Employees Gone Wild Read online

  TIPS

  Thought Crimes

  It’s not against the law to think criminal thoughts (except in certain dystopian science fiction books and movies). Conspiracy to commit a crime may be actionable, but there are very specific requirements before anyone is likely to be charged with conspiracy. Clare’s case was no more than talk, so it wasn’t even brought to the authorities.

  But companies are not limited to the law when finding grounds to discipline or dismiss an employee. Firing her was an open-and-shut case.

  CASE FILE

  Don’t Look a Gift Horse in the . . .

  It’s not uncommon for employees to circulate a birthday card for a boss or colleague that everyone signs. It’s a nice little thing that coworkers do for each other. Most of the time.

  Art bought a card for his (female) boss for her birthday and passed it around the office for everyone to sign. He asked colleagues to return it to him after everyone had the chance to sign it. Everyone assumed he wanted to be the one to give it to the boss, so he’d get the brownie points: fair enough, since he’d sprung for the card and circulated it. But in fact, Art wanted to add his own artistic touch to the card before delivering it.

  Art added a drawing in the card. A drawing of himself. A drawing of himself, completely nude with Arnold Schwarzenegger-like muscles, sitting on top of a gigantic birthday cake, a flatteringly sized candle strategically placed to leave little to the imagination.

  Although he kept his clothes on at work, everyone knew Art had a near body-builder physique he was very proud of.

  No one knew what he had done—but all their signatures were on the offending card. Art’s colleagues were baffled when they were called into the conference room for a dressing-down from the boss about the dressed-down-to-nothing picture. It didn’t take long for the truth of the circumstances to come out; in fact, Art was pretty proud of himself—and I don’t just mean his artwork!

  TIPS

  Trust but Verify

  Most of the time, when an employee takes the lead in doing something nice for someone else, it’s out of genuine kindness and affection. Sometimes, it’s to make him- or herself look good, whether to the boss, colleagues, or others. Most of the time, you can assume the best of a coworker. That’s a route to good relationships in the workplace.

  It’s when someone changes hats that you might want to look more closely; when the always selfish person is suddenly generous, it may be that he or she had a visit in the night from three spirits and turned over a new leaf. But don’t bet on it.

  CASE FILE

  Show Me the Money

  Ron, who worked in accounting, was a busy guy, always on the run from one meeting or deadline to another, often with a pile of folders or sheaf of documents tucked under his arm. It was probably inevitable that he would eventually leave something somewhere. In fact, it probably happened more than once—but it was one particular time that caused a big stir.

  It was annual budget time, so among the documents Ron was rushing around with were assorted departmental and corporate budgets—including one that listed each employee and his or her salary. Ron stopped off in the men’s room between meetings, and when he rushed off to his next meeting, he left the salary document behind, next to the sink.

  Only after an hour did he realize his mistake and retrace his steps, looking for the missing papers. By that time, of course, someone else had found the document—and juicy information like that spreads through a company with an efficiency that management can only wish for when there’s work to be done. We never did find out who picked it up, but like the old commercial, he told two friends, and they told two friends, and so on, until most of the office knew everyone else’s salary.

  Now, there are a few companies that espouse radical transparency and make the salaries of everyone, top to bottom, available to everyone in the company. Those companies are rare, and this wasn’t one of them.

  Needless to say, there were a number of questions asked of supervisors about salaries—“How come Joe is getting more than I am, when we do the same job?”—and requests for raises—“I’m much more experienced than Sal over there, so I should make more.” The culprit who spread the information was never identified, but Ron was reprimanded for being careless with confidential information.

  At another company, a female vice president inadvertently received the salary figures for another department instead of her department, which revealed that her male counterpart in that department was being paid almost double what she was. When she confronted the president of the company about this, he shrugged and said, “I guess he negotiated better.” She left shortly thereafter for a position elsewhere that paid three times what she had been making.

  TIPS

  I’ll Show You Mine If You’ll Show Me Yours

  • Knowing what the going rate is for your job puts you in a much better position when you are negotiating salary. But getting that information by illicit means won’t win you any points. Stick to internet research for that information.

  • You may ask a peer to reveal his or her salary if you’ll tell him or her yours. Be careful, though; some companies may have policies against sharing that information among coworkers. Also, think first about how it will affect your working relationship if you find that one of you is making significantly more than the other.

  • If confidential salary information comes into your hands, think twice before sharing. Although we never discovered who circulated the information Ron left in the men’s room, if we had, that person would have been subject to disciplinary action; while Ron made a careless mistake, that person knew full well what he was doing was wrong.

