Lazy colleague causing so much bad feeling in team

[Dwayneswain]

We are a group of 7 in a team, all doing admin type tasks, taking incoming calls and answering emails (think a type of call centre)

One of Our KPIs are the number of emails we respond to. Now this is where it’s a bit unfair as some emails can take minutes to respond to and some a few hours depending on how much info we need to pull together.

One long standing member of the team is quite frankly an arse. He will deliberately pick out the quick to reply emails to keep his numbers up, he will switch his phone onto busy so incoming calls miss him and jump to the next person. Our boss cannot drill down into the figures so has no idea this is going on. The phone calls are not monitored and his time on busy is not seen by management or counted.

Weve tried bringing this up to our manager and he remarked that it felt like he was managing a bunch of kids and that he’d speak to him about it. He hasn’t.

Crap colleague is careful not be off the phone when boss is around but boss is only in half the week so there’s lots of skiving time. He also invents issues every couple of weeks in order to wfh where his skiving behaviour gets even worse.

None of us feel we can go to boss again and tell him - especially as it’s clearly being viewed as us being a bunch of kids.

Any ideas on how to deal with this? DH who works in a male factory environment says just call him out in front of everyone but I’m sure that’s not the best way to deal with this.

I can assure you management can absolutely see the figures, call centre management involves constant stats and reports being flung in your direction. I can see every single email and account for every minute of phone time for all my staff. Your manager is lazy if he isn't dealing with your concerns

My work is now more individual areas of responsibility so this doesn't really come up but in my previously role it most definitely would have been vociferously noted if someone was cherry picking the easy emails out of the inbox. The only way unfortunately to deal with it without management intervention is to call him out as team members or play him at his own game and pick the easy emails yourself (and maybe dish them out to your other colleagues?)

I have been working in that type of environment myself for the last few months. I think there are a couple of people that are not as productive as others, I could tell this very easily when there was only me and one other person doing a particular job one day! But honestly, I work the same hours whether I am efficient or not efficient and actually I trust management to spot these patterns. So I would just get on with my own job and leave management to worry about it, or not as the case may be.