I'm going to out myself now. I don't care if anyone at Target gets mad and wants to come after me. I don't need Target. Consider this my Jerry McGuire moment.
If you have access and know where to look, you can find a list of every single TM in the company who picked even 1 OPU last fiscal year. It's a long list. You can sort by total units attempted and see the TMs who picked the most. At the very top of that sorted list, you'll see me.
Like The Ghost of Tom Joad, you'll see me. That's my name up there. If you dig deeper, you'll find that my INF% for last year was under 3%. When it comes to picking, accurately and quickly, I know what I'm doing.
You know what I got for that? Well, I got a 60 cent per hour raise. I guess that's nice. It also got me large and painful callouses on my soles that I'll likely have to deal with for the rest of my life. Sunday morning I was picking in stationary and I squatted down to look for an item on the bottom shelf. Suddenly, my knee went all jelly and gave out. I had to sit down. Right there in stationary, I just plopped my ass on the ground. My knee started feeling a little better, so after a bit I went on. It hurt for a couple of days, not too bad. Then Tuesday afternoon, just walking down the stairs at home, it happened again. Picking so much so fast got me that too. (And, it got Target a TM who had to call out two days in a row.)
I actually do more UPH this year than I did last year as we're getting a higher percentage of groceries. Last week, my TL was showing me the list of everyone's productivity. He pointed one TM out that "needed to improve." Let's call her Jill. He asked me if I had any ideas about how to make her faster. I looked down at her UPH. It was more than mine was for last year. That' s not good enough now. Really? I'm beat. I'm dead. I'm broken. But, what I did for my store in the midst of a pandemic isn't good enough anymore? OK. (Jill, has by the way, has been relegated to fitting room duty until BTS. I'm betting she quits, which is a shame as she's a fun person to work with and great with guests.)
To what end? It's nothing more than we aren't first in the district. That's it. It's just our higher ups wanting to say they have their horses working faster than other stores' higher ups. Yay?!?
So, if your SD wants your already green in productivity TMs to go a little bit faster, ask him(her?) where it ends. Does it end with your best picker sitting on his ass in stationary because his knee gave out? What happens when you get your team to whatever magical number your SD wants, but then some other store in the district manages to go even higher? Are you going to have to pressure your team to match or exceed them? And, where does G.U.E.S.T. fit into all of this?
Or let me end here: Target's mission is to bring joy to the everyday lives of people. I have a whole other manifesto in my head about that and how fulfillment can better facilitate that. It starts and ends with this: joy can only come from the joyous. Bringing joy, not pressure for ever increasing metrics, to the lives of TMs, is the best thing that can be done to bring joy to guests. (Note, joy does not come from odd pizza parties, the occassional gift card, or praise for doing well once in a while. That's momentary happiness, not real joy.)
Jerry McGuire out for now.