There’s something that’s been building and building for months now; I feel really overwhelmed and stressed out much of the time, while simultaneously feeling like I’m not pulling enough weight for other people on my team.

Problem is, the tasks that I currently cover don’t play well with each other. Also, the new technology that we’re supposed to be using for making reservations leaves much to be desired.

Here’s a partial list of tasks, some of which I’ve been totally neglecting because the first two tasks take up the great bulk of my time:

• Small group hotels (taking up about 80% of my time now)
• International travel (should be taking more calls, can’t because of hotel groups)
• “Group” air reservations (actually, individual reservations using special group profiles)
• Hotel reservations for certain interviewees that have to be direct billed to a specific person
• Small group air – “photo shoots” (a new task that I’ve asked to take on to reduce the workload for a teammate)
• Customer service inquiries (time-consuming, and lately, totally neglected if not something quick and easy to resolve)
• Billing inquiries – I get stuck with these because I’m willing to solve the puzzles
• QC (quality control) on several very inexperienced and unskilled agents in another office who are “helping” us
• Format and exchange ticket help for other agents (not as much of this as there used to be

So: the problem is that the hotel group stuff is ONLY going to increase, because I found out to my horror (no understatement there) that another category of small hotel groups that used to be handled by a meeting planner at the client home office will probably be foisted off on me because the meeting planner doesn’t want to bother with them anymore. Doing the hotel groups keeps me off the phones, off email for large chunks of time, either entering lists of names in spreadsheets, entering those names into individual
hotel reservations, and emailing or invoicing them. And then I spend a lot of time maintaining files, calling hotels, faxing namelists, and emailing namelists, and printing everything I do, and so on and so on, scooby dooby doo.

More moaning and groaning to follow…

Although I’m supposed to be working on hotel groups just for 2 hours in the morning, I find that I can’t get all the stuff done that needs doing in that time. And even when I’m logged in, supposedly taking calls for international and also for the people attending group meetings, I’ll get phone calls transfered to me for hotel groups. So I can’t escape them during my “non-hotel group” part of my day, because it’s pretty rude to tell someone, in effect, “I can’t talk to you about this until tomorrow, when
I’ll be too busy to call you back.”

The main groups agent, who does the big air groups, and builds the specialized profiles for the meetings that are used to book individuals attending those meetings, is even more overwhelmed than I am. She works from a home office, and even though she logs out at 430, often keeps working on into the evening and at night, because she’s always fretting about all the hundreds of faxes she gets with air travel requests, and the emails, and the calls she has to return. Time was when there were 3 agents to do the work
she does alone now, and the volume has at least doubled.

She and I have both been grousing about the constant interruptions, the sense of something always hanging over us, and the feeling of never being in control or caught up with one’s workload. And we’ve been mulling some developments that will only increase the amount of workload, and trying to figure out a way to get in control of our own destinies as to how to handle this massive amount of “stuff” that we have to get through on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

Today there was a special staff meeting – held on the weekend, supposedly so everyone on our team could be there. Naturally, only about half showed up, and typically, the meeting got hijacked early on and got turned into a gripe session. I wasn’t immune from the groupthink, either; I piled on when a couple of sore points came up, but also tried to ask questions to try to steer the discussion back to whatever agenda item we were supposed to be on. But I got sucked back into the discussions of non-agenda items
like everyone else, and besides which, I wasn’t running the meeting. What was supposed to be an hour or 90 minutes dragged out to 2 hours. And just when it appeared we’d get on track, someone would raise another gripe (one person raised most of the issues).

So, there wasn’t much constructive that was done. We were given a lot of goals handouts full of statistical impossibilities and corporate opaquespeak; the elephant in the room was wearing a little pink hat and waving a pennant in its trunk that said “Deadwood beware.” The utilization of the online travel tool has been picking up, our call volume has dropped, and the agents with the least skills and the worst evaluations are starting to sweat a little. Some agents have been farmed out to take calls for other teams,
and one or two agents who can’t make that kind of transition have been left on our team to take the few incoming calls while our agents cover for teams that are currently being trained on the new technology. Which leads to the irony of having the unskilled people in the other office cover for us, taking the bulk of our calls while our few dedicated agents struggle with the new technology.

One agent in particular has been through the training at least once, maybe twice, and still requires someone to walk her through all but the most routine of the routine transactions. Another agent has honed impressive skills in taking as few calls as possible, and messing those up and leaving unfinished work for somebody else to deal with late in the day. A third can’t seem to make a reservation without a goofed-up hotel reservation, a completely mispelled name, a totally wrong date, and the wrong profile used
to boot. And those are our own agents, not the “helpers.” The helpers are a whole other definition of “we don’t need that kind of help.”

Meanwhile, pestilence stalks the land; a lot of people insist on coming in sick and getting everybody else sick while they laugh about how they tried to stay home but wanted to save their sick days for vacation or their kids. GRRRRR!

I’ve been trying to come up with ways to cope with all or most of the above – workload, people, grips, elephants – and that’s for another post.

Me, I’m for bed.