I don’t formally have any managerial role, but I do have an admin assistant, shared with two other people in my department. Theoretically all four of us report directly to the head honcho but in practice our department operates more or less autonomously. He sees the money coming in but knows nothing about how we bring it in, and has no firsthand knowledge of how our admin contributes to this. He’s on a different floor and the nature of his job is he’s rarely in the office for more than an hour or two a day, so plenty of days go by in which we never see him at all.
Yesterday our admin had her one-year review. No one else in our department knew about this, we weren’t asked to give any report or feedback into her work (although he knows we all think extremely highly of her). And when the review was over she came into my office nearly crying because she’d been accused of a disciplinary violation, which I am certain she isn’t guilty of. This alleged violation occurred several months ago and, again, none of knew she was even suspected of it.
Am I right in being completely pissed off about how this review has been handled? I have no HR experience myself but it seems all wrong to me.
I believe my own rule is correct: Unless you sign the paychecks, HR is never your friend. If HR is involved with you at all, or if you decide to talk to them, you are already in big trouble.
No employer hires someone for no reason. Every employee solves a problem for the employer. HR employees have only one problem to solve, and that problem is you.
Yes you are justified in being pissed off, but whether or not Head Honcho’s handling of the review is actionable is another story. Since Admin Assistant technically reports to Head Honcho (that is how I interpreted your post, but please correct me if I’m wrong), then his review of him/her is not subject to your assessment…UNLESS your company’s policy states otherwise.
So to summarize, Major Dick Move on HH’s part & I question his motive(s). But I doubt you’d have any recourse unless he violated company policy. People suck sometimes.
Unless you have a really close relationship with the manager, I don’t think you can insert yourself. However, your feelings on this are correct. He’s a crappy manager.
First rule of good management: if your report does something incorrect, you let them know asap, not save it up for the end of the performance period. Managers don’t like being blind-sided by things and sometimes they forget that nobody else likes that either. It’s also not at all productive to save all corrections up for performance review time. It’s very possible that the employee won’t remember the situation by then, and even if they do remember it, a long-delayed correction is just… not productive.
Probably the best thing you can do is to discreetly tell your admin that she can depend on you for a good reference if she decides to go elsewhere.
It is wrong. If any such violation occurred it should have been addressed immediately, not several months later. Was the “violation” documented in the review, or just communicated orally? The woman should raise her issue with HR, if you have a structured HR department. This sounds like a toxic boss and that is hard to fix.
I am not an HR professional but I have been a mid-level to senior manager in companies varying from 50 employees to 100,000 employees over the last 30 years.
Bringing up an alleged disciplinary infraction months after it happened is awful management practice, there’s no real way to resolve the situation after that much time, and if the employee is doing something wrong, they can’t correct behavior if they don’t even know about it. But one thing you didn’t say was whether she got a good review or not - if this is a hands-off manager, then she may just be reacting to something essentially meaningless, and the fact that he didn’t directly ask for your input may not be bad either. If he’s giving her a good review but checking the box on “I have to address this thing in the file, now it’s done” then it’s really no big deal, and I’ve seen plenty of places where the review is a process required by HR that doesn’t really man much. If she didn’t get a good review, or there’s more to the disciplinary thing than him noting something like ‘counseled employee, situation resolved’ then yeah there’s a problem. Not a lot you can do in either case.
I had an awful manager once who blindsided me at an annual review by telling me that there was a written incident from nine months before that we needed to address. The incident itself was overblown but legitimate, but the way it was handled was just awful. I had unintentionally been grouchy with someone who came to ask me a question while I was working with other stuff, and if anyone had told me at the time then I would have apologized to the person and made a point to be careful of tone when people came to me after hours. I’m not sure what anybody was supposed to do nine months after the fact to resolve the situation, and a written complaint seems overkill for a single incident of being mildly rude, it doesn’t seem like it served any purpose except to eventually help him in his quest to fire me. (Which you’d think would be bad for me, but getting fired turned out to lead to the best revenge on a crappy manager: I landed a higher paying, much less stressful job before I was even off the payroll).
From what the OP posted, I would NOT raise any issue with HR without significantly more information. If she didn’t get a bad review, complaining to HR can only worsen her situation. And it’s not clear that the manager is violating any company policy, so trying to go over the manager’s head when she (from what HR will see) has violated policy is not always the best tactical decision. As has been pointed out, HR is there to keep the company from getting sued and to administer benefits, they’re definitely not a friend of any employee.
What is your relationship with the head honcho? If it’s good, you could say something along the lines that you’d like to give feedback for her file if it’s not too late. Even if your relationship is not warm, you might also inquire about the process for providing input on the team prior to reviews, in order to plant that seed.
What is the consequence of this disciplinary matter? I’m wondering if it’s a pretext he’s chosen to deny her a raise.
I think she has plenty of information to tell HR that her boss notified her of a “disciplinary violation” and ask if there is a record of it and what action does the company intend to take, and did the manager overstep his boundaries by notifying her of this violation if HR was not involved or notified. If she doesn’t approach HR, then she has no other options but to either suck it up or resign.
