Employee Review of Dial America Marketing - Check out more reviews of working at Dial America Marketing

This review should have been submitted around this time last year when I was laid off, however I only just learned of this website. With that being said, I worked in the Greenville office for 4.5 years. I loved my job and I was pretty darn good at it. I will not say that there were not areas of opportunity in my performance, no one is perfect. There were certain redundant duties that required paperwork that, in my opinion, was useless and honestly did not affect my teams performance whether or not it was completed on a consistent basis as required by company policy. I had one of the top teams in the branch and on my specific shift pretty much on a regular basis once the Shift Manager above me was one that cared about their job or who wanted to be on the shift they were assigned. For almost the entire first year I was a full-time employee, the manager above me was one who was about to leave the company or one who had been wih the company so long they were burned out and just going through the motions. Then to try to correct that they took a senior manager whom I had flourished under as a part-time team leader and moved them to my shift to work with me again. This being the opposite shift for that manager, of course seemed like a punishment rather than using a more viable option of moving me to another shift until I was better trained. It was all politics involving pet managers who didn't want their work schedules to be affected. Of course the pet managers won out rather than doing what was probably better for the branch and for my training. I should have been placed on the shift with our program manager or the program manager should have moved or altered their schedule temporarily to directly train me. It was extremely frustrating for me to get a quarterly review during that time. I really didn't understand exactly what was expected of me and how the ratings I would recieve were derived. Finally after another quarter, they brought in a new manager after I basically refused to be pushed into the position. I felt if I had taken the position at that particular time, my days would have been numbered. Now keep in mind this was a newly promoted shift manager from another branch. Therefore, for about 2-3 weeks unitl he was brought up to speed to take the reigns, I was pretty much running my shift with a little assistance from the program manager who worked a 9-6 shift most of the time and much of the info the new manager got about our shift and our specific programs were either trained or supplied by me. It was a stressful time but I knew that things were going to get better on my shift and my half-cocked training would get completed the right way. Once I knew what was expected and fully understood how things were evaluated and how to get the results I needed to be successful, I began to see much better results from my team and our shift as a whole. I began to gain the respect of the entire shift and pretty much each individual TSR that worked in the branch. Our branch manager then was promoted and transferred. To me this was a blessing, b/c I had not always seen eye to eye with the branch manager concerning his management style. Our program manager was promoted to branch manager and I was so happy for her and for our branch. We had developed a pretty good working relationship during the time I had worked as a full-timer. I thought the job was getting done pretty good for the first year with the new branch manager. We did get branch of the quarter 2 times during that first year and our shift did get Shift of the quarter once. That quarter I recieved the highest quarterly review I had ever earned. Somewhere soon after that, I can't place i within a specific quarter or possibly two, things changed. The branch manager became extremely complacent. Rarely did things of great performance get recognized at all. Pretty much things of only bad performance were addressed in weekly meetings. I would see the branch manager sitting in the office on their cell phone texting or on the internet during alot of my downtime between shifts. Rarely would anything get addressed by the hands on method we had been accustomed to anymore. Things would be addressed by the shift manager only. There seemed to be a great deal of favoritism shown to our PM manager. He could take time off pretty much spur of the moment. He was allowed to work opposite shifts when it suited him or his plans. Things became it seemed like he was running the branch as an assistant branch manager rather than as assigned specific shift manager he was paid to do. He was allowed certain priviledges that others would be denied even when others had requested in advance in writing the same temporary privledge. More and more the branch manager became less and less involved in normal operations. It seemed the only time the branch manager would be active (as a branch manager should be) was when the regional manager would be in the office for a visit. During this time our performance as a branch began to suffer. Therefore our leads began to be the less productive leads which eventually lead to budget cutbacks. As a part of the cutbacks, I got laid off. I was laid off because my team had the lowest score. This was the first time during my full-time tenure I had had the team with the lowest score. During that quarter I had lost some key team members due to reduced earnings or to better jobs. I was given a performance alert and told I needed to get my scores up, however I was not even given half the next quarter to bring up my scores before I was laid off.
I just learned that the Greenville branch has been closed. From what the managers that remained for the next year after I was laid off have told me, nothing improved with the branch manager. If I had to place blame for the office closing, I would say the lack of involvement from the branch manager caused the closing.