I’m pretty sure it’s against most labor laws to take missing $$ out of paycheques, unless it’s been proved that a particular person took it.
No? I’m I out to lunch? I read at another forum and that seems to be a pretty consistent response to that sort of question.
I wanted to add, I think the situation was very badly handled, also.
If I were an employee - NOT one of the receptionists - I’d be looking for a new job, and I’d probably be considering getting my bonus cheque and splitting the next day. When management treats their employees like thieves, it doesn’t foster a great working environment, IMHO.
I think this was handled extremely badly by the management of your office. I am not at all surprised at how your head receptionist has been acting. You have treated your employees terribly and with extreme disrespect. You’ve accused them of being liars and thieves. Then you hit them in the pocketbook and withheld pay from them! All that done when you really don’t know exactly what happened. You don’t even know if an employee stole the money, or if a customer did.
With an office environment like this, I wouldn’t care how good your payscale was or how generous the benefits plan was. I would be gone.
To attempt to fix this, you need to reimburse any employees who had pay withheld from them, apologize to them, and figure out a better system for handling cash in the future. Oh, and as Harriet mentioned, get some additional HR training for yourself.
Or maybe you should just let your receptionists sue your asses off, instead. :rolleyes:
The problem is you still have poor cash controls. If someone else has access, you now have a potential for theft that will be difficult at best to isolate even with just two people. It would probably be childs play to have multiple drawers or force countouts for breaks, lunches, etc.
At the amusment park I worked in everything was fine until one cashier supervisor decided to get creative and 4 registers came up a total of $2,100 short.
Any changeover should be counted over to the next person. Period. If anyone including yourself takes over that drawer for any reason without counting the drawer in the presence of the prior cashier, you are accepting responsibility for any discrepancies. They fired a new manager after he wrote me up for refusing to discipline a cashier for a $125 short drawer he didn’t count over from her…even though the policy is nobody is exempt from this process and he knew it.
There should be only 1 key to that cash drawer as well. Put it on a keyback or something the employee can clip on a belt or pocket. Part of the process becomes the transfer of the key as well. Making the loss of the key subject to disciplinary measures should be ok for a variety of reasons.
There are a number of cash control methods we could easily discuss here, eat the loss and learn from it rather than punishing your employees for unprovable assertions and pissing them off in general. One pissy receptionist could easily turn away tens of thousands of dollars in business with a simple, “sorry were all booked up for that day, maybe you could try a different facility”, a few times a day, until she quits or gets fired, or you get fired for the slump in revenues.
I see so many actions that leave you open for lawsuits, that I won’t list them. You need to get a lawyer that can advise you in what to do with this mess now. Delay making any more of these decisions until you get a lawyer to sit in with you. You need to get a professional to advise you in security and employee management. One lawsuit can cost in the tens of thousands per year for multiple years. I have to add that I would have been rightously pissed if I had been confronted in this manor. There is also a good reason the federal government has made it illegal to require an employee to take a lie detector test. They are not reliable enough.
I also suggest you don’t post anything else to do with this. The first thing a lawyer is going to say about posting here is that everything you posted can be used in a lawsuit.
You need a proper drop safe, as you are also vulnerable to armed robbery. Not from your staff, but from some rather shady customer who might have twigged to the fact you have a lot of dough around.
I believe so too. I once had a customer walk out without paying, and when I offered to have it taken out of my paycheck (I was sixteen at the time), my manager said that they legally could not do that. The only time I legally had money deducted was when there was a mistake with the time clock, and they accidentally gave me too much, so rather than give me a new check, they simply took it out the next week.
I was also under the impression that you can’t ask your employees to take polygraphs. Don’t tell me they weren’t forced to, anyone refusing to do so would automatically look guilty.
Maybe it’s just me, but when a boss starts bragging about how super generous and what a super fun happy place they have for their employees, I usually think it must be the worst work environment ever.
Have to add to the pile-on here; the theft was badly handled, your cash is badly controlled, and I would probably be looking for a new job, too, after being polygraphed and having money deducted from my paycheque on an unproven assumption. When you can’t prove who took the money, management eats the cost. That’s just the way it is. If management doesn’t want to keep on eating thefts, they need to fix the problem.
The pissy attitude of your receptionist is a whole 'nother issue, and she should be written up for disciplinary action for her insubordinate attitude. You don’t have to like your job or your supervisors, but you do have to be polite and respectful at work (and they have to be respectful back). You might want to talk to a lawyer, but if you fire this receptionist now, she may have a wrongful dismissal leg to stand on. This whole episode is seriously botched. I would start a paper trail on easing her out the door.
Yeah, I’m pretty much with everyone else in this thread. I’ve never been of the “If you have nothing to hide, why worry?” school of thought, and if asked to give a polygraph for any reason I’d refuse as long as I feasably could. And yes, the cash drawer is the responsibility of the employees, but when more than one person has access, are you expected to watch it when you are supposed to as well as when the other person is supposed to? I’d probably quit on the spot if I was told that I would be fined for a theft committed by another employee.
