I remember working in the warehouse industry where I was an Order Selector for an Organics Perishable Company. The job description was to select, store, and package inventory of products and filled customer orders correctly. Sounds simple right? That wasn’t the case at this company. The order selector has a quota that he or she has to meet in order to be productive. The order selector uses an electric motorized pallet jack that can hold up to 2 pallets at a time to complete their orders. The quota mark was set at 120 items per hour and overtime was mandatory. My shift started at 3:00 pm and couldn’t leave until all the orders were filled. One night, there were over 200 orders to fill that consisted of at least 123 items on each customer ticket. I worked from 3:00 pm to 5:30 am with only lunch and two 15-minute breaks. This may have been caused by being understaffed and a lack of workforce planning strategies. I decided that I needed to look for other employment opportunities elsewhere. This organization had ridiculous man-hours that I didn’t know about when I applied. To overcome this, the instance of losing employees to this brutal type of work while also, contributing to the turnover rate. The company should have sat each individual employee down and asked them for their input about the way responsibilities should be performed for their position. The organization should ask their employees about how the job duties are impacting them, if so, how could they change them. At this particular organization, there were no types of training to help you effectively select orders. To overcome the issues that I was experiencing at this particular organization, I simply became strategic in how I sought new employment. We work four days on and three days off each week. On the days I was off, I treated seeking employment as if it was a job. I would wake up and dress like I was going to an interview just to complete applications. Eventually, I landed a far better job that had benefits and better training for its employees. The training program lasted for 4 weeks and you could tell that the organization cared about its employees by the way the class operated and was structured
