An ESFP woman’s faculty runs on being inside the group rather than watching it, and the only rung above her floor is a job whose written requirements include keeping an appropriate distance from the people she works with. She took it. It lasted six months.
The first thing I ever heard about Dessa Woolard came out of an exit interview in 2009, from a man who was quitting after nine days.
I asked him the question we ask, which is whether anything could have been done differently.
“Nah. It’s not the job.” He had his coat on the whole time. “The girl in the freezer’s the only reason I lasted the week.”
I asked which girl in the freezer.
“Little one. Talks the whole time.” He thought about it. “Woolard.”
I wrote no actionable feedback on the form, because that is what that form was for, and I filed it, and I have the form. It is the earliest piece of paper in this building with her name on it that is not a timecard.
Dessa came to Vandine in 2004 as a selector. She was twenty-two. A year at a chain restaurant behind her and a year of nothing before that. She is a small, extremely loud woman who is louder in a freezer, where everybody is louder. She has a laugh you can hear over a pallet wrapper. She knows the names of every driver on the yard, all three shifts of maintenance, the two women who run the cafeteria, and something true about each of them. She has never in twenty-two years been late by more than four minutes and she has never once used that fact in an argument.
Vandine Foodservice runs a distribution center in Marchand — nine hundred thousand square feet, dry, cooler, and freezer, four hundred and some people across three shifts, feeding restaurants and schools and nursing homes across a hundred and sixty miles of this state. Night selection is the heart of it. Everything a customer gets was picked, case by case, off a slot, by somebody walking a pallet jack in the dark.
I came here in 2007 and have been the human resources manager since 2011.
Twenty-two years on that floor. She has never bid off nights, never taken a lead position, never applied for anything again after 2014, and been named in three exit interviews as a reason somebody stayed, which I know because I do the exit interviews and I keep them.
Here is the sentence this building has used about Dessa Woolard for twelve years. It is kind, everybody who says it means it kindly, and it is the most efficient way to make sure nothing ever gets looked at again.
We gave her a shot. It just wasn’t for her. She was happier before.
The night supervisor position is open again and the requisition is on my screen. Nakia Ravenell applied on the fourth day it was posted, which is fast for that floor, and I know why she applied, because I asked, and she told me Dessa told her to.
Duffy Mangum ran this building for nine years and had one line he used every time it came up.
“Some people are floor people. That’s not an insult.”
Headsets
A selector wears a headset and the system talks into it.
It says an aisle and a slot and a number of cases, and you go there and you say the check digits back to it and you pull the cases and you build a pallet, and then it says the next one, for nine hours, in a room that is twenty degrees below zero if you are in the freezer. Every pick has a time value computed off a standard, and at the end of the shift there is a number that says whether you ran ninety-six per cent of standard or a hundred and four, and that number is the whole of what this company formally knows about a night’s work.
What the headset does is put every person on that floor inside their own separate machine for nine hours.
Which means the entire social life of a distribution center happens in the gaps. At the pallet wrapper. In the battery room, which is the only warm place in that end of the building and which is therefore the most important room in this company and appears on no organisational chart. At the ten-minute break where nobody takes ten minutes. On the walk out to the lot at four in the morning, which is the longest continuous conversation most of these people have with another adult in a day. In the two seconds it takes to pass somebody in an aisle.
Dessa Woolard is the reason those gaps are survivable for about forty people a night, and she has been doing it since 2004.
The freezer is a real thing and people outside this industry underestimate it. You wear a suit and you sweat inside it and the sweat is a problem. Your hands stop being reliable at about the seven-hour mark. There is a rule about how long anybody is in there continuously and there is a real practice, which is different, and the difference is one of about nine things this company would rather I did not put in writing.
I have been in the same book club since 1998 and I have read, I would estimate, a third of the books.
Inside It
What Dessa has is not friendliness. Friendliness is a manner and it can be turned on at a counter. Hers is a live reading of a specific room of specific people, updating all night, and I did not understand the difference until it was gone.
It is also, and — the thing I got wrong for a decade — it is reciprocal. She is a participant rather than an observer, and the difference is the whole of this. The faculty runs on being inside the group — one of forty, on the same clock, with the same aching hands, taking the same abuse from the same system — and it does not come with her when she is lifted out of it. Nothing about that is preference. It is how the instrument is wired.
Tevin Roundtree started here in 2019 at twenty and lasted nine days and then came back six months later and has been here since.
I asked him once what changed.
