Episode 100: Blake Lively’s Hollywood HR Nightmare: Lessons For Small Practice Owners

Paul: For those of you out there listening to me that have like six people on your team, this is one of the challenges that you face. I mean, when you have a real legitimate complaint someone’s bringing them to you, This is one of the hardest things to, for even ask to figure out with you and for you is how can we help you get this investigated and take positive steps towards it. And frankly, even with all of our expertise and all of Sony’s money and all of whoever else was involved in this, this is just the difficult part. But, but it can be handled better. And in hindsight, should have been handled better. 

 

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. CeCe welcome to the, welcome to the show. 

 

CeCe: Thanks, Paul. 

 

Paul: Before we get started on this, we may need to tell everybody who the players are and what’s going on here, because I don’t think everybody knows who Blake Lively, the actress, is. I know a lot of people do.

 

CeCe: Yeah.

 

Paul: And I don’t. What’s the guy’s name? Justin Baldini? 

 

CeCe: Baldoni. 

 

Paul: Baldoni. Sorry, Justin, I got your name wrong. 

 

CeCe: I may not have pronounced that accurately either.

 

Paul: Well, but people may not know who they are, what this case is about. It’s all over social media. I mean, it’s just everywhere. It’s crossed my feed. So let’s tell everybody what, what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about a movie. 

 

CeCe: Yeah, we’re talking about two actors who are working on a movie set, creating a movie together. It’s a little bit more complicated than that because they both also are in, you know, executive producer other types of roles. And then ultimately, though, Justin Baldoni also is an owner of the company, of the production company. 

 

Paul: And the script. He has the right to the script and he’s partnering with Sony. 

 

CeCe: Correct. So effectively, he is Blake Lively’s boss. Yeah, she’s an employee of the production company. What’s the name of the movie? 

 

CeCe: It Ends with Us. 

 

Paul: It Ends with Us. Yeah. It was a hugely popular book. Hugely popular is what I’m learning. Like, it was a big splash, which I love that. And then they decide to make a movie, or he decides he wants to buy the rights to it, they make a movie on it. I think the movie was pretty well-received as well. 

 

CeCe: I’m not sure. I don’t know. Yeah, I don’t know. It’s probably getting a lot of popularity right now. 

 

Paul: I’m definitely thinking about looking at it. I’m thinking about watching it. So for everybody out there who didn’t know and by the way, I had no idea who these people were until I started looking. And I was like, ‘I recognize that actress’. 

 

CeCe: Oh, you never watched Jane the Virgin? It was a great show.

 

Paul: No, no. So there was a period of time there where she was in all these movies. I was just not interested in the movie. She was, she’s often depicted as a mean girl, wasn’t she in a movie and she played the mean girl? That was her job. 

 

CeCe: Yeah. I’ve actually never seen any of the things she was in, but his claim to fame is Jane the Virgin. yeah. 

 

Paul: Oh Jane the Virgin. Okay, got it. All right so everybody who’s out there listening, this podcast is not about that movie. 

 

CeCe: Correct. 

 

Paul: It is about what happened on the set and how it really is, a lot of it just a big HR nightmare that could have been avoided.  It really could have been avoided. Yeah. Everyone in this situation that we’re talking about today on the podcast is pretty much litigation happy? I mean, this is a, this is a lawyer’s dream, right? I mean, they’re just like, ‘Let the billing begin’. And as a lesson, before I go a little even further, it dawns on me, I should say this: one of the reasons for having good policies, handbooks and some support is that we don’t want you to get into litigation. If you look at this in all litigation, there is no winner. The winners here are the lawyers who are fighting back and forth and billing. So if you can avoid litigation and or end it quickly, if a complaint comes, that’s kind of the goal for us out here in small business. We just, we do not have the capacity to go after these things. I also want to note that these people are dealing in $250 million lawsuits back and forth with each other. So just really I mean, for us, I think that’s a $25,000 lawsuit for the normal, for the normal people. But we’re not trying to protect our ability to fly private jets everywhere we go, put our staff or our family that we don’t like on a different airplane is that.

 

CeCe: Yeah, but that’s still that’s a lot of money for a small business. 

 

Paul: Even $25,000 is a lot of money. As I said, everybody seems to be litigation happy here and in everything that we’re, that we have talked about or are going to talk about in this is really based on what is alleged in the complaint. 

