Episode : HR Gone Wrong Part 2 – Workplace Dilemmas and Ethical Conundrums

Voice Over: You’re about to listen to an episode of What the Hell Just Happened?! Join Paul Edwards and his guests as they discuss interesting HR topics and solve some of our listeners’ submitted questions.

Paul: And occasionally I’ll go off HR topic and talk about whatever I want to talk about. Think barbecue. Space exploration. Technology. Money. Managing. Business. Things that interest all of us.

Voice Over: We get a lot of emails with questions. Stay tuned for details on how you can submit yours to the show. And now let’s get started.

CeCe: Hey, all of our listeners. This is CeCe Wilson. I am the head of HR here at CEDR and joining me today is Jennie McLaughlin, our Director of Compliance. Paul is out and so we have taken over the podcast room.

Jennie: Yay!

CeCe: [laughing] So we have another installation of HR horror stories today. We’re in the unique situation where we’ve got many, many decades between all of our HR experts here.

Jennie: Yes!

CeCe: Of HR experience. So we’ve got a lot of interesting stories.

Jennie: Well, also, what’s great is all of the stories we’re sharing come from all of our experience. None of these, we haven’t taken anything out of the requests members have sent to us.

CeCe: Yeah. These are just our personal experiences. [laughing]

Jennie: We have a lot of crazy stories, so we don’t even have to get into those.

CeCe: Yeah, and part of the reason why we’re doing this is because they’re interesting and there’s lessons to be learned. But also, when you’re dealing with all this stuff on the day to day, you’ve got to find some of the humor in it, right?

[laughing]

CeCe: All right. So the first one came from one of our employees. She was working at a hotel and she was notified that someone was let go. She wasn’t personally working in HR, but one of their housekeepers at the hotel had reported some messy rooms that were not occupied. They were vacant. They had to look at the security camera footage and realized that the night employee had been bringing a woman into the rooms for an hour every night. I guess taking advantage of it, being slow there?

Jennie: But not thinking about being caught by the rooms being messy?

CeCe: Yeah.

Jennie: I mean, didn’t even think to try to clean up after himself? Not that that would have made it okay, but, like, be smarter, guys.

[laughing]

CeCe: Yeah, hide it better! But also, causing extra work was probably part of the problem, I would imagine.

Jennie: Yeah. These are rooms that are vacant and you’re making other people have to pay to clean up after you and wasting their time on that which is not okay. Not okay.

CeCe: Yeah. Well and led to the housekeeper complaining because otherwise they wouldn’t have had to watch the security footage. [laughing]

Jennie: Yeah. So don’t bring guests for “social time” at your workplace.

CeCe: No matter how slow it is.

Jennie: Not okay. I have a situation that happened to me that is pretty simple. I worked at a law firm, and we represented employees and always had employees calling in, saying different things they wanted to sue their employer for.

CeCe: Sure.

Jennie: And most of them, there was nothing illegal going on, which was great for you, employers. Not so great for my boss who needed the business, but there was one who was adamant that we had to go after his employer and he was convinced it was this massive case because him and several other people were passed over for a promotion because the boss promoted like a family member or something, and that was it. That was this huge case that was going to be the biggest case out of the city in a decade. I informed him, kindly as I could, over the phone that, like so far, it doesn’t sound like there’s anything that went wrong. Maybe not great to prefer a family member over other people who are qualified, but narcissism isn’t actually illegal. So there’s maybe not good HR practice, but there’s nothing legal here that we can resolve. So he started screaming at me. [laughing]

CeCe: [sighs] Oh gosh.

Jennie: And telling me what an idiot I was. How, this is over the phone, he was going to come down to the office and make me understand that this is a huge problem and it’s impossible for this to be legal, and I’m like, “It’s…it’s…Sorry, I can’t do anything. There’s literally nothing illegal about this.” I just ended up having to just hang up with him because he was very, very upset. One of the few times I had to be like, “We’re now going to lock the door to the office, because also I’m pretty sure there’s valid reasons this guy was not promoted.”

[laughing]

CeCe: Yeah! Yeah, right? Oh man. It’s sad because a lot of times we do have to be the bearer of bad news and then people get mad at us personally. That actually leads into my next example and that was I had a candidate. We do phone screens. We let them schedule. I use a tool called Calendly and it sends them the link and they can schedule for whatever is convenient for them and avoids the back and forth. So this candidate had scheduled a time for a phone screen with me. I called at the scheduled time and she didn’t answer, and that happens a lot that people don’t answer the phone. It’s frustrating, but it’s to be expected. So I’ve gotten out of the first – I used to try to make it more of an effort to reschedule, but that usually didn’t result in anything.

