If the guy is struggling through difficult personal times, he needs to be fired, and recommended to a suicide prevention line.
The guy is unstable…children aged 8-14 may be able to get away with this, for 'going through difficult personal times". Adults should be fired. If he isn’t a robot, neither are the adults with whom he works. If he isn’t mature enough to know to keep his problems to himself, he needs to go back to high school and have a good talk with the coach. The business world is for professionals, not for some freak to ‘find himself.’ If this was him acting out while going through ‘difficult personal times’, then what will his behavior be if he goes through ‘terrible personal times’?
This was insubordination, an instant fireable (Scandanavian countries excluded) offense world-wide.
Skald, for your own protection, I highly recommend that whenever you “counsel” Miss Modesty, you have a witness present. Otherwise, you could very well find yourself defending yourself from a sexual harassment charge. And perhaps HR should be handling this too? Or at least, after you explain what is and isn’t appropriate, they could write it up for your approval and then distribute it. And you’d want a signed acknowledgment from every employee that they’ve read it and understand the consequences for failure to comply.
As for Mr Congeniality, my first thought is to use your ‘chain of command’; i.e. call HIS boss in, tear HIM a new arsehole, tell him to ‘counsel’ his subordinate, and that you want to see them both in your office at, say, 1400 that day.
You seem to be going into quite the tailspin yourself.
Who cares what other countries do? Let’s act as if Skald was talking about the US. Go crazy. We can do it.
And, who says that this is what they would do to an insubordinate employee? What if he goes postal? Would the compassionate countries with worker protection and universal health care agree that the bodies should be buried, or cremated? The employee deserves to be canned, if the employer cares about, or is compassionate about the co-workers.
You don’t know what the other countries would do, so don’t act as if they would do whatever you so decree. We aren’t the saps you think we are, listening to your fallacious appeal to authority, in the name of compassion. Snap out of it.
I have only seen one case of a young woman in semi-transparent clothing in a professional office.
It would have been more effective if they had sent her home immediately, instead of waiting until every male in the place had found a reason to go in the front door - most always, it was through an unmarked door directly into one’s department, She was gorgeous, and luckily never repeated the mistake.
But this woman pulls this off how many times? The “exposed tattoo/piercing” rule was enough - I believe that was mentioned explicitly? And how many females over age 14 need to be told to keep something opaque over their nips?
Keep a camera - not a phone, a dedicated camera, flash on - document this behavior and write it up - sex in the workplace is an HR nightmare.
As to #2 - maybe he has a credible reason why he did not realize he had jumped off the plank - but I doubt it. The “you’re not my boss” types generally don’t think they need a reason - just a chance to get away with it.
Whatever he comes up with, did you ask he co-workers about his choice of words/attitude when he (thinks) he’s out of earshot of ‘the boss’?
If that wasn’t a one-time thing, ask his direct super why he is still employed. I’m also guessing blackmail…
Since Skald hasn’t returned with an update I have become concerned that employee #2 may have gone postal and shot up the place. Any workplace shootings in the news over the last couple of days?
The workplace isn’t a military installation. Insubordination is not the incredibly egregious moral wrong some of you seem to think it is. More important than authority figures being treated with proper respect is everyone getting the job done well. Often proper decorum is part of this, but exceptions exist, depending on the workplace, depending on the style of the manager, depending on the situation.
Firing people costs money and time, and a single incident–even an incident of that horrible awful sin of insubordination–doesn’t necessarily justify a firing. This is why I would wait and see what the guy has to say for himself at the very least. Most probably he will now need to be on super double secret probation–not for the sake of people showing proper respect but for the sake of ensuring things are going smoothly so the job can be done well–but to instantly fire him no matter what his story is would be, imo, jumping the gun.
It’s not the insubordination nearly as much as the screaming profanity so loudly, in a call center, that it can be heard on the other side of the building. I see no reason why that does not absolutely justify a firing.
I was addressing my comments to the several posters on the thread who are citing the insubordinate nature of the behavior specifically as an auto-firing offense.
As for the yelling etc, that’s pretty damn bad! But if it has never happened before, and the guy seems to be sincere about making sure it never happens again, then it might be worth keeping him employed (on super double secret probation).
I agree it’s not an automatic firing offense (neither is the inappropriate dressing). These are problems that need to be addressed but are fixable if the employee is willing to fix them.
What would concern me most about the swearing was that the managers were off at the time. If it had just been a typical day and his regular manager had heard him swearing, then you could more easily make an argument the employee may have been having a bad day and it was an isolated incident.
But this happened when the regular manager and the temporary manager were off. This, to me, indicates that it wasn’t an employee having a bad day; it was an employee thinking he had a good day to act up. This looks like an employee who has no concern about acting unprofessionally as long as he thinks he won’t get caught.
Managers can’t watch employees all day and they shouldn’t have to. A manager should be able to tell an employee what to do and then be able to rely on the employee doing it after the manager leaves the room. An employee who needs to have a manager watching over him all the time to make sure he’s doing his job isn’t worth the trouble.
Not just that, but the fade. I’ve never known a ‘business casual’ office that allowed faded jeans. Every one I’ve worked at has specified that jeans must not be faded, ripped, frayed, etc.
I think Skald should give the employees one of this infamous hypotheticals.
“There were some employees that didn’t follow the dress code and were insubordinate. They could choose to continue that and be unemployed, or shape up…”
The (Fortune 200) company that I work for has no dress code AFAIK, just “don’t show up naked”. I’ve seen ripped and faded jeans (hell, I’m wearing faded jeans as I type this), tee shirts, flip-flops, even shorts.
Having said that, I suspect that if someone showed up as described by Skald she’d be asked to change.
I worked for the web-division of an investment company in San Francisco for about a year. There was basically no dress code there either. My normal outfit was a pair of cargo shorts, a tshirt and a baseball hat on backward to keep my extremely long hair out of my face.
There was this old guy I would see roaming the halls every day, dressed much the same as I, but with a little more flair – aloha shirt and sandals, long scraggly beard and hair. I always figured he was the janitor, or some mail-sorter who’d been there for years. Turns out he was Vice President In Charge Of Some Important Shit Or Another.
