Episode 510: Spooky Hour – Horror Stories from the Crypt

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.

Paul: Hi, everybody, and welcome to today’s What the Hell Just Happened in HR, and What the Hell Just Happened in HR is that it’s spooky time. Halloween is upon us, and we’re going to do a little bit of a different podcast today. So what we’re going to do is kind of follow this format that they use over at CEDR HR Solutions to do in their newsletters. It’s like we do these three roundup questions where we take the questions that are being sent in from members and from our community and we generalize them and we anonymize them and then we give pretty good direct answers to what the problems are that they’re sending over to us or to those questions. So in today’s podcast, we’re going to sort of do a roundup of all the calls that are coming into CEDR right now, to our sister company. These are the calls that are coming in from the horror movies of which CEDR provides HR support to. I know a lot of you wouldn’t imagine that, but over at CEDR, we provide all kinds of support to different industries, and of course we would be working with horror movies. Once a week, CEDR publishes the roundup of questions and what I like is that these particular questions, and if you’re out there listening and you have a horror movie or you have a horror situation and as you all could imagine, once these movies get up and running and they’re created, they run 24/7, 365 days a year. It’s just one problem after another. In today’s podcast, I’d like to welcome our head of compliance over at CEDR, Jennie McLaughlin, and I’m going to welcome her to this special edition of What the Hell Just Happened. It is our Spooky Hour Horror Stories from the Crypt podcast episode. Jennie, welcome.

Jennie: Thanks, Paul.

Paul: So I know that you’re constantly having to research the laws because you’re head of compliance and you’re going to be really good at helping me answer some of these questions. So what I want to do is just kind of jump in Jennie.

Jennie: All right.

Paul: I’m just going to jump in and I’m going to start letting, we’ll just go over some of these questions that are coming in. So question one comes from Emily. Emily asks, and it’s kind of a long question, but whatever: “So we have an employee named Jason who is pretty awesome,” – and we hear that, Jennie, a lot of times you got an employee, you got a problem with them, but they’re good in another way. She says, “I mean, overall, I think that the customers like him, his sticktoitiveness and his dedication to his job duties is always impressive.” Emily goes on to say, “But he’s creating a lot of messes,” and that she had just gotten a complaint from a new employee saying that they felt bullied by Jason. Then on top of that, it seems like every night shift that they have, more employees than usual, are walking off the job and not returning. As Emily puts it, “I mean, it’s almost as if they just literally disappear.” I’m not sure, and again, you know, this is the Halloween thing, I’m not sure if this is ghosting or not? I think that kind of fits?

Jennie: Oh! Ghosting.

Paul: See how I brought that into play? But we probably talk about what the risks are around that and she says, “Look, we asked Jason for his thoughts on all of this and Jason claims he has no idea what’s going on. As a manager he says everything’s great.” She also included this, which I guess she must have sent the question in because she was trying to deal with a lot of things going on with Jason: “He’s also asking for a lot more rolls of plastic sheeting and chainsaw replacement blades than any of his predecessors.” They feel like they may need to talk to him about their policies regarding, and I’m air quoting for anybody who’s listening, “borrowing supplies” because you need to have some rules about what people can do. But apparently they’re ordering quite a bit of plastic and chainsaw sharpening equipment and stuff. So her question is, “Where do I start? I mean, he’s kind of new, but he’s doing great.” Jennie, what are some of the concerns that come up for you?

Jennie: Well, you know, in talking to Emily, I’d want to know, is this…There’s a lot going on, but –

Paul: I mean, we got missing employees, we got messes.

Jennie: Missing employees. Maybe some stolen chainsaw blades? I don’t know. Maybe bullying people. I’d want to know, have you had to address any issues with him before? I know from our history, that Emily has already issued him a corrective action in the past, reminding him that it’s his responsibility to clean up his messes. He’s leaving some messes in the company bathroom.

Paul: From what I understand, it was all over the walls.

Jennie: All over the walls. It was just a big, sloppy mess.

Paul: It was almost like a horror movie over there.

Jennie: It was weird. Yeah. And, you know, no one knows better than him how much of a mess a chainsaw on a bathroom can make?

Paul: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Jennie: So he has to do a better job with that.

Paul: Well, I mean, but this might explain his ordering a lot more plastic from –

Jennie: He’s using the plastic sheeting so that –

Paul: So that it’s not as messy there.

Jennie: So the stuff doesn’t get on the walls.

Paul: A lot of times when we issue a corrective action to somebody, we’re asking, we’re telling someone like, “Why are you working overtime?” We don’t realize we’re actually causing the overtime. We’re seeing one more patient a day and we keep running over.

Jennie: So maybe he’s not actually stealing or using company materials like all this plastic sheeting.

Paul: He is reacting to that first corrective action.

Jennie: He realizes he has to clean up and some plastic sheeting will keep things a little bit cleaner.

Paul: I think we were hoping for sponges and Dawn dishwashing detergent.

Jennie: Yeah. He took it in a different direction.

Paul: He went plastic. Yeah.

Jennie: Yeah. So with this, I think we want to look at, ‘We’ve got employees saying that he’s bullying them.’ Bullying is tricky because there’s no actual law against bullying, but you need to look at is there bullying that may be connected to something?