Jennie: It wasn’t really worth your extra time.

CeCe: Yeah, and more often than not, even if they did reschedule –

Jennie: They didn’t show up or they weren’t very good.

CeCe: Yeah. The not-answering in the first place was a sign that I shouldn’t have ignored. So I stopped doing that and now I usually just say, “Sorry we didn’t get to catch up. Best of luck in your job search.” I keep it light and friendly, but like, it’s also a message that this is kind of the last time I’m going to reach out to you. So this particular candidate sent me an email letting me know that she no longer wanted to be considered for the job because I would be such a nightmare to work with and for.

[laughing]

CeCe: I mean, you can ask Frankie. Frankie’s here. He’s on my team. He does the recording. It’s true. [laughing]

Jennie: You are terrible. Yeah, Frankie’s nodding. Yeah. He hates everything about working for you. You require him to show up to the appointment he scheduled.

[laughing]

CeCe: So, it was kind of the first time I’ve been personally attacked just for responding to a candidate, but that’s okay. It’s funny because that happened inadvertently to you, actually, Jennie, in an interview. In an interview where a candidate told us how much they disliked working with attorneys.

Jennie: Yes.

[laughing]

Jennie: They had previously worked in a law office and were happy to tell us how much they didn’t like it and don’t like working with lawyers. I’m like, “Oh. I’m a lawyer.” She just went beet red. Got worse when I identified that multiple other lawyers also work at CEDR.

CeCe: Yeah, Yeah. So maybe not the best environment for that particular person.

Jennie: So, you know, maybe you self-selected out? We did not not consider her because of that, but also it was like, “Well, okay. You’ve decided you don’t like working with me. That’s fine.”

[laughing]

Jennie: So I had a personal experience, which was very strange, but I was working somewhere and I was still relatively new there. New jobs are hard and it can kind of wear you out and be a challenge, but I was noticing things were really difficult. Like I was really tired all day at work. It was hard for me to get my stuff done. I was getting headaches a lot and I was just like, “What is going on? Like, I just can’t keep up with things here.” So what I found out was our manager was secretly switching out all of the coffee for decaf.

CeCe: Oh my gosh. Why!?

Jennie: Well, because she thought she was helping us get healthier.

CeCe: No!

Jennie: Yes!

[laughing]

Jennie: So she would supply the break room stuff, and she knew myself and others all got coffee in the morning, and she would put a regular coffee canister in there, but she would pour in decaf coffee and not tell anyone. So once I started only drinking coffee I made myself, my work was so much better and my health was actually so much better. So, I don’t know what the lesson is there?

CeCe: I don’t know. I don’t drink coffee, so it’s hard for me to commiserate, but I do need my caffeinated tea every morning. I can’t imagine if somebody was swapping it out.

Jennie: See? If someone swapped it out?

CeCe: Yeah.

Jennie: That would not make you healthier?

CeCe: No.

Jennie: It would give you headaches and make you go to sleep and not do your job. Maybe she wanted my boss to fire me, and so she’s like, “I’ll make Jennie’s work really bad.”

[laughing]

Jennie: “Take her caffeine away!”

CeCe: That would be a pretty creative solution, I guess. How did you figure it out? You asked her? Is that what you said?

Jennie: No. Someone there told me. I can’t remember exactly, but then I learned that our boss was aware of it.

CeCe: Oh my gosh!

Jennie: So I was like, “Guys! This is not okay.” Yeah. Anyway, fun times. Be careful, I guess, about who is stocking your break room.

[laughing]

CeCe: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So this next one is a situation that I was involved in. I actually wasn’t directly in HR at the time. I was working in payroll, but I was working for an organization that required fingerprint clearance, but that can take a long time to come in. So a lot of times they had people start before the clearance came back, and most of the time, they were cleared and it was fine. In this particular instance, it was two employees. It was like a couple. They both started working for the place at the same time. It was working around kids, which is why there needed to be fingerprint clearance. They just stopped showing up to work at one point. They had been gone for a couple of days. You know, we had reached out, couldn’t get a hold of them. Getting ready to process it as like a job abandonment and stuff, but the police contacted us before that happened.

Jennie: Good sign.

CeCe: Yeah. They asked if we had heard from them, if they had been showing up to work. We said, “No, actually. We’re trying to figure out what was going on ourselves.” The police said, “Well, we have reason to believe that they’ve kidnaped this individual and they’ve taken them to Mexico and that’s why they haven’t been showing up to work.”