What beneficial effect do you expect this to have? If, as you seem to suspect, there was no formal record of the issue, she’s just generated a record of something bad for her where it didn’t exist before, and pressed HR to intervene for something bad to happen to her. In the vast majority of companies, there is no boundary against a manager talking to his subordinates about a problem, and generally things go much better for the employee if the manager just talks to them about an issue without involving the HR bureaucracy.
Again, the OP didn’t actually state that she got a bad review, or that anything beyond notification was happening with the incident. If the only bad thing is having an incident mentioned after months of delay and then forgotten, ‘sucking it up’ is a much better option than ‘making HR take notice of it and attempting to fight someone who might actually be the owner of the company’ over it.
Seriously, what company has a policy that a manager cannot talk to a subordinate about an issue in general without involving HR? It seems like there’s a lot of people on this board who really have no idea how businesses operate on a basic level.
I think everyone is misreading the request of the OP. At no point in the OP was there any discussion about “going to HR”. Instead ruadh was asking for opinions from SDMB HR types. Very different discussion.
In that spirit, yes, the manager who gave the review is a bad manager for all of the reasons stated. One can only speculate on the motivation for calling out a supposed violation long after the fact. Perhaps the boss knows that the assistant is a star, and fears that she may ask for more money, and this is his bastard way of squashing that. People can be jerks, yah?
I was a middle manager at a Fortune 500 company for 10 years and have also been a manager at other medium-sized companies and am now a VP at a small company. So I have a pretty good idea how businesses operate.
If the description were, “The manager complained about something she did several months ago” then I would agree. I would also agree if the manager had said, “Listen, you technically violated policy, which means you could be disciplined, but let’s not go there. Just don’t do it again.”
But the wording was specifically “disciplinary violation.” The OP’s tone gave this a ton of gravity. This implies that some company policy was violated, and that discipline or other formal action is intended or threatened. A manager should not be taking disciplinary action without HR being involved in some way. In answer to the OP’s only actual question, I don’t blame ruadh for begin pissed off.
My take is that the manager’s an asshole and is blowing hot air. But if that upsets the employee, there are three options, and talking to HR is one of them. Personally I’d leave and find a better boss.
This is not an issue you raise with HR. It is an issue that you raise with the manager who gave the review or their manager.
Back in the early 90’s I was knocked down on a review for something that I allegedly did six months earlier and warned in the review not to do it again (a similar situation, it seems).
I went to my boss’s boss and said that I wanted it removed from my annual review because if I had done something wrong, it should have been addressed at the time it occurred and I should not have been ambushed with it six months later during my review. He agreed and my annual review was changed to remove it.
As one who writes and delivers reviews, there are 2 issues in the OP:
Should the manager have asked for feedback from others in the department prior to writing the review?
Maybe. Not enough info in the OP to really tell. If, as stated, the manager already knew that all of her team mates held her in high esteem, perhaps he thought that enough.
Was the alleged “disciplinary violation” handled correctly?
As written, absolutely not. Rule #1 regarding reviews: there should NEVER be a surprise during a performance review. Ever. All issues should have been addressed at the time they occurred (or became known). The review itself should be simply a recap of performance during the time period covered and setting expectations for the upcoming time period. The only possible exception to rule #1 above is if the employee performed so exceptionally well that they are receiving a reward above and beyond what they may have expected.
The OP says that the admin was bothered by it, it doesn’t say that there actually was any gravity to it. There is absolutely no implication that formal action is intended or threatened in what the OP wrote, which is why I said that I would not recommend going to HR without some more information. I have seen people, both posting here and IRL, get extremely upset over getting mild verbal correction from a manager like “if you don’t increase these numbers, you’re going to get in trouble for it”, and what is written does not rule out that the employee is overreacting. I am surprised that someone who claims to have significant managerial experience either believes that HR should be involved every time they give a verbal warning to someone, or doesn’t understand that a verbal warning is actually a form of disciplinary action. And I’m also surprised that anyone, especially someone claiming business experience, would recommend going to HR as a first resort for a situation like this. The vast majority of the time, if there’s a confrontation with a manager and he’s not doing something illegal, dragging in Hr makes your life worse.
I’m a manager in HR, although not directly involved in the employee review process except for the people who report to me.
My advice to manager is always this: NOTHING you say in the annual employee review should be surprise to the employee. If you think it’s going to be a surprise, you should have already brought it up with them before entering the room.
In the case of poor performance, it should be addressed as soon after the event as possible. It it’s an ongoing performance or behavior problem, there should be a performance improvement plan in place. Even if you’re going to give the employee a glowing review, they should already know that you think they are doing a good job before they go in. If the content of their review is a surprise, you’re being a bad manager.
Outside of that, it’s impossible to know what was going through this manager’s mind. Accusing someone of a disciplinary infraction, especially an undocumented one from months ago, is bullshit. If she has any complaint, it should be about the fact that he blindsided her with it at her review with giving her a chance to address it first. And if she want’s to pursue it she should go to her manager’s boss, not HR, first.
There you go. Someone who experienced the same thing (me) and an HR manager are both suggesting the same thing. Speak to the Manager’s boss, address it as something that should have been dealt with at the time if it had been a problem and ask that it be removed from the review.