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I was better on hourly. Quality of work was better

Posted By: too, since I wasn't always rushed. - N/M on 2009-05-19
In Reply to: Hourly pay versus production pay - Sim




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no work late...she raved about the quality of my work.....sm

I have emails raving about how good my work was.  The trouble came when I started asking questions about pay and complaining that she was sending me work when was convenient for her and not when I needed it.  She would stay up all night and then sleep a good part of the day.  I told her before I started that I wanted to work early mornings.  She said that was no problem whatsoever, BUT then I would see no work until 4 o'clock in the afternoon.  She would promise me work and send it to me and it would be the wrong voice files, so I had to delete and start over.  She was SO disorganized.  She said that she has 50 happy transcriptionists and complained that I wanted some samples.  I did not know how she wanted things formatted.  It was just a mess.  The day she "fired" me (I have never been fired before in my life), I had basically told her that morning if things didn't change I wasn't typing another character. 


Of course she had 50 happy transcriptionists.  Her work was being subcontracted by a lady in Atlanta.  She didn't have contact with these transcriptionists.  There was a middle man.  I told her I could guarantee the lady in Atlanta provided her transcriptionists with some sort of guidance or samples.  The hospital system had some sort of weird thing in place where some places needed soft returns and some hard returns and she told me you couldn't mess with that but I was unclear on exactly what went where. 


I don't think I will ever work for a small company again. 


Anyway, I have drafted a demand letter which I intend to send Monday.  Someone below asked for the name of the company, and I would rather not say until this all pans out.  I will definitely post the name of the company eventually.  I just don't want her to know what my plans are at the present time.  I don't know if taking her to court will do any good, but it is worth it to make her miserable.  It is a 2 hour drive for me, but I called and I can file via the U.S. mail.  So it is only one trip.


Work hourly for physician. Need help..
I wonder if someone could tell me how they created an invoice when being paid hourly doing transcription. I tried using MP Count but it only calculates using line counts. Thanks for any help.
Are you a bad MT with lousy quality work?
My calls are answered immediately, i've been on the same account for years, i'm praised for my work, receive emails thanking me.  Maybe its YOU and not THEM?
Well, yes, but then the quality of the offshore work (sm)
would be worse than it is now, with not enough people to edit it, it would get way behind TAT, and eventually it will come back to us. 
It's definitely a work quality issue.
I'm having a tough time myself. I had the ultimate in great MT jobs up until just recently. Seriously, my Expander stats were running about 70% per day. Now I'm doing maybe 20% on my expander stats because I have a new job where the dictators just ramble on endlessly and backtrack often. It's about $11 an hour and the schedule doesn't work for me either. After I pay taxes and equipment costs, I might as well be working at Burger King or Walmart. I don't know what I'm going to do. I can't make it on this low income. Maybe those sweet accounts only happen once in a lifetime, and my sweet account is gone to VR.
Are you paid hourly? If so, I'm surprised they allow you to work with such little ones.
 r
I get paid hourly $18.00. The hospital I work at don't believe sm
in production because of the error rate, blanks, etc. just to make money. I am sooooooooooooooooooooooo happy.
I get paid hourly and I work at home
They expect me to work 7-1/2 hours a day and I do, but they do let me spread it out over the course of the day. I work four hours in the morning, two in the afternoon and the other one and a half in the evening. I can leave and go to an appointment and make that time up in the evenings also. But then again, when I don't have any work I still get paid.
Poor quality is just that. It has nothing to do with work ethic.
Goodness.
I think you would have to charge an hourly rate for this type of work.

I would think that our QA scores honestly reflect the quality of our work
and are not infuenced in any way by how we interpret the status you may or may not hold. Hopefully, you are not basing QA statistics on whether or not you like a certain MT's attitude about you.
Excellent sound quality and just leave me alone to work! nm
s
i would not babysit them. if their quality is that bad on resume, it would be on work ethics too.
;
Now MT companies in India have control over the work produced. Quality is much
zz
Hahah!a! Funny typo: not quality 'scAre', quality 'scOre'. LMAO!...nm
nm
I work four 8 hr shifts, home based for hospital.. hourly plus incentive.
sfg
Winscribe is fine where I work. But if a mic is malfunctioning, sound quality is suboptimal.
cc
Work in a hospital and no one cares about quality, unless there is a malpractice law suit involved.

All anyone worries about is quantity.  The work is terrible and the only time anyone even acknowledges it is when a doctor is being sued.   When my son was operated on I had to marked his leg in permanent marker before surgery because left/right get mixed up so much.  You can tell reports that comes from India and my supervisor sits there and laughs with us.  Due to the "freeze" we haven't had raises in over 5 years.  


