Operations Supervisor, Healthcare Services, McKesson

>> My name is Sarah Trevisani. I'm an operations supervisor at McKesson, located in Rocky Hill. It is a pharmaceutical distribution center. We are in charge of pick, pack and ship. So we serve as the middleman. The manufacturer will ship us Lipitor, and we will ship it out to Walgreens, Rite Aid, the mom and pop shop down the street, and you and I can go pick up that prescription. So I'll get to the distribution center around 6:00, seven o'clock at night, and the shift starts at eight o'clock, so I'm in charge of putting together the line-up of where everyone's going to work. So it's kind of a lot like coaching, where you want to make sure that you have the best people in certain areas, whether that's working in the controlled area, which is our very skilled night shift pickers. They have the best accuracy, and we need to make sure that when we're sending out Oxycotin, we're not giving a little bit extra. And then you have some of your faster pickers, and you need to make sure that you put everyone in a good spot so there's not bottlenecks and we make all of our truck departures. So the employees come in around eight o'clock. The conveyors get running. And normally, it's just managing the people, as well as looking at the numbers on the computer screen. How many picks do we have left for this truck that needs to leave at 12:30 am, and do we have everything done so that that truck can get out on time? And the busiest days are if something happens. So, say, we have an employee go home early and we need to move the shift around. Or maybe there is a glitch in the computer system and we're getting all our orders late, so we need to hurry through those orders to try to make our trucks on time. But it's more of an HR position, learning how to manage your people, engage your people. Get buy-in, if you're doing a project or trying to see how a different process might work. So really engaging the employees and getting them to work for you, not because you're their boss on paper, but because of who you are as a person. There's a challenge in our distribution center. We are a union house, so everything has to be done through the union. Everything is based on seniority. And there's certain angles that you have to take to approach situations. And you learn a lot more than you realize you learn, just to how to deal with people. But say two employees get in a fight, and one takes a joke one way and the other one didn't mean it that way, and they start to argue. Then you just have to bring them in and get their sides of the story, and figure out if they can continue to work together. And if not, you might have to send them home. But they're grown adults. They realize they're here to do a job, but sometimes, people might not want to work in a certain area, and you kind of have to explain, "We're all one team. This is a business need. Would you want to be that patient who went in to get their prescription and couldn't because we didn't do our job and deliver it, because you didn't want to work in a certain area?" And sometimes, you have to twist things into perspectives for employees and how their job's directly affecting them. And then they're usually more willing and able. But, like I said earlier, if you build that strong relationship with the employee, then they'll pretty much do what you ask them because they trust you.