Dear Team-member …
There’s a branch of Domino’s Pizza that I’ve passed a few times in Evesham. I’m trying to cut down on takeaways et al (despite having none of these options when back in the Outer Hebrides) so I haven’t been in yet.
And it doesn’t look like I will ever purchase a pizza there, as a few days ago the place was suddenly all dark, with two notices blue-tacked to the window. I feel bad for the people who worked there (past tense). Here’s the offensive notice; will show the stupid one afterwards.
Dear Team-member
Okay; what kind of a “team” is it where the team owner or leader locks the team ground in the cover of night, sticks a notice on the stadium saying there is no longer a team (making the Team-member thing nonsense) and hides?
Is anyone thick enough to believe this pseudo-motivational “team” nonsense in this context? Is the “team leader” arrogant enough to believe that all his team are in permanent “High five! Team us are winners!” mode, as opposed to just wanting to make a decent living and support their families.
This store has been temporarily closed
Just temporary? Is this honest? Why were people removing equipment from it, then?
A letter has been generated and mailed out to you
That is just really taking the mickey. Is there a more inpersonal way of rubbing in how anonymous you, dear team member, truly were? One sentence ago, the member of staff was part of a “team”. One sentence later, that member is so inpersonal that the letter wasn’t even “written” – it was “generated”. No doubt someone selected the “Send redundancy notice to all staff members” option, and the staff database software package did the rest.
In the meantime
Does this mean until the temporary closure ends? How long will that be?
Should you have any immediate concerns
[sarcasm] Of course not. The “team members” won’t be concerned about when they will get paid, when they will have jobs to return to, if they will have jobs to return to. These things of course will not concern them at all. [sarcasm]
Then please call 07917 657624 to discuss.
I did out of curiosity. It was a mobile phone number which rang out.
Anyway, that was the offensive notice. Here’s the stupid one:
Why would someone make a 40 mile round trip for a pizza? Only, ironically, in the Outer Hebrides would this be a viable option through a lack of choice. And as for the Bristol option – several counties away for a pizza? Eh?
Back to the original notice. I guess this is one reason why more people are going self-employed, as there is increasingly no such thing as job security in most positions. One day you are making pizza; the next day you have no job and only find out when you turn up at work. Unfortunately, this is par for the course now, with e.g. workers at Waterford being told by text message that their jobs have gone. And this method of sacking people turns out not to be an uncommon event.
As a side-point, perhaps this is another indicator of when a technology goes “mainstream”, when it is used by people to dump each other or by employers to sack their workers. Will this be another of the many uses of twitter at some point? “@team-members You are redundant. Your P45’s are in the post.” Horribly, realistically plausible.
Self-employed work may be risky, but so is working in a job where you are suddenly out of work with no notice. And bills still to pay. At least with self-employed work you can normally see the bad times coming and take appropriate action.
I hope the workers at the pizza place find alternative employment. Or, better, set up their own successful businesses. Good luck to them. Less good luck to whoever wrote (generated?) that offensive notice for the window; may Karma run its course…
Great post, stuff like this really annoys me; some organisations think people are disposable and treating them as such just means misery for staff because they aren’t valued, this leads to poor customer service and in turn more likelyhood of the company closing.
Goes to show you that just changing the language doesn’t cut it. Changing the attitude is the crucial part. Much harder to do!
This will have been a farnchise that got it wrong. That said, our business is small starter offices and workshops. We are full with people clamouring for space – everyone of them having lost their jobs and having decided to give it a go themselves. And of course its the smallest businesses that actually provide most employment. After all, if every one man band took on another worker the unemployed would disappear overnight.
I found an antidote to the apalling notice in the window of the pizza place…our local Zavvi store has recently closed. In the window is a large chalk-board on which is written the first name of every member of staff at the time of the closure, with their number of years worked, and a big thank you from the management for “a superb team!” – I wish I could have got a picture but the glass wasn’t clean enough to get a shot through sadly.