 

CeCe: Right. And so we don’t know what’s true at this point. Nothing’s been proven yet. And so we’re not focused on that in this conversation. We’re just trying to explain what Blake Lively is alleging and how that fits in to the framework of employment law and HR. And a complaint is always going to sound bad, right? Like it’s one sided. It’s, you know, it’s one person’s perspective and and their intent is to make it sound as bad as possible and present the worst parts of it. This does sound really bad, but we don’t have a full response from the other side. You know, it hasn’t been litigated in court. So we really don’t know the facts and we don’t know the truth. 

 

Paul: Which is exactly what you would experience as a normal business owner. 

 

CeCe:Absolutely. Yes. You would get a complaint and it would sound terrible and you would go, ‘Oh my gosh, what do I do with this?’ And then it might turn out that it really is as bad as it sounds, but it might turn out that somebody was sort of being dramatic. They’re taking something very personally. They’re presenting it out of context. I mean, there’s just a whole bunch of perspectives. 

 

Paul: One of my favorite stories and I’m generalizing this and it’s, I’ve seen it happen a couple of times, but I don’t always get to be involved in it, is that you get the complaint letter and then you get the response. Which is, ‘In your complaint, you listed the following things, but it looks like your client didn’t tell you about all these things they signed. all these corrective actions we issued all this, you know, records we have. Here is that part for you to consider now.’ So, you know, there’s always a response. So they’re just allegations. What else? What else you got here? 

 

CeCe: Well, there’s a good example within the complaint to sort of highlight what we were just saying. And so, for example, Blake Lively alleged that Justin Baldoni barged into her trailer while she was pumping, but now his team has released a text showing that she told him that he could come meet her while she was pumping. So we don’t know where the truth is. Maybe it’s somewhere in the middle. Maybe, she told him, and it was a one time. And he sort of took it too far or he took some leeway there and did it more than she was comfortable with. We just don’t know. We need the facts. We need to know the dates. We need to know if there are any witnesses. And that’s exactly what we would do if this was happening in our workplace. 

 

Paul: Okay. And so you’ve read the complaint, right? Okay. So break it down, like because this is what happens with that really complicated complaint comes in that, that letter and everything, you kind of think about the three or four things that are being alleged here. So we got to get rid of all the superfluous stuff in the lawsuit. When it comes to HR, what is she alleging?

 

CeCe: She’s alleging that she was in, a in a work environment and was exposed to harassment, retaliation and also a failure on the employer’s part to investigate her complaints and to then prevent or remedy what she was experiencing. 

 

Paul: Right. So that’s the, that’s the one that we can all grab hold of here. This applies to all of us. As in all of you listening out there, if you’re an employer, this is where you get yourself in the most trouble. But the the retaliation portion, that’s always very interesting because, you know, you can get the, your complaint could have no validity. In the context of a complaint at work, the employer might make a complaint that literally has no validity. But there’s still a trailing issue here about retaliation. So even if someone says you did this and you, and you’re able to prove you didn’t, if shortly thereafter you take some kind of action against them for reporting it to you or, you know, close proximity in time to it. That’s how you can really get yourself in trouble. And then one of the best defenses that you can have, I guess, anywhere in court and in life is show that you did an investigation, that you looked into it, and that you used what you learned to draw some kind of reasonable conclusion. Which is not the same as. ‘Yeah, we saw it, we read it, we talked to a few people and we decided there wasn’t anything to it’. I mean, that’s better than nothing. But that’s not, that’s not a thorough investigation.

 

CeCe: Right. I mean, you want written accounts of the conversations that you had with people. You want timelines, you want all of that. Yeah. 

 

Paul: To the to the very best of your ability. Okay. So I think the next thing here to cut through the chaff of these, these movie stars, this really boils down for at least for us to do the podcast. This really boils down to one thing. A lot of people feel like Blake is this big star, got a lot of power and she does a lot of money. And clearly two jet she needs to fuel that is not relevant here. Her relationship, so what’s her relationship to this? She’s, she’s not, she’s not the owner. She, she, she’s not the one to put on the whole thing. She’s there to act. 

 

CeCe: She is. Yes. She did have some sort of executive producer role. However, that doesn’t negate the responsibility of the actual production company who is employing her still.

