New Manager

Not very many people know that I work for one of the biggest retail stores on the planet.  I try not to mention them by name because I do not have permission to actually use their trademarked name. However I really have nothing ill to say about my job or the company that I work for. I have been working on and off for this company since 2005 and this store that I am at at the moment is my third store. I started out working in the fresh area Deli/Bakery and now I am an overnight stocker. In the beginning this position was rather awkward for me because I was not used to working in this area of the store. Basically I was very much out of my comfort zone, I actually was coached for being slow and apparently not being able to keep up with some of the other employees that have been there for years. They assume that working for this company for over a decade that I would know exactly what was expected of me in this position. Let me remind you that I have never in all the years I have been working which is actually since I was 14 years old, Been Told that my job was not up to par. This feedback actually made me feel inadequate and completely embarrassed that my work was not good enough.

Now I am a important part of a team. My coworkers and I work seamlessly together. We work as a unit and I think we feed off of each other and try to do the best that we possibly can in order to do our jobs and to maintain what our founders meant for this company to become.

So recently we got a new member of management that is technically called a Coach. The last person that has had this position we met one time and he never came back. The gentleman who had the position before him has been gone for over a year. He was transferred to in different store and we have been working with what we have since. So when we were told we were getting a new coach not everybody was Keen on the new guy. I am definitely not using his real name because I do not have permission to write about him in my blog so we’re just going to call him Devon. Devon is 6 years younger than I am he’s in his thirties and he has been with this company for 17 years which is just about the same amount of time I’ve been with them, except of course he has consistently been with the company. He came introduced himself to the overnight crew At first I was a little taken back by him because he did not offer his hand to me to shake when I met him. I wasn’t really sure what to think of him. However when he began his first day with us, he completely showed us a different way of stocking. Whereas before we were assigned an aisle or an area and expected to work the freight and zoned said area. Instead we are now as a team down stacking our freight onto the floor in front of where it belongs, which caused a lot of people to think we were doing double work, because we have always been used to working from our pallets and carts straight onto our floor. Downstacking our freight onto the floor where it is going to be stocked, then as a group we call it swarming we go down each aisle and stock the shelves as a group, before we leave that aisle we Zone it and go to the next. This technique has proved that we can get a lot more done in the eight hours that we are working.

Devon has actually made me think more about being open to change. He’s become so much a part of our team that a few days ago somebody made a comment to him saying that he didn’t know what he was doing and I got offensive not offended offensive I wanted to know exactly who told him that he didn’t know what he was doing because I wanted to give him a piece of my mind. I feel like in retrospect I’ve always thought if it’s not broke don’t fix it, but I’ve also spent my entire life having to accommodate myself and the way that I do things because of two things number one I am only 4 foot 9 and I joke around and tell people I was born on a ladder because I am definitely not afraid of heights otherwise I would never be able to do my job or any job since I was 14 years old. My height has never got in the way of me doing my job in any of my jobs. Number two I have OCD and I do things a lot different than a lot of people do. I thrive with structure and order. This just seems like what Devon is bringing to the table. Seems like under his leadership we are actually working as a crew and not just for ourselves.

I think that one of the things that this pandemic has opened my eyes to is that we are social creatures and being separated and quarantine from each other taught us how to truly be alone and some people are good with that but some of us need to have contact human beings.