Episode 113: Ghosting in the Workplace

Voice Over: You’re about to listen to another episode of What The Hell Just Happened?! Join Paul Edwards and his guests as they discuss and sometimes even solve some interesting HR problems.

Paul: And… I’m gonna go off the rails sometimes and talk about whatever I want.

Tiana: Hello-o-o, Paul.

Paul: Hello-o-o, Tiana [laughs].

Tiana: [Laughs] Ooo, I’m going to use a spooky voice.

Paul: A spooky voice? [laughs]

Tiana: Today we are talking about ghosting.

Paul: Oh, yeah. Oh, wow. I see what you did there.

Tiana: That was clever, right?

Paul: Very clever. You know, I didn’t know what ghosting was until about two years ago, and then. Yeah, no, I know. I know what it is.

Tiana: So let’s kind of, like, take it to the HR context of ghosting.

Paul: Yes, there are many contexts for ghosting, but ghosting in HR is the thing now, so we get that. Let’s talk about the different ways you can be ghosted. You can be ghosted for an initial interview. You set up an initial interview, and the employee doesn’t show up and they don’t respond to text.

Tiana: Very true. Classic ghosting.

Paul: They’re just not that into you anymore. And so they ghost you. And that ghosting metaphor runs itself through all kinds of things that have to do with HR.

Tiana: Absolutely.

Paul: Which are ghosting scenario today?

Tiana: Well, it’s one of the most tricky ghosting scenarios because this person is already your employee but it’s that employee who has abandoned their job.

Paul: So they don’t show up one day.

Tiana: They don’t show up and no call, no show.

Paul: A no call, no show. And let’s give this persona, because this happens all the time in different contexts, so let’s give this a persona. I’m going to give it a persona that this employee is – this is unexpected. They’re not new. So we expect ghosting in new employees. Yeah. It’s more – it’s more rare for it to occur with an employee who’s been with you for several months or several years…

Tiana: Oh, for sure.

Paul: But I think you should kind of show the same initial concern for them going missing that you would show regardless of how long they’ve been working for you.

Tiana: Really good point. Yeah. Regardless of their tenure, what the situation might be, it’s not a normal thing. We never want to normalize somebody just not showing up for work and not calling you. So, you know, by acting with the best of assumptions and intentions, you know, assuming the best intentions in our employees.

Paul: Right.

Tiana: You know, it’s helpful to start out as considering, “Is this an emergency?” You know, and so and oftentimes a really good first step is actually reaching out to an emergency contact for this person. If they haven’t shown up for their shift, you haven’t heard from them. It’s been a couple hours. I’m going to throw out the caveat that a lot of times other employees might chime in and they’re like, “Oh, well, Suzie is over on Instagram and she’s like going live right now. She’s totally fine.” So in those cases, maybe…

Paul: She’s going live in Cabo. I think we know where she is.

Tiana: Yeah. So – so those instances aside, if you legitimately don’t know where this person is, that’s a good first step.

Paul: Right. And it’s normal for someone who has – it’s weird because it’s normal for someone who has abandoned their job and just doesn’t want to come back to work and doesn’t want to talk to you anymore. They’re conflict avoidant or whatever it is. They – they present themselves the same way as someone who may be having some kind of a life emergency or other reason why they’re not coming to work.

And that’s the one that I’m worried about, Tiana, because I recall again and the way back machine and it didn’t happen to one of our members but you know how it is, as HR experts, we’re always reading up on court cases and different things, they’re firing stuff at us all the time. I remember this case vaguely where an employee had a medical condition.

She worked for a rather large company. I think it might have been like a call center, and they had a no call, no show policy – was three days, theirs. It might have been five. I don’t know. She went missing. She did have her boyfriend call in and tell them that she wasn’t able to come in, that she had a medical issue.

The policy read three days, no call, no show. It’s grounds for termination. And they also had another policy that said if you are sick and can’t come to work, you cannot have someone else call in for you. So they combined those two things and issued a termination letter to her and they got sued underneath the ADA because she was trapped in a hospital. She had had a procedure.

Tiana: Right, with no way to reach out.

Paul: She had no way to reach out. So she followed the first policy and had her significant other call in. They used that against it and termed her and she won a substantial lawsuit.

Tiana: Ugh, what a mess.

Paul: So back to where we were going here, folks. We – I’m we’re treating – if we’re treating you, hey, I like that metaphor because we work with medical and, you know, if we’re treating you, we’re treating you for kind of the worst case scenario here. Let’s look at this and make sure that there’s not something wrong.

Tiana: Absolutely.

Paul: Also, while we’re doing it, we’re documenting, right?

Tiana: For sure.

Paul: So nobody can come back later and say that we didn’t make every effort to try to figure out what was going on.

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