 

Paul: So they’re the employer? She is an employee of them. 

 

CeCe: Yes. Yeah. 

 

Paul: Yeah. They needed to be treating her more like an employee. 

 

CeCe: Absolutely. Legally, they have that responsibility. 

 

Paul: Yeah. I mean, I wonder if it would, if they would have. I don’t think they would just based off of what I’ve read. But again, everything’s an allegation. Would it have been the, would they have acted the same had it been like a production, first line production person who runs and gets stuff for different people and is just a rank and file employee. If they came up and said ‘Someone sexually harassed, someone walked in on me in the bathroom when I was pumping, when I said, I’m in here’. If they came would this would this, you know, these organizations step up it as an employer and do all the things that we just talked about? And I don’t know that they would have. 

 

CeCe: I, yeah that’s so hard to say. Hollywood’s just a different beast, right.? So, but probably not. I don’t think that they probably would have done anything substantially different.

 

Paul: I don’t know that they would have. And that would have been a mistake as well. And there’s some stuff peppered in here that other people who were rank and file were filing some complaints. Or not happy with the way things were going forward. 

 

CeCe: I think the only thing, if it had been that situation, people would be a little bit more clear on how wrong at least the company was for not stepping in and investigating. I think sometimes it’s people’s inclination to go like, ‘Well, Blake Lively can stand on her own’. But if it was one of those, you know, hourly employees who’s doing clerical stuff or doing those more administrative manual tasks, people might view it a little bit differently. 

 

Paul: Well but, but we have a problem here. We have something that kind of speaks to that, which I’ve just kind of jump into. No employee handbook, no policies. They were in California where there’s certain posters that are supposed to be up and there’s supposed to be a way for people to file their complaints. So now I’ll hit that several times during the during the podcast today. But those are key things. You need to have the right policies in place and let someone know that you will not retaliate against them.

 

CeCe: Yeah, I have to imagine they’re going to get nailed for some of those things just because they’ll be exposed throughout this process, even if in the end her perspective is off and it doesn’t go in her favor for that part. 

 

Paul: You know, what we don’t have is we don’t have dental practices or medical practices that come together for a very short period of time, and then they break up.

 

CeCe: Yeah. 

 

Paul: And that’s what a movie set does it comes together. So I get it. It’s, it’s there’s not a lot of room for error for you to grow and learn, because by the time the bad things have happened, you’re on the back side of your movie ending and you’re you know, you’re going you’re going in a you know, in a new direction.

 

CeCe: Yeah. You might have a whole new team. Yeah. I think they just don’t, you’re right that, that sort of fluidity of what the team looks like probably prevents them from viewing themselves as an employer in the traditional sense. And maybe they don’t realize. They have huge legal teams so you’d think somebody would have been like, ‘Hey, you’re not doing this.’

 

Paul: You would think so. Look, I got some more thoughts. I’m just going to kind of jump in here and talk about a few things. I think an important point to make here is that several employees, not just Blake, had issues primarily with Baldoni and the Wayfarer CEO. Apparently they had no HR or policies. The question that you have to ask is: well, if they had issues, how are employees supposed to handle that? Like, what are they supposed to do with it? So, so we look at the complaint and jeez, it’s a long one and there’s a lot of stuff in it. So for everybody listening we’ve, we’re not going to address all the other craziness that’s in this, but there’s just a lot of HR kind of tea here I’m going to spill. I’m going to date myself back to what, five years ago? There’s a bunch of HR tea here. So according to the complaint, Blake was not the only employee who had issues during the filming. She’s not the only one who raised complaints. So, so we know that now from looking at the complaint again, these are all things that are alleged. So if I’m not saying alleged enough, I need to be saying that these things are alleged. They are not statements of fact yet. They’re just things that we’re pulling out of the record. Because the concerns that were being raised were about the business owners themselves,  Blake tried to go above them and complained directly to Sony, and Sony was the distributor of the film. So she, she tried to go straight to Sony. Well, Sony replied to her and they told her they couldn’t resolve the issues since they had no control over the conduct of Wayfarer employees. That’s such a lawyer answer. By the way, for anybody who’s listening, that is the lawyer answer back saying ‘Not it, not it. We’re not the ones.’ This is the same thing they do in franchises. You file a complaint against McDonald’s. The first thing McDonald’s says is that ‘These are independently owned organizations. We have no control over the way that they manage their employees or what they do.’ Your complaint is with that franchisee, not with McDonald’s at large. Sony’s doing the same thing. So part of this story is that filming stopped due to the writers’ strike. And I think that’s important because it gave everybody an opportunity to kind of stop and think about things. And in this interim process, Blake Lively, who was raised in the, in the Hollywood business, who is a powerhouse in her own right, understood that she could, on her own, express her concerns and dissatisfaction with the things she perceived as creating a hostile workplace environment.