Paul: It’s subjective.

Jennie: Yeah. That may be harassment for an illegal reason but also there can be a lot of “he said, she said.” Even if it’s not illegal, you don’t want tension like that in the workplace.

Paul: So best thing, best practice everybody for that, is just go ahead and get a statement from the employee. We like to provide to all of our members out there: There’s kind of a form for doing this and it encompasses some questions on it that ask things like, did anybody else see this? Do you know if anybody else is experiencing this? Can you be more specific? So I think, jumping in there, you want to do a little bit of an investigation, but you also want to get the employee who’s complaining, you want to get their words on paper. Kind of get some details and then you can go from there, right? So I think they may have a little bit of an investigation here. I think we may have explained why he’s ordering more plastic.

Jennie: Yeah, it could be justified.

Paul: Yeah. So you won’t just accuse him of stealing things.

Jennie: Let’s not jump to things. In here, we talked to Emily and she started an investigation, and she decided to talk to Holly about a separate issue of Holly’s. Emily came in to work in the morning, and Holly was on the night shift, and Holly wasn’t at her workstation. Couldn’t find her. Come to find out, she’s just floating in a canoe in the middle of the neighboring lake.

Paul: She’s just out there in the middle of the lake.

Jennie: She’s just out in the middle of the lake. So Holly wants to treat this like job abandonment. You’re just, I don’t know, taking a nap out there? Whatever?

Paul: Right.

Jennie: And then Holly comes back and says, “No, this is because of the bullying. I had to run away because Jason kept trying to go after me and he was being a jerk.” So now, is Jason causing the problem or was she really just abandoning her job or committing time theft? So we talked to Jason and Jason says, “None of this even happened and you can see exactly where I was all night if you just follow this trail,” of what he said was red paint. He was right. There is a trail of what looked like red paint all over the place and none of it really looked like it was near Holly’s workstation. So, again, maybe we’re just throwing blame at this Jason guy for no reason.

Paul: Yeah, he may just be just doing his job and maybe so.

Jennie: And Holly, she’s in a canoe.

Paul: Okay, so the last thing that I want to address here before we move on to the next roundup question is this ghosting thing where it looks like employees are just walking off the job and then just disappearing. So the first thing I want to say is, this is why you need a good human resource management system. That’s your online system. In our case, over at CEDR, it’s your HR Vault where you keep everybody’s personal information. So you’re going to reach out. You’re going to see if you can get in touch with them, find out. Send them a text. Send them an email. Give them a call. Make sure they’re okay. The first thing we want to make sure is that they’re okay. I will share this story, not in a horror movie, but in a dental practice. We once had someone walk off the job and it kind of raised a red flag, as it should, because it’s not just always ghosting. Long story short, she was working in another satellite office and she was being sexually harassed and it wasn’t going very well and the associate was doing it. The employee walked off the job and didn’t come back because she was being harassed. Just to kind of put a period on this story, it was true. It was what was going on and because we took the time to immediately try and get in touch with her and find out what was going on, we were able to walk that office through this process, which actually really mitigated them being sued because they immediately suspended the associate, once we were able to confirm it was true. Fired the associate and the employee was immediately offered pay for all the time they had missed and also offered to be reinstated in their job. Of course, they would come back to a situation where that associate wasn’t. So just because people are ghosting you, right?

Jennie: Yeah.

Paul: Right, Jennie? It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do a few things to kind of figure out what’s going on because –

Jennie: It’s a little bit of an extreme example, but we’ve also seen it happen when someone doesn’t call in. They don’t show up and they haven’t called you and it turns out they had a major medical emergency. They’re in the hospital and they’re intubated. They can’t call you. It may take their friend or her husband or whoever a little bit longer to think, “Oh, let me call your office.” It’s not the first thing on their mind.

Paul: Well, I think what we found out here was that Jason’s responsible for chopping up…Well, we don’t want to out this particular….We will just say chopping up “things” –

Jennie: Chopping things up.

Paul: And disposing of them in a well, not always an improper way, but I mean, I believe that’s something he’s getting better at. So I think in the end we did discover that some of these employees may have gotten kind of involved with Jason after hours? And we have some sneaking suspicions, but again, this didn’t happen at work, so it’s really not something that we can involve ourselves in.

Jennie: Yeah. Can’t do something and we don’t want to just outright accuse them of committing a crime because that’s up to the police to figure out.

Paul: Yeah. All right. So Jennie, I think we did a pretty good job of answering all the issues on that particular horror movie. Let’s move on to our next question.

Jennie: All right.

Paul: Well, thank you for being on our special spooky, scary Halloween podcast. For those of you out there listening, we hope that you got something from today’s podcast. You’re never going to get these 18 minutes back.

Jennie: You are not sorry. Happy Halloween.

Paul: Yeah, Happy Halloween, everybody.

Voice Over: Thanks for joining us for this week’s episode of What the Hell Just Happened. If you have an HR issue, question, or just want to add a comment about something Paul said, record it on your phone and send it to podcast@wthjusthappened.com. We might even ask if we can play it on the show. Don’t forget to Like and Subscribe and join us again next week.