Follow up on resignation of governor-general of Canada resignation for bullying behavior

In my previous post I talked about the governor-general of Canada resigned her post when accusations of abusive behavior towards her staff came to light. The allegations came from current and former staffers who said that she led an environment that was toxic and she and her deputy bullied staff. Background information on this story is in my previous post from January 25th.

 

In a letter to the editor on January 26th a male reader wrote that in his 50 years of practicing employment law he never saw a male leader lose a job for treating staff badly. I understand the point he makes, and that he underscores; treating people badly is always unacceptable, but penalties are applied unevenly. The writer does have a great point. It reminds me of a common belief that men who are considered heels in the workplace are hard-driving, and women who are heels are considered – well, they would be called a sexist word that I don’t use, but to limit the options that could come to the readers’ imaginations – they would be considered a word that rhymes with the word dish. 

 

I do recognize that women get penalized for certain behaviors in a way that men don’t. My belief is that a heel is a heel whether in male or female form. Treating people with kindness shouldn’t be relegated to a judgment of gender either. I have also learned from research about organizational behaviors that men also get penalized in certain environments for not being abrasive enough. 

 

On January 27th The Globe And Mail published an online article written by Robert Fife and Kristy Kirkup, titled, Review into Julie Payette’s tenure as governor-general details allegations of aggressive conduct, public humiliations.

 

(https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-review-into-payettes-tenure-as-governor-general-details-allegations-of/) Under Canada’s equivalent to U.S.’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) The Globe and Mail obtained the report prepared by Quintet, the company that investigated the allegations regarding Payette’s behavior.

 

The report included reports of “yelling, screaming, and aggressive conduct, demeaning comments, and public humiliations”. In reference to the comments by the former lawyer who said such behavior doesn’t lead to men getting fired, it’s a shame on us as a society that that behavior is tolerated anywhere. Ultimately, the only time that behavior is considered unacceptable is if it comes from a woman, however, from a man it’s normal. This is just so unfortunate. 

 

The Globe And Mail reported that the review team conducted 92 interviews, including current and former employees. The terms used by participants described the work environment during Payette’s tenure included the following: Hostile; negative; toxic; poisoned; climate or reign of fear or terror; walking on eggshells.

 

Other descriptions said the conditions included: “Disrespect, a non-inclusive workplace, employees were stressed and worn out.” Additionally, during Payette’s tenure many employees, including some who had worked for the office of Rideau Hall, left, permanently, temporarily or took sick leave, 13 of whom said they did so because of the work environment. Staff turnover was at “record levels” – 16 people left in less than 6 months. Quintet said the stories were so consistent regarding the negative environment that it was a “serious problem” that “required immediate attention”. 

 

As I said in the previous podcast, and my blog post, Payette said the following in a detailed statement: "We all experience things differently, but we should always strive to do better and be attentive to one another's perceptions." 

 

It would seem that Payette doesn’t understand why her behavior was unacceptable by suggesting that she thinks workplace abuse and bullying is about the perception of the people on the receiving end.

 

One of the complaints lobbed against Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who appointed Payette to the post, is that Payette didn’t undergo a thorough background check, according to sources. The sources said that no one reached out to speak with previous colleagues who would have known her in the capacity of manager. I did read in another article where one fellow astronaut spoke about her as a great colleague as an astronaut and of her professionalism when they worked together. That doesn’t surprise me, I have seen too often people who treat “underlings” with disrespect who treat differently those they consider their equal in rank. 

 

Trudeau, for his part said that the vetting of Payette was rigorous. Yet, another article talks about how he disbanded a non-partisan committee of which the duties included recommending nominees hired into the governor-general position. Trudeau was wowed by Payette’s star power. She had dazzling credentials: A Former Chief Astronaut of the Canadian Space Agency, she had an Engineering degree, attended McGill University, speaks six languages, performed with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra.

 

If they had vetted just a bit more, they would have learned that in 2016 she “left as head of the Montreal Science Center” when employees complained of verbal abuse. Now Trudeau has to explain how that wasn’t discovered before. The other explanation is that may have been known information, but information that was ignored. There were similar complaints, The Globe And Mail said, from when she served on the Canadian Olympic Committee. 

