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Marty here with Warehouse and Operations as a Career, I hope everyone’s had a prosperous, safe and productive week so far? You may be noticing quite a bit of activity out in your warehouses over the next 2 weeks, inventory control may be finishing up with those yearly cycle counts, oh and several industries will be experiencing those last minute audits on sanitation programs and customer reviews of their products. And we’ve been busy here at WAOC as well. I’m really excited about our next couple of programs. Next week we plan on having a few great guest on the show to discuss their planning and goals and share their advancements over 2018. The next week it’s looking like we’ll be talking with the old WAOC gang for our 4th Quarter Roundtable too. There I go getting all side tracked again, but be sure to plan on checking in with us next week, I think you’ll enjoy all of our guests! OK, so I was working with a few individuals this week, existing employees, and all three of them was asking me who they needed to see about changing something in HR. One man had had a baby and was asking about open enrollment and what it meant. He was needing to of course add his new daughter to his insurance. Two other associates had asked me about changing their W4’s or adjusting their tax information. I wasn’t much help to any of them, but I was able to get them pointed in the right direction and get’em some help. I hadn’t thought much about it but it is that time of year, this is when we should make any adjustments with our benefits and deductions, it all kind of goes along with our 2019 planning and goals.
So we’ve probably all heard about open enrollment over the last month or so, Open Enrollment is usually about our health insurance. It’s that one time each year that we can make adjustments to our policy for absolutely no reason at all. Throughout the year, and there’s a few exceptions I guess, but usually it takes a life change of some sort to change our policy. Something like a child birth, or a loss of a family member, maybe divorce or a marriage, something along those lines. But during open enrollment we can easily decrease or increase our coverage and make those kinds of changes. I had an employee working for me once that fell into the open enrollment trap. He’d had a baby in like June and just never thought of letting HR know and there was something like a 30 day grace period he’d missed. He was told in August that he’d need to add him during that years open enrollment. We’ll he forgot to make changes that December and it was the following year before his daughter could be added to his insurance. In most instances there’s nobody that can help us, even our employers may not be able to intervein on our behalf. I tried everything, I spoke with my corporate office and the insurance rep for our company but wasn’t able to get the rules bent even a little.
Another thing we may want to take a look at is our weekly deductions. Things like the number of dependents we claim, our direct deposits, maybe we could increase the dollar amount we send to savings each week? Think of all this as an opportunity to get things in order at the end of the year! If you have any concerns or questions, I’m certain your HR department can help you out.
We’ve talked about how important our on-boarding and new employee orientations are, how we need to be prepared to have all this information with us, especially our insurance needs and deductions all together. It’s just a little of that employee responsibility, our responsibilities as new associates, to our employers and our families, right?
Speaking of being a new employee, I was speaking with a gentleman out on the floor last week about his new job. He’d only been working for 3 days and was still in training. I think we all know that queasy feeling we have being the new guy. Not only have we walked into a place we’ve never been in before, maybe we’ve never even been in a warehouse before. We’re seeing all this equipment darting around and we’re being introduced to a lot of people that know what they’re doing already and here we are knowing no one and probably not sure what we’ve signed on for. It’s so important that our supervisor or trainer gives us a good orientation, introduces us to everyone, shows us around, and tells us all the rules and procedures. A lot of the time all that can make us feel a little better those first few days. I’m a big believer in orientation and training. I also believe there’s absolutely nothing wrong with asking questions, even prodding our way through a good orientation. Just being honest, some supervisors may lack the skills to be that Welcoming agent or he or she may expect us to know more about the task than we do. I think that orientation and training we should be getting is so important that if we feel it’s lacking, we need to let somebody know that. Our sup’s and trainers want us to succeed, they need the help, that’s why they hired us. Of the hundreds of supervisors and trainers I’ve known thru the years I can honestly share that I’ve never heard a one of them talk about a new boot that has asked too many questions about their orientation or how to do their job. I have experienced many new hires terminated or those that just quit showing up because they didn’t ask the questions necessary to know their procedures or how to do their jobs. It’s perfectly fine to ask to be introduced, ask to be shown around, it’s cool to ask what each department does as we’re walking by them. Let’s bring up the safety procedures, evacuation routes, SDS stations if those things are explained to us. Remember we have our new bosses or trainer’s attention right now, we may not have this much 1 on 1 attention for a while, lets make sure we understand everything we need to know so we’ll be successful!
Another thing I think about every time I’m working with a new associate is how can I make the feel that they fit in with the team. You know, work is work. It’s not a social club or high school. Yes, we need to get along with everyone, but we don’t have to be friends with everyone. As employees we should make an effort and see to it that our newer employees feel welcomed. We were all the new boot once. Remember we need someone to take our place, someone that can do the job at least as good as we can, if not even better, before we can move on to another position ourselves! And on the other side, we as that new hire, need to remember although we may have 10 years of experience doing the task we were hired for, we don’t have experience in this building or with this team. Its our responsibility to learn from them and not go into it trying to teach them a better way of doing it. It’s hard, being the tenured associate, boss or trainer. But its even harder being the new hire. I’ve found an open mind, being friendly and sharing our experience with others will make us all successful and prosperous employees!
Speaking of success, is anyone happy & content where they’re at? Making the money you want, don’t need any more? Are you pleased to retire from your present position? If you answered yes to those three questions, I’ve very proud for you! And that’s absolutely fine. If your doing exactly what you love doing and you look forward to accomplishing your task each day you’ve made it in my opinion! But if you answered no to all three of those questions, we’re in the perfect time of the year to plan out our next move. WAOC is all about advancement and moving through all the warehousing and transportation task, from general labor to the president of our corporations. I’ve always thought the end of the year is my time to reflect on what I’ve accomplished, where I failed, where I want to be this time next year and what I need to do to get there. Think it through ladies and gentlemen, in this industry you can earn as much as you want & grow within your companies as far as you’d like to go! I’m living proof of that, as well as many of our guest this year. We wanted it, planned for it and accomplished it. You’ve gotta love our industry and operations, I think it’s the best job is, you have the best position there is, until your next position! Well the years wrapping up and so is this episode of warehouse and operations as a career. I hope you enjoyed it, and we appreciate you listening in. Please email us at host@warehouseandoperationsasacareer.com if you have any questions about something we talked about today or have a topic you’d like to know more about. I so enjoy researching and learning, especially when it’s something we can all share! Don’t forget about our Facebook and Twitter feeds, using @whseandops. We’re in and out of there all week long! Until next week, lets help out a new boot, and as always be safe, lets share a safety thought with a new hire this week!