Employees Gone Wild Read online

  Copyright © 2015 by Richard Burton

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover design by Owen Corrigan

  Cover and interior illustrations by Ian Baker

  Print ISBN: 978-1-63220-633-6

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63220-779-1

  Printed in the United States of America

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction

  CHAPTER 1: Walks of Shame: Office Sexcapades and the Ugly Morning After

  CHAPTER 2: Inferior Superiors: Bosses from Hell

  CHAPTER 3: Welcome to the Nut House

  CHAPTER 4: What Happens in Vegas May Not Stay in Vegas: Keeping Off-Hours Peccadillos Out of the Workplace

  CHAPTER 5: Crime Doesn’t Pay Biweekly

  CHAPTER 6: Take Cover: When Employees (and Others) Lose It

  CHAPTER 7: A Straight Flush: Bathroom and Other Personal Fouls

  CHAPTER 8: When the Cat Gets Out of the Bag

  CHAPTER 9: Employees Behaving Better

  INTRODUCTION

  Imagine if you will the following workplace scenarios:

  • Two employees having hot and heavy sex in an open cubicle in full view of coworkers.

  • An employee leaving a special deposit in the bathroom paper towel dispenser.

  • A fired employee texting her former boss to threaten suicide.

  • Police showing up at the office and dragging an employee away in handcuffs.

  • Oral sex solicitations via office e-mail.

  Impossible? Unbelievable?

  Astonishingly, all these, and other equally outrageous scenarios, are real. I was there.

  Read on. The scandalous details are all in these pages.

  I’m an attorney with over twenty years of legal and business experience. I’ve served as general counsel for more than fifteen different corporations, acting through a handful of holding companies. A major part of my job has been overseeing human resources investigations. In the course of conducting and managing over one hundred cases, I’ve become privy to shocking behavior among employees and management, ranging from the idiotic to the bizarre to the flat-out criminal.

  Because, while they’re happening, HR investigations are strictly confidential, I’ve never shared my knowledge of what goes on behind the scenes at the average office and how crazy things can actually get . . . until now. (Don’t worry. The names have been changed to protect the innocent—and the guilty!)

  Each chapter of Employees Gone Wild covers a different area of, shall we say, colorful workplace behavior, illustrated with vivid examples drawn from my own case files, and occasionally supplemented with equally colorful stories from the experience of colleagues and business associates. The place you work is crazy? Let’s see if you can top what I’ve seen. (No, don’t take that as a challenge. Please.)

  Why share all these wild and woolly workplace adventures? Well, it’s not to give employees ideas. You’ll note that most of the perpetrators paid a price for their behavior, ranging from disciplinary action to firing to arrest and jail time.

  What I would like to give you in this book, along with a roller-coaster ride of hilarious workplace craziness, is some good business and personal advice, whether you’re a rank-and-file employee, a supervisor or manager, or a human resources professional. We can all learn from the experiences of these employees from hell. What I am not here to give you (warning: a typical disclaimer from a lawyer is coming) is any form of legal advice.1

  More times than I can count, employees called on the carpet for some egregious misdeed have claimed they didn’t know what they were doing was wrong. Yeah, sure, some of them were lying. But I am confident that a lot of the bafflement was genuine. It’s true that many of us are thrust from school straight into the workplace with nothing but observation to tell us what is okay and what is not—and depending where you work, the examples around you might not be the best ones. There are also a lot of fuzzy lines: we spend a lot of hours at work, so our relationships and activities there may bleed into the personal, and vice versa.

  Throughout this book, I’ve included guidance on where to draw lines between personal and professional, what kind of things are appropriate in what kind of workplace, where to get help if you find yourself harassed or discriminated against, and what will happen and how to handle yourself if you do get into trouble. Think of it as a short—but undeniably entertaining—course on how to keep your job and build a career—and what you should definitely not do.

  For managers, supervisors, and human resources professionals, I’ve included memos to management with thoughts on how to spot trouble, how to nip that trouble in the bud, and how to address it after the fact. Rank-and-file employees can benefit from that info, too: think of it as a peek inside your boss’s head and make it your edge to get ahead.

  Let’s start with a little basic information.

  Frequently Unasked Questions aka Things You Never Asked, But Should

  What is a Human Resources Department for?

  Despite popular opinion, they’re not just there to screen résumés and send out memos about policies and rules.

  Back in the olden days, they were called personnel departments; the name change was intended to recognize that people are the most important resource in any company. No matter how good your product or service, you won’t succeed if the people producing and delivering it aren’t doing quality work.