 

One of the morals of this story is that policies should be applied equally. If an organization has determined a hiring policy, for example, then it should apply to everyone. When I worked in one previous Human Resources role, I was the person who ensured that hiring managers completed all steps of a background check (credentials and references). I angered at least one vice president by insisting that I could not authorize a hire on behalf of the organization until the background check was completed according to policy. 

 

In addition to self-preservation – meaning that I knew who would be blamed should there be an issue post-hire, it would be me -- it is so much more expensive and difficult to oust someone who has started a job should it be discovered that they had falsified their credentials. I have heard about those stories in the news media (including about college presidents who didn’t have an undergraduate degree and who lied about that in the hiring process, but the appropriate checks weren’t completed). I didn’t want our organization to be one of those featured in the papers because of a lack of due diligence … because of special treatment of a highly placed hire. 

 

While the Prime Minister says that the background process was followed, “sources” said that an application-based process was not. As the former “background check police” what I hear is she was so important and so high level that an exception was made to the normal processes. As I asked last time: Are there human beings organizations are willing to sacrifice at the altar of prestige, an individual with the right pedigree who is allowed to treat others poorly, with little to no accountability? 

 

Quintet’s report cost taxpayers close to C-$400K dollars. As I said last time, It costs a lot to protect bad management. 

The lessons are many, but here are my takeaways:

·      The people hired to do the job of vetting should have been allowed to do a thorough job.

·      If you have a policy, it should be applied fairly and equally; if you make exceptions, just be transparent and be sure you can defend the exception

·      Your rank-and-file workers keep the organization running, and who you choose to lead and motivate them matters; hiring someone who denigrates and doesn’t care about your employees is more expensive in the long run. 

PLEASE NOTE: Please stop by and listen to my podcast, Workplace Fairness and Dignity at http://buzzsprout.com/1603621.

Reputation Travels

The company Glassdoor is well known by job-seekers and companies alike. While people on the job hunt can look for jobs, they can also research the companies they are interested in and look at reviews from current and former employees. They can also research reviews by people who interviewed at a company to learn their experiences. I know this because I have seen reviews on a past employer posted about interview processes that did not go so well for the “candidate experience” because of inexperienced interviewers.

Employers, to state the obvious, don’t want negative reviews of their company. I have worked for organizations that spend time scrubbing negative reviews. I have also had the experience of making a contingent job offer and then being called back after the candidate was alerted to negative Glassdoor reviews about the company. To state another obvious fact, reputation matters. It is often said that successful employee matches with an organization come from referrals. If your organization has a reputation for misery and miserable management, it will get out. If this information doesn’t end up on Glassdoor, it will circulate by word of mouth.

In “60 Hiring Statistics You Need to Know” talks about how Job seekers will read six reviews on Glassdoor about a company to form an opinion. Also, the article says 69 percent of people looking for a job will not accept a company with a bad reputation (even if they were unemployed, according to Glassdoor); 84 percent would go to another company if offered a position if the company had an excellent corporate reputation. 1, 2

Those identified to manage employees will affect an organization’s reputation. For this reason and for the good of the human beings that are being supervised great care should be put into the determination to the selection of people-managers. When people are treated poorly under the patronage of an organization, the employer will be the entity whose reputation that suffers because that individual has been given the power, that they abuse, by the organization.

Personally speaking, I have been fortunate to have had for the most part decent to excellent bosses. These bosses have been a credit to the organization that selected them to manage people. I have taken enough risks throughout my career to have had a diverse number of jobs, a very few of which have brought in contact with bad bosses/managers. And I have managed at least one toxic employee in my management tenure.

Based on my research of best practices, and my own personal experience which confirms the research, bosses can fall into the following categories, depending on behavior:

Decent to good bosses:

• They let each person do what they are best at, and/or most enjoy doing
• They give workers the task and allow them to get it done – they were non-micromanagers
• They are respectful in treating the people that report to them as adults
• If there are issues, they address them directly, giving the opportunity for interaction
• They are respectful of the power bestowed on them by the company

Poor bosses:

• Are aware of and abuse their power, for example, they have staff do things that they should be doing because they can
• They have poor professional boundaries with the people they are charged with supervising and they transfer their way of interacting with people in their personal lives to their interactions with staff
• They thrive on getting people to fear them or attempt to intimidate staff, just because they can
• They micromanage, they assign work, then manage every detail of the work assigned
• Treat staff with disrespect in many ways, including infantilizing them, treat them like children

  

Organizations would do well to put people in positions over others if they are people who are held to a performance standard more like the former than the latter group. The organizations’ reputation would be the better for it.