Let me say that in a more simple way. Blake Lively has a buttload of money and access to attorneys and decided ‘I don’t have to sit around and wait for Sony or them to play this game. If I, I can initiate this this process and I can verbalize in writing to the people I’m working with that I need things to change around here.’ So Blake demanded on behalf of herself and also on others on the set, and this is another little important thing, because this is this is concerted activity within the business. Um Blake demanded on behalf of herself and and others a resolution to the hostile work environment concerns before she was willing to come back from the strike and go back to work. So I think the next place that we have to go is we need to talk about that last thing, which is retaliation. So now it seems that for whatever reason, even though there’s an agreement now in place and we’re going to talk about other reasons why retaliation is bad too, because there’s some protections under the law. You don’t just have to have an agreement if you’re working for someone that says you won’t retaliate against you, it can be actually unlawful under certain employment laws. So now it seems that for whatever reason, retaliation was precisely what is alleged to have happened in the lawsuit. And this is a big deal. So the cast and the book writer chose not to appear with Baldoni doing press so that kind of sets things off. It’s just something to kind of keep in mind is as I’m walking through this story, Baldoni engaged in his own marketing of the film and he did it separate from what was agreed upon with Sony, which gave the appearance that there was something going on, that there was a reason why he wasn’t out with his costar. People began to notice that and they begin to question it. And I think it’s very important to understand here that when they do these contracts with these movies and stuff, they lay everything out, all their expectations. If they want you to travel for the next six months, as part of you getting paid millions and millions of dollars to promote the film, then that’s what you’re going to do. And then in turn, your side gets to negotiate back and say, ‘Okay, I’ll travel for six months, but who’s paying for the private jets and for my extra people to travel with me?’, you know. And so all of this stuff gets laid out before it starts, and it’s all pretty standard. It’s not like they’re just making it up as they go along. Everybody kind of knows what the expectations are going to be. So questions like, is it going to be three, six or nine months? So the next thing you know, lots of media starts to come out disparaging Blake as well as the way she was personally marketing the film. So she has an interest in the film. I think all of these actors that are the principals in it, I think they have a financial interest in the film. They probably get paid a flat fee and then they get a portion of the box office. So the more people that go and pay more interest it’s shown, the more that Netflix pays to air it at some point, the better it is for them. And, you know, so they’ve got some skin in the game. So the next thing we know, at least from the record, from what they’re saying in the record, is that Blake Lively and her team became aware of some tech showing that a team of online publicists allegedly worked directly with the producer and the actor, the guy that we’re talking about, to quote unquote get out in front of the issue. And the issue being that in the middle of this film, it kind of got shut down first by the writers strike. That’s not the issue, but it kind of got shut down and nobody would come back because there were some allegations that that some things were happening on the set that weren’t copacetic. A concerted campaign created a narrative that painted Blake Lively as something other than a victim. So remember earlier in this process, for lack of using a better word, she’s kind of a victim. She’s saying ‘People are saying things they shouldn’t be saying around me. People are asking me to do things in scenes that I haven’t agreed to. And people are walking in on me, in my in my trailer.’ You know, she’s saying that that she’s a bit of a victim here and people need, to need to cut it out. So a concerted campaign created in there. That pain you bring me is something other than that victim in in one instance, a text that basically said ‘We can bury her’, which I find interesting. So if we went into some of the basics in employment law here, we would probably want to kind of go through this set of things here that I’ve kind of laid out. First thing is, is have policies now have a way for people to report. Next thing is, is to have processes. So it’s policies and processes. The way to report it, who to report is part of the process. If you feel that you something’s going on, say something and this is who you would say it, how you might say it. Having a good understanding of what a hostile work environment is and isn’t, I think is is super important. Because people banter, throw that word around, lawyers toss it in to complaints, even when there’s nothing there to support it. But I think it’s important for everyone to understand what that term means and what it doesn’t mean. So not giving privacy while pumping, making inappropriate comments here and there, talking about someone else’s appearance. Those are the kinds of things that can add up to become a hostile work environment. It’s kind of a body of what’s going on. And there’s so much going on here that I think, you know, maybe the application of the word hostile work environment is, is maybe fair. The next thing to understand from the HR point of view is that you can’t retaliate against