Episode 93: Beware of Workplace Monsters: Taming the Ghouls Draining Your Practice

Paul: It’s tempting to want to just step in and give some overly broad direction to them, which is ‘You need to stop complaining. I don’t want to hear any more negative comments out of you, and you better be talking about work. I don’t want to hear any more of this gossiping and stuff that you are doing’. Everybody just be careful because those terms can be misconstrued, especially if put into writing in the wrong manner. And it can violate a very important federal law which allows employees to discuss their wages, their benefits and their working conditions. So you can see how this all mixes in, right? Because they’re doing some emotional werewolf-ing stuff and they’re probably mixing in some complaints about work. So that’s why now it gets hard because as a manager, you got to focus in on what it is they’re doing, the impact of it, and this should sound again like a, you know, some kind of a corrective action.

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 topic to talk about whatever I want. Think barbecue, space exploration, growing your business. The things that interest all of us.

Paul: It’s Halloween, everybody. And you’re tuning into What the Hell Just Happened. Today’s episode we picked three of the top issues that we get over at CEDR in the Solution Center, which is the place where the experts get all the questions from our members. And it really highlights the fact that, you know, some problems are easy to solve because there are technical issues and you can just approach it that way. But today we’re really going to be talking about some of these softer issues. The first one, it’s more technical, it’s people won’t clock and they’re zombies and it’s… they’re clocking zombies and you’ve got to do something about them. But the other two, which we’ll talk about, which is the emotional vampire and the workplace conflict werewolf. These are softer problems. You can’t just aim, point, aim and shoot and fix the problem. I have asked Britt to join me today on the podcast and Britt and I are just going to talk about some of these things and give you a few solutions to them so that you can maybe possibly get this stuff, I guess we’ll call it under control. And I hope you find today’s episode, the Halloween episode, enjoyable.

Paul: We need some sound effects here. Like ‘I want to suck your blood’.

Britt: Awooooo.

Paul: Britt, that is not scary. So in today’s episode of What the Hell Just Happened, it’s the monster. It’s the monster episode, appropriately, because it’s Halloween and we’re going to go over a few of the monsters that we find as HR people roaming through offices.

Paul: I don’t want monster to mean instantly bad, but it is monster behavior. It’s disruptive. It’s not always in the best interest of the practice. It’s not best interest of the monster. And it’s definitely, and I do, you know, because we do this is mostly an HR podcast, What the Hell Just Happened? You know, technical HR term is it pisses people off, especially managers when monsters do the things that we’re about to go through. So the first one Britt, with no further ado. Are you excited to know what the first monster is?

Britt: I am. What’s the first monster?

Paul: It’s the time keeping zombies.

Britt: Oooh, zombies. I like it.

Paul: Every single week. Sometimes twice a month, Sometimes once a month. Some poor manager out there or owner who’s working through, I don’t know, Gusto or something like that.

Paul: Who has decided, by the way, let me just point this out to those of you who are doing your own payroll and not working with a full service payroll company. Where you sit down. I don’t know what your is worth, but I’m going to make it $500 an hour. That’s what I think you’re times worth if you’re an owner of a practice and listening to this, if you’re an owner of any business. I mean, minimum, your time’s worth $500 an hour. If you have to spend an hour doing payroll instead of hanging out with your family or seeing a patient or doing something productive within your business, which can make more way more money than $500. I don’t understand it. I just don’t get why people hold on to doing their own payroll. And I appreciate that small businesses have these companies out there that you can get online and screw up your payroll. You know, through an app. But I really do recommend that you consider using a full service payroll company. And then you just have to be careful there because that’s not always a good thing either. I mean, some of the major payroll companies out there are just awful to work through. So.

Britt: It’s interesting, too, because the last two jobs that I had before CEDR, it was manual timesheets.

Paul: No kidding.

Britt: It was printed out. Sign it, and then forward it to your manager and sent it to your manager to sign. And then they’ve got to take it to the CEO to sign. And it always was a hassle that every other Friday to get it done.

Paul: Can you imagine the person receiving that?

Britt: I getting all of those…

Paul: Getting all that stuff sent to you.