Jennie: That’s….Also not a legitimate reason to miss work. [laughing]

CeCe: No, no, definitely not, but they wanted our help in trying to get a hold of them. Payday was coming up and so they figured they’d be reaching out.

Jennie: They’d want their paycheck.

CeCe: Yeah. They were too new to have set up direct deposit yet after disappearing right away so they were going to get a physical check and they wanted us to arrange a time for them to come pick it up. So I had to speak with these people. They did end up calling. They wanted to come meet, but I think they realized that that probably was going to get them caught and so they never did show up. [laughing] So that’s kind of a good thing, where maybe it would have been better if we would have waited for their background check to come through.

Jennie: Yeah. This is a little bit…So are they still on the run?

CeCe: I mean, that was many years ago. I didn’t follow the story, but we did see it in the news that they had taken this individual.This next one is another one of mine. Again, I was working in payroll in the finance department and I had a manager who you’d turn in your work and she’d mark it up with a red pen, you know, like at school? Which is fine. That’s not the complaint of mine. She would assign, depending on what your mistake was, she would assign a monetary amount to your mistakes.

[laughing]

Jennie: Like, how good it is? You’re giving me a bonus? No.

CeCe: No. Like a penalty. So she’d have a jar and she’d let you know when she was done reviewing your work, and you’d have to come pick it up and see what she would tell you how much you owed in the jar and you’d have to put money in the jar for penalties. She would tell us, “Once it’s full, we’re going to do a team lunch or something.” It was supposed to be like some fun thing.

Jennie: An incentive to do bad work?

CeCe: I guess? I don’t know. [laughing] So once the jar was full, we were expecting that we were going to at least get a lunch or do something with it and instead she actually ended up buying a bunch of pies and she put them in kind of like a common area of the suite and she put a little sign that said, “Courtesy of Finance’s F-Ups.”

Jennie: [laughing]

CeCe: She did not censor it. We were not actually allowed to eat any of the pies. It was for everybody else to have the pies.

Jennie: [gasps] Oh my gosh.

CeCe: So it was like public humiliation with a monetary penalty, and yeah, it was not motivating.

Jennie: What was that supposed to do?

CeCe: I really don’t know the thought process. I mean, that was pretty par for the course for her.

Jennie: Well, I mean, not motivating.

CeCe: No.

Jennie: Really inappropriate in so many ways, but also illegal. You can’t charge your employees penalties. We get, occasionally, members with good intentions – like even the person I was just talking with having a problem with someone showing up for work. Suspending them? Not the answer. Fining them? Also not the answer. We definitely heard situations and the Department of Labor has addressed this. It’s happened so often. If you’re late to work, you have to put a quarter in the jar, like that kind of a thing. Or you make a mistake on your finance assignment and you get a penalty. [laughing] You can’t, I mean, in the eyes of the law, that’s considered withholding pay. You’re not deducting it from their paycheck, but effectively you’re taking money away from them, even if they’re the one handing it to you. It doesn’t make any difference in the eyes of the law. You can’t do that.

CeCe: Yeah, because it’s not like you have a choice. It’s not like you’re actually purchasing something.

Jennie: Well, you’re not. You’re purchasing pies for another department.

CeCe: Yeah, right? [laughing] So the silver lining there is coming to CEDR and so that was on like Pi Day, you know? 3/14?

Jennie: Oh, so they made it a thing too?

CeCe: They made it a thing. So I have since turned that around and brought in pies that the whole staff was able to partake in for Pi Day here.

Jennie: Aww, but what employee did you have to pay for it?

CeCe: CEDR!

Jennie: Oh! You mean you can budget for that?

[laughing]

Jennie: Interesting. Well, interesting in a different way. I read about this actually, I read about the situation online, but we’ve seen similar things happen. So what happened here was a business owner found out that one of his employees was posting explicit videos of herself on OnlyFans. So the boss was not very happy about this. So he called their legal team about firing the employee because he said what she was doing was immoral. So legal, of course, because lawyers, we need all the information, asked for a lot of detail about it, including how this came to the business owner’s attention.

CeCe: Sure. Yeah. Good question.

Jennie: Well, the owner happened upon it when he was logged into his own OnlyFans account and looking for content.

[laughing]

CeCe: So it’s only immoral to be the person creating the content, but not to consume the content?

Jennie: Apparently.

CeCe: Okay. To each their own.

Jennie: Yeah. So Legal said, “We’re going to pass on that.” Because she wasn’t doing anything. She wasn’t doing it at work. She wasn’t talking about work. It wasn’t having an impact on her ability to do her job.

