They say a change is as good as a holiday...

We shall see...

As some of you already know, work has been a bit crap lately for me. I love my job, I really do and I also really enjoy working with these people, unfortunately the bank doesn't really endear itself to it's employees.
I'm not a very sales-driven person. I hate being a customer when someone is trying to hard-sell me and so I don't like having to do from the other side of the counter. In my opinion if someone comes in to do their banking, it's up to them if they want to open a new account and they'll let me know if they do. Otherwise I just want to do my best to be friendly, helpful and efficient.

Unfortunately, the bank doesn't see it this way. As a teller (CSR1 to be technical) I don't have to actually sell the products but I have to 'identify a need' and 'refer the customer to the CSR2's'.
Now this is something I believe I do. If someone is paying too many monthly fees or has money sitting in a low interest account, I bring it to their attention. I don't think it should be my problem if they then don't want to do anything about it.
The bank however says otherwise. I have to get a certain amount of referrals a week that actually go and open a product or 'have a quality needs based conversation'.

Now, the real killer is that because of all this new bullshit legislation which has removed our award, the bank is now allowed to keep from us our old 4% per year mandatory pay rise. Only employees who make their targets will be eligible for the raise. So, to put it another way, my ability to keep up with inflation, interest rate hikes and the ever-increasing price of fuel now rests in the hands of a third party - the customer.

I do my job, I talk to customers, I inform them of our different products, blah, blah, blah, but according to the bank, I'm not doing my job, hence I don't get a pay increase.

The branch I'm at now is a very quiet branch, we see mostly the same customers, we have our regulars, we don't get a lot of new traffic. It's very hard to meet my targets. Actually, it's nigh on impossible. I'm at 46% for crying out loud!

And so today I mentioned to my boss that I'd like to talk to her about maybe seeing about a transfer to a busier branch. She said that yes, we could discuss it later on in the day and she would talk to her boss about it.
Within an hour I was told that on Monday I'd be starting at the next branch over, a very busy branch in a new shopping centre.

I didn't think it would happen so quickly!

And now I'm shit scared. It seemed like such a good idea at the time, it would solve all my problems. Now that it's actually happened I'm wondering why I didn't keep my big mouth shut!

Apparently they're going to do a six week trial to see how it goes as they're swapping me with a girl from the other branch but I know that even if I don't like it, I won't get sent back to my old branch. However I can hope I'll settle in well and actually enjoy it.

I mean, you do adapt to change, don't you? You eventually adapt to anything I guess. And it's not even that big a change really, it's just a different work place, it's still the same job.
I'm just a scaredy cat.

Anyway, I'll keep you all posted about how it goes, I'm sure it won't be as bad as in my imagination.