  • If you do find out someone else makes more than you do, or more than you think he or she is worth, you might think back to the story in the Bible about the vineyard workers who were hired later in the day and got the same pay as the workers who had been hired in the morning. When the workers who’d been there longer complained, the vineyard owner pointed out that he’d paid them what they’d agreed to when he hired them. The moral for the workplace is that what the other person gets paid isn’t any of your business; your business is what you get paid. If you want to make a case for a raise, base it on the value you bring, not what someone else gets paid.

  MEMO TO MANAGEMENT

  Salary information is best held in confidence in most cases, but that doesn’t mean it won’t slip out. Your best defense, should that happen, is fair and equitable treatment of employees and even-handed, evidence-based performance evaluations.

  CASE FILE

  It’s a Dirty Job

  An executive called Chuck liked the ladies. Lots of ladies. Lots of ladies who were not his (presumably oblivious) wife. He was smart enough not to carry on with coworkers, but one woman in the office knew all about his extracurricular activities: his assistant, Ann, who was frequently tasked with sending flowers to Chuck’s latest conquest, buying gifts for girlfriends—including lingerie. Chuck told her, “You’ve worked with me a long time. You know what I like. And you’re a woman, so you’ll know what she’ll like. It’s better if you pick something out.” And indeed, Chuck’s long-suffering assistant did know Chuck’s taste, and he was always pleased with what she chose. (She never found out if Chuck’s lady friends were as pleased. But since Chuck continued to send her shopping, she assumed they were.)

  It was awkward enough that Ann was shopping for Chuck’s conquests so frequently that she knew the sales staff at the high-end lingerie shop by their first names. But the breaking point came when Chuck announced on Friday at noon that he was leaving early for the day, and he needed Ann to pick up condoms for him when she went out for lunch.

  Ann brought the request, and her discomfort with it, to the attention of the HR department. An HR representative had a little chat with Chuck about what was and wasn’t an appropriate use of business resources—and employees count as business resources.

  The next lady Chuck sent flowers to was Ann. And he placed the order
himself.

  TIPS

  Not My Job, Man

  Unless these things are explicitly in your job description or part of the nature of your work, you shouldn’t feel you have to:

  • Buy condoms, sex toys, or other highly personal items for a boss or coworker.

  • Babysit for the boss’s children, do their homework for them, or write their school papers or college application essays.

  • Provide an alibi for the boss’s indiscretions or get mixed up in a boss’s personal relationships in any way.

  • Provide computer support for the boss’s family members or lend out company software for someone’s personal use.

  • Lie, cheat, or steal on your boss’s behalf. (Leaving aside the kind of minor misdirections that are part of anyone’s work life, like, “I don’t want to talk to him. Tell him I just left.”)

  And yes, all of these are things I personally know that real employees have been instructed to do.

  MEMO TO MANAGEMENT

  It’s common for executive assistants to provide a certain amount of personal support for top executives in order to free them to focus all their time on business needs. Still, there’s a difference between picking up dry cleaning and buying condoms. Keeping good administrative support staff means keeping their responsibilities within the bounds of business propriety.

  CASE FILE

  It’s There in Black-and-White

  Manager Ty was a technophobe. He had risen in his career before the computer age, when secretaries were the only ones who knew how to use anything with a keyboard, and he had a hard time joining the modern era. The IT department had set up his computer to turn itself on at nine every morning and open the applications he would most likely need. But that wasn’t enough; he watched key business information in one of the windows like he would sit in front of the TV, but never touched a single key himself.

  Fortunately, Ty had a long-time assistant who handled all his communication, just as she had in the old days. She printed out his email for him to read on paper; he then dictated replies, which she emailed back under his name. Not the most efficient way to work, but it worked well enough for Ty.

  That was true until a friend of Ty’s discovered one of the most popular things on the internet—and I don’t mean pictures of cats. Ty’s buddy started emailing him pornographic photos that he found online.

  Ty’s assistant, Polly, was shocked, to say the least. At first, she assumed it was a mistake, or spam, and deleted the emails. But they kept showing up—and showing all.

  Meanwhile, Ty’s buddy was surprised that Ty wasn’t showing any appreciation for his efforts in finding and sending the best of internet porn. They ran into each other and the friend asked Ty, obliquely because both their wives were present, why he hadn’t replied to the emails he’d sent.

  The next day, Ty called Polly into his office and gave her a firm dressing-down for not passing on all of his email. Polly replied, discreetly, that she felt it was part of her job to screen out anything that was not essential for him to see. Ty ranted that he would be the decision maker about what he needed to see, and she should make sure she printed and delivered every email he received.

  When Ty’s buddy sent his next batch of explicit photos, Polly dutifully printed them out along with the rest of Ty’s email and made sure to place them on top of the pile, front and center on his desk, in plain view for anyone to see.

  When Ty returned to his desk and saw what he had been missing, well, let’s just say he felt like a part of the anatomy on view in those pictures.

