Hello.
Posting this in this forum section as I assume the answer would/should be fairly standard or consistent across the board.
So I work at a job whose management is, to put it kindly, the living embodiment of every “horrible boss” story you can imagine or have heard. It’s as though they bought and are using such a book as a “how-to manage” guide. One of them is the office manager, so they run everything.
The examples could go on for pages. For this post, I’ll keep to one. The management style there is basically an ever-moving goal-post, where when something is due to a mistake or misstep on management’s end, the employee is always wrong (even when they’re not), 100%, and “should have known better”. Period. End of story. Management’s failure to do their job always becomes the employees’ problem.
In this case, it’s about how they deal with call-ins (to be late, out for the day, etc).
Once upon a time, there was an office answering machine. Problem was, the managers (two of them) never remembered to check it, so people would call in and they wouldn’t know. Eventually, the answering machine filled up, and they didn’t know because they never checked it. So it became hit-or-miss, to call in and hope someone was there to answer before work hours.
When they realized it was an actual issue, and that they’d have to deal with it (by, you know, checking the answering machine every morning), they decided instead to do away with the answering machine altogether. Their reason was, literally “We forget to check the machine, so it’s not reliable”.
Their new solution was to call either of them on their personal phones, and let them know. One or the other. I’d call one of the managers, and the message always reached the people it needed to.
This worked okay for a short time, until yesterday. I called in, as usual, left my message and then went back to bed (I felt like I’d been run over multiple times by a Mac truck, and then set on fire for good measure).
An hour or so later, the other manager calls wanting to know how come I wasn’t at work. I explained that I was sick, and that I’d called the other manager and left a message with them (it was well before work hours, so there was plenty of notice).
They sounded irritated at this and said “Well they’re not here yet. You need to call both of us and let both of us know. Because if one isn’t here, the other has no way of knowing”.
At this point, I’d like to note that:
- I have no idea who is or isn’t going to be there, or at what time.
- They text message each other constantly, all day, for all kinds of other reasons. So you’d think it might have occurred to them, being managers and all, to do so with employee call-ins.
Anyway.
So, once again, a failure on management’s part was twisted around to become my problem. Even though the requirement is to contact one or the other, I’m at fault because I should have known to call both of them.
I’m half expecting to be written up for failing to give sufficient notice (they do this, basically, to make it “official” that they were right and the employee was wrong), which is what brings me to my question.
Having explained that, my question is do I have grounds to refuse to sign the write-up if it comes to that? And if they decided to take further measures in response to my refusal, such as termination, do I have any recourse? At what point can it be validly argued that an employer/manager has acted far beyond reasonably?
Thanks.