Ever said I quit? And how\u2019d that work out for ya? I\u2019m Marty with you here at Warehouse and Operations as a Career. Everyone had a great week? Mines been busy, I\u2019ve strayed a bit from my normal operations tasks and have been helping develop a couple of training classes, what else took up some time this week, oh, I\u2019ve helped develop a couple employee engagement surveys, lets see, and I\u2019ve been working with several supervisors on termination forms, more to, what is a termination and how should their companies forms be filled out correctly. Leads and Supervisors sometimes, it appears, associate termination as an employee being fired. Actually, I\u2019ve found that very few associates are ever actually fired. So, I\u2019ve been working on a few near future episodes, I\u2019ve lined up some great guests and they\u2019ll be sharing their expertise with us this month, I think you\u2019ll enjoy them as much as I\u2019m going to! Since I don\u2019t have a particular topic for today lets just review my journal from this week, I think we can learn something from those few bullet points!
\nWhile I was putting together a few notes and developing some instruction for term forms I had the opportunity to think about the words I quit. Now a termination form is really just what it says it is. It\u2019s generally not meant to mean I fired someone so here\u2019s the paperwork. It is the form companies use to document and remove an individual from the payroll system, maybe any insurance policies, turn off any access badges to the building or time clocks, maybe they have a recurring charge for magazines the company pays for, gosh there\u2019s a lot of things that have to happen when someone leaves their employer, even things like program passwords and email accounts have to be changed to protect the ex-employee from someone else using them improperly! Say an employee is moving, going back to school, maybe had a life changing event, who knows , lets say they\u2019ve won the lottery, someone will have to turn in a termination form on them. All it means is that the employee and employer are parting ways, and it\u2019s usually on good terms, but a termination form will be filled out and used to pass around to the various department heads to take them out of their systems. I\u2019ve found most separations are voluntary, of course there are some that are checked involuntary, meaning the corrective action process has played out and the individual has been fired or released from their duties. I see that every once and a while with things like attendance issues or problems with productivity, things like that. And of course I hope if we\u2019re supervisors or leads we\u2019ve given the associate every opportunity to improve. I\u2019m sure I\u2019ve mentioned before how personally I take it when an employee has to be let go. Did I not train the properly, did I not explain the rules and expectations in a way they could understand them? And the big one, did I counsel them, spend time with them one on one, ask them how better I could aid them in correcting the problem. So that\u2019s really all a termination form is, its nothing negative in any way, actually if we have system access, email, things like that they protect us by separating our names from them!
\nSo back to I quit. This week I helped put together a couple of employee surveys. One of them was for an exit interview that companies can use for employees that quit, walk off the job or maybe they were hired but never showed up to work, or only worked for like a week and never came back in or called anyone! In our industry we see a lot of that I guess. I\u2019m not sure why really, I think maybe since we can go out tomorrow and find a general labor, forklift or order selector position, and if we\u2019re just thinking of our work as a job, instead of a career, we\u2019re a bit prone to get upset or frustrated and utter those words, I quit, either to our bosses or ourselves and poof, we\u2019re gone. Definitely not the right way to handle the situation but in our field,