“Second time I got put in the freezer.”
I said most people leave over the freezer.
“Dessa’s in the freezer,” he said, like I was being slow.
Yesenia Fabre has selected next to her since 2008 and said a thing to me at a company picnic which I then sat on for a decade. She said that on a bad night — a truck short, a customer add, everybody four points behind — Dessa would start singing something stupid, and the whole aisle would end up either singing it or yelling at her about it, and either way forty people would come out of their headsets for ninety seconds.
“That’s the whole thing,” Yesenia said. “You come out of it or you go home and you don’t come back.”
Cordy Hake selected on that floor for a dozen years and had some of the same gift, less of it, and went supervisor in 2015 and is night operations manager now. What is said about Cordy is that he came up off the floor and never forgot where he came from, and it gets said at every service award dinner, and it is true. Nobody says that about Dessa. What the identical warmth earns a man in that building, and what gets handed to him in place of a title, is counted on his own page.
Four hundred people. Nine salaried supervisors. Two of the nine are women and neither came off selection.
I asked Cordy once, years afterward, how he had handled the first six months.
“You just take it,” he said. “They give you a hard time for a while and then it’s over.”
I asked how long a while was.
He had to think. “Couple of months?”
He is not wrong about his own experience and I have no doubt at all that it went exactly like that.
Step Up
Corporate built a program in 2012 called Step Up. Ten sessions, a workbook, a cohort of hourly associates identified as supervisory potential, delivered by me.
Dessa was in the first cohort and I put her there. Nine of us in a training room, me running it out of a facilitator’s guide, and at the end of the ten sessions everybody got a certificate with the company logo on it and a photograph in the break room, and hers is still up.
My own reasoning, precisely, because it was neither stupid nor cynical. Our night turnover was running at fifty-one per cent. Every retention study anybody has ever done says people leave managers and stay for people, and the person forty selectors stayed for was walking a pallet jack. Promoting her was the single most obvious idea in this building and three different managers had it independently.
She did the program. She was good at the parts about people and she found the parts about documentation tedious and she said as much in front of the class, which I noted approvingly at the time, because it struck me as honesty.
Duffy signed off on it in about ninety seconds.
“Woolard. Sure.”
I said we ought to think about what support she’d have on nights, since Ruell was covering two buildings.
“She’ll be fine,” Duffy said. “Everybody likes her.”
That is a real sentence that a real person said in a real meeting, and I wrote it in my notes with a tick next to it, and it is the closest thing to a risk assessment that promotion ever got.
We made her night selection supervisor in the spring of 2013.
Here is what we changed when we did it: her title, her pay — six thousand dollars and a shift differential she lost, so about two thousand net — and her badge colour.
Here is what we did not change. The engineered labor standards program, which she was now responsible for administering against her own aisle. The attendance points system, which is mechanical and has no discretion in it. Her span, which was thirty-eight people. The fact that she now sat in on the shift start meeting where the numbers get read out with names attached. Whether anybody would back her when she said no. Whether she had a peer on that shift who had ever done the job. Anything at all about the freezer.
And the shift start meeting, which she now attended, where the previous night’s numbers get read out by name — who ran under standard, who had an occurrence, who put a case on the floor — in a room of nine supervisors, about people she had eaten lunch with for nine years.
She asked me, before her first one, whether she had to say anything.
I said only about her own people.
“Say what about them?”
I said whatever the number was.
And her headset. A supervisor does not wear one.
She walked onto that floor on her first night with nothing in her ear and could hear the entire building, and not one person spoke to her all shift.
She told me about it six weeks later, laughing.
“You know what’s loud? Nothing. Nothing is so loud.”
Points
The attendance system gives you points. You get a point for an occurrence, a half for a partial, and at eight you are terminated, and it is automatic, and the supervisor is the person who prints the form and sits down with you.
In the winter of 2014 Yesenia Fabre hit seven and a half.
Her mother had been in and out of the hospital in another county for most of that year, which the system does not know and cannot know, and she had used everything she had, and she was one occurrence from being fired after six years.
Dessa printed the form and sat down with her and did it.
That is the thing everybody in this building remembers as the moment. Three people have described that conversation to me over the years and none of them were in it, and the version that circulates is that Dessa cried and Yesenia did not speak to her for a month, and both are true.
What I found out this spring is the part nobody remembers, because only two people ever knew it.
It was a retirement lunch and Yesenia was a glass of wine in, and I made some remark about the points system and how it had never sat right with me.
