I thought I had heard everything in my years of being the boss but this is a new one on me.
A long time employee came to me with this story this morning and she wants me to “handle it”. I will refer to her as Mary.
On Friday, she received a call from the girlfriend of another employee’s son. I will call this employee Jane. The girlfriend stated she was calling to warn Mary that Jane is out to get her and has threatened to slash her tires and do damage to her car. Mary was also told that Jane knows that she has a vacation coming up and is planning to do damage to her house while she is out of town.
Now some background: Jane has been with me for over a year and is excellent at her job when she is here. The best I have ever worked with. However, she has been written up for being late which has improved since the reprimand. Since Jane started, I have received two anonymous voicemail messages that I have to ‘watch her’ as she is “on drugs” and she “steals.” I have seen no evidence of this and ignored them.
Mary does the same job as Jane but isn’t half as good. Over the years we have given Mary other responsibilities so she does pull her weight. There is some jealousy there and Mary does “tattle” about little things Jane does such as being late or taking too long a smoke break. Mary is also a HUGE gossip and while I would have hung up on this girlfriend she apparently talked to her for over twenty minutes listening to her bad mouth Jane. (And probably joining in although I have no proof of that)
Mary wants me to call in Jane and threaten her. Obviously that isn’t going to happen because Jane wasn’t involved in this and no damage has been done to Mary’s car or home.
However, what the heck do I do? I have already told Mary that she is not to engage this girlfriend in any way on my time and is to immediately forward the call to me if she calls back. However, Mary seems really afraid of Jane and is afraid to leave town. Although this phone call and threat wasn’t from Jane, if Jane didn’t work here, this disruption wouldn’t be happening. So Jane really is partially responsible by association.
What do I say to Jane if anything? Will the police do anything if she calls them? What about if Mary or I call them? Is that an over reaction?
If one of my employees came to me with a story like that, I’d point out that I’d rather be left out of the drama, and suggest she speak with law enforcement.
I agree with kayaker. You have no control over what any of your employees do on their own time, and if it’s not affecting their job performance or otherwise impacting your business in any way that you can discern, then it’s best not to get involved. If someone thinks their home will be vandalized while they’re on vacation, they need to talk to the police, not you.
I’m going to watch this thread with interest, too - I’ve never heard of this, and haven’t got a clue what you would do as a boss (except as kayaker says, to stay out of the drama). Something weird is going on with Jane, though - none of these calls are normal.
I’d make the girls act like men. Make them actually accuse each other to the other’s face instead of gossiping behind backs like this. Tell them to work it out themselves and stop letting it affect their work. Failing that, put them at opposite sides of an empty room with one knife in the middle. Two employee enter, one employee leave.
These people are crazy and crazy people don’t respond to logic. They respond to fear.
I would just tell the whole group that someone has been going around calling up the office, threatening employees, causing property damage, and whatever else you can think of. The police, in cooperation with the company, have been investigating it for some time and they are pretty sure they have it narrowed down to one of several people who they are watching closely. All they are waiting for now is this person to strike again so they can arrest them. Also, because your company is in [whatever industry you are in] and it is employee related, the perpetrator would be subject to the Patriot Act and several other Federal statutes pretty much guaranteeing a 20 year prison term.
Sounds like there’s two possibilities here: Either Jane is cuckoo for cocoa puffs, or someone wants other people to think Jane is cuckoo for cocoa puffs. I mean, really - who calls up someone’s boss to warn them to “watch her”? I suppose it could be a genuinely concerned family member, but it’s probably just as likely an abusive family member trying to make her life hell.
I agree that if Mary is concerned, she needs to call law enforcement and let them sort it out. If they want a statement from you about those other phone calls you got, it’s up to you what you want to tell them, but if I were you I’d stick directly to facts you yourself have first hand.
Personally, it sounds to me like Jane’s son’s girlfriend is the nutjob. She calls one of your staff, and I wonder who left the two anonymous messages as well?
This. And the police will say "yeah, we can’t take action on “Jane’s son’s girlfriend told you that Jane was thinking about doing something.” No crime has been committed, and there is no evidence any crime WILL be committed.
(my money is that Jane’s son’s girlfriend is cuckoo for cocoa puffs - if the woman in question is even really Jane’s son’s girlfriend - and having not made any progress on getting Jane fired by leaving anonymous messages on your phone, has chosen to prey on Mary - who frankly sounds like an easy target. I might, Jane being a good employee, call her into the office and let her know that people are making accusations against her - that you do not believe the accusations against her but she might not want to talk about work to her friends and family.)
