Do you have a moderately but not entirely common name? Because I can see a situation where something like this could happen:
Random Employee: “Hey, I see we just employed someone called Jonathon Hopkinson. I’m pretty sure someone of that name at my last work was canned for embezzling eleven thousand dollars out of their travel expenses.”
HR: “Let me see…nope, turns out that JH was a fifty-year-old Mormon amateur triathlete. Our JH is a thirty-year-old model-train fanatic who has a coffee-drip-feed. No further action!”
I just wrapped up 20 years as a VP at one of largest banks in the country - not once have I left a meeting with HR thinking they were on MY side.
I once had an employee with a HUGE attendance problem. He was absent way beyond company policy limits, and the days he showed up he was an hour or more late. I did all the documentation, and when he’d racked up enough occurrences, I called HR and let them know we needed to do a termination. The employee was already in their offices when I called, telling them he was being persecuted for not adhering to a policy he didn’t understand. Yep, he claimed no one had told him he couldn’t miss a lot of days or had to be at work on time. Yes, he was given a copy of the company policy every time he was written up, but no one had explained it to him or made him read it, so how was he to know?
HR’s recommendation? We throw out all his previous occurrences, they meet with him and explain the company attendance policy in detail, and we start fresh. My boss, a Senior VP, nearly had a stroke, and the employee was there smug as can be. I said “No problem.”
Three months later, we fired the guy with their blessing. I knew the guy was never going to get his crap together.
In my experience, HR is on the employee’s side unless they’re a clear physical threat to the other employees or practice blatant harassment, and I mean multiple witnesses, preferably the entire department. Basically, they worry about the company getting sued for firing someone, so the only time they’re truly willing to get rid of them is if there’s a threat of getting sued by another employee if we keep them around. Except for executives, who can be let go at the drop of a hat.
If you’re still within your probationary period, there might be some danger, but if not, like I said - don’t sweat it. I wasn’t advising you to seek out a meeting with HR though, but just wait and see what’s up.
In my experience HR is on HR’s side. They are not going to support an employee against management. They will also not support management against an employee if there is any chance of a lawsuit or other item that might bring the wrath of top management down on them. They don’t care if an employee is getting screwed, and they don’t care if your department is suffering from an incompetent.
I personally haven’t had any problems, because people working for me with performance issues were nice people, and I was happy to implement the performance improvement plan. But I feel your pain.
When I was a manager, the last thing I wanted to hear was some employee saying nasty things about another one. You have to spend time you don’t have on it, you have to get HR involved, and it is uncomfortable. Advice here for someone making a complaint is to collect lots of data on when and where the supposed offenses happened. Since in your case there wasn’t any such data, you are probably safe. In many cases the snitch is going to come off worse than you will. My first reaction would be “deal with it yourself, before you come talking to me.”
Please avoid reading his calendar looking for more evidence, and don’t bring it up. It might be perfectly legal, but it won’t come across well. Do make sure you schedule 1-1s with your boss, become a person not a name, and make sure he knows what you are doing. If he has his own opinion of you, your skills, and your personality he is much less likely to believe smears.
I would agree with this. At my last job, I ran afoul of HR because my staff felt “uncomfortible” because one of my team was completely stressed out over the fact that he was utterly incompetent at his job. Like we would be in meetings where I would explain something, the VP of the group would explain something he would be like “OK” and then a week later, not only was it not done, he would ask questions that made it seem like he never even understood the core concept. And then he would have a panic attack and be on the verge of tears when I would question him on it.
Unfortunately, our new HR idiot was more interested in creating some sort of Googly Facebooky bullshit culture where the analysts could wear pajamas to work instead of actually dealing with performance issues.
HR can work for you though. At a job I had several years ago, the VP of my group was a fucking lunatic. Long story short, I documented her abuses, informed HR and within a few months she had “retired”. It’s helps though being a new manager in a company and phrasing your HR complaint as “uh…I’m new…is my boss supposed to scream at my people like that?”
Why can’t he just set a time with his manager to just ‘check in’ since he’s been there a month. He can identify where he thinks he needs more info, where he thinks he doing good… tell him that xxx and xxx have been really helpful in his training… blah, blah, blah… and then just ask the manager what are the two things that the manager thinks he should improve on.
That gives the manager a free-for all to bring up two items that are concerning him. If the manager has a major issue, he’ll state it and then John can address or correct it.
That way, John appears pro-active and makes the manager’s life a little easier.
It is entirely possible that any slight could have been a corporate culture thing. I worked for a company once that was really like a cult, right down to having verbal mores.
For example, you cannot use the word “problem” and must use the word “challenge” there – this is under all circumstances. An employee crashed her car on the way to work and it was told to us that “XXX had a challenge on the way to work this morning and won’t be in until her car has been towed to the shop”
Staples were another sin. No matter what the document size, you were expected to paper clip it for as long as possible, only moving up to binder clips when the document was 1/2 inch thick or more… paper clips were sort of tracked and traded… especially large paper clips. It was a sin that would be discussed among co-workers if you took prized paper clips from someone’s desk without asking.
Not to make light of your understandable panic, but this doesn’t really raise huge alarm bells for me. If it’s an HR concern there could be a very simple and innocent explanation. And the guy who wrote it just wrote it in such a way that it sounds a lot worse than it is. The word “Concern” might unnerve me a lot as well. It may very well be that they’re gathering information “secretly” so to speak, so that they don’t have to unnecessarily bother or embarrass you.
I’ve had managers before who managed to make “we need to talk” sound as if I were about to go to the gallows, then come to find out, I’d been handed a plum assignment. Things in type can look a lot more ominous than they actually are. Congrats on the new job, and here’s hoping the mystery gets solved soon!
If nothing comes of it, then it is nothing and whatever allegations were made were found to be baseless. In most circumstances, further allegations (if that is in fact what happened here) from that party are likely to be taken less seriously.
I’ve had a couple of stupid false accusations made about me over the years (like the guy who reported me for “drinking on the job” when he’d been in the room when I used hand sanitizer. Then later claimed he had never said I was drinking, only that he “smelled alcohol” :rolleyes: ). You usually find out who it is fairly quickly (they talk to people, who talk to people who talk to you).
If, by chance, something crops up in your performance review later, you should do what I did 20+ years ago when my personal Worst Manager Ever sprung something like that on me.
I refused to sign off on it, then I took it to his boss, where I pointed out that if what was being held against me on my review had been a legitimate performance issue, it should have been addressed with me at the time it occurred, eight months prior, rather than being shoved in a file to be sprung on me at review time. The Director agreed and it was recinded from my performance review, which was otherwise spotless.