 


I think that depends on the quality. Do you honestly think there is good quality just throwing every
MT on any account like they are. I also think QA has been told to not waste a lot of time on blanks so I think the hospitals are getting a lot more blanks. I certainly have more when I get in a hospital I dont know and they talk 100 miles an hour.
I thought quality was a given. Speed and quality are not mutually exclusive. sm

I maintain 99% accuracy above on my reports.  However, the original question was regarding personal preference, and I have stated mine, and I respect your opinion as well.  :-)    I do think if I was working in an office or hospital setting, the setup you mentioned might be more profitable in the long run.  There are too many interruptions and such when you have other people running in and out, phones ringing, etc. 


I doubt that anyone but me really cares about the lines per hour it takes for me to do a report.  They just want an accurate report in a timely manner.  I take pride in my work, and would never just slop something out for the sake of the almighty buck.   And, as an added incentive, I work for 2 companies, and one of them has my name on each report.  I don't have a problem with it, but I did think it was a bit unusual at first.


Oh well ... I must confess that what I'd TRULY like is to be paid lots of money to just sit and play Battle Phlinx on Pogo all day long, but as of yet, no such luck.  


I work for an agency, type for a major hospital - no hourly wage - just production. nm
x
k, that is your opinion, i stated mine. poor quality in my opinion shows bad work ethics if they do
;
Thank you. Think-----hourly!!! Do not sm
accept less than an hourly wage and a reasonable one at that.
Hourly plus

A hospital where I worked long ago (in a galaxy not far away) had a hybrid pay system- a basic hourly rate plus incentive bonus for production over a certain amount.  I think this is the fairest way, because sometimes I'm fast and sometimes I'm slow, but I'm always accurate.  My first transcription supervisor back in the dark ages said "No one who reads that report will know or care how many lines you type per hour.  They only know what that report looks like".  I still believe that.


Hourly sm
Though there are a lot of variables you haven't told us, on face value I'd say hourly. I've done both, and hourly has paid better.

With MT you usually can't transcribe hour after hour nonstop (or at least you won't be doing so for many years if that's your pattern). Therefore, when figuring your actual earnings you need to include time you have to rest between transcribing to get your true hourly earnings.

As an MT this scenario is typical at so many companies: Get up early. Check for work. Do what's left. Get 7 great jobs that have you flying along thinking you're going to make a ton today. Suddenly run into Dr. X, ESL from hell, and watch your great production day go to pot. Fight for jobs at end of payperiods. Bounce around on accounts. Cry a lot as you worry about your bills.

With hourly lead position, you've suddenly opened up your possibilities. There will always be work for you. You now have more than just MT on your resume. You can also get up and go to the bathroom during work without worrying that it's cutting into your lines per hour. You may work more than 40 hours a week, but it will be actual work, not sitting there waiting for jobs to trickle in, not resting between transcription periods.

It may be stressful at times, but so is MT when you're worrying about meeting bills and having a consistent paycheck when work volumes fluctuate. It's also an investment in your future. You can possibly grow from there to be supervisor, recruiter, trainer, or use your management skills to GET OUT of this field and get into something else.

I've done both in many different ways, and would recommend the hourly.
HOURLY...
...and with my level of experience, $16.50 or more per hour.
Hourly QA Pay
Just wondering what average hourly QA pay is? I've been QA'ing for 2 years now, but have always been paid by the line and not sure what to quote for hourly. I live on the East coast. Thanks.
yes it's hourly
But no pay when not working.
I went hourly

I went hourly....kinda.  My advantage is that I know what my paycheck will be and I don't have to worry about the difficult dictators that take FOREVER!  I am also paid for tech time and during phone calls and software issues.  On the negative side, production does nothing for me at all.  BUT, then again, what I make is about the same as 220 lines an hour.  I do get raises just like everyone else.  If there was never a chance for a raise, I would not do it.


I also went hourly...
For a bit over $16/hour with yearly raises. I love it! I don't have to worry about my paycheck if I have a bad couple of days, and it's just a much less stressful situation. Of course, in my old production pay job, I had the worst account ever, so I may be biased.
hourly
What have you been getting as an hourly wage?
hourly
Figure out what you make per hour now -- but be sure that you figure in if there is going to be difficulty doing his typing, formatting, background noise, etc.  I would say anywhere from $20 to $25 per hour. 
Hourly
We were all hourly employees at that time. We were so trusting or ??? that we couldn't figure out how she kept getting such good numbers on production sheets. She was always on top. Duh! Of course she was, since she was using us to "create" her success. They (HR) told us that couldn't happen until we showed them how to do it. Accidentally, I found out when a colleague and I "switched" stations so she could try out my new keyboard for a report or two and then we realized we were "on each other's number" so we went in to change them and that is when it came to us that this must be what was going on with her. Sure enough, when we got out the logs (handwritten for our own eyes only log things we just kept for ourselves) there it was, our jobs had magically converted to her jobs! It was sad and backstabbing too!
hourly
Transcription Plus I believe. I am not sure of their web site but I think they pay hourly.
Hourly
$12.70/hour. Is that too low? On a side note, I have a B.S. in Management and have never figured out a way to use it and still work from home. 
hourly pay
Those days are long gone. You might be able to find one if you really scoured the internet and hospitals all over America.

