26 Oct 2018
Bizmates Response
7yHi there. Thank you for your comments. I appreciate your taking the time to write so much so I’d like to reciprocate that by replying in detail.
First of all, as I’ve mentioned that our trainers are evaluated based on the amount of contribution they have on the business, and I decide what contribution is. You aren’t evaluated on how hard you think you worked or how good of a trainer you think you are. When you have 1000 trainers, I need to look at actual figures and give trainers with higher figures a higher rate and trainers with lower figures a lower rate. If you can’t understand this concept or if you think this basic concept is unfair, the KPI system will not make sense to you. Now let’s go through each of the points you’ve brought up.
1. The tax has nothing to do with Bizmates. That is a BIR requirement. You have a legal responsibility to pay your taxes.
2. Again, this is a legal requirement for all consultants. If you weren’t paying taxes in your previous company, you and that company were breaking the law.
3. If you’re not happy with a dept’s response, you should report it to the dept head. If you’re still not satisfied, it’ll be escalated to me.
4. The evaluation from students is a survey. You might get a low score from a student who is just in a bad mood. It happens. But at the same time, some students just give perfect scores for all evaluations. This happens too. At the end of the day, really good trainers have high scores and average trainers will have average scores. As for getting suspended, of course that can happen. If you get multiple complaints within a 500 lesson term, yes you can and should be suspended when most trainers don’t get any complaints out of 500 lessons. If you are worried about getting suspended, that means you need to rethink what you are doing in the lesson because very few trainers get suspended for complaints.
5. I don’t know if promoted is the word. But you do need to become an assessor which about 70% of our trainers achieve in their first month. So I don’t think it’s such a difficult target.
6. If you don’t believe in a performance based system, this is not for you.
7. A trainer can become an assessor after teaching 100 lessons if their stats are good which about 70% achieve. Then you can open all slots. So I suggest you focus on improving your stats so that you can become an assessor rather than complaining that you are not allowed to open those slots.
8. Like I said, let’s focus on improving your own stats first.
9. Why would you complain about this when you even said that the pay is higher than most ESL schools? Do you prefer to get a holiday rate but a lower regular rate? Our top trainers are taking home over 80K a month.
10. Sure, we have over 1000 lesson materials. When a trainer finds a mistake, they report it and it gets fixed.
11. Why should you be paid in full when you didn’t even work? And the student doesn’t get charged for the lesson because students don’t pay per lesson.
12. No coaching sessions unless you request for it? Then why don’t you request for it? The great thing about this job is that you have no boss who monitors everything you do. You are your own boss. But it sounds like to me that you want someone to supervise you. This is a job for people who can self-manage not for people who need constant support.
13. We do encourage students to fill out the form. But we can’t forced them to do it. It’s like forcing diners to fill out a form after every meal at a restaurant. We can’t do that. But with 120 forms, I think we should get a pretty good idea of your actual performance.
14. If you don’t get a response, you follow up. If you still don’t get a response, you escalate it.
Like I said, if you don’t believe in the concept of pay for performance, you’ll never be satisfied with the system. If you are willing to accept a system like this, I suggest you focus on improving your performance. Hope that makes sense. Hika Ito, CEO Bizmates Philippines