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Support Staff
Good day everyone,
Long story short, I’ve been in the post industry for almost 20 years and in the last 4 or 5 years, I have found that the support staff has been very lax in their work ethic and their attitudes.
A good example is where I work, we are supposed to have our tapes pulled by the support staff for our sessions and most times the tapes are not pulled and on to make matters worse, they get an attitude when you ask them to pull them for you. I am not a primadonna, but somehow I manage to get my job done everyday. I don’t ask the support staff to come edit or load tapes or type cg. All I ask is for them to do their job.Thanks,
John
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5 Replies
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Maybe you need new support staff.
What do they do, if they’re not doing their jobs?
Who’s in charge of them? Who hires and fires them?
Sometimes it’s the wrong people in those jobs, sometimes it’s just perspective. When I was promoted from assistant to editor back in the ’90’s, it floored me that the assistants didn’t do what I used to do just months, nay, weeks before. Out of all those guys and who used to be assistant editors, none but me is now an editor. Half of them got out of the business or moved into Admin, and the other half seem to have gravitated to doing live graphics and PowerPoint.
I’d lean towards they’re not hiring the right people. Or they’re not paying the right people enough to care.
debe
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“Out of all those guys and who used to be assistant editors,”
Apparently my “gals” went AWOL. They should be there and it should read, “Out of all those guys and gals who used to be assistant editors,”
There were two! Really!
debe
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Sounds like they lost their motivation. This could be due to *many* different causes, some interpersonal, some not. It’s a hard thing to get good, consistent, dedicated work out of people who are basically volunteers or very low on the wage scale, unless you can invest in them the feeling they have a personal stake in the success or failure of the project.
Assistant jobs like this were always touted as the first step in an ever-upgrading path of post jobs. So my question, if I put myself in the assistant’s place for a minute, would be: “when was the last time I got to do more than file tapes on shelves? When was the last time the editor took some time to teach me something, or even have me cut part of a sequence (under his supervision) for the experience? WHEN DO I GET A TURN TO PLAY?”
I am NOT suggesting you are running a sweatshop, by any means, but it’s good to occasionally put yourself in the perspective of the other person to see if this arangement is still mutually benficial. The barriers to entry are so much lower now, you can’t always expect the same kind of dedicated low-level peon type to stay as patient as they used to… they can just go out and buy their own system and practice at home without you… and undercut your rates!
You gotta let the waterboy practice throwing passes every once in a while, or they end up spitting in your Gatorade when you’re not looking.:-) -
welcome the generation ‘Y’ i’m experiencing this as well. the younger they are, the less the motivation. and it’s not like they are teenagers. can’t wait until they try to make a real living.
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I agree with Mark. When I was an assistant (not that long ago) I remember being frustrated at my low-wage coffee-girl status because of all the skills required… you had to be smart enough to tackle the routers, 3 different platfoms, archiving and restoring projects, and crazy multitask dubbing – yet you still had to fetch glasses of water for the senior editors and get yelled at by the production manager for labelling commercial dubs 1×0:30 instead of 1x:30. The trade-off for me was observing the workflow in a super-high-end company, plus cool co-workers and clients who hooked me up with all the freelance editing gigs I could handle.
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