Britt: And then having to print them all, sign them all, check them all.

Paul: Yeah, that’s a lot. That’s a lot of fail points. That scared me so bad. I just dropped my pen. Okay, so let’s see. Let’s start with this first thing here. Just know that there’s tons of technology out there for timekeeping that can solve a lot of the things that we’re going to talk about.

Paul: This one little zombie that, the problems that they cause. You know this is something that over at CEDR we integrated a really powerful timekeeping system. It’s all online. It’s keeping track of everything. You can tell when someone’s late, you can tell if they haven’t clocked in. Then you can tell by the way, it’s tracking all of their time for them. And it’s also set up so that it’s actually reporting both to them and you how much time off they have left. They can put a request. I mean, I didn’t intend to come on here and be like, ‘Hey, you should use our timekeeping system.’ But hey, but anyway, let’s talk about these damn zombies. So you know that the email goes out or the internal chat goes out, says, ‘Hey, everybody, I got to approve time cards.’

‘Tell the managers whatever, approve time cards by Thursday because we’re running payroll on Friday’, and you can literally hear the zombies fire up in the back and, you know, and so at that point, that’s when the manager is like, ‘Oh my goodness, I’m going to sign into the system and see who hasn’t clocked in, who needs a correction.’ And the next thing you know, you realize that it’s usually the same zombie. Or the same couple of zombies. They haven’t clocked in when they were supposed to. They need a correction. They haven’t been clocking out. So you don’t know when they stopped. By the way, they’re on vacation right now. They left on Wednesday without a care in the world, including they were just like went zombie being all out. I guess they’re going to go out there and eat brains or do whatever it is they do on vacation. And they have they didn’t clock out. And so you don’t even know how many hours that they worked. Yeah. So it’s maddening. I mean, these people are they absolutely drive me crazy. And, you know, it feels like you can issue a corrective action to a zombie over and over and over again. And it just really has no impact on them. Like it’s just over and over and over. You’re like, ‘Please clock. You got to do this, you got to do that.’ But before we get into maybe how you can cure this with your zombie, let’s talk about the risk to your practice.

Britt: Hmm, yeah.

Paul: So there’s a whole set of really scary monsters out there who work for the federal government, and your state and local authorities who really expect you to keep accurate records of the time that your employees have worked. And the purpose for that is very…it’s ten fold. That’s how they charge taxes. It’s how they collect Social Security. It’s how they collect state unemployment tax. That’s how they ensure that you aren’t misclassifying your employees. I mean, there’s just a ton a ton a ton of things out there of which if your time records are not accurate, it can really cause you some serious issues. And so this isn’t just about getting payroll done, which it really I think that’s the worst part of having a hard time keeping zombie.

Britt: It’s a time suck.

Paul: Yeah

Britt: I mean, it really is. As a manager, you’ve got a million and one things on your plate. The last thing you want to be doing is spending 4 hours on that Friday chasing people down and, you know. Answering vacation requests and, you know, trying to get those people who always turn it in late every other Friday to send it in again.

Paul: And then here they come with emails, sticky notes, stopping you in the hallway. ‘Hey, I need you to fix my time from Thursday. I’m sorry, I forgot to clock out’, you know? It’s just so… my understanding of this, and I have a long term understanding. I’ve been an employer for many, many, years dating all the way back to the early nineties, everybody. I was 12. Ha. That was funny. Okay Britt, finally she laughed. Uh, what was I going to say? I have a long history… the clocking, the thing, the people bring me the stuff. I don’t know what the point was, what I was getting at. So I’ve been doing this for a very long time and it’s always been a big pain in my rear end. I mean, it takes a ton of time and it’s very difficult to keep track of. And so the last thing you need is somebody zombified their brain around time keeping and just kind of wandering through it, not caring. So the way that you get a zombie to start doing what a zombie is doing in this particular case is you just, you know, you guys have seen on television just going to in the hallway and chop their head off. No?

Britt: Brains.

Paul: Brains everywhere. And you got to clean it up. And then there’s the OSHA report that you’re going to have to put in. Yeah, maybe that’s not the best. Maybe that’s not the best guidance.

