Zero Fulfillment.

Nowadays, whenever there is "training" being delivered by my boss, I always feel extremely unmotivated right after and I am sure this is the opposite effect of what my boss has in mind for his employees when he does all this training, I'm pretty sure he is trying to inspire us and motivate us to do better, but sadly, because of how disconnected he is to how his floor staff operates. whenever I listen to him attempt to train us, I can't help but immediately question how feasible all his tips and tricks are and how much he actually believes them working.

He has given us multiple training over the past almost 1 year I have been with the company and  every other month, he would contradict himself without even realizing it. 

Just a few months back, he was telling us not to approach the customers and give them space to walk the showroom because people need time to familiarize themselves with the space, and only to approach them later and ask them if they require any help. But then fast forward to now, he is telling us to approach the customers the moment they step into the store because we have to guide them to the showroom, and that we should just stick to them like glue, this is also to pressure customers who are not really serious about buying our furniture to quickly exit the store from the sheer discomfort of being shadowed by a salesperson. 

It's very hard for me, or any of my colleague, to take his training seriously when he is constantly flip flopping around the SOPs every other month, sharing with us why his method works. I mean does it work if you find the need to be swapping them every other month and do you actually think any of the sales staff will take the training seriously when we are all very aware of how much contradiction is happening between trainings?  

Unmotivating and extremely useless sales training aside... 

When it comes to restocking furniture pieces for the Warehouse and getting new pieces to display in the Showroom, instead of asking the sales team what is actually selling and what the customers are asking about, he chooses to speak with the Merchandising team to get their opinion and what ends up happening is he will end up just restocking the same few sofas and armchairs we have been getting for the past few months, because based on the sales record, those items are selling, but then he doesn't realize that the only reason those items are selling is because those are the only items that we are showing on the showroom floor. We have customers coming into the store expressing interest in other designs that they have spotted online, but they don't end up getting those because they can't test out the furniture in the store, and the reason why they can't test it out is because my boss isn't ordering those in, and the reason why he isn't ordering those in is because he doesn't ask the sales team for suggestion, almost as if our opinions don't matter to him.

About 2 weeks back, I was preparing a showroom layout proposal for an upcoming collection that the store is planning to bring in, I took into consideration the overall look of the showroom, what colors I thought would look good in the space, what colors we already have that we don't want to repeat, what colors hadn't brought in yet that could inject some fun into the space that would work with our existing pieces and most importantly, what other furniture design the sales team wanted to bring in based on customer feedback as well as what some of the senior staff feel use to sell really well. I was so excited to share all this with the boss because it would be nice to actually show him that I am taking my VM position very seriously and I was hoping that I will be able to make a visible change to the Showroom, and actually move away from the previous VM's vision of the space,  but on the day of the meeting, I had to attend to a customer, so my boss and the merchandising team started the meeting without me and I figured I will just join once I was done with the customer.

Well, when I was done, I went towards where my boss was, expecting him to ask me to join the meeting, but when he didn't,  I thought maybe he thought I was still having a meeting with the customer, so I asked if he needed me to sit in, to which he responded with...

"I would rather you concentrate on serving the walk in customers, it is the weekend, the store is going to be busy and I would prefer all of you to be on the floor serving. you have already briefed the merchandising team so they will present your slides on your behalf. "

... I had only shown to the merchandising team very briefly what my proposal was, a proposal I had spend days doing, how did he think that the short exchange I had with them was sufficient? 

That is how serious my boss takes me as the store's Visual Merchandiser, so little fuck is given about my opinion that he doesn't even bother to let me present my proposal and instead prefers for me to focus on my role as a Sales Associate, a role he is very aware I did not apply for, a role I thought I would slowly gravitate away from after I became the store's VM, and sadly, a role that he will always sees me first and foremost. 

A Sales Associate. 

When I got shared the list of items that my boss had decided to purchase with the merchandising team, I come to find out that pretty much none of the items I had proposed were picked, and instead of getting the items that me and the sales team thinks will work with the space, he goes and get this huge modular sofa from a series that isn't selling well at all. I honestly do not know why he chose that because I am pretty sure the sales from the past year shows very clearly that no one is getting that series. We literally have a sofa in that series in the store that has been there since I joined and barely any customer has asked about it, but for some reason, my boss thinks it is a great idea to buy an even larger one. When I shared this with the sales team, everyone pretty much had the same response... 

"Why?"

... and this is what I mean by him being so fucking disconnected. You make purchasing decisions with the wrong group of people, and when the sales team performs poorly because of your poor decisions, suddenly it's the sales team fault for not performing. 

