2 set 2021
Risposta di Ruby
4yWe appreciate you taking the time to share your experience while working at Ruby. We’re disappointed to hear about your frustrations and want to take a moment to address some of your concerns and share some additional context about the challenges we’ve faced as a business since the pandemic and the impact it has had on our Rubys, particularly our Receptionists.
Our first period of being understaffed in the Summer of 2020 was due to a large portion of our staff needing reduced hours due to the pandemic (mental health, childcare, etc.). We were committed to supporting our team through this, retaining every job at Ruby and being a stable employer when many businesses were laying people off given the uncertainties surrounding the pandemic.
We did emerge from this period of being understaffed after a few months. However, last Spring, as the country started to reopen and loosen pandemic restrictions, hiring and retention became a challenge. This pushed us into another period of being understaffed. The staffing challenges we’ve been experiencing are due to both the shortage in the labor market as well as high turnover among our newer Rubys, largely due to job-hopping and seasonal incentives. Ruby is not alone in this—businesses nationwide are experiencing a similar phenomenon.
These staffing issues have caused the pace of calls to be faster than we want for our Receptionists and we know it’s been a very difficult time for our staff. Since last spring, we’ve been transparently communicating every two weeks to the Receptionist team on where we stand with staffing and what we’re doing to support the team.
We also initiated a Retention and Attrition Task Force focused on reducing turnover and better supporting new Receptionists hired and trained remotely as our offices remain closed due to rising COVID infections in our local communities. Efforts are already paying off, in August, we saw a 30% reduction in turnover from July.
Recently, we also cross-trained our entire Chat Specialist team (50+ people) to take calls and help support call volume and realize our future vision of a unified service experience.
We have also prioritized approving PTO at our target levels, however, we have had to ask Receptionists to provide as much advance notice as possible given the high demand for time off. As soon as we have optimal staffing, we expect to return to previous levels of short-notice PTO.
Our Receptionists are the heart of our business and we’ve been doing everything in our power – primarily hiring as fast as we can – to support our team and get to a fully staffed floor as quickly as possible.
In the next few weeks, we do expect to emerge to a fully staffed floor and will continue weekly hiring to sustain a staffing buffer.
Our strong desire and expectation is that our Receptionists have a healthy and sustainable pace of calls so they can take a breath, grab a drink of water, engage with our community, and take PTO or a Wellness day when they want or need it– that is our goal, from Services leadership, to People Ops, to Workforce Management, to the Executive team. Our Receptionists are our primary focus and it’s all hands on deck to support them and get to balanced staffing levels as quickly as possible.
It’s saddens us to hear that you feel like decisions made were anti-employee so we’d like to offer a little more insight on some of the items you mentioned:
Attendance Policy: our attendance policy is designed to create flexibility for our team, while ensuring predictable staffing so we can meet our customers’ needs in a way that’s equitable for all of our team members. Last spring, based on employee feedback, we did role out updates to our attendance policy in favor of our team members, including removing some categories of occurrences and providing an attendance policy toolkit to help everyone better understand and apply the policy. We know life happens and we want our team members to be successful, the last thing we want is attrition due to attendance. And we just rolled out yet another round of updates to further simplify the policy and provide more flexibility for our team members. These changes have been well received.
Trimming: this benefit is available when we have a staffing buffer, but due to the pandemic and being understaffed, it has unfortunately been unavailable. We have been offering schedule flexibility and encourage Receptionists to reach out if they are interested in adjusting their shifts. We also plan to reexamine our Trimming program in light of our remote workforce once we are optimally staffed.
Wages: we increased our pay scales last spring and again at the beginning of September which included a new 90-day pay increase tier. As you mentioned, last spring we did institute a wage cap at 5 years to encourage Receptionists to seek progressive career opportunities—whether in Services leadership, Customer Success, People Ops, Product & Development, Sales & Marketing, or Finance. We have many former Receptionists in every department of our company!
Stats: measuring stats is not only important to understanding how we’re delivering on our service commitments to our customers, it also ensures that we are equitably measuring the performance of all of our team members. We just launched new dashboards to make stat tracking easier and more transparent.
Frustrated Callers: unfortunately, due to the pandemic and high levels of stress within all of our communities, we have seen a rise in frustrated callers. We empower Receptionists to escalate any abusive behavior through our escalation process, we never expect any employee, “just to take it.” We are actively working with customers where we see these trends.
Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion: we have been on a 3+ year action-oriented roadmap including establishing an Equity Steering Committee, hiring an EDI Business Partner, rolling out EDI training, offering robust programming for heritage observances, and donating funds to support social justice and equity issues. Next on our roadmap includes Employee Resource Groups (ERGs), recruiting and hiring analysis, continued EDI education and programming, and developing a social justice strategy.
Change Management: the example you noted regarding a change in the scope of Additional Responsibilities for some team members is a change that we know we did not roll out well. There was miscommunication between our departments and the change caught our team members by surprise—obviously, that’s never what we want. Since this time, all of our senior leaders have gone through change management training and we created a Change Management Business Partner role designated to raise the employee voice through all major changes.
Receptionist Ambassador Program: first and foremost, this is an employee-led program that we support, but don’t drive. Rubys were responsible for how the program was established, structured, and managed, and the groups were designated by our office locations. With the pandemic and working remote across multiple states, the location-based model wasn’t feasible or equitable any longer. Some Ambassadors also voiced concerns that the program felt unproductive. We love the spirit of this group, and hope that in part, the Equity Steering Committee can be another confidential and safe outlet to bring concerns.
We take employee feedback very seriously and feedback loops are an integral part of our employee experience and culture. We offer anonymous surveys through a third-party vendor, on-demand office hours with all members of leadership, an Ask Me Anything site, and listening sessions—all with the goal of elevating our employees’ voices and working together towards innovations and solutions.
Finally, before closing our offices due to the pandemic, we did change our “Monday Munchies” program to daily-stocked snack pantries to make this perk more equitable for our weekend/night shift Rubys.
We sincerely wish you well on your next adventure and thank you for your three plus years at Ruby.