Britt: So it is the best, especially if you’re talking about someone who’s either always late, or always asking for corrections or coming to you, ‘Oh it looks like I have OT that you didn’t approve. But I worked it, you know. What do you, how do you get those people on board on those Fridays so that you can get done at a reasonable hour on that Friday?

Paul: Well, I do want to give everybody one more little incentive. Okay. Two incentives. One, the amount of time that you spend doing this as a manager is very, very valuable time and it need not be the case. Everybody should be clocking in doing what they want to, you know, doing what you need them to do. I think the estimates are anywhere from 50 minutes to 4 hours, depending on what the problem is, to make a time correction for a single employee.

Britt: Woof.

Paul: Now look, … everybody’s listen like ‘That’s not true.’ Look, I’m telling you, there’s ramifications. Like if you’re keeping a spreadsheet, you’re keeping track of what people are doing or not doing you’ve got to go and make those adjustments and of course, you’re going to forget about it. And it just, it’s a big time suck. So I’m not saying you can’t make a correction in less time, but if we look at the I think it’s the Association of Payroll Providers or something, they give some numbers on this. They kind of actually measure it. So there’s the, you know, that’s that cost there. What was the other question I was going to answer about this, what can we do?

Britt: Yeah, how do we how do we get them in line? How do we get these zombies fed?

Paul: Well, they’re zombies. That means that they just aren’t paying attention to this. You know, they got one thing on their minds and that’s eating brains. And so they’re not thinking about you or your time or timekeeping or any of the crazy stuff that, the problems they’re creating.

Paul: This is one about accountability. And this is where I like using technology and what you really have to do is you have to meet them where they are, which is you need to meet them on the following morning and say, ‘You did not clock out last night. And we’ve already talked about this.’ There’s another lever here is that in all employee handbooks, it needs to state that employees need to clock properly. And so we’ll put something in there about if someone asked you to not clock and work, you need to report it to management. That’s a very protective policy inside of an employee handbook. If anyone tells you that you’re not going to get paid overtime, that’s not true. We follow state and federal laws. And you know, there’s ways to say this in your policies. But the other thing that’s in that policy that’s implied in that policy is you have to clock. We’re not, this isn’t an option. It’s not something you get to keep doing over and over and over again. And I have found that you have to do two things, you can’t just do one.. I’m going to take another left turn. I know that you’re tempted out there tell people if they don’t clock properly, they’re not going to get paid for it. You can’t. You got to be careful about that.

Britt: Yeah.

Paul: There are some methodologies for where we can incorporate that kind of thing, but it’s almost as cumbersome as calling them up and, you know, reaching out to them and telling them ‘Clock, darn it.’ So the two things that you have to couple is you have to give them a corrective action, which is to say this is the issue, this is the impact, this is the improvement. And this is one of those things where, ‘We’ve talked to you until we’re blue in the face. I don’t know how to get through to you, but you’re now risking your job if you continue this behavior. We are no longer going to continue to work with you. That’s how important it is.’ And then you get the whole ‘Well, I’m just, you know, I can’t do-’, you know, you’ve just got to cut through that. And then the second component, remember that I said that there’s two components, is accountability. You got to be there. Even though you’ve issued the threat and you think that that ought to do it, you’re going to have to just really when they’re not clocking, when they miss the clock or they ask for a correction, you really have to make it uncomfortable. But again, it is your job as the employer. You have to give them a way to make these corrections. You have to make the corrections. You can’t use their lack of following direction in a punitive manner because this has to do with wage and hour rules. And the rules is just simple. If they work it, you have to pay it and you have to pay it in accordance with, you know, the overtime rules or whatever else is going on.

Britt: So you’re saying not to wait until payroll day to check everybody and see whether… you’re saying Tuesday night.

Paul: Yeah.

Britt: You’re checking and seeing who did that Wednesday morning. Anybody who was in the office Tuesday before you left or after you left, you know, you’re saying check those, check everybody throughout the week as you go. Instead of on that every other Friday.