  Human resources departments deal with everything from hiring (where most of us get to know them) to evaluating employee performance, training and developing staff, helping managers get the best out of their employees, overseeing employee benefits and workplace conditions, making sure pay and benefits are equitable, managing organizational change, and solving problems that involve people (which is pretty much any kind of problem). When those problems become extreme, the HR department will be involved with the remedy, especially when it includes firing somebody.

  If the only time you deal with them is when something bad is happening, yes, they will seem like the company cops. And there are good and bad HR people, just like in every other job.

  So you’re a lawyer. Are there usually lawyers in HR? Because that seems kind of . . . excessive.

  Nope. I’m in a completely separate department; human resources professionals have their own special set of skills. But a lawyer may become involved any time the situation has legal ramifications for the company: when the company might get in trouble because of something an employee has done; when someone is being fired (for instance, in case they decide to sue—the lawyer’s job is to make sure the company doesn’t break any laws and open the door to legal or financial liability); when a contract is being negotiated and signed; and of course, when the police are or might be involved (companies are just like the perps on Law & Order in that regard: they want their lawyer).

  I might get in
volved earlier than lawyers at some other companies because I work for a large company that has in-house legal people and because I have a lot of experience with HR issues, so the HR professionals may stop by my office for advice or help whenever a novel problem arises.

  When do the regular HR people get involved?

  That varies. A manager may bring them into the conversation when an employee problem exceeds his or her ability to solve, or they feel an impartial third party would help the situation. Some managers bring HR in because they want someone else to be the bad guy. (See how HR people get that reputation?) Managers are just as likely as other employees to land on the HR department’s top-secret Bane of Our Existence list.

  Employees might come to HR if they don’t feel comfortable talking to their bosses about problems, or if the problem is with the boss. Good HR people also keep an ear to the ground and may discover a potential problem early enough to nip it in the bud.

  HR is frequently involved in any kind of problem involving substance use/abuse because of the risks to both people and company from alcohol and drug use on the job. Similarly, HR is brought into the picture immediately in cases of sexual harassment.

  I am a model employee. What kind of people aren’t?

  Of course you are a model employee. (You can decide whether I’m giving you the side-eye or not.) Problem employees come from all departments, all levels in the organization, all ages and races and sexes. But in general, there are probably more issues, in my experience, with younger employees, those who may not have learned yet what is or isn’t appropriate in the workplace, especially when large groups of young people work together without guidance and mentoring from more mature staff. If a department is like a college dorm or frat house, well, it’s not that surprising if people start acting like teenagers away from home for the first time.

  Not to say young people have a monopoly on going wild by any means. You’ll see in the stories in this book that Animal House behavior knows no boundaries.

  What can my company fire me for?

  Laws regarding hiring and firing vary from state to state. There may also be union contracts or industry standards and regulations that come into play, depending on your job and field. But if you do anything illegal, it will be hard for you to hold on to your job. And if you do anything that damages the company’s business, you’re on very thin ice.

  But you’re the model employee. You would never do anything like that. You’re not anything like the people in this book. Right?

  The people in this book set the bar for wild workplace behavior pretty high—and then cleared that bar with inches to spare. If you haven’t decided on a career and want one with lots of variety and a new challenge every day, not to mention a never-ending supply of crazy stories, you might want to consider a career in human resources. The downside? You have to deal with employee behavior like the stories in the pages that follow.

  So let’s go wild.

  And let the craziness begin!

  1 No legal opinions or advice are given in this book. In addition, no attorney-client relationship is formed or intended to be formed by any of the content contained in this book.

  CHAPTER 1

  Walks of Shame

  Office Sexcapades and the Ugly Morning After

  It’s no secret that office work can be tedious. Long days spent in seemingly endless yet unproductive meetings. Lonely hours sequestered in a joyless cubicle. The torments of rush-hour traffic. Lunch hours spent eating microwaved leftovers at your desk. Coffee breaks and trips to the water cooler that somehow fail to make the end of the business day seem even one second closer.

  The monotony of the nine-to-five routine can feel claustrophobic, even soul crushing. Little wonder some office workers try to spice up their days by flirting with colleagues. And some of them, as you’re about to see, take that flirtation a step—or a giant leap—further.

  CASE FILE

  If the Cubicle Is Rocking, Don’t Come Knocking

  Let’s start with an extreme example, a cautionary tale for the ages. It was a Friday afternoon in July at Company X . . . or perhaps I should call it Company XXX. Most employees were attending a company-sponsored picnic, but a few workers, for whatever reason, had skipped the event to put in a full day at the office. While the rest of the office were enjoying hamburgers and hot dogs and participating in morale-building activities, two employees back at the office were engaging in what you might call an immoral-building activity.