With that said, it seems that your problem employee has a preexisiting grudge regardless of this situation. I’m not sure what you can do about that. Some people are determined to be unhappy. If she is going to quit anyway, then that’s probably the easiest way out of the situation for you.
I’m having trouble understanding why no one wants to hear the part about the receptionist suggesting the polygraph herself. It really does seem that the test was not only her idea but was quite strongly her desire as well.
Nowhere do I read that any of the employees themselves were offended by it. Personally, I’d rather have the test and be cleared than have the slightest bit of lingering mistrust. When you add in the fact of previous employee theft (embezzlement) then I think you’ll see that such mistrust would have been quite likely.
That said, I don’t think taking the money out of their paychecks was fair. Someone screwed up, obviously, but not all of them. Given that access to the cash was through a couple of locked doors and the money was taken from a couple of locations in the drawer, yeah, I’d say it screams “inside job” to me. You knowwhat my theory is? The disgruntled employee did it herself. Seriously.
At the zoo our little tour float (under $50) is simply kept in a plastic drawer, inside an unlocked cashbox. Even so, in order to take it, a thief would have to get past me and anyone else who happened to be up front. Hasn’t happened yet, in the nearly four years we’ve had that set-up. We’re in Surrey, the theft capital of Canada, I might add. Two locked doors and a locked box? What was he, the Invisible Man?!
You really need those security cameras.
A drop safe/drop box is good for fires, too, if the box is fire resistant. Part of cashier training should be when to drop cash. Always have the cashiers drop hundred dollar bills. There shouldn’t be more than five twenties in the drawer at any time, either, unless you get LOTS of hundreds on a regular basis, and will need to make change for one after another. It’s just a good cash control device.
Lynn–it might be kinder to the O-poster to e-mail them a copy of this Thread, & then delete it from the Board.
Because–
You have no basis whatsoever to fire that woman. To talk with her, etc., OK. But to FIRE her? Because she’s angry about something? Give me a break!
But it sounds like her anger is leading to her insubordination. She needs to be able to respond in a constructive or at least neutral way to management speaking with her and it sounds like she is being uncooperative in that sense.
If she was disgruntled before the theft, it’s possible she did it, to sabotage herself or bring things to a head. If she does have a substance abuse issue, she is legally given one chance to get treatment before she can be dismissed for this.
When I worked in an office where money was stolen, our boss sat each person down and asked them if they did it. Of course no one said yes (we all pretty much had the same suspicion) and that was that. With no proof it didn’t go any farther; changes were adopted in how money was stored and handled.
zoogirl I did see the one woman suggested the lie detector. Their company put the other three in a position were they could accept or be the crook by default of refusing. I no my rights enough to refuse and I still would resent being asked to take the test. The way this company is handling things, shows me some major incorrect ways of handling cash and employees, or no written policy at all. The woman now sounds like a liability to the company. It sounds like the bad implementation of corrective action could be the reason for her attitude and behavior problem. This is something they need to talk to a lawyer about so they don’t end up in court. Doing anything more until they seek legal advice can cost them dearly at this point. I still believe the company and employees would benefit greatly by hiring a person to come up with security and personnel policies. They should then have a lawyer look the policies over before implementation. The lawyer can then advise then on any legal difficulties that might ensue from their implementation. The last place I worked had pretty fair policies, but they learned to run policy changes by the lawyer. Four years of fighting a lawsuit kept them from given better benefits each of those years and some years not any new benefits. Benefits meaning bonuses, wage increases, better health care, and anything that is an increase in the employee’s standard of living. That doesn’t even consider all the personal time each of the owners and managers had to redirect to fighting an ex-employee’s lawsuit. It hindered the growth of the company and threatened the existence of the company, because of the resource diversion to fight the lawsuit. Everybody in the company lost out in this case.
This is the last time I will post to this thread.
I would put this quite firmly in the “I’m totally innocent, but if you guys are going to be total assholes, I’ll prove myself.” camp.
Then the employers demonstrate that they ARE total assholes, and employee gets pissed off.
Imagine if you’re spouse constantly accused you of cheating on them. Now imagine yourself saying “What do I have to do to prove that I’m innocent - take a polygraph?!?!”, and now imagine your spouse saying “Yes, that will do it. I’m also going to give one to all of your friends.”
Now, I supposed you asked for it, but I think if you were pissed off, you’d be well within your rights…
I don’t think that’s necessary. This thread (at the time of this posting) has been viewed some 900 times. I’ll bet that a lot a people * besides the OP* are learning some valuable lessons from doper’s replies. After all, isn’t that the whole point of the board’s existence?
Also, the OP started this whole thing. Why should the SDMB be put in the position of having to delete the OP’s statements on a public board?
I could be wrong, of course. I think what we mainly need to remember is that NONE of us were there, except the OP. We don’t know how the employers came across. Their tone of voice, body language and history with all the employees are factors. There’s a big difference between “I think we’d all be feel better knowing for sure” and “Take the test or walk.”
You’re right, of course.
I just think that even “I’d think we’d all feel better knowing for sure.” would still be horribly offensive to someone who was a long term, trusted employee. Particulary if the loosy-goosy cash handling policies as described by the OP were in place.
YMMV