Paul: Use phrases like ‘If you can’t get this right, you have a review coming up and you know, we do raises and stuff. This will absolutely impact it. I am not going to have my time burned because you can’t remember to do something that’s an intricate part of your job and it’s really going to impact whether or not you could even get a cost of living or a raise here.’

Britt: Wow, that’s powerful.

Paul: I mean, as a manager, you just have to at some point, you have to just kind of get people to do it. Now, look, at some point you get people corrected and, folks make mistakes. Look, if they make some kind of improvement, the next thing to do is go, ‘Hey, I appreciate you clocking. I really do. Thank you for getting this.’ Like reinforce the good behavior. And let’s hope that it keeps, that it keeps going.

Britt: You’re holding accountability for the negative and the positive. That’s important.

Paul: Yeah. Yeah. And if that doesn’t work, you chop the head off the zombie. You get him out of there, you know, if. If it’s that bad. Yeah. All right, let’s move on to our next monster.

Britt: Okay.

Paul: Can you guess which it’s going to be? I’m going to give you a hint.

Britt: Okay.

Paul: AWOOOOOOOO.

Britt: Must be a werewolf.

Paul: I did not brace Britt for that. No. What would make you think it’s a werewolf? Gosh, you got that wrong. No.

Britt: I’d love to know what else that could be.

Paul: I wonder if anybody else heard that. Because-

Britt: Kim is right next door.

Paul: She’s next door? So she’s chuckling. Kim’s on the complaints team, everybody. All right, so let’s talk about the werewolf of the workplace. Britt, what are your thoughts on this kind of werewolf?

Britt: Yeah. So these are the people I personally don’t enjoy the most because I don’t like conflict. I’m a peacekeeper.

Paul: Yeah, Britt does not like conflict.

Britt: So I’m a peacekeeper. And I would rather make everybody else happy than deal with somebody.

Paul: Okay, so let me ask you this, sorry to interrupt. How does it make you feel when this person you have to work with them and you have to deal with them?

Britt: It makes me stressed out.

Paul: It does. Yeah.

Britt: Yeah. And it’s harder for me to do my job because I’m constantly bracing, because these work place conflict werewolves, they tend to be calm and docile until stress happens.

Paul: Until they’re not.

Britt: Yeah. And so you never know, it’s like a ticking time bomb and you don’t know when it’s going to go off. You don’t know when it’s going to affect you. But you know that when it does blow up, you know that it’s going to affect you some way, that they’re going to say something or do something or something else is going to fall on your plate because they just can’t handle it anymore.

Paul: And it’s often nonsensical, right?

Britt: Yeah, it just doesn’t make sense because last week it was fine, but this week it’s not. Yeah.

Paul: Yeah. So everybody Britt is conflict avoidant. She really doesn’t like it.

Britt: Very much so.

Paul: I’m not picking on you Britt. And she’s a great, she’s a valuable member of our team and the last thing I need as a owner, or her manager needs is for Britt to be walking on eggshells because someone else is stomping around and having some kind of hissy fit at work. And that to me, these conflict werewolves, they’re always seeking, they’re seeking conflict. So it’s not just about they have a bad day. They make everybody else have a bad day. It’s that they are like blockers in a lot of ways. We’re about to put a big guide out over at CEDR on this, on these people we have labeled blockers.

Britt: Yeah. And a podcast episode in a couple of weeks.

Paul: And a podcast episode in a couple of weeks. They are blockers in a lot of ways in that they are the ones who are going to complain about any kind of change, any proposal that might cause more work for them or someone else.By the way, we have a black dog in here because it’s Halloween and we need to be, and we need someone scary. And your lab is a total fail on that last part.

Britt: Me too. I mean, it just must run in the family.

Paul: Yeah, that’s not a scary dog. Anyway, blockers. They just enjoy conflict. They’re always leaning into the negative. And they’re not. They’re not just not afraid of conflict. They kind of seek it in some ways,

Britt: And they tend to turn everybody else in the office into a werewolf by the end of the day.

Paul: Yeah, they’re all in there. We’re all in our offices. Just being in there, grumpy. Yeah. Is that a trait of werewolves? Are they just grumpy? My recollection is that they like to play basketball. There’s a movie. Yeah. Michael J. Fox. Look it up. Do you know who Michael J. Fox is?