  The following Monday, a female employee who had stayed at the office on Friday turned up in the HR department to report that she remembered nothing from about three o’clock that Friday afternoon until about four-thirty on Saturday morning—when she woke up in a jail cell.

  Not your usual Monday morning in HR. But the story is far from over.

  We learned on investigating that, upon leaving work, the woman had driven to a local hotel where she behaved in an erratic fashion—enough that the hotel staff didn’t want to deal with her. The hotel called her a cab. The cab driver said she was incoherent, acting “drunk”—more than the usual drunk needing a ride home on a Friday night. He phoned the police, who arrested her for disorderly conduct. Hence the jail cell.

  Did any of her coworkers notice anything unusual on Friday before she left work? Oh yes, they did.

  This employee worked in a floor of cubicles with little or no privacy. A colleague, a new employee who was closing her first sale, reported going to the jailbird employee to ask a question. A male coworker was massaging the woman’s neck as she sat at her desk responding to the inquiry.

  The new staffer came back a short time later with another question. Now the guy’s hands were down the front of the woman’s blouse. Apparently unfazed, they answered her question.

  The third time she stopped by the woman’s cube, the newbie found her mentor with her blouse completely off and the male coworker kneading her breasts.

  They still answered her questions—the business questions. Not the ones undoubtably on her mind: What kind of place is this? What have I got myself into, working here?

  And the fourth time, the clothes were off, and the woman and her colleague were having sex on the desk. In a cubicle. In plain view.

  They barely paused to answer her question.

  I know what you’re thinking: Did the young woman manage to close the deal?

  Oh, that’s not what you’re wondering? Yes, other people saw the tumescent twosome in action. In fact, when questioned, we learned that everyone who was in the office that Friday afternoon had gotten a good look at the action. As I said, it was an open office, and they weren’t exactly discreet.

  Then things went from bizarre to disturbing.

  The woman told HR that, before the turn of events the junior staffer (and everyone else) had witnessed, the man involved had given her an alcoholic drink and insisted that she try it. Because she had no memory of anything that happened afterward, she believed she had been drugged.

  I immediately launched a full HR investigation. I interviewed the woman who had brought the complaint, the employees who had witnessed the scene, and finally the man in question. Both the man and woman involved were married to different people and both had children.

  The male employee rather sheepishly admitted bringing alcohol to the office and giving his female coworker a drink, but he vehemently denied drugging her. He did, however, admit to having sex with her in front of others, explaining, in what may be the understatement of the year, that things had gotten “out of hand.” He apologized and begged for his job, assuring us that if we let him stay he would have no more contact of any kind with any female employee.

  Needless to say, we fired him on the spot. The woman involved chose not to pursue any legal or criminal action.

  After the Morning After

  Bad enough to lose your job for getting busy—and I mean that in the nonwork way—at the workplace. What happens afterward, when looking for another job? Can or should a prior employer rev
eal what really happened if asked for a reference?

  Labor and employment laws have grown much more proemployee over the years, putting companies at serious risk of legal claims if they say or do too much. For this reason, most companies reveal only “name, rank, and employment dates” when anyone inquires about a former employee. If a company were to communicate forthrightly to a third party what it believes an employee may or may not have done, that company would be opening itself to legal claims, with all the attendant expense and bad publicity. (However, if the woman in this situation had taken the man to court, the company would have the public record of that case to fall back on.) And even if the company said nothing, that court record would have followed the man to his next potential job. Is a one-afternoon stand really worth it?

  Situations like this are often very tricky for companies to navigate. As far as a company’s “need” to do more, in many situations like this, companies simply don’t know for sure if a crime has been committed. HR departments may be the dress code and time clock cops, but they aren’t the police, with subpoenas or search warrants. It is often one person’s word against another’s, and that’s all there is to go on. Here, for example, it was impossible to know for sure who was telling the truth. Even if the woman had evidence of the presence of a date-rape drug, the company had no right to demand this information, and the woman didn’t offer it. The company had no standing to file a criminal complaint against the male employee at issue. The female employee could have, but she decided not to.

  The man was fired for breaking company rules; that’s always within the company’s power. The woman, too, had likely violated company policy, but because of the possibility she was indeed drugged and therefore not in control of or responsible for her actions, she was not fired. Though we did not know for certain that she had been drugged, neither could we prove she wasn’t. On balance, and based on her prior employment record, we decided to give her the benefit of the doubt. Still, the situation was enough that she quit two weeks later and moved out of state.