“She came to my house,” Yesenia said.
I asked who.
“Dessa. The morning before.” She was looking at the cake. “Ten in the morning, in her own car, off the clock. Sat at my table and told me exactly where I was and exactly what was going to fall off and when.”
I said that was new to me.
“Nobody knew that,” Yesenia said. “I’m telling you because she’s not going to.”
The night before the form, Dessa drove to Yesenia’s house at ten in the morning, off the clock, in her own car, and told her exactly where she stood — seven and a half, what the next occurrence would do, what the rolling twelve-month window would drop off and when, and that if she could get through nineteen more days she would fall back to six and a half.
She got through the nineteen days. She has been here eighteen years.
What Dessa did in that driveway was a terminable offence under our own policy, and that policy has my name at the bottom of it.
I asked Yesenia, at the lunch, whether she had ever told anybody.
“Who would I tell?” she said. “They’d have fired her for it.”
No Hard Feelings
By the late summer of 2013 the shift was cold to her and by the winter of 2014 she was somebody who ate lunch in her car.
I walked the floor with her about two months in, because that is a thing I do quarterly, and it was the first time I had been out there with her since the change.
We went the length of the freezer aisles and back, maybe twenty minutes.
Seven people said good evening to her. Every one of them said it the way you say it to a supervisor: eyes up, nothing after it, back to the headset.
At the pallet wrapper a man called Hank Sczesny — the steward, who has known her since she was twenty-two — said, “Evening, boss.”
She said, “Don’t.”
He said, “Evening, Miss Woolard,” and went back to it, and the two men next to him laughed, and it was not a mean laugh and it did the same work as a mean laugh.
When we got back to the office she said, “He’s just being Hank.”
I said he was.
I have the file. There were three grievances in six months, which the union steward at the time told me was normal for a new supervisor and which everybody upstairs treated as a signal. There was an incident where she went off at a driver in front of the dock and it was in front of nine people. Her documentation was late, consistently, and I chased it, consistently.
And her shift’s numbers were the best they have ever been, before or since, and nobody looked at that until this spring, including me.
She came to my office in the autumn of 2014.
She said she thought maybe it wasn’t working.
And I said — warmly, with the sensation of being generous, and I had prepared it — that she could go back to selection any time, with no hard feelings, and that nobody would think a thing about it, and that a lot of people find out that the floor is where they belong and there is no shame in that whatsoever.
She said okay.
She said okay about eleven seconds after I finished, and I took that as relief.
I have thought about those eleven seconds a great deal in the last few months. She had come in to say a hard thing and she had probably rehearsed it in her car, and what she got was a door held open so smoothly that walking through it was the only available move. I did not ask her what was actually happening. I did not ask what she needed. I did not ask whether anything could change, and I am the one person in that building whose job it was to ask that. There is a box on the form for it. I left it blank.
She went back to selection at the start of the following week, and the floor took her back in about a shift and a half, and everybody was relieved, and I wrote voluntary reversion, associate request in the file.
Essential Functions
I was updating the job description this spring for the new posting and I read it properly for the first time since I wrote it.
I wrote it in 2011. It is two pages. Most of it is what you would expect: administers labor standards, ensures compliance with food safety and OSHA requirements, manages attendance and performance documentation, conducts shift start meetings.
There is a line in the essential functions, sixth bullet, in my own words.
Maintains an appropriate professional distance from hourly associates.
I know exactly why I wrote it. In 2010 we had a supervisor in the dry warehouse who was buying and reselling things to his own crew and who ended up gone, and legal wanted language, and I wrote language.
It has been in that document for fifteen years and it has been in every posting and it was in the packet Dessa signed on her first day as a supervisor.
The only ladder off that floor has, written into its first rung, as an essential function, a requirement to stop doing the one thing she is extraordinary at.
Nobody hid it. There is no villain in that sentence and it is four inches from the top of page one.
I showed it to Ruell Batiste this spring, the sixth bullet, and asked him what he made of it.
“That’s just standard language,” he said.
I asked him whether he keeps a professional distance from his crew.
He laughed and said of course not, you’d never get anything done, and then he stopped laughing.
The Workbook
The Step Up workbook has a session on working styles and there is an instrument in it, and the results go in the participant’s file, and I administered it, and I still have the master set because I never throw anything out.
Dessa’s page says ESFP.
