Week 8 / Resolving Interpersonal Conflict (Post 3)

 For this week post, I will be recounting one of my most recent part-time job experience, it is important to note that this happened during safe-distancing protocol was in placed. 

It was the launched of a new SIM-card phone plan that was targeted for senior citizens, the plan was very appealing as it was only $10 for 50GB and it was gaining a lot of attention. The company was under pressure to adhere to the safe-distancing protocol put in place by the government and have been unable to control the crowd since the event begun. To prevent breaching the safe-distancing rule and backlash of long waiting time, the company started to outsource their distributions of sim-card to external vendors to set up booth in neighborhoods and I was stationed in one of them.

Before starting, we had received a training to manage the distribution and an explicitly instruction to ensure that there was no crowd which may breech the safe distancing protocol. For the first few days of work, the booth I was stationed in with a few other colleagues, had distributed little to none of SIM-card. At first, we thought it might have been the issue of customers not knowing about the location as the company did not update their website to announce the locations of these pop-up booth, however, after an update there was still no significant increase in distribution.

Due to the lack of awareness, for the next few days we were told by the supervisors to hand-out flyers and capture the attention of passer-by. It is important to point out that distribution of flyers was not in the job scope and the job we were tasked to do is to distribute and handout the sim-card after the costumers had registered online and managed the queue. Tensions between the supervisors and part-timers started to grow and making things worse was when one of the supervisors send a voice message through WhatsApp and in his message, he mentions that it was part of the job scope since distribution of the SIM-card was low our job was to bring it up.

After listening to the message, I turned up to work the next day and reasoned out with the supervisor. I mentioned the reason why we were hired and our job scope and have been doing a good job since the idea of the booth was to prevent overcrowding and him implementing the idea of increasing the distribution will lead to an increase of human traffic which is what we were explicitly asked to prevent. I must admit that I was very angry and did use a sarcastic tone as I brought my point across because I wanted the supervisor to know how hypocritical it was. He then shared how he was pressured by a higher-up to increase the distribution and needed some time to sort it out.

It was later than noted to me by another supervisor that I have tendency to speed up my speech to prevent the listener from rebutting which prevents me from communicating with the other party and I thank him for pointing it out and since then I have been more aware of my actions when resolving a conflict. 

Question: Would you had confront the supervisor? If so, how would you have done it otherwise.

Blog replied:

Ying Qian

Dyner Wong

Tabatha Teo