My guess: Jane told her son not to see his nutjob girlfriend anymore (or made some other reasonable parent-type demand). Girlfriend, in retaliation, is calling Jane’s work to make her life hell. If fact, she may even know that Jane and Mary don’t get along because Jane (or her son) talked about it at home. No one calls someone’s work, anonymously, to tell said company to watch out for a specific employee… unless they are trying to get that employee in trouble, and I’m guessing totally without merit.
I say you call them both into your office and say you have been hearing that there are some issues between the two of them. Ask if this is true.
If they both say no, you say great, I never want to hear about it again.
If they say yes, tell them to resolve it right now or one of them is gone. If they can’t resolve it, fire Mary, since Jane is the better worker. Have the documentation ready to justify firing either of them going into the meeting just in case.
That last part is probably not going to happen, but I do think it would be worthwhile to try to get them in a room together to talk about any problems between them without ratting out Mary.
This is all very sound advice. I doubt that there’s even a son’s girlfriend. There is someone trying to get Jane in trouble. I thought it actually might be Mary herself.
This is very interesting and dramatic. Not a workplace issue, though.
Yeah I think perhaps lorene and I are on the same page. It’s just a bizarre story - Jane, a women who I’ll guess is in her late thirties or forties (old enough to have a son with a girlfriend) and is a hard worker (or at least, works twice as hard as Mary) was talking to her son and/or his girlfriend and just casually mentioned she was planning on slashing a co-workers tires and vandalizing her house?
I feel sorry for you, Foxy40. This is definitely not a workplace issue but it looks like something that you’ll have to be part of, eventually. It’s escalated to the point where either Jane has threated something pretty bad, or Mary has decided to create a story that she has. I don’t see this resolving itself.
This seemed like a good idea until it got to the Patriot Act stuff. At that point I think most people are going to call your bluff.
I’ve had to deal with what basically amounts to catfights at work. Most of them are a long time coming as well. Two employees that just don’t get along well and you know someday they’re going to have it out. This is a bit worse though. I think I would take CPomerov’s approach, but a bit altered.
Put them both in a room and lay out everything you heard and find out what’s going on, tell them they can resolve it right now or they both get fired.
It sucks that you have to lose Mary in the mess as well, but if you don’t get rid of her as well, she’s likely to keep getting these calls and if the calls are serious, she could wind up with some property damage.
OTOH, now that I think about it, I’m guessing Mary is just caught in the crossfire. You’ve had two complaints about Jane stealing and being on drugs and now this. It sounds to me like someone isn’t out to get Mary, someone’s out to get Jane. I’m guessing the call was BS, they were just trying to get someone to say exactly what Mary said to you in hopes that you would fire Jane.
As for who it is. It’s someone that knows that Mary has a vacation planned. So it could be anyone Jane talks to outside of work or it could be Mary making the whole thing up herself.
You don’t happen to have Caller ID do you?
One of the problems you have is that Jane may well not know anything about this. She doesn’t know about the first two anonymous calls, and she probably doesn’t know about this call. There’s a good chance that everything that the caller said was made up. That Jane mentioned to someone that Mary was going on vacation and the caller took the opportunity to make a prank call in hopes of getting Jane fired.
Of course, you could still fire Jane on the grounds that you just can’t have that going on at your place of business.
This was the first thing that came to my mind when I read the OP. My guess is that she had someone else leave the anonymous messages after she convinced them that Jane is nuts, then faked the call with the girlfriend.
ETA: the OP mentioned that there was some competitiveness between the two. Any way Mary could feel so threatened she’d try to get Jane fired?
Those are the kind of conversations we have at my house. Are you saying you don’t?
Why fire Jane over this? Jane can’t control whether people make calls about her.
But your point about Mary’s vacation is a good one. Either the caller said, “By the way, aren’t you going on vacation soon?” or, again, Mary is making this whole thing up. I doubt someone would tell their son’s girlfriend when and where their coworker was going on vacation. And why would the son’s girlfriend call, anyhow? Out of the goodness of her heart?
For the sake of this argument, let’s assume the calls are coming from Jane’s side of things (as opposed to Mary). In that case, while Jane couldn’t control the calls, if the OP gets rid of Jane, then the calls stop. Sucks for Jane, but if she’s dragging that kind of drama around with her, it’s going to cause these kinds of problems, especially when it creeps into her worklife.
My ex-mil may have mentioned to me in passing if one of her co-workers was going to be on vacation. Especially if we were just chit chatting about work or if I asked if about something next week and she wanted to tell me that she was going to be working more next week.
As for calling, maybe it wasn’t a nice chit chat, maybe it was “That bitch get’s a vacation next week and I have to work, I’m gonna slash her tires and burn her house down” type of thing. Maybe (outside of work) Jane is a bit nuts and the girlfriend was trying to give Mary an honest heads up.
Maybe the girlfriend really hates Jane and was trying to sabotage her.
Most likely, we’ll never know.