  TIPS

  This Is Why You Need a Personal Email Address

  Don’t use your work email for communicating with friends. Need I say more?

  CASE FILE

  A Moving Experience

  Mo was making a plan to move on from her current job, taking a position with a competitor that would entail relocation to another city, where the competitor’s headquarters were located. It’s not uncommon when an employee is leaving for the competition, especially if the competition between companies is fierce, for the employee giving notice to be terminated immediately to avoid her taking company information, client contacts, and so on, with her when she defects. Mo knew that, so she was keeping things under her hat while she planned for the big move.

  But “under her hat” didn’t exclude using her office computer during lunch to list furniture on Craigslist that she didn’t intend to haul cross-country; sell things on eBay to clear out clutter before the move; and research neighborhoods and apartments in her soon-to-be new city.

  Once again, I remind you that nothing you do on a work computer is private, and sure enough, someone who was monitoring web traffic saw all Mo’s activity. Combined with a recent job listing in an industry publication for someone with Mo’s background, management put the pieces together. All of a sudden, Mo found herself with plenty of free time to plan the move.

  TIPS

  Discretion Is the Better Part of Valor

  Things that you shouldn’t share with your employer by posting or pursuing them at work:

  • Your future job plans

  • What you’re getting everyone for Christmas

  • Where you’re taking the family on vacation

  • What you did with your friends last Saturday night

  CASE FILE

  Bandwidth Cap

  A young employee named Van liked movies. He liked movies a lot. But he didn’t like paying for them, so he downloaded illegal copies of recent films via the internet.

  Van knew—because he worked in IT—that his company had a much faster internet connection than he had at home, so he began doing his illegal downloads at the office in the background while he did his usual work. He figured he was safe from being caught because he was in IT—he was the person who was watching everyone else’s internet traffic for things they weren’t supposed to be doing.

  But Van’s habit was eating up bandwidth and slowing everyone else down. His boss, the IT manager, started getting flak from management about the crawling internet and its effect on business. The boss asked Van if he had seen anyone doing anything illicit that would account for the problem. Van said no.

  But he wasn’t wise enough to cut it out. His boss took a look at the activity logs and immediately saw what Van was up to. Van was in other respects a good employee, and his boss decided it was probably a mistake of youth. He reprimanded young Van and told him to cut it out.

  Which Van did—for a month or two. Then, when he got tired of waiting for slow downloads at home—or maybe worried about his illegal downloads being tracked to his home IP address—he decided to chance it and download a movie here and there, at times of day when there was little internet traffic and therefore less likelihood he would slow everyone else down and be noticed.

  But Van’s boss was of the “trust but verify” school of thought. He had flagged any of the relevant traffic to make sure the employee had kept his word and was immediately aware when Van began his downloads again.

  Two strikes and Van was out.

  TIPS

  Risky Business

  • Downloading movies, streaming music, watching YouTube videos, or any other bandwidth-intensive activities are likely to be noticed by management. Even if it’s business related, it’s the kind of thing that is monitored in order to manage resources. So if it’s not business related, it’s not a good idea.

  • Illegal downloads are that much worse; by doing something illegal on the job, you expose your company to risk of legal action. Don’t flatter yourself that you’re such a key employee that the company would be willing to take that risk. You’re not, and they won’t.

  • Games, whether online or on your office computer, are probably not part of your job, either. Is it really worth risking your job to take a solitaire break? If you have to do it, do it on your phone—as long as it’s not a company phone.

  • Remember, too, that if you have a company BlackBerry or cell phone, that’s a
company device, too, and you should observe the same separation between business and personal activities when using that device.

  • If you’re using your personal device—such as a smartphone—to access business materials, be sure to use a separate account for work email than for personal, so not to muddy the waters. Be careful, too, when sending an email from your phone to note which account you’re sending from. It’s not uncommon for someone to accidentally send a business message to a coworker from a personal email account, then have the entire chain of replies go to that account on the phone and be missed when the employee is at his or her desk.

  • Many people use a cloud service such as Google Drive or Dropbox to store large business files so they can work on them at home or on the road. Again, it’s wise to set up a separate account with those services for your work-related materials. Both of the aforementioned services, and others like them, offer the ability to keep a synchronized folder on your desktop containing all your files; if you’re using your personal account and enable that feature, you may not realize that all your personal documents are mirrored on your office computer. Even if your personal documents are innocuous—pictures from your vacation, note to the dog sitter, that novel you’ve been working on since college—they don’t belong on the office computer. And many of us have more personal items, like financial documents or information about our children, stored in a cloud service folder. You definitely don’t want that on the office computer, potentially accessible to the company. Use a separate account for work.

  Phone Home