The paragraph under the letters is worth nothing. What is worth having sits in the facilitator’s notes at the back, which explain that the letters compress a running order — one habit carrying nearly all of it, a second that decides what becomes of whatever the first one finds, and, at the end of the line, two that a person only reaches on purpose, slowly. The order for this one is worked out on the page the type is given by itself, taken from the sixteen that workbook was drawing on.
The one carrying nearly all of it is the live present, aimed in her case at a room of people, at full resolution, updating. Not people in general. This shift, tonight, with the truck short and everybody four points behind.
And it is reciprocal, which is the thing the workbook does not say and which nobody in this company understood. She is inside the group, on the same clock, and the reading and the belonging are one operation. Take her out of the group and you have not moved a skill to a new location. You have switched it off.
The second habit is what meets the reading, which is a settled private sense of what the person in front of her is owed. It has no hierarchy in it. It does not rank what she owes Yesenia against what she owes Vandine Foodservice, because it is not a system of rules, it is one answer per person, arrived at whole. Which is why the driveway happened, and why she could not have explained the driveway to me, and why she never mentioned it, including on the day I handed her the exit.
The final pair, the ones at the end of the line, are the entire content of the job we gave her. Running the apparatus — the points, the standards reviews, the documentation, the escalation ladder, the whole machine whose purpose is to apply the same rule to unlike people. And the long view: what six months on the wrong side of that machine does to a person who has spent nine years inside the group.
She had neither. We knew she had neither, in writing, in a file, in my handwriting on a workbook page.
The plain part, since I built the program and wrote the description. Before anybody takes a step up out of an hourly job, the questions to ask in writing are what changes about the workload, what authority actually comes with it, and who backs you when you say no — and if the honest answer to all three is nothing, then that is the answer and it is worth having on paper before rather than after. And if the written requirements of a role contradict the reason you were selected for it, that contradiction is in a document you are entitled to read and to ask about. No part of that is about a personality. The people for it are a steward, where there is one; an attorney, where there is not; and whoever the company has for complaints, which in this building is me.
That workbook’s own front pages say the instrument is a self-awareness exercise with no business in selection, and that people answering it again four weeks on land somewhere else roughly a third of the time, while the measures beneath barely move.
Corporate reports Step Up completions annually as a workforce development metric.
Dessa is a completion. She has been in the numerator on that slide every year since 2013, and the number goes in over my signature.
Nakia
The requisition closes on the fifteenth. Nine people have applied and six of them are already salaried somewhere in this network, which is what happens when a posting has been up long enough for word to get out that a floor person applied.
Two things let go on me this spring, and neither of them was what I went looking for.
The exit interview in 2009, first. I have used that story at two regional meetings as a nice example of how retention is personal, and the punchline is always the guy with his coat on. What was actually in front of me that morning was a man telling me the name of the asset that was holding my night shift together, and I wrote no actionable feedback on the form, and I filed it, and it took me sixteen years to notice that I had been handed the answer to the problem I spent the next decade being paid to solve.
Then my own office in 2014, and no hard feelings. Twelve years I have filed that under a decent thing done for somebody who was struggling. What I did was end a conversation before it could become a request. She got eleven seconds and a door, and I have watched the tape in my head enough times now to know that she was going to say something else.
What her file has no space for. She is reckless with money and half that floor has lent her money; she has twice put somebody on a shift she knew they could not work because she could not stand to say no in front of the floor, and both times somebody else absorbed it; and she was, for the whole of those six months, apparently fine, and told everyone she was fine, and nobody in this building can say when she stopped being fine, including her.
Her shift’s numbers in 2013 and 2014 — turnover, recordables, standard attainment, unfilled slots — are the best this building has recorded. I ran them in the spring. Nobody has ever run them. Everybody remembers those six months as a failure because of how they felt, and the record says the opposite, and the record has been sitting in the same system the whole time.
I have the job description open in one window and Nakia Ravenell’s application in the other. She has been here six years, she runs a hundred and two per cent, and Yesenia says the freezer likes her, which is the only reference in this building that has ever predicted anything.
I could take the sixth bullet out. I have the authority; it is my document. Legal would want language and I could write different language, and it would take an afternoon, and it would not change the points system or the standards program or the shift start meeting or whether anybody has her back at two in the morning.
Nakia Ravenell came to see me yesterday about the interview and asked me straight out what the worst part of the job is.
I could have said the documentation. I could have said the hours.
I said, “Deciding what you’re going to do about your friends.”
She said, “Dessa told me that.”
The people in these essays are composites drawn from long observation. The theory is not.