Yesterday just before I left work I was reminded by a co-worker that our boss had demanded that we nominate an agent of the month before we left that day. Annoyed but resigned I returned to my desk and quickly wrote up a nomination, printed it and dropped in off on my boss’ desk on my way out the door.

Today they announced my agent as the winner and I don’t want to take away from her accomplishment. She’s a great agent, is always at work and does her job without complaining or needing her handheld - a nearly perfect employee. I do have to say that the selection process is somewhat suspect.

It seems that each manager reads their nominations outloud to the other powers that be and they take a vote. The nominations are done on a form that pretty much makes them idiot proof - check boxes and text entry are hard to screw up. They even give it to us in an electronic format so we can check the spelling and grammar. One of the managers told me that the decision was a no brainer - mostly due to the fact that my nomination form was the only one that wasn’t embarassing to have to read.

One supervisor wrote that the nominated agent didn’t meet any performance standards. Another supervisor’s was so riddled with misspellings and typos that no one was really sure what was trying to be communicated while a third pled the case that her agent should be the agent of the month because she’s been sick - which also means she’s been missing a lot of work.

Here’s the thing. This isn’t really all that surprising. In the past we’ve had a manager count to the number eight on her fingers, a trainer write a quiz where questions (as in had a question mark at the end) had the options of true or false and a coach announce that all pronouns should be capitalized. It took nearly a week to convince our site director that no matter how good our agents were we’d always have forty of our two hundred agents in the bottom twenty percent in each metric catagory.

I just don’t know anymore.