Interaction Experiences

I am having some trouble thinking of parallel experiences in which one experience was bad, and the other was good. I think that my experiences have been much less distinctly tilted one way or another. I can much more easily come up with aspects of my current job, for example, that I like, and aspects that I dislike.

The post says to use aliases, so I’ll try to be vague instead of giving specific names. I work at a bank in Champaign. When I started the job this summer, the bank had just lost all two of its three previous tellers. E (female) has been working at the bank part-time for over a year, B (male) had been hired about a month before me to fill the full-time teller position, and I was hired to fill the other part-time teller position.

I will start with an experience where things went poorly. Our branch is open every day during the week, and just our drive-thru is open on Saturdays. On Saturdays two people have to be at work, because we each only receive half of the vault codes for security reasons, even though it only takes one teller to run the drive-thru. On one of the Saturdays that I had been assigned to work this summer, the other teller I was scheduled to be working with, B, did not show up. I waited until 15 minutes after the drive-thru was supposed to have opened at 8am, and then because the manager was out of town on vacation, I called one of our branch loan officers. The bank’s CEO ended up having to come in to help me get into the vault until the loan officer I had called was able to get to the bank to sit there with me until the drive-thru closed at noon.

B called into the bank at about 9:30 and said he had forgotten to set an alarm, and the loan office had me tell him to just stay home for the day. On top of not showing up on this Saturday, B had already called in sick to work on five separate occasions that summer (several of those being on a Friday). The loan officer spoke with me that morning about the situation, and he was clearly angry that B had not shown up for work. The loan officer mentioned that B had called in sick more days in the 2 1/2 months B had been working at the bank than he had taken as vacation days all year, and said that if the decision was up to him, he would fire B. Apparently the manager was supposed to tell B not to come in on the following Monday, and so the loan officer asked me if I could come in early that day.

B did show up for work on Monday though, and said that the manager never told him not to come in. When K, the manager, got back from vacation on Tuesday, he told me that I would have to work fewer hours later that week because of the hours I came in early on Monday. He then told B that B could work extra hours that week if he wanted to so that he could make up his hours for “missing Saturday.” Unfortunately, the buddy-buddy system between B and the manager K was not just noticeable on this day, but is evident most days that I am at work. This is problem with a type of ‘clique’ feel happening at my workplace. This incident also occurred because of B’s lack of commitment to work. All-in-all, this situation is very frustrating because the other teller and I frequently feel that we are treated unfairly.

I have had very good experience, though, working with the other teller, E. We are both good about helping the other person when they get busy as opposed to only working on ‘our work’. The way we are able to share work fairly to get things accomplished makes both our work and personal relationship go very smoothly. This has a lot to do with E’s personality, because she is a very friendly and open person, which makes her easy to get along with, and with her commitment to the work, because it causes her to care about getting things done regardless of who’s ‘job’ it is to do the task. 

Individual vs. Team Production

I thought this piece was very interesting. The ideas in it made a lot of sense. It just seems natural that if two people have to work together to produce something, they should both share the product, especially in the case where neither of the two would have been able to produce the ‘marbles’ alone. This idea seems to be so common-sense that I never really thought about why it is that so many people act as if that is the case.

The first example of this I was able to think of was the bank that I work at. At any place of employment, a group of people work together to produce something – in my case that is banking services for our customers. Under this line of thinking, my paycheck is my share of the ‘marbles’ that I helped to produce. The bank would not be able to run and make a profit at all if there was only one person trying to produce the services by themselves; in the case of most businesses team production is necessary. And since all members of the team are needed for production, the rewards, or profits, are shared by means of paychecks and bonuses.

One aspect of the idea of sharing rewards in group production is the decision of how much of the rewards each team member receives. It seems to make sense that the team members who did more work should get more rewards, and those who did less work should get less of the rewards. In the article, both children had to pull the rope in the exact same way, but if one of the children had to pull their rope harder or longer than the other, it would be interesting to see if they were allowed to keep a larger portion of the marbles. The size of a team member’s paycheck can be related to this idea—I make less money than the branch manager of my bank, because I don’t put in as much effort to produce the good as he does.

I really agree with the conclusions offered by this piece. I think that people have a desire to share the gains when they had to work together to achieve them. This may be because it feels like the ‘right’ or moral thing to do. It also, though, may be an individualistically motivated action too; if you don’t share the rewards with the person or people who helped make it possible for you to get them, then they have no motivation to help you bring about the rewards again in the future. 

Transfer Pricing

It seems to me that anything that the Illinibucks can be applied to would be something the students would use them for. The main possible uses that come to mind would firstly be to move to the head of the line at any on-campus food provider, so for example using one would allow you to move to the front of the line at Chipotle. I think that this use would work pretty well, especially if students were only given a set amount of Illinibucks and could not buy more, because that means that students don’t have to wait in line when they are in a hurry, however the set number means that it won’t be impossible to get food if you are waiting in line, because only so many people will want to use up their Illinibucks at that particular time.

Another possible use would be that these would allow someone to go to the front of the line at bookstores as well as food providers, which would be especially handy at the beginning of the semester when everyone is purchasing books and the lines at the Illini Bookstore and TIS tend to get extremely long. Once again, though, if some people were able to get more Illinibucks than others because they could afford more, it would put the students would couldn’t at a disadvantage because they would likely have to wait in line even longer without having the added benefit of being able to, at least to some degree, predict how much longer the line will be like students have now.

A third possible use would be to jump ahead in registering for classes. This would change the allocation method from being based on your year in school, any possible honors programs, and your major. I think that this would be particularly ineffective, because it would make it more difficult for students who need a class, for example a senior who needs a particular class for their major, to get into the course.

I personally think that in all of these circumstances the llinibucks would work better if everyone was given a set amount, rather than being allowed to purchase them. If students were able to purchase as many as they wanted, then there is the potential that Illinibucks become almost necessary in order to get to the front of whatever line the situation involves, because if one student doesn’t use them, they will just have to wait longer because so many other students will.  I personally would spend my Illinibucks when I did not have the time to wait in a line, or if they were used for class registration, when it was a class I urgently needed. I would try to not waste them because I have a limited budget and would want to avoid ever having to buy more.

If the administered price was too low, there would be an issue with Illinibucks becoming the norm as I mentioned above. A majority of people would use them fairly frequently, and the more people that used them, the more beneficial it would become to use one yourself. If the administered price was too high, then they could serve as a differentiator between students who have enough money to feel comfortable spending it in that way (or who’s parents have enough money), and students who don’t. This seems unfair to me, however this would not be the only place where money serves as a divided in that aspect, and so it would probably seem normal if this policy was administered.