And yet I wouldn’t put my neck out there without evidence backing me up. After all, if I can accuse him without evidence, he can accuse me without evidence, and given the clear incompetence of management I’d be guilty until proven innocent by people who don’t care enough to bother checking such things.
And I am seriously having a hard time imagining a management that is unaware that a dude is only doing ten hours of work a week, present or not. This implies a level of outright negligence that suggests that they too are only working ten hours a week, in which case they might see Carl as a kindred spirit!
I would probably have had a “Stop fucking the rest of us Carl” conversation before this. With an anonymous hotline taking it further isn’t even in doubt. Carl is going to have metaphorical bus tracks across his back.
I wouldn’t blow a whistle on him. But if the boss comes looking for him, I am not going to make up a cover story on his behalf. I might even say something like, “Carl has been leaving early a lot lately.”
I’m not going to go out of my way to help management do their job, though. It’s the boss’s job to make sure people are working when they should. And in this day of flexible work schedules, the comings and goings of other coworkers really isn’t my business.
I used to have a “do my job and keep my head down” kind of attitude.
As I’ve gotten older, that’s morphed into “do my job and don’t be afraid to call out anybody who isn’t doing theirs.”
Absolutely I’m reporting Carl. He’s screwing over the rest of us and stealing from the company. Fuck him.
That would depend on the company. In some companies, clocking someone else’s timecard is a fireable offense.
Part of my difficulty in answering this question is that I don’t believe HR or the company when they say it would be anonymous. There’s too many ways to track someone if it’s done electronically. If it’s a box, maybe there’s a camera or someone sees you in the hallway where the box is. But if it’s a purely hypothetical 100% anonymous way, I would report Carl every time.
I does not have to be done electronically. It can be sent snail mail. The letter would be sent to corporate headquarters, which is located several states away.
I am in this camp. I have no way of knowing what arrangements Carl might have with management. If he does something that directly impacts me, I would ask the boss what’s happening. Otherwise, let it lie.
To me, this doesn’t actually sound like a particularly good anonymous tip line situation. Either
a) immediate boss really doesn’t know what’s going on, but is willing to take action and has some trust in me already. In which case the result of a tip is that the boss talks to me and asks me if it’s true.
or b) boss knows about this and doesn’t care/can’t do anything about it. In which case an anonymous tip does nothing except the possibility of the boss telling Carl that someone finked on him.
So what I’d do is have a very non-committal talk with my boss. Next time I see him just kind of mention that something funny was going on with Carl’s time card, in a ‘oh that’s funny but not really my job to worry about way’. If boss says 'Really? That’s not right" then he gets the whole story. If boss says “Hey, that’s not your problem”, or sighs and says he knows but there’s nothing he can do, then I shut up.
Doesn’t seem like it’s worth the effort and risk. In a real-world situation, it’s doubtful that management is actually unaware of what’s going on, and if they’re actually so clueless that they’re unaware it’s doubtful that they’ll care. It’s pretty likely that Carl has some connection that means management doesn’t want to fire him, and if not then bringing this to the attention of management makes it likely that they’ll crack down on the whole department, creating new policies and enforcing old ones that don’t really matter. Also, the fact that people fear retaliation from Carl is a hilariously huge red flag; if Carl is capable of retaliation, he’s obviously got some kind of ‘in’ with management; if he was just a slacker slipping under the radar then there isn’t anything he could do. I find the belief in “the report can be anonymous” touchingly naive, I certainly never would believe a large corporation promising me anonymity.
My action is to keep collecting my paycheck, as all of the possible results of reporting him are negative to neutral and I can’t see how trying to do management’s job for them would possibly benefit me.
Is your parking monitored? We have to use our badges to get out of the parking garage and we have had employees caught not punching out on the time clock and falsifying their work time and the parking garage times not match.
We have joked in my job, that time sheet violations seem to be about the only clear fireable offense.
I’m not sure what the exact procedure would be, but I’m pretty sure that there would be repercussions if an employee repeatedly “forgot” to sign in or out. They’d probably be given a directive to sign out, and if they kept forgetting, they would likely be disciplined.
We have plenty of co-workers (most?) who put forth less than 100%. But I consider some slacking off different from falsifying time. I’d probably report him. Especially since - as you describe the situation - his behavior DOES result in extra work for the other team members.
I’m basically fine with any of my co-workers working whatever “scam” they want to. I feel my response is generally to just decide what kind of scam I want to pursue myself. And I generally appreciate the laziest, crappiest colleague - they make me look good in comparison without me putting forth any special effort!
But habitually leaving w/o clocking out crosses some vague line for me. I’d probably report him. Depending on the overall situation, I might or might not care whether it was anonymous.
In the real world, the behavior of the person sending the letter could end up exposing them. Probably not at the corporate level where they get the letter, but within the department people will try to draw conclusions based on observations. If Bob is always complaining about Carl, if Bob has brought it up with the 1st and 2nd line managers, and if Bob has talked to Carl, then people are going to assume it’s Bob who sent the letter. Of course, it could be quiet guy Joe who sent the letter, but people wouldn’t know that. So in the real world, if I were to send a letter, I would only do so if I thought my behavior in the office would not indicate that I was the person who sent the letter.
Also in the real world, the manager may get pissed that corporate is now aware that he wasn’t on top of things and is on his back to get his dept in order. Corporate may say he’s at risk of getting fired because he is not managing costs. The manager may try to figure out who the troublemaker was that sent the letter just to get him out of the dept to avoid any of these issues in the future. The incompetence of the manager is why Carl is able to get away with all this stuff, which would lead me to believe that the manager won’t necessarily act in a pious manner.
This doesn’t seem like a “whistleblowing” example. I see a distinction between reporting something low-grade unethical and alerting authorities about more egregious behavior. For example, in my family I might tell my parent that my brother hit me or stole a dollar from dad’s wallet. This would be more like the Carl scenario of alerting authority to a low-level rule breaking. If, however, my parent hit me, calling child protective services would be the analog of whistle blowing because there is no remedy within the system and the violation is of a higher level, committed by someone with a responsibility for the vulnerable person’'s welfare.
Some possible ways: Corporate ethics department says ‘this is a local manager issue not a corporate ethics issue’, forwards the message to the manager (or second line manager). Manager then deduces from writing style, fact that co worker has complained in the past, the timing of any specific incidents, or a combination who the complainer was. Corporate ethics takes the unsigned letter seriously and someone acts on the complaints. Since they’re acting ethically, Carl is disciplined for the specific incidents laid out in the letter - which then means that Carl and the manager have the precise complaints in the letter, and can deduce who was around to witness those precise incidents. (If the letter doesn’t have specific information, then corporate ethics would be acting unethically to do anything more than say to the manager ‘some anonymous source said Carl sometimes does something, look into it’.)
The manager is likely pissed at someone going over his head to cause trouble and will want that to stop and it’s established that Carl is able to visit retribution on people, so there’s good reason to expect blowback from the complaint.
