Saturday, October 31, 2015

Conflict Management


I was recently involved in a conflict at my job here at school involving an employee who also lived at the housing complex we both worked at.   For purposes of this blog, I will call them John.

From the very beginning of his questionable hiring (meaning many of the employees who already worked there, including myself, did not feel he should have been hired and we believed our manager had ulterior motives for doing so, these I will refrain from elaborating on), John was clearly not qualified and caused problems.  He managed to do so in a multitude of ways, including simply making things up regarding prices and availability of apartments, giving away merchandise without authorization from our manager, and making people within the office uncomfortable because of his comments about other employees.  Not only are the first two items I mentioned damaging to the business, it made the rest of the employees who were doing their jobs properly look bad because we had to attempt to clean up the messes created by John making promises we couldn’t keep.  I would attempt to explain this from more than one perspective, however, I genuinely believe everyone in the office shared the same mindset. 

Once it became clear that this person was the one misleading potential residents, and in general not doing their job, it became something of a joke around the office.  Every time we had an issue, the first reaction by anybody was to ask if John was responsible.  I also mentioned his comments towards other employees.  These got more and more inappropriate the longer he worked with us, to the point where some employees were genuinely uncomfortable to be around him.   This also became something we discussed at the office very openly when John was not around, including with our managers who were aware of his actions.

The real breaking point of the situation came when John got into a dispute with his roommate.  At first, he was given the benefit of the doubt, thinking that he was actually getting harassed as he claimed.  Our managers allowed him to move to a different unit in the building, problem solved right? Wrong. Only a week or so into living with his new roommates and John was involved in another dispute.  This time he claimed someone has stolen his property (toilet paper) from his room.  So again our managers let him move within the building.  John is now on his third apartment and third set of roommates within a few months. Sure enough, before long, he has an issue with his newest roommates.  At this point, everyone in the office including our managers realize it is not the roommates that are the issue, it is clearly John. 

Finally, much to the relief of every employee in the office, our property manager decided to relieve him of his duties and informed him he would no longer be employed by us.

Normally, when someone gets fired, they are obviously not happy, but generally take it like adults and move on. Not John.   Upon being fired, John not only moved out of the building to spite my manager, he began to make claims of sexual harassment publicly on social media about his former roommates, claims we know for certain to be false. 



It has now been about a month since John was fired, and thankfully much of the conflict has died down.  Nobody took his claims of sexual harassment seriously and he eventually gave up on that front.  However, he did manage to get a job at a competing company on campus, and is now abusing his knowledge of our operations and the building to spam our residents with mailers and advertisements, physically trespassing on the property and placing fliers under their doors.  This is a whole new situation and it remains to be seen how this will play out. 

I definitely believe this entire situation could have been avoided if management had recognized that John was not good for the office environment.  He never would have lived in our building had he not been an employee and management had multiple opportunities to recognized and deal with the issue.  As soon as his inappropriate comments made other employees uncomfortable, he should have been dismissed.  Instead, he was allowed to stay and the situation compounded into something far worse.  I think this is a great example of how important managerial decisions regarding people really are, and a great lesson for my future.


1 comment:

  1. As the expression goes, one rotten apple spoils the barrel.

    It sounds like John was in need of counseling. If he was a student on campus, somebody should have encouraged him to get help. I recognize that for his co-workers that would be an uncomfortable thing to do. But if done as a group, and if insistent about it, perhaps it could have happened. What you describe is a tragedy and the issue is whether it had to play out that way.

    Of course, you didn't elaborate on why he got hired to begin with so you may have felt the responsibility should have been borne by your boss. So it may be that the appropriate sequencing would have been for your group to go to the boss first and encourage him to do something about it.

    As you told the story, firing John "solved" the problem locally, but it really just moved the problem elsewhere. Perhaps it was somebody else's problem to solve. But who exactly would that be?

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