Sources:

1,2 Mervyn Dinnen, 6 Recruiting Tips for Companies with Bad Reputations, www.glassdoor.co.uk., Jun 22, 2015. Jennifer Gladstone, 60 Hiring Statistics You Need to Know, Employment Background Investigations, Inc. www.ebiinc.com, May 25, 2017.

High-level government official forced to resign due to bullying and harassment in the workplace.

This week a friend shared a story with me about a high-level government official that was forced to resign when the bullying and harassment she practiced and presided over in the workplace came to light. This happened to a member of the Canadian government, Juliette Payette who, until her resignation was the governor general.

The Washington Post, on Thursday, January 27th, published the story, Canada’s embattled governor general resigns amid bullying, harassment allegations, written by reporter Amanda Coletta. A governor general is the Queen of England’s representative in Canada. The governor general serves as commander in chief of the Canadian armed forces; represents Canada at home and abroad; and grants royal assent to bills so that they become law, according to the Washington Post. The post said the findings in the Quintet report were so “scathing” and “blistering” that for Payette, a former Astronaut, it was untenable for her to have continued in her role. The story my friend sent to me was posted by the CBC online. The article, Payette stepping down as governor general after blistering report on Rideau Hall work environment, was written by Ashley Burke. Unsurprisingly, there was high turnover at Rideau Hall.

Allegations about Payette’s behavior came from 12 anonymous current and former staffers who said that “Payette verbally abused staffers, reduced them to tears, dismissed their work harshly in an effort to humiliate them and was prone to disquieting outbursts.” Independent consulting firm, Quintet Consulting Canada, whose website lists a specialty in HR management consulting, was hired by an office in the Canadian government to conduct an outside “workplace review” of Rideau Hall --- the offices of the Governor General, and they found that the Governor General, Julie Payette, and her Deputy led a “toxic” work environment that included workplace harassment. The Washington Post’s description of the events originally told to the CBC is “that Payette led a workplace that was a ‘house of horrors’ replete with harassment and bullying”. Payette’s “number two” in Rideau Hall who was also a long-time friend was accused of the same behavior.  

So often reports of bullying and harassment made by many, many people in one organization are buried or not taken seriously, including over a period of years. The questions that immediately came to mind when I read about this action taken by the Canadian government were: What led to this review, what was so bad, what was the inciting incident for what the CBC called an unprecedented third-party review? Who hired the independent consulting firm? The CBC reports that the Privy Council Office or PCO launched the review in July “in response to a CBC News report featuring a dozen public servants and former employees confidentially claiming Payette belittled and publicly humiliated the staff”. (The PCO is part of the secretariat and federal cabinet of Canada.) The head of the PCO described the report as “disturbing” and “worrisome”. He also talked about her giving her resignation to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau where they discussed the report.  

Payette acknowledged “tensions” and that everyone has  "a right to a healthy and safe work environment." Payette knows intellectually what she’s supposed to say; she understands intellectually the correct sentiment, regardless of her true understanding of correct behavior. But her actual behavior is proof that she doesn’t understand the meaning of the words, “healthy and safe work environment”. By calling what was referred to as a “house of horrors” as “tensions”, it’s clear that either Payette is incapable of taking responsibility for her actions, or maybe she just doesn’t care. 

She goes on to make the point in a formal statement that “no formal complaints or official grievances were made during her tenure (which started in 2017) which would have immediately triggered a detailed investigation as prescribed by law and the collective agreements in place, I still take these allegations very seriously”. She really had no defense, and, again, just no understanding of how she affected people. No one filed a formal grievance, etc. etc., she said. Well, yes, because they were terrified. They knew what would happen should they be identified in any way. Things would have gone to a house of horrors to who knows what? 

She continues, "We all experience things differently, but we should always strive to do better and be attentive to one another's perceptions." This provides more support for the argument that Payette doesn’t understand why her behavior was unacceptable by suggesting that workplace abuse and bullying is about how the people on the receiving end perceive it.  

Justin Trudeau’s statement said” Every employee in the Government of Canada has the right to work in a safe and healthy environment, and we will always take this very seriously”. The statement continued that “Today’s announcement provides an opportunity for new leadership at Rideau Hall to address the workplace concerns raised by employees during the review”.

