Word: sprinted
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...welfare rolls. She had been on welfare for six years. Jobs like cleaning hospital rooms and cutting vegetables ended with her quitting or being fired. And she had four kids who had to be shuttled to day care and baby-sitting. When Kimberly Randolph, an operations supervisor for the Sprint phone company in Kansas City, Mo., met Johnson at a job fair, she pegged Johnson as "a job hopper, with a bad attitude." But at her interview, Johnson made a plea. "That was me, and I know it doesn't look good," she said. "But give me a chance...
Johnson took her chance and ran with it. She woke up at 5 a.m. and spent two hours on buses, dragging the kids to day care and then getting to training classes. For nine months now, she has been an operator at Sprint's calling center at 18th and Vine, and she's a star. She sits at a computer with a headset on, placing calls and billing calling cards. She handles 600 calls a day, at an average of 38 seconds a call. Already, she has racked up four "good customer-contact reports" from satisfied callers...
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...
...last far longer on battery power. Also, digital networks generally provide clearer signals than analog. One day, digital networks will blanket the planet. Now, however, coverage is spotty, with smaller places unserved. Worse, there are three different digital "languages"--one used by AT&T, for instance; another by Sprint; and a third, known as GSM, that is big in Europe and offered here by Omnipoint. Alas, they can't understand one another's signals. That's why digital-service providers are throwing in great incentives to buy. The Qualcomm phone ($199) I tried--and would have bought, if Sprint...