Ecolab Equipment Care They did not train completely causing me to fall on face when actually put in a dispatcher's position Fishers, Indiana

Like all businesses, organizations and individuals, I found Ecolab Equipment Care a mixture of good and bad; I worked there for the past four months as a Service Delivery Specialist or Dispatcher to the technicians who repair restaurant equipment.

While most of the other 30 or so dispatchers couldn't be nicer or more helpful as well as some of the supervisors, my bone to pick or major criticism of Ecolab Equipment Care based on my short experience there is they do not have a good training program for the new dispatchers.  This lack of training caused me undue even brutal emotional distress when I actually started on the job dispatching to the Jackson, MS-New Orleans,LA market, the Memphis Market, and the Nashville Market.

Never have I tried so hard to do a good job before not just because I was being paid to do so, but because my Christian beliefs dictate that I do a good job as a service to humanity even if, generally speaking, I am not being paid fair wages for such, and after trying so hard ended up failing miserably.  I won't mention the names of these dispatchers, but I was warned that Ecolab's lack of complete training for dispatchers sets the new ones up for failure.  Right On!

In fairness to Ecolab because they were nice enough to hire me when I had no experience in this field and in this bad job market, I had several deaths in my family as I started this job making it hard for me to concentrate on the basic customer service training at first.  But because Ecolab was paying me (through a local temp service) to train and I needed work even if totally grief-stricken, I forced myself to do as well as I could and gradually got better.  

Also, I didn't know before starting this job that dispatching work is not really my vehicle, at least not Ecolab's style of such, and that I had little interest in spending my days servicing restaurant equipment.  That said, I would have done a much better job had Ecolab trained me 100% before actually starting the job instead of only roughly 60%.  That lack of 25% to 40% training made me falter around appearing as a bumbling idiot on the job which I am not; while I may not be Einstein I have been an honor roll student and have almost 250 college credits to my name.

It would be hard to explain here the details of this lack of training but one major point is they don't provide new dispatchers with a training manual.  I begged for a training manual, and the response from management was that I must be crazy.  Management just wants you to learn it all on the job.  And while most if not all jobs of any level require on the job learning, this dispatcher job should not have required most of the training or learning on the job.  This, say, 30% lack of training left some important dots un-connected causing me to make big mistakes that lost some restaurant customers and caused hardship on the technicians and district mangers.

Printing a dozen or so dispatcher training manuals a year is not much of an expense, and the result would be better and more quickly trained dispatchers that in turn would mean a more immediate payback on training expenses.  But no one can get that point across to Ecolab Management.  Hence, when I first started on the job dispatching, the technicians complained that I didn't know what I was doing, and I got all the blame for that.  In other words Ecolab Equipment CAre management didn't want to evaluate their training program to see how it could be improved to created better new dispatchers but rather put all the blame on me.

While the emotional damage done to me through this lack of training may not seem like such a big thing compared to stories of employees and customers being ripped-off huge sums of money or suffering horrible working conditions, I can't help but report the ridiculousness of not having a good training program complete with a training manual for new dispatchers.

Furthers, like many corporations, Ecolab in general is cutting costs which is not in itself such a bad thing. Businesses have a moral obligation to generate healthy profits but those healthy profits must come ethically and honestly, of course.   But when corporations cut back on expenses such that the employees and customers suffer while a handful of top executives are making mega-bucks, then cutting costs is not a good thing.

In terms Ecolab Equipment CAre, they have cut back on technicians in some areas forcing them to cram many runs (service repair jobs) into a 40 hour week and the scheduling has to be stressful.  I was beginning to hear negative feedback from technicians that EEC's new policies was very hard on them and their families, and Ecolab was inching toward slave labor, but I was not their long enough to verify all of this.  I will say that EEC was starting to lose customers to service vendors who hired enough technicians and trained their dispatchers to get service out very quickly.

In summary, my criticism of Ecolab is that it did not train me properly causing me to fall into almost failure on the job which in turn has caused severe damage to my self-esteem, and I probably will not get a good reference from this job even though, because I don't have a care at present, was walking several miles to and from work through severely cold weather, piles of snow and ice and that even at night.  I am still trying to recover emotionally from this Ecolab job, and part of the issue is not just with management, but some, though not all of the service technicians I dealt with were little snots in that they had harsh comments to my face.  If they only new how hard I was trying.