In all honesty, the Post story reported that when news of workplace harassment first were launched, the Prime Minister defended Payette as an excellent governor general. There had been questions about whether she had been sufficiently vetted. She had dazzling credentials: A Former Chief Astronaut of the Canadian Space Agency, she had an Engineering degree, attended McGill University, speaks six languages, performed with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. My question is: Are there human beings organizations are willing to sacrifice at the altar of prestige, a truly maladjusted individual with the right pedigree who is allowed to treat others poorly, with little to no accountability? 

One, of the things I find noteworthy about this story is that a high-level official was forced to step down for mistreatment of employees. But first, there was the initial, and typical, denial by leadership. I suppose you could consider it loyalty, but what message does it send to the people who are experiencing the mistreatment. I think some people reading the articles about how the nice Canadians felt about their treatment at the Governor General’s hands may think, “disquieting outbursts”... Oh, you think that’s bad, let me tell you about… But, why should we have to do that? It’s not about everyone being super pleasant to each other all day long, it’s about people not being afraid to go to work, about people being treated with dignity as the expectation. There is no perfection, but we all know abuse is abuse, it shouldn’t come on a grade, as in, oh that’s not bad. People have bad days, but bad days should be the exception, not the norm and there should be limits to what type of behavior is allowed in any workplace.  

The fallout of not addressing the allegations when they were first brought to light about Payette’s behavior is: 

• The staffers went public; 
• C $150K is what it cost the taxpayer to handle the legal bills surrounding the accusations and for the office to hire a former Supreme Court justice to represent the accused. 

It always costs a lot to protect bad management. Gallup says poor managers drive employee disengagement; and they cause U.S. organizations $450-$550 billion a year! What if organizations plowed money they lose from propping up poor management into doing the following: 

• Maintaining a healthy work environment; 
• Demonstrating to employees that they matter, starting with maintaining a workplace that insisted on respectful communications, that has zero-tolerance for bullying behavior.   

An organization that adopted this philosophy would not need to do marketing to attract employees; the philosophy of employee care would sell itself. Think of the word-of-mouth recommendations and referrals that would come from employees, that is the ultimate in marketing. Moreover, think of the money the organization would save, thereby contributing to the profits!

Workplace Bullying: Who is bullied; why it happens.

 

Workplace bullying is a subset of an abusive and toxic workplace. Suffolk University Law Professor David Yamada is an architect of a “bullying bill” for the Massachusetts state legislature. In his 2008 article Workplace Bullying and Ethical Leadership,  in the Journal of Values-Based Leadership, he describes what workplace bullying is, and what it is not:

 

Workplace bullying does not concern everyday disagreements at work, the occasional loud argument, or simply having a bad day. Furthermore, it does not involve interpersonally difficult aspects of work, such as giving a fair and honest evaluation to an underperforming employee. It also is not about gruff vis-á-vis easygoing bosses, as bullying often transcends management styles. Rather, bullying encompasses a power relationship, whether vested in organizational hierarchies, interpersonal dynamics, or both, that has crossed a line and become abusive.

 

Yamada says that in addition to the direct costs due to litigation and medical costs for workers’ compensation claims, there are other indirect costs that stem from the effect that bullying has on other employees, even if they are not direct targets. These are factors such as other employees or witnesses to the abusive behavior feeling an environment of fear, mistrust, withdrawal, hiding mistakes.  

There are types of bullying that occur between targets and aggressors. Yamada states that where in the workplace the bullying tends to be “top-down” it is “disproportionately harmful to female workers. He shares findings from a survey done by the Workplace Bullying Institute (WBI) and Zogby in 2007 that reported findings. A more recent survey done in 2017 by the Workplace Bullying Institute on U.S. Workplace Bullying adjusted the numbers somewhat a decade later. A random sample of 1,008 adults found the following:

·       70 percent of bullies were male: Their targets by gender were female targets at 65 percent and male targets at 35 percent

·       30 percent of bullies were female: Their targets by gender were female at 67 percent, male targets were 33 percent

·       The racial group breakdown for targets of bullies were: Hispanic – 25 percent, 14 percent were witnesses; African American – 21 percent, 22 percent were witnesses; Asian – 7 percent, 44 percent were witnesses; White – 19 percent, 19 percent witnessed the  bullying

(Gary Namie 2017, Workplace Institute, www.workplacebullying.org )

According to Yamada, bullying targets are varied and the reasons certain people become targets are equally varied. They include weak performers, who may be vulnerable to bullying because of personality characteristics. High-level performers are also bullying targets who “trigger reactions from insecure bullies who see them as a threat”. Other targets may be bullied because of race, gender other characteristics that bring out the bully’s biases. 