Britt: No, I don’t know a lot of, like, actors. He’s old. He’s old school. And he did some movies. And one of them he was a werewolf playing basketball. And, you know, they can jump and they can dunk. So I know that about werewolves.

Britt: Well, the only two werewolves that I know from movies are Professor Lupine from Harry Potter and the Twilight series. So, like, I have a very different view. Basketball doesn’t come to mind.

Paul: Well, are the vampires bad on Twilight? Weren’t they middle of the road?

Britt: Technically, they’re both good. They’re both evil. They’re both, you know. Yeah. That’s why there are sides. You’re either Edward or you’re Jacob, I think, I think there’s another person. I don’t know.

Paul: Okay. So oddly enough, one of the cures for the kind of the conflict werewolf. The werewolf is always seeking to block things and to be a no and is also getting in arguments with everybody else. Is to talk to them about what it is that they’re doing. And again, I think one of the hardest parts about being an owner or a manager because, by the way, and I’m going to use dentists, but I think it’s doctors in general. We have all kinds of medical people listening. They’re conflict avoidant. It’s in their nature. They just want to do the treatment. They just want to make people better. They just, most doctors do not seek conflict because they really do need to be malleable and make their patients comfortable. And part of the way you do that is trying to, you know, create, maintain a calm demeanor about yourself and about all of your employees and everything that’s going on. So in the context of a business who’s like, we’ll use our software as an example, we call it BackstageHR. And the reason why we call it BackstageHR is, you guys are out there. You’re all trying to be rock stars. Some people are supporting the rock stars who are out there in front doing the clinical stuff. By the way, you don’t have to be a clinician to be a rock star. Your front desk person. That’s a rock star. They’re the first touch. The better they are, the better everything goes, right? We’ve got all these people. Now, if you have the greatest front desk person, they’re so good, you know, they’re great. They make the patients feel good. You can tell the days when they’re working, you can tell when they’re missing. You know, they’re missed. Do you really want to set someone beside them who is just this emotional conflict werewolf? You know, it’s so… I guess it’s another point to make. When you let this person be

Paul: their selves in this negative way it’s going to impact everybody. Including your patients and including, you know, how the day goes. And so it’s pretty scary.

Britt: Yeah.

Paul: See, see what I did there? It’s the Halloween episode, and I worked the word scary in.

Britt: Awoooo.

Paul: God, Britt. You just aren’t scary. Okay, so I want to go back to accountability. You have to talk to them about what it is they’re doing. Words they’re using, the way that they’re approaching what they’re, you know, what they’re saying. You really do have to be careful, though. Again, I got to drop a little HR lesson in everything. It’s tempting to want to just step in and give some overly broad direction to them, which is ‘You need to stop complaining. I don’t want to hear any more negative comments out of you and I, and you better be talking about work. I don’t want to hear any more of this gossiping and stuff that you are doing’. And by the way, that’s the other way the conflict, it shows up as gossip. It shows up as a lot of gossip. Everybody just be careful because those terms, all those things I just said, and I prefaced it with it with a terminology of overbroad can be misconstrued, especially if put into writing in the wrong manner. And it can violate a very important federal law which allows employees to discuss their wages, their benefits, and their working conditions. So you can see how this all mixes in, right? Because they’re doing some emotional werewolf-ing stuff and they’re probably mixing in some complaints about work. So that’s why now it gets hard because as a manager, you got to focus in on what it is they’re doing, the impact of it, and this should sound again like a, you know, some kind of a corrective action. All corrective actions do not need to be in writing. You should make notes of them regardless if you’re not going to put it in writing. But that same kind of attitude, that same kind of methodology is a better word for it, is I need to identify the specific likely what the issue is and the impact on the practice or in your fellow employees or whatever it is. I need to talk to you in those terms, very specifically. And it’s not that I’m upset with your general negativity and I would like for you to be a more positive person and be a team player. I mean, that’s what you want. That’s where you’re going with this. But for someone’s independent, specific behavior, you kind of got to go, ‘Yesterday when you said and did X, Y, Z, the impact was this and I don’t like it and this is where I need you to improve it. And we need to talk about this and I need you to talk to me in a way that you recognize what I’m telling you’. And you know, so guys that still that written conversation kind of format, but we’re having it in a human-to-human sort of conversation.

