In high school, I got my first job working at my local big chain supermarket. When I first began working there, I put in maximum effort, I wanted to do my job and I wanted to do it well. This is not the attitude any other employees there had, and my enthuasiasm for working was short lived. As time went on and I got my paychecks, I began to question why I was putting in so much effort for a company that clearly didn’t appreciate my effort. The company that I was working for were all scheduled for just under full-time work, working an hour less than full-time each week. This was an effort to work employees as much as possible without being required to provide benefits to their employees. On top of this, the hourly pay was 20 cents above minimum wage. The closest thing that the organization had to benefits was a 20% discount in the home and garden sections for employees.
Turnover was obviously incredibly low. The organization had zero incentive programs, however they had biannual performance evalutions performed by somebody whom you had never met, meaning they had never seen me work. In the end they gave out pretty much all average performance numbers and getting a raise from high performance was unheard of. During my two years working there, the only time that my pay went up was with a 25 cent increase in minimum wage. Naturally our pay raise was only 25 cents.
I observed a lot of actively disengaged employees and many not engaged employees. It seem like every employee there was on autopilot counting down the hours until they could make it home. Virtually none of these employees had any sort of company loyalty. After working there for two years, I only knew 2 employees in my sections of 50 that had been there since I started. Working there definitely taught me that when good employees are underappreciated they are sure to become average employees, and average employees become bad employees.