people when they bring complaints to you. Raising a concern is protected even if the underlying concerns aren’t true or wouldn’t even rise to a legal level of something like a hostile work environment or discrimination or any of those things. So I want to say that again, even if the complaint is untrue, may not have any merit or may not rise to the level of lot where it could be included in a lawsuit, you still need to just hear this stuff. You should not retaliate against them. And what you shouldn’t do is hire a group of publicists to get out in front of this thing and drive that person into the ground and start, in effect, attacking them online. And, you know, I have no interest in Blake Lively or the Baldoni. I have no, I have no interest in the movie or in the subject or anything. There’s no reason for me to see any of this. I don’t, I just don’t care, don’t care about the book by the way. However, this stuff showed up in my feed, so they did such a good job of trying to run her into the ground that disinterested people in the algorithm still got some of the stuff presented to them. So good job. Good job of the thing. They did a great job doing, maybe, maybe not doing a great thing. The person to complain is about can’t be responsible for investigating and resolving the complaint, especially in an organization of this size. For those of you out there that are listening to me that have like six people on your team, this is one of the challenges that you face. I mean, when you have a real legitimate complaint someone’s bringing something to you. This is one of the hardest things for even us to figure out with you and for you is how can we help you get this investigated and take positive steps towards it? And frankly, even with all of our expertise and all of Sony’s money and all of whoever else was involved in this, this is just the difficult part. But, but it can be handled better and in hindsight should have been handled better. An administrative complaint with a California civil rights department, it requires a process for discrimination claims. Again, I want to remind everybody this is not a big company problem. Once these laws apply to you, it’s a can be a small company problem. So it’s kind of, I like this story. I’m telling the story because it’s all blown up and it’s out there in the open for everybody to see. But again, it’s pretty interesting and it’s applicable even if you’ve only got a few employees. So I also want you guys to remember a few things. This is, I think is a really good thing. And someone else caught this. So I may sound smart, but someone else caught this. We often tell everybody out there, I really want you to use your company. I want your employees to be put in your system and use your company’s systems for things like email. And if they’re doing texting for work or any of that stuff, I want the employees in your system. And I want other policies in place that allow you to monitor those systems and to be able to go back in and see what’s been said and where it’s been said and, you know, all of that stuff, because frankly, it’s super important that you have access to that. It could help you win a lawsuit. Nonetheless, you got to make sure that you have control over the information that you can access it. So I think it’s important here to kind of note these other things not just go through them real quickly because they’re tangential, but I think they’re, okay they’re HR adjacent. Blake is also suing the publicist, but not the publicist’s company. Not the publicist’s company that Baldoni was working with. So you would think when I say she’s suing, you would say, ‘Why didn’t she sue the company? Why she’s suing the publicist that was working with them?’ So the individual PR person working with Baldoni left the publicist’s agency. She left the publicist’s agency under bad terms. And there was a breach of an employment contract going on. So allegedly, this PR person acted independently and out of the scope of what her employ would have allowed. So this individual publicist has kind of gone on the attack in saying ‘We can, you know, we can crush her’ or something to that effect, allegedly saying these things. The main publicist, the main company’s like ‘We don’t do that. That’s not who we are. We don’t use the blackout stuff. That’s not who we want to be involved in’. So much so that they didn’t know that it was going on. So they were let, you know that employee was kind of acting independently. Here’s the thing: for Blake to get a lot of evidence, she’s subpoenaed the PR agency. The agency was happy to turn over the evidence, which most time when you get a subpoena, you’re like, ‘God, I don’t think I want to give them this.’ But they were like, ‘No, here you go. Here you can have this stuff.’ And because everything was done on a company phone and email, everything that she had been saying this, this publicist who was kind of going rogue was part of the record. And it became evidence that this person was acting, that they were acting on their own, and that they were, you know, kind of a rogue employee out there doing something that the PR company didn’t want them to do. And this is super important because it’s going, it got the PR company out of the line of fire, which I think is a really big deal. Had the PR company not had their employees using the company owned devices, the PR company likely would have been sued itself. They wouldn’t have been able to give the records and the records wouldn’t have shown what it was so  it would’ve just been, he said-she said and they wouldn’t have had the documentation. And then it’s one of those things where they sue everybody in sight and you have to fight your way out of it. 