Britt: Well, and something else that I’ve learned from you in all of our conversations about blockers, if we’re assuming that these workplace conflict werewolves kind of follow that tune, is that they want to be heard in a lot of ways, even if they’re wrong, they still want to be heard. And sometimes just acknowledging that you understand that this is frustrating or different or you know what? Yeah, like this change is going to cause a little bit of stress in the beginning, but the way that you phrase how to have those conversations where it turns from, ‘I hear you and I understand where you’re coming from, but I still need to change and yeah’.

Paul: Yeah, I hear you. And it’s okay. You get to be upset and I need solutions. So anytime you want to bring a problem or you want to, you know, you’ve got this going on, it’s more constructive for you and for me and for the practice. If you bring that issue to me along with three or four suggestions on, how we might be able to improve this. And I’d like for you to spread that throughout the practice, because that’s part of our culture here, is we do identify when things aren’t working right because that’s part of innovation and growing both personally and professionally. But we, you know, without solutions, all it is is a complaint and how do you kill a werewolf?

Britt: According to lore, there is no way to kill a werewolf.

Paul: Not even the silver bullet. Nope. That’s for vampires. A stake?

Britt: You can’t. Nothing truly kills them. You just have to work with them.

Paul: How appropriate is that? No, seriously, I think that you can really work hard on this, but you probably are never going to kill this behavior if you’ve hired a werewolf. Let’s just hope that, you know, you need their hunting skills and all of their other skills outweigh this kind of, this negativity and this conflict thing that they’re constantly getting into. I think they do kind of fit the cavemen on Geico, those guys are so negative, right?

Britt: They are.

Paul: They’re just, the werewolf is just kind of they start off negative.

Britt: Yeah.

Paul: And if you really want to upset a werewolf and run it back into their office, start with ‘You should turn that frown upside down and turn it into a smile today’ because that’s, werewolves love to hear that stuff.

Britt: I doubt it.

Paul: Okay, what’s our third? We have three monsters so we’ve gone through the first two. What’s our third monster?

Britt: Emotional vampires.

Paul: I’m solving all the problems today. So these are the, we’ve touched on a lot of the monsters are kind of intangible. Well, the timekeeping zombie, that’s tangible. Yeah, that’s just a butthead not clocking.

Britt: Yeah.

Paul: Okay. Another HR term, by the way. Britt’s learning so much about HR. When you take the SHRM test, it’s question number four, define butthead. Time-keeping zombie? Yeah. Okay. And so the answer is A. Okay, so now we’re going to move on to what was it?

Britt: Emotional vampires.

Paul: I’m going to take a shot at this. I mean, I joked around that they want to suck your blood, but they want to suck all the energy out of everything.

Britt: All the fun, too.

Paul: They’re a lot like the werewolf, but they are so… their vampire-like activities are sucking the life out of your business and out of everybody around.

Britt: The culture and everything.

Paul: They are truly that person I think of as when they’re having a bad day, everybody’s going to have a bad day. And you don’t always know why or when. And to me sometimes, it’s astonishing that anybody brings that stuff to work to me. Like but I’m generally a pretty positive person. I try to be.

Britt: Me too, yeah.

Paul: Yeah. Well Britt, you’re just nice and kind and all the things that Halloween is not.

Britt: I’m not in charge of your raise, I hope you know that.

Paul: Oh darn it. I thought you were. So some of the problems with, I think, with the emotional vampire is I can’t fix this problem. I’m telling you as an HR expert, I think I can’t. I don’t have a lot here. You know, I’ve given you the same thing over and over again, which is you got to sit down and talk to them and say, ‘This is the issue, this is the impact’. And you can try that with an emotional vampire, but for most emotional vampires, they need therapy, you know, or to be someplace in a position whereby whatever is going on for them does not impact the people around them. And that’s a pretty not… I don’t know what that looks like, you know.