CeCe: She wasn’t wearing her company logo? [laughing]

Jennie: She was not. She wasn’t doing that. She was coming to work on time. Nothing. You’re there as a consumer using the – you can’t have it both ways. So CEDR actually…This happens not uncommonly, something like this. If you still search CEDR’s website, we have a blog. If you just search for the word ‘stripper’ we have a blog from years ago about an office manager discovering his front desk employee who was a stripper and he discovered this because he was at the strip club. So he also wanted to have her fired for ethical reasons and we were able to step in and say, “Okay, but we also then would have to tell your boss to fire you, right?”

CeCe: Yeah! So with OnlyFans, though, I’m not super familiar, but I thought that I’ve heard that like there’s influencers or they have private content, but it’s not actually explicit, too?

Jennie: No, it’s used for all kinds of stuff.

CeCe: Okay. So just being on OnlyFans doesn’t mean that you’re creating pornographic content?

Jennie: Not necessarily, no. Now there’s kind of an assumption there because that’s what it’s known for and it seems like in this scenario he was saying it was explicit content because he had viewed it himself.

CeCe: Yeah, that makes sense.

Jennie: But we definitely have heard of people just learning their employee has an OnlyFans or something similar, but you don’t know what that is. People use it for different purposes too.

CeCe: Yeah. Well, speaking of pornographic content, I’ve got one last one for you.

[laughing]

CeCe: Oh! Actually, this was at the same place as the pie situation! We had hired an IT person. His office was right across the hall from mine. It was like a narrow hall, and he would have his door closed all the time. There was one occasion where I came out of my office. Door was closed. We were at the very end of the hall, pretty secluded from other people, but I could hear that he was listening to porn in his office.

Jennie: That’s why his door is always closed.

CeCe: Yeah. So I did report it. Made me super uncomfortable. Like I said, we’re at the very end of the hall by ourselves. He was already somebody that I was uncomfortable around, so now I’m like, certain that he’s listening to porn or watching porn. So I reported it to HR, and nothing ever came of it. Several months later, he ended up leaving the organization. I didn’t know. I wasn’t privy to all of the details at the time because I wasn’t in HR, but was glad that he was gone. A few weeks after that, they did have to notify us that our identities had been compromised.

Jennie: Oh, great!

CeCe: So he had hacked into the systems and accessed information that he wasn’t authorized to. I mean, IT people, they have access to all your stuff, but that doesn’t mean that they’re allowed to look at everyone’s Social Security numbers and bank information and all that stuff. So they actually purchased some identity monitoring for all of the employees for a period of time. This was at an organization where we had doctors. It was behavioral health and so he had stolen the doctors’ prescription pads and so then the police are involved. That’s when I kind of knew all that was going on, because I had reported the porn. So they interviewed me and it was a mess. The kind of moral of that story, if they would have just addressed the watching of the porn? They could have saved themselves a ton of money for all of the identity theft monitoring. Saved the doctors the headaches because then they had to individually go report all of their stuff to make sure that they were covered. I know that that’s a concern for some of our members, too.

Jennie: Yes. We’ve had, over the years, a number of reports of employees calling in prescriptions for themselves or family members, using the doctors’ numbers or stealing the prescription pads or even now that things are electronic, abusing it that way. The most shocking part of it is that a lot of times the doctor doesn’t want to report it. If they’re using your DEA number or otherwise your state licensing to access drugs, you should be reporting it, but a lot of times they don’t because I think they don’t want to go through the hassle because maybe they have to change their number or do different things or be subject to an investigation or they just don’t want to get that employee in more trouble. We’ve actually seen doctors have licenses suspended or suspensions of their DEA licenses because they have allowed this to happen. They’re not reporting it. That’s a bigger problem.

CeCe: Yeah, I can imagine. I mean, if somebody is a mandated reporter for like child abuse or something and they don’t because they don’t want to get that parent in trouble or something. They face repercussions there.

Jennie: It happens, and in this situation you let the employee go maybe, but you don’t say anything about it and then they just go get hired and do it at the next place and you know it’s a problem.

CeCe: Yeah. Or they have that information and are able to abuse it further.

Jennie: Yeah. I think there is too much trust that, “Well they’ll never do it again.” But they often do, and that’s not okay. Well on that note…[laughing]

CeCe: Yeah, I think that’s all that we’ve got time for today.

[laughing]

Jennie: But hopefully some of that was fun for everybody. We always have more stories.

CeCe: Let us know if you want another one of these because we’ve got an endless supply.

Jennie: Thanks, CeCe.

CeCe: Thanks, Jennie.

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