Word: sprint
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Johnson is part of a small but impressive welfare-to-work program Sprint began last October in one of Kansas City's poorest neighborhoods. Sprint's 18th-and-Vine call center employs 48 operators, half of whom were on public assistance. The center is meeting its performance standards, and its 77% retention rate is more than twice as good as Sprint's call center in the Kansas City suburbs. That's a big deal in an industry where every employee departure can mean $6,000 to $15,000 in lost training and productivity. Sprint is thinking about upping the 18th...
...Sprint isn't alone on the welfare-to-work bandwagon. Of the top 100 U.S. companies, 34 have programs, and 13 more are planning them. Executives of such blue chips as United Airlines and Salomon Smith Barney were at the White House this spring toasting President Clinton's one-year-old Welfare to Work Partnership and saying their welfare hires had better retention rates than workers found from other sources. Why the sudden success? There's the economy, which has made employers so desperate that some are hiring convicts to work in prison. And there's welfare reform, which...
...Sprint's experience is that soft-skills training seems to work. Most Sprint welfare hires start with six weeks of basic-skills boot camp at Kansas City's Metropolitan Community Colleges. It's amazing what some students don't know. To many, it's news that they can't wear just anything they want to get a job: short shorts, sweats, spandex. Some need to be told that "bed head," clumped-up hair from a night on the pillow, is out. With the motto "Expect the Unexpected" on the board, they talk about getting to work. "That person...
When students graduate, they move on to 14 days of Sprint in-house training, where the advice gets more refined. Instructor Kelly Marcus tells them they can keep a conversation from getting too heated by using the "blameless apology"--to be sorry a customer's calling card was rejected rather than accuse him of not having paid his bills. And Marcus teaches Sprint-specific skills, like advising trainees with a shaky knowledge of geography to try looking for "Guatemala" in the computer's country listing if they can't find it under cities. She cautions against playing tricks on customers...
...Hazel Barkley, 18th-and-Vine's operations manager, is a believer. She tells her welfare-to-work employees they can rise as far as they set their mind to. (Sprint reimburses tuition for skill-boosting classes.) And she lets them know she herself started by working the phones. Yvette Johnson has already picked out a computer-spreadsheet class she wants to take during her daily noon-to-2 p.m. break, and she's aiming for management. "There's a lot of things we can do here," she says. "One thing I know, I won't be on welfare again...