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What Your Boss Doesn't Tell You Until It's Too Late: How to Correct Behavior That Is Holding You Back

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Company lack training for new employees

Posted by: christpunchers
Date: 4/2/2008 1:39:32 AM

I recently left my old job which taught me a great deal of skills (phone skills, dealing with people face to face in the the worst situations, cashier skills, computer skills, multitasking skills, micromanagement skills, etc). The new job pays more, demands more out of my sets of skills, and is overall a position that requires a lot more responsibilities...

...However this company is severely understaffed. The boss works along us for a few hours every day to help out (or to just vent her frustrations). Though she is a fast worker, she lacks the assets that a manger ought to have. She has a very short term memory and basically only keeps track of whether or not money is coming in or how poorly so-and-so handled a matter.

There is no training or preset guidelines or rules or instructions for me to follow. Half the time I'm sitting there dumbfounded because I was never given the basic rundown of what choices I can and cannot make.

There is a million things for me to absorb on the fly while the people who are supposed to be teaching me are of course too busy to really sit down to walk me through anything.

I'm having a great deal of trouble trying to figure everything out all the while the boss becomes unreasonably irritated when I ask some very basic yet essential questions -that if not asked otherwise- could cost our company money.

The question is, how do I ask for proper training? With the lack of man power, the amount of stress everyone is constantly put under, can I really be able to expect much help? I really want to learn, to grow, and to master my position, but there is just too little in the way of explaination for a how things ought to be done. For the long timers there is a lot of reliance of "just knowing". When I try to observe what my coworkers are doing, I question them on why certain things go the way they go, and to that the only response is a half answer of "well it's somewhat like this but when you do this job enough times you'll know" which really does not help me at all.

Sometimes I cannot even properly help out certain clients because the boss and her right hand person can give whatever price they want while the rest of us are given inconsistent guidelines and we end up not knowing whether we should even quote a person or not.

I have to say the worst part about working for this boss is how she is simply too unclear with her instructions. She's got a million thoughts in her mind, her speech is beyond fast (she'll give you a task to do that has been discussed in the next room with another employee then she expects you to somehow know exactly what's going on then assign YOU a task related to that topic while you're at your table already doing something else. All the while she's walking down the hall on her way out to a meeting, with half her sentences trailing off. Most of the time I cannot even understand what she wants to see done. She never goes through the steps with me otherwise the next time I do a procedure I will be less hesitant to just get it done rather than be afraid of screwing up because I simply don't know the "proper" procedures.

When I do screw up because I was never taught or trained I'm being told I lack common sense.

One more troubling thing about this company. I was never asked to sign anything or any sort of agreement or employment contracts. It's been a few week since I've arrived, and other than some taxation papers I have to fill up there was no employment package or any sort of documentations for me to read. Am I looking at some black hole here if I plan to ask for a raise or some sort of review or if I quit I will not likely be compensated?

Due to the nature of the job and the amount of work that could come in during the last minute sometimes I end up staying an extra hour however the pay is based on a salary rather than an hourly wage so there are no time cards or time tables to sign. How should I even bring up the question of overtime pay in this situation? I'm already being accused of not being up to speed for this ridiculously difficult job (where I'm constantly on the move making 10 major decisions at once), I don't think I'm seen to have a "right" to even ask about overtime pay.

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