The way to address bullying in an organization, Yamada writes, is for leaders at organizations’ highest levels to make clear that workplace bullying is unacceptable. In addition, the way sexual harassment and workplace violence have been incorporated into employee education, so should the issue of workplace bullying be incorporated. He addresses the issue that undoubtedly exists in many organizations. The bully is often someone who has become skilled at the “kiss up, kick down” strategies and able to “hide his abusive side from superiors who review his performance”. He can also be popular with management “including those who will determine his fate”. Even so, Yamada says corrective actions such as coaching and counseling tend to yield changes that are only temporary. Ultimately increased morale and lower attrition boosts productivity overall, more than one individual [i.e., the bully] can over the long term. 

 

An important point the Professor makes is, workplace bullying is not a single issue, it is not an “isolated” problem: “Workplace bullying is strongly associated with other forms of aggression and misconduct at work.” He says the idea that people are “entitled to be treated with dignity at work remains a somewhat revolutionary concept.” This is because of what I personally consider the normalization of bad behaviors such as bullying, intimidation, and abusive conduct and the concept that power in the workplace entitles people who have no business managing others to wield their power over others. They believe that their direct reports should conform to their personal interests rather than that prioritizing the interests of the larger organization of which they are both employees.  (Yamada, 2008)

 

Disclosure, I interviewed Professor Yamada for a story on workplace bullying for a blog I maintained while in graduate school. 

 People go to work to earn an honest paycheck.  They don’t go to work to earn a paycheck with a dose of abuse and an extra helping of humiliation.  They go to work to use their talent to improve the organization that employs them, to work alongside colleagues who are also there to do the same thing.

Poor management prevents employees from reaching their potential to help the organization succeed. Organizations that truly value their employees they need to address the issues that keep employees from performing to the best of their abilities for the organization. This would include addressing supervisors and management that mistreat the people doing day-to-day work that makes to company run.

 

Citation: Yamada, D. (2008) Workplace Bullying and Ethical Leadership. Values Based Leadership Journal. 1(2).  http://www.valuesbasedleadershipjournal.com/issues/vol1issue2/yamada.php

What poor supervisors and managers cost the organization

Mark Allen, Ph.D. is the Academic Director of the Master of Science in Human Resources at Pepperdine’s Business School. According to an article he referenced in The Real Costs of Bad Management-And What You Can Do About It bad management can lead to death:

 

If decreased productivity and increased turnover aren’t reasons enough to stop the practice of having bad managers, consider this: bad managers lead to increased stress, major health issues, and even death.

 

Toxic management practice leads to decreased productivity, increased turnover, increased stress to employees, major health issues and even death. He quotes an article written by Jeffrey Pfeffer, Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, and author of the book, Dying For A Paycheck. Pfeffer co-authored a paper¹ in Management Science where he and his co-authors built a model to estimate factors for mortality and health expenditures associated with exposure to workplace stressors including unemployment, long working hours, low organizational justice.

 

Their conservative estimates found that in the U.S. more than 120,000 deaths per year and the related extra health care costs were $190B of annual health care costs could be attributed to harmful management practices.  They conclude, “Our results suggest that more attention should be paid to management practices as important contributors to health outcomes and costs in the United States.” This, they say, makes the workplace the fifth leading cause of death annually.

 

What I hear from these results is that there should be more accountability to how human capital is managed, and organizations should look at how power over others’ lives is wielded in the workplace. The alternative could be fatal.

 

In own article, “The Real Costs of Bad Management” Allen says:

 

What astounds me is that organizations still blindly accept the premise that having bad managers is a routine and inevitable cost of doing business. I wonder if this would be as acceptable if our executives knew the true costs: lost productivity, turnover of high performing employees, $190 billion in healthcare costs, and 120,000 annual deaths. So what can we do about this problem, a problem which can now accurately be called an epidemic?

