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.
As the expression goes, one rotten apple spoils the barrel.
ReplyDeleteIt 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?