 

Paul: If Paul was King of the World segment. In this segment, I’m going to try to fix all the problems of the universe. I thought about them all. I spent a lot of time. Britt’s here with me, if I ruled the world. But first I got to set the stage. I’m going to miss TikTok, I’m just going to say that. On TikTok I’ve been following this feed called SB Mowing, and there’s a guy named Spencer who’s on SB Mowing and different people do this. And this being they go out and they film themselves cleaning up a yard like they’re landscapers and they find yards in terrible shape and they go out and they do something. Spencer is taking kind of a different approach to this really smart, smart, monetarily. He goes, he doesn’t charge people to do it, but he’s getting paid because he’s getting a bunch of views on TikTok and all the other channels. So he’s getting checks for doing it. I think he’s making a lot more money that way than he would charging somebody 300 bucks to mow their lawn. And what Spencer has done is actually gone to his city and said, ‘I’m here. This is what I want to do. And I’d like for you guys to help me find people who need help.’ And so his approach is he’ll even go to a house. He’ll confirm that no one lives in it and he’ll look, you know it’s easy to spot. You’re driving through the neighborhood. All the yards look pretty good. And there’s this one house that looks like a horror show sitting there, ann the vine’s growing up. And, and so Spencer will go in, he’ll film himself. He speeds everything up real quick. You don’t have to spend a ton of time with him. And he goes in there and he just rips everything down, takes out trees, mows grass, cleans up driveways, and that’s what Spencer does. And Spencer, in working with the city, got a call. They said, ‘This lady has a problem. You might want to drive by her house and see if you can help’, which I thought was pretty neat. When I was talking to Britt. Britt was shaking her head and I was like, ‘Wow, I’m doing a really good job of explaining this.’ But Britt that’s not what was going on, was it?

Britt: No. So the funniest part about all of this is that I knew immediately who you were talking about, because when I was pregnant with my first child, I had really bad pregnancy insomnia. So I couldn’t fall asleep. And the only thing that helped and so weird, was watching lawn care videos. So I got addicted to watching SB Mowing and to watching Spencer clean yards because he helped me fall asleep and my husband used to joke that it was a pregnancy craving, but I had to watch these videos or else I couldn’t fall asleep.

 

Paul: So it’s AMSR, is that what it’s called? 

 

Britt: I think so, yeah.

 

Paul: Where you just hear this sound in this thing and you just get in this zone.

 

Britt: You just watch him like, clean up and trim back the… Yeah. And like, you know, taking the shovel out and, and I mean, he doesn’t do an okay job like he does a phenomenal job.

 

Paul: He does it all the way.

 

Britt: Yeah. Even though it’s free, he’s not getting paid to do it. Like he is getting paid, you know, to post these videos but he genuinely cares about doing a good job.

 

Paul: He really is kind of a sweet guy. It comes off as being a really good guy. So anyway, he goes up to this house and there’s a woman living there and her name’s Beth. Yeah. And in this instance, there’s someone there. Beth answers the door. I’m going to put Beth in her eighties, eighties or seventies. So clearly Beth is, I don’t know this, but just based on my own mother’s actions and she’s around that age, it looks like Beth may have had some health issues, maybe a stroke here or there that she’s gotten through fine, but it appears that she’s in this home alone. She doesn’t have a lot of help.

 

Britt: And she’s got severe mobility issues. So like Spencer has to help her off her own porch.