 

In addition to the potential of creating unhealthy environments and contributing to employee illness, toxic organizations have tangible costs. Employee turnover costs companies one and one-half times the employee’s salary, says Allen. Based on this information in the following table I have created a snapshot of the manager’s salary, the employee’s salary, and the cost impact of replacing two employees and four employees within a 12-month period.

The point of the table below is to name the costs to an organization from a manager who has high staff turnover; whether through firings or employees leaving.  A manager’s salary may be $75,000, but if they have to replace a role or roles twice in the same year, which is not uncommon, and the employee makes, say, $60K, that manager is costing the organization $180,000 which is 140 percent of their own salary. Not only are they costing their organization employees, but they are costing the organization in decreased productivity due to the downward trajectory of morale by the employees who witness what the poor supervisor is able to get away with and how they are able to drive out talent. 

Manager/Sup. Sal.	Employee Sal.	Cost to replace  employees 2x in 12 mos.	Cost to replace  employees 4x in 12 mos.
0	0	12 mos.	12 mos.
40,000	25,000	75,000	150,000
65,000	50,000	150,000	300,000
90,000	75,000	225,000	450,000
120,000	100,000	200,000	400,000

 

 

In “The Real Costs of Bad Management” Allen talks about the phrase well-known in the business arena: People don’t leave organizations, they leave managers”. He says where companies refer to “employee engagement”, this can be tricky. He says, “bad managers lead to low engagement. Low engagement leads to declining productivity and higher turnover.”

Allen says the first step in addressing the problem is to admit there is a problem. In my personal experience, organizations that are well-aware of toxic management and leadership too often prefer to not acknowledge a problem. If the problem comes to a head, it’s easier to get rid of the lower-level employee and to leave the supervisor or manager in their role. The happens even when the employee is a perfectly high-functioning individual; the person in the position of power is the one who gets to retain their job, even if they are contributing to an exodus of staff.   Allen says, “I believe that the greatest source of dysfunction in our organizations is the abundance of bad managers. They cost us productivity and drive away our talent. But this is also our greatest area of opportunity.”

 

Allen offers a solution to creating a better environment which he says is to choose the right people to manage other human beings. Just as you wouldn’t hire an accountant with no aptitude for the job, and no experience, nor an engineer without the same, don’t hire someone without the interest and aptitude for managing people. He says it’s also important to ask people if they want to manage others, because the ones that want to do so may be the folks with an aptitude for managing your greatest asset – your employees.

 

Sources:

The Relationship Between Workplace Stressors and Mortality and Health Costs in the United States. By Joel Goh, Jeffrey Pfeffer, Stefanos Zenios. Management Science. March 13, 2016, Vol. 62, Issue 2, Pages 608-628. (https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/publications/relationship-between-workplace-stressors-mortality-health-costs-united) ¹

 

Allen, Mark (2019).  The Real Costs of Bad Management-And What You Can Do About It. Graziado Business Review 22(1). https://gbr.pepperdine.edu/2019/03/the-real-costs-of-bad-management-and-what-you-can-do-about-it/ ²

A link to a graphic from Decision-Wise.com on the costs of bad management: https://decision-wise.com/infographic-the-cost-of-a-bad-manager/

 

COVID-19 and its effect on work culture now. 

Currently, COVID-19 pandemic has created an environment that benefits employers more than employees. Yes, commuting is better for some, but employers are getting more out of their employees who are afraid if they are not seen their job may be eliminated.  I know that’s what happened with me. In the office when I routinely worked late at my desk I showed that I put in more than my 35 hours per week I was hired for, and it was more accepted that I was producing. If someone wasn’t producing, it was also more obvious. Once we went virtual it was easier to create an impossibly difficult environment. The mass work-from-home experience created a heightened “Hunger Games” environment where some bosses operated in an increasing environment of oppression and exploiting people’s fear of losing their job with all the stories that came in of layoffs and the growing unemployment rate. And so, people are more likely to tolerate poor treatment even more than before in the hope of remaining employed.

It is a once-in-a-century pandemic, COVID-19, that is the cause of the current economic uncertainty. Now that the coronavirus has legitimately caused harm to businesses, as workers seek to remain employed and to not join the ranks of the 19 million plus people seeking unemployment benefits workers are even more inclined to put up with workplace torture, and abusive management are more emboldened. Forms of dissent, however legitimate are now seen by some abusers as “you should be grateful to have a job”, regardless of how dangerous that job may be to one’s well-being. 