I so desperately want to quit my job right now because of how undervalued I have been feeling, despite actually doing design proposals for my colleagues as the Interior Stylist, I have been constantly updating layout proposals for the Showroom and making quality of life changes for the team as the store's VM, but my boss still continues to calls me out for not doing my job because I haven't been emailing him my correspondences I have been having with customers, customers I do not have because I am busy helping my colleagues with their customers design proposal.  

No matter how well I do my job as an Interior Stylist or the VM, I will never be performing as long as I am not doing well as a Sales Associate. My boss keeps telling me he didn't hire me just to do sales, he also hired me to do Interior Styling, but when I am doing Interior Styling work, he calls me out for being lazy because it's not my customer but my colleague's customer.

At the end of the day, I am doing Interior Styling, it's just not in the way my boss had originally intend, but it is still Interior Styling, but because he is so fucking narrow minded, he doesn't register me helping my colleagues as me doing my part as an Interior Stylist. I have to be doing my role as an Interior Stylist according to his perception for it to be considered me doing my work.

This narrow mindedness is also what makes the sales team have so little respect for him as a boss, the amount of shit we talk about him behind is back is honestly extremely toxic, but at the same time, it's inevitable because he is so frustratingly rigid, I mean he is getting his personal assistant to give us sales training on the days he isn't available, his own PA, who has no experience doing sales at all, giving the sales team sales training.   

Let that ridiculously unqualification of ridiculousness fucking sink in. 

Your PA have no sales experience, but you are making her give the sales team, who consist of individuals who have a combined sales experience of at least 20 years,  lessons on how to do be a better sales person. 

That's like me getting driving lessons from someone who doesn't have a driving license, but has taken a few basic theory lesson.

That's like me learning how to bake from someone who has experience eating Begawan Solo cakes.

That's like me getting a heart transplant surgery from someone who has watched every season of Grey's Anatomy. 

The pay is not good for the amount of work I am expected to do, I mean I was suppose to get a pay increment since March but that conversation has not happened yet because my boss kept postponing our KPI. I am very sure if he wanted to, my boss can make time for us, but the only reason he isn't is because he simply doesn't want to discuss our inevitable pay increment.

And instead of increasing the pay of his existing pool of floor staff, he goes and hires 3 new people for the team. 

1 Sales Supervisor and 2 Interior Stylist

The 2 Interior Stylist are now facing the same issues I faced when I first joined, which is an identity crisis. They came in fully expecting to do design related work, but then are suddenly required to do sales. no where in the new job description that had been put up did it mention sales.

You say the business is performing poorly, well, here is one very obvious reason why, you are hiring the wrong group of people! 

You want people to do Sales, hire people to do Sales.

You want people to do Design, hire people to do Design.

Don't put a job ad looking for a Designer, but then expect that designer to be able to do Sales as well. The main reason why I had originally applied for this role was because I thought I wouldn't have to do Sales, the 2 new Stylist who joined recently also came into the role becoming completely unaware that they had to do Sales and they remained unaware for almost a while until they started to realize that they were not doing more sales than design related work.

To be honest, I am very aware of the reason why my company doesn't want to put Sales in the job description, it's because they are not offering the main benefit of a sales roles, which is commission. Any experienced sales person would immediately lose interest when they realize there is no commission, so what my company does is they put the position as "Interior Stylist" to attract the more design centric individuals and when then make them do sales under the pretense that..

"You are not just doing sales, you are more than that, your job is to help customers create their dream home."

 

...it is a load of bullshit.

I have been doing just proposals for my colleagues for the past month, and I have been CC-ing my boss when I email those proposals to my colleagues because his micromanaging ass dictates that we CC-ing him in everything. 

Then during yesterday's meeting, he singled me and one of my colleague out for a lack of emails with our clients. My colleague has honestly been a bit lazy lately because she is getting ready to go for her maternity leave, but I have been doing my job as a stylist by sending him the proposals I have been doing for my colleagues and that doesn't get brought up, instead he is focusing on me not having any clients of my own. 

So yeah,  really really hating my job right now because of my boss , desperately hoping a new job opportunity will come along soon so I can actually throw in my 1 month notice for real this time. The only reason I am staying is because I can't let go of the monthly pay check. but the temptation to go back to doing Interior Design, despite the full commission salary, is real.

I am honestly wondering if I have to be stuck in this company until the end of the year because I am just feeling really dejected and depressed as the months go by, especially with how my boss has really ramped up on his micromanaging.