 

Paul: Oh one of the sweetest parts is just watching her take his arm and him walk her through. But anyway, to get to the crux of the story he says, ‘Hey, Beth, I see that your yard needs to be cleaned up. Can I clean your yard up?’ And she’s just shocked. She’s like, ‘I’ve been trying to do it. I got a letter from the city two weeks ago. They’re going to fine me. I keep calling different companies. No one shows up to do anything.’ You know, that. That, you know, things just aren’t going great. That’s the world problem I’d like to solve. Then Spencer being Spencer, while he’s doing it he notes that the front porch is about to fall down. She needs a handicapped ramp. He says, ‘Look, I’m going to clean up so you can get into your car’ because she drives her car up the driveway. But she can’t. She can barely get from the house to the car. And I get it because mom does the baby step thing, too, like her feet scoot along and we’re bracing ourselves. Any time she changes from like concrete to grass to a rug to dirt, and we’re bracing her, too. And so it’s difficult. And the last thing we need is a fall, like this is the worst thing that can happen to someone of that age. So here’s what Spencer figures out. Spencer figures out that he, that she Beth, needs more than just her yard done. Like in typical good person fashion. Likely if we went in that house we would find that there’s other things that need to be fixed, leaking faucets and you know, all sorts of things that are fall hazards for her. She needs the handicapped ramp and literally she, he can’t fix a driveway like this. It has broken up and it’s, it’s terrible. So that means she can’t walk down to her mailbox safely. Just all of these quality of life things are simply being affected because she can’t really afford or get her mind wrapped around having someone come and mow the lawn and take care of stuff. And I’m going to be a good son right now and say that I recognized this with my mom about five years ago, and I just took over. The mowing guys send me a picture, I sent them a Venmo. It’s that important, everybody that we take care of people in their older age, which I’m heading towards. So I’m pleading with you all to take care of me. Anyway, so he puts up a GoFundMe, you know, he’s got his channel and he did his mowing thing, but out of character, he says, “This lady needs some money to do all of this.’ Because it doesn’t look like, you know, there’s family or anybody around. So he puts up a GoFundMe and puts a $100,000 on it, which I-

 

Britt:  Which is part.

 

Paul: That’s really high. And I thought, ‘Good luck, Spencer.’

 

Britt: Especially for random strangers, on the Internet.

 

Paul: Yeah. And so but here’s what’s supposed to happens, and Spencer’s smart. Here’s what always happens. You say how much you need and that’s how much you get. And when people come in and if your goal was $20,000 and they see you have $26,000, they go, ‘Okay, they’re taken care of. They’re going to be able to get their dog to surgery or they’re going to be able to take care of their mom’s hospital bills’ or whatever it is. That’s just the mentality of it. I think that’s a good mentality. You just kind of set the thing. So I think he set it at $100,000 because he was hoping anything, anything would be helpful. You know, even if she only got 15, 20, $30,000, it would be enough to get a lot of the little things done. Britt, this thing’s been up for five days.

 

Britt: Yeah.

 

Paul: What was the contribution to Beth this morning when we checked it, GoFundMe?

 

Britt: Yeah. So this morning it was at $765,728 and climbing.

 

Paul: It is still going up. It’s, it’s pretty amazing.

 

Britt: Yeah, it’s incredible what happens. Yeah.

 

Paul: Yeah. Yeah. I mean.

 

Britt: When good people do good things when.

 

Paul: When two good people, because you can see Beth is a good person and you can see that Spencer’s a good person. My hot take on this, if I could cure all the problems, is that instead of municipalities issuing $256 threat and fine to this house, they ought to go check on her and see if she’s doing okay and see if she has the funds and see if she has support and see what needs to be done. And then they ought to be able to do the minimum for her to get the yard back in compliance and try and help her out. I don’t know exactly how that’s supposed to occur, but I know that it doesn’t occur. I wish government would do a better job. You know, I think we all do. But I also recognize that there’s limitations on what we can do, you know, as a society and what our governments can do. I just this one struck me because it was so clear that Beth needed help, not a letter threatening her. You know? 

 

Britt: And she was brought to tears like, in these videos and all this up the.

 

Paul:  Where he was like, Beth, I want to tell you, first time, it’s already gone over a half a million dollars. She’s like, ‘But there’s no fire here’. She, she immediately thought about the fire and the floods. I mean.

 

Britt: Yeah, I think it’s just as important to seek out opportunities where you can help people who need help as it is to to ask for help when you need it.

 

Paul: Yeah. One of my favorite podcasters in his, ends his broadcast with ‘Take care of yourselves and if you can take care of somebody else.’

 

Britt: I really like that.

 

Paul: Yeah, it’s pretty cool. And I think that’s the way to get through life.

