevitably emerges from this sort of low pay situation. It doesn't mean that employees ought to be treated as subhumans, obviously. Another aspect is that this sort of control will also attract management who enjoys wielding that sort of power. Management isn't guilty. But these restrictions are all generally reactions to the problems management had getting their employees to show up on time. There's a whole back and forth of events that inevitably occurs at scale, which is why the whole job has a bad rep, not just particular companies. The same forces produce convergent evolution between all the companies that have large call centers.
You'll get similar experience managing a McDonalds, or any number of other places where you're trying to get a whole bunch of low-paid people doing a particular job.
So when you say, "It isn't all just being a jerk for being a jerk's sake.", you essentially mean that everyone involved is a victim of the circumstances? That these jobs naturally attract certain types of people on both employee and management side, trap them, and pit them against each other?
You're trying to motivate people who really aren't getting much out of the deal. The "managers" are still earning biscuits.
Everyone I know who works in retail, for example, seems to be stuck in a sick system hellscape. If you win, you still lose because the "best job" in a store is still only realistically suitable for a teenager.
Also, I don't think that "those places attract a certain type of managers" is much of an excuse for those managers.
I also agree that there people who profit, but I encourage you to see that as part of the dynamics rather than an exceptional case that somehow happens every time. It is perfectly predictable that people who will try to profit from this will enter the system, in ways both monetary and psychological. It's merely the n'th step, not some sort of surprise.
Call centers (and most low paying jobs) operate with a goal of minimizing costs. Most incarnations of motivating people with a carrot involve spending money on bonuses for performance, raises, etc. So those can't be implemented because it would raise costs. Another option for the carrot is promotions, but my impression is that there isn't a lot of upward mobility in call centers; at least not of the variety that eventually gets you out of the call center.
So once all your options for motivating people with carrots are gone, you end up with the stick. And this is what it looks like when your only motivation option is the stick.
You could probably operate a call center that handles calls as quickly using bonuses and such, but you would be more expensive. You'd have the benefit of having happier employees, but that's not a thing businesses are willing to expend money on. And even if you did, some enterprising soul in a few years would propose eliminating the carrots to save money and youd be back to square one.
It also doesn't help that most of these workers also lack a lot of other employment opportunities. In tech, for instance, it's hard to run a shop using sticks instead of carrots because your workers have plenty of other potential employers. They'll just quit.
I believe it is more about general "efficiency" or milking of the workers. How to get the most while spending the least. Which is a working principle, but does have dark side effects, when we are talking about human ressources.