If my memory serves me right, people were more productive on hourly pay with OT thrown when work levels were high. My rationale for saying this is that the work environment was more cooperative than competitive. This led to more job satisfaction and thus more productivity and less down time.
Quality is quality whether you are an MT or CEO.

How good is the quality of the performance of your managers or the guys at the top?   Anybody want to evaluate that?   Can they get their raises based on our evaluation of their quality?  


Let's see now.  Which CEOs were named in lawsuit?  F for quality.  How many managers do we need to give us stupid pep talks?   F for managers.  QA this post MQ and all other nationals who decide they reward us on "quality"   Look in the mirror and fix yourself.


what is your quality like?
.
Oh, the quality! Well now we know.
x
quality
I totally agree with you. There should be some kind of feedback on how you are doing. Not only for mistakes, but also if you are doing a really fine job. I know when am not real sure of something, or if I did do something wrong, I really do want to know. How else do you learn? I know too, that when someone notices a job well done and lets me know, it makes me want to strive for that "perfection", and it just plain feels good. I think the circumstance has become if nobody says anything, then it's ok, kind of leaves you in the dark. Just always remember, everything you type becomes a legal document. I'm sure you do a good job.
I can't believe the quality.
This year I had to subcontract out because I have too much work to handle, and frankly, I can't believe the appalling quality I am getting from transcriptionists with 10+ years of experience. To put it bluntly, it's shameful. I pay 11 cpl to my transcriptionists but after a year of searching, testing, and training, I have only found 2 that are actually worth it. My doctors are so easy. They are clear, they repeat everything, and there are no ESLs, but these people just don't read directions, don't proofread their work (when they clearly need to), and don't have even the basics of grammar down.

It wouldn't surprise me at all if doctors that have switched from an over-priced American company to an offshore firm didn't notice any difference in quality at all.

I know this isn't going to be a popular view but it is the truth, and I can tell you I was just as shocked to learn this as anybody.
98% quality
Hi peers,

Can someone describe me how to calculate 98% accuracy. Any description or link would be appreciated. Thx!
quality, etc.
Case in Point ~
with a union, we could at last demand to stop being treated like cattle and/or factory piece workers. What in the heck has happened to hourly salary!!??? How about straight salary? These records are, after all, LEGAL DOCUMENTS. When we are forced to type at the speed of sound instead of making the production of the highest quality possible documents our top priority, this demeans our profession.
UNION...UNION...UNION...UNION
better pay is better quality/less pay=less quality
nm
I just took one and know I did not do well, quality is not
an issue with me, but knowing I am timed my fingers just don't work.
should be quality - should have had an ESL MT do this for me
so sorry!
wow - someone is getting cheated on hourly - sm
Let's face it, a facility will do their darndest to start out an employee at a low rate and then slowly bring them up. But for the Lafayette area, the pay should be (AND IS EXPECTED TO BE) around $12-13/hour.

Opelousas - a while back there was a hospital in that area that had an opening for a transcriptionist.
HOURLY VS LINE

I disagree with the hourly rate.  I like to know that I get paid for the amount that I produce.  It would really be hard to regulate an hourly scale.  If you feel bad now how would you feel knowing that someone is goofing off or typing slower or whatever and getting the same rate of pay that you get?   I have a couple of subs and I know about how long it takes to do one of the psych reports but how could I know what that person is doing.   I really think that the hospitals/accounts would have a problem with this especially with us working at home.    Also how could we clock in and out at an hourly rate.  I am a pretty trusting person and trustworthy but there are times I stop and take a break and go to this board, etc.  That is why they went to the per line charge. 


And yes, I can do 2500 lines per day. For one account last month I had them keep track of the errors that they found and it was 5 out of 10,.973 lines for that month.  So I feel I do a good job but if I were to go to hourly I would lose money as with this account it takes me about 30 to 35 hours a month with delivery, printing, etc. to make $1100  to 1200 a month.   They would not pay me $35 to 40 an hour. 


 


Editor hourly pay??

After years as an MT, I'm thinking of switching to Editing...Can anyone please tell me what is the standard hourly rate to request for an Editor? BTW I live in the Midwest with a fairly low cost of living. Thank you!


That is a low hourly rate. I would look
elsewhere. That is below normal.
We do get hourly wage

during down-time and the only approved down-time is meetings and computer malfunction.  Lack of work was not approved so if there is lots of work available we have no worries, if not then we will be scrounging around for work.  I don't have time for that.


I will have to ask my supe if that is how it is because that is how I understand it.  If so, I maybe putting in my 2 weeks notice.