 

Britt: Hey, Paul, I’ve got a community question for you for our Community Question segment. Are you ready?

 

Paul: So it’s a community question. We get them in our Facebook group or you send them in to us. And in the outro from the podcast, we’ll give you the email address you can use to send a question directly to me. And I love your questions. Make them hard. Make them difficult.

 

Britt: Yeah, and it’s in the show notes as well. So check the show notes for that. So inside of our Facebook group we got a really good question and I am excited for you to answer it today.

 

Paul: Do you know the answer?

 

Britt: I think I do, because we talked about it a little bit. But before I talked to you about it, I didn’t know the answer. So I was very excited to kind of pick your brain about this. So the question reads: “The doctor just amended our handbook to include a paragraph about telephone calls being recorded for marketing or training purposes. An admin employee is refusing to sign the acknowledgment and is stating that she does not agree with the recording policy. What now?”

 

Paul:  We want agreement, right? We want buy in. When we make changes in our business and want people to accept it, want to have buy in. So the first thing I would try to do is talk to this employee and see what their actual concerns are. So ‘I just don’t agree with it’ is not enough. Like, why don’t you agree with it? And maybe they’ll give you enough input that you can be like, ‘I understand what your problem is here.’ You know, if you’ve got somebody like us on your own, you try to find ways to assuage that that employee’s concerns. So I think that’s always the best and first, first step towards it. However, this is a common practice. It is a business practice. It is much needed, I think, in many businesses, because you want to check for quality control. And frankly, I don’t know any good business that doesn’t do some quality control and listen to the calls to make sure that everybody is doing their job the way that they should do it. It’s, it’s a very important business tool because of the way it’s associated. And if the policy is written properly, it’s a policy and your employees do not need to agree to it for it to be enforceable. So the reason why we ask for an acknowledgment is that we want you to acknowledge it. So one thing I want to make sure and I don’t know, is that your policy doesn’t have the term ‘You agree to be recorded, yadda, yadda, yadda.’ It is ‘We are implementing this system. Here’s the reasons why.’ What you’re asking for is them to acknowledge that you’ve told them that that this is occurring. That’s what you’re seeking. So by distributing it to this employee, by either getting an email back from them saying, ‘I don’t like this and I don’t agree to it’, you have actually done your job because you can prove that you told them that you were doing this and now presuming that it’s okay to do it in your state, presuming that you have everything else correct, you can just move forward. You don’t need agreement from this employee and you could even if you wanted to. Maybe with a little help, tell them that ‘We appreciate your concerns’. Get those concerns, please, and then tell them we’re going to record. ‘When you answer the phones, when you do these things, we will be recording and will be using them for quality control purposes’. And that’s it.

 

Britt: So you ask the employee if they haven’t given a written notice that they disagree. If they’re not going to sign it, then just have them email you.

 

Paul: ‘Can you tell me what your concerns are here?’ That presents you know, the other way to show it is that two or more of you talk to them and you’ve got a witness that you’ve distributed the policy to them.

 

Britt: Some sort of documentation.

 

Paul: You need some kind of documentation to be able to prove it. The simplest documentation is, ‘Here’s the policy in writing. Click our little thing over here and acknowledge it that and sign it that we told you that it’s here’ and you move on with your day. I have a feeling this employee is just being, for lack of a better word, a little dramatic and bringing something up. They have some concerns. They’ve taken this as a point to take a stand on. They’ve been on Reddit. They’ve been in that crazy, couple of those crazy groups, and they’re just uncomfortable with it. To see if you can sway it. Next question would be, and not going to answer this today is, could you fire them for it? And that’s a very, very good question for another podcast.

 

Britt: Cliffhangers. I love it.

 

Paul: A cliffhanger. I just did a cliffhanger. All right, everybody, I hope you enjoyed today’s podcast. We gave you a lot of stuff here. We got Blake Lively and whatever the heck’s happening over there, all kinds of employment HR law discussions during that. If I was king of the world, I promise you have some really good things to talk about as king of the world. We’re going to get into those self-checkout lanes here pretty soon, and we’re going to talk about how we’re being forced to work for free. And then, you know, I love the tough HR questions. I love that segment. We’re just going to try to make sure we get it every single podcast. And thanks for coming to What the Hell Just Happened. We appreciate you guys as listeners and share it with your friends. 

 

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