When someone talks about the poor management or toxic environment existing in their workplace, one of the most common solutions that is offered up is, “just get another job”. The chances are, if it were that easy for employees to walk off the job, and to “just get another job” I would venture to say there would be far fewer issues with poor environments for employees. Organizations would invest a lot more energy in employee satisfaction, or at the very least encouraging employee loyalty, including ensuring they were treated the respect adults deserve in the workplace. The burden of a poor workplace environment is instead placed on the employee making a change rather than the organization making a change for the good of the whole organization. 

Career-based articles often refer to candidates in job interviews fudging details of their actual experience in order to get a job offer. However, the same goes for the employer as well.  Often what happens is the management seeks to fill a position and may also misrepresent the truth in order to hire the type of talent they want working for the company, and then once they score the talent, the new hire finds out that the reality of the environment was not the positive experience they were told it was. By the time they realize the truth of the environment, it is too late. 

People go to work to earn an honest paycheck.  They don’t go to work to earn a paycheck with a dose of abuse and an extra helping of humiliation.  They go to work to use their talent to improve the organization that employs them, to work alongside colleagues who are also there to do the same thing.

Poor management prevents employees from reaching their potential to help the organization succeed. Organizations that truly value their employees they need to address the issues that keep employees from performing to the best of their abilities for the organization. This would include addressing supervisors and management that mistreat the people doing day-to-day work that makes to company run.

Next: What supervisors and managers with poor people management skills cost the organization.

From fired to fired up.

 

 

Welcome to my blog, a companion piece to my podcast Workplace Fairness and Dignity. My ultimate goal is to shed sunlight on an issue that people, understandably, don’t want to publicize. They have been fired, often for no justifiable reason. This happens much too often, and I want to crack open the black box that keeps the destruction caused by these firings secret, often shaming the fired who have no reason to feel ashamed. Let me share a brief version of my own story.

On August 29^th, 2019 I was thrilled to get an offer letter confirming the start of my employment set for September 29^th 2019 with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts working with the same agency I had worked for previously for four years before I left to attend graduate school full-time. On September 16^th, 2020, I received my bookend letter of my firing, during the videoconferencing call on which I got fired, after being given a 15-minute notice that I was meeting with one of my supervisors and the Human Resources representative.  I say I got a 15-minute notice as I had no inclination that I was to be fired, there had been no conversations with my supervisors suggesting I needed to be “concerned”. There had not even been a fake PIP (that Performance Improvement Plan my friend calls that one-month notice that someone should be looking for a new job). 

Because there were no performance issues, my supervisor needed to make up reasons for my firing. Actually, where we are “at-will” employees, particularly non-unionized management, there really needs to be no reason given other than maybe to document that the organizations’ representatives are not breaking any discrimination laws by firing you. These creative reasons for an otherwise arbitrary firing tends to become a “cover your tracks” exercise, especially where there is no cause for firing. For me this meant, although I had received a strong performance review one month prior, in August, within that one month, my letter outlined that my supervisor had lost confidence in my abilities, according to her, and now I was being fired two weeks before my one-year anniversary on the job.

The why is easy, I spoke up because my supervisor had become abusive and unprofessional. I was therefore fired for speaking up. They, my supervisor with the leadership's authority given, fired me because they could. I said something they didn't want to hear and that was that. It happens all the time, but it is wrong, legal, but wrong. With this blog, and my podcast I seek to shed light on the fact that employees who are doing the right thing are harmed economically because of the power placed in the hands of people, often supervisors and managers, who don’t always have an organization’s best interests at heart, but who, based on personal whims at best and personal animosity at worst, manage to rid the organization of people who do.

In an opinion piece, Be Heard bill protects civil rights in the workplace (The Boston Globe, October 23, 2019) Massachusetts U.S. Representative Katherine Clark said of the bill that she introduced, the message is the following: “No matter your race, income, or occupation, you have a right to be safe at your job. You deserve dignity. You deserve respect.” This is a message that bears repeating and one on which I will reinforce through this blog, and my podcast, titled Workplace Fairness and Dignity. 

Next: COVID-19 and its effect on work culture now. 

Do visit my podcast site, also titled, Workplace Fairness and Dignity, where you can listen to my first podcast at: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1603621/7281925. 

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