Britt: But they’re just constantly negative.

Paul: All everything’s negative.

Britt: And it’s like a foundational thing, like with a werewolf, they change into that being.

Paul: They go in and out of it, actually. One day, that’s the problem. The werewolf, one day the werewolf is like, ‘I love the werewolf, man. Look at I love this person’. And then the next day, they’re kind of like ugh.

Britt: Yeah, but vampires, they’re just constantly in that state. They don’t shift. There’s no shifting.

Paul: No, they’re pretty much… I think the one that we’ve been thinking of, yeah. They’re pretty much that way. And again, the impact is much the same as the werewolf who’s kind of shapeshifting on you. It’s impacting everybody around them and it’s going to impact your business and your, you know, your patients and all the people that work for you. I will not work alongside of the vampire.

Britt: I think a lot of people don’t. I think that’s why you get high turnover rates and why people leave, even if it’s a great job and they love what they do it’s that a coworker is awful.

Paul: Yeah. Yeah.

Britt: And so they leave because they’re not happy day to day because they don’t enjoy going into work.

Paul: Well, we all get sucked into that negativity thing. It’s crazy. It like… I mean, it’s so easy to enroll people. Maybe this is what’s going on social media. I’m about to solve all the problems of the world here. I mean, it’s so easy to get drawn into the negativity and the outrage. And I have to tell you that the worst of the vampires actually do that. That goes beyond just their general negativity in their Eeyore-ness. Another HR term. It goes beyond that into what I just described where, you know, it starts to really become a problem. Yeah, I hate to say this, but I think you counsel them, you talk to them about what it is. I think we want to be sensitive with folks like this because I am not talking about the person who is experiencing domestic violence at home right now. I am not talking about the person whose family member is very sick and this is impacting them. I’m not talking about the person who is impacted themselves by an illness. I’m not talking about those people, although I’ve been in some of those shoes before and been very sick. And it does impact your ability to be at work.

Paul: It does impact your ability to be positive. I mean, you know, all those things do occur and they still impacted everybody around me. There wasn’t much I could do about that. So we want to be we want to be kind in this approach right?

Britt: Yeah.

Paul: But you know, a person who’s having difficulties and it’s kind of coming in to work and that’s not normal. That’s not the vampire that I’m talking about here. I’m talking about the person who can find the negative in every single thing that goes on.

Britt: And not only can, but does.

Paul: Yeah, yeah. So this Halloween, I hope we helped solve some of the little monster problems that we have going on out there. Yeah.

Britt: And this is going to hopefully help all of our listeners reduce the number of hours, which is money for the business and, you know, the number of hours that you have to work dealing with all these different monsters. As we were talking, I was thinking, you know, how funny would a horror movie be? You know, we just have to get from here to there. Well, that would be perfectly, you know, it’d be a walk in the park, a couple of hours of a journey. But then you’ve got all these monsters coming out and attacking you and it’s, you know, an hour and a half and a month later.

Paul: I’m laughing right now because I just see myself just I turn the path and it’s just gorgeous. And a zombie pops in and says, ‘Could you approve my overtime, please? I forgot about the clock, the hours I worked two months ago. I worked on a Thursday and I worked till 6:30 and I’m clocked out at 6:15. And I want that 15 minutes of overtime.’

Britt: And then you turn another corner in the corn maze, and it’s like this werewolf comes out and he’s like, ‘That change will never work. It will never.’

Paul: ‘You should just stop. Don’t keep going. You’re never going to make it.’ And then you turn another corner and it’s an emotional vampire just crying and going, ‘I want to suck your work culture.’

Paul: ‘I need to talk.’ With that, final thought, Britt. Thank you for joining me on the podcast today Britt, that was fun. I hope you guys found this scary and frankly, we just picked the top three things that we get the most complaints about and just boiled them down and try to make them listenable again. Stand up for yourself out there. Be kind to one another, eat lots of chocolate. It’s Halloween. What else do they need to know? Can’t kill a werewolf. I think that’s all we got. I got nothing else. All right, everybody. What the hell just happened is you turn the corner and there’s a monster standing in your office and you’ve got to deal with it now.

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