Subscribe to this blog
 |
Over 200 HR professionals from a variety of forums participated in the HR Horror Story Contest from Halogen Software earlier this month. This year, HR pros shared their insights into some of the spookiest HR issues around, and many shared their own personal HR Horror Story. Some were funny, while others were downright disturbing! To see a summary of the survey results check them out on the Halogen Blog. Below is a big collection of just some of the HR Horror story submissions we received. Names and places have been omitted to protect those involved – and once you read some of these stories, you’ll definitely see why anonymity is a must! Happy Halloween from Halogen Software and the Lighter Side of HR! The Winner:My previous employer was a manufacturing company of almost 800 employees and we seemed to have a lot of interesting troublemaking employees. Since I had the honor of being the Sexual Harassment Prevention Captain for the plant, those were the ones I dealt with the most. I had two sexual harassment issues in the same week that involved people’s butts (to have one was enough, but two!). First, I had a male employee who got mad at another male employee who was working on the same line as him. The second employee turned around to ignore the guy that was mad and the guy that was mad leaned over and bit him on the behind. The biter actually tore a small hole in the guy’s pants. This was a grown man with grown children and he felt the need to resolve the conflict by biting the other guy on the rear end??? As if that termination was not bad enough, two days later I had another employee who got mad at his boss. His method of conflict resolution–mooning!!! The guy actually unbuttoned his pants, pulled them down, bent over and (the best part of the story, I think) shook his bare bottom at his boss. His boss thought this was funny–it was another employee who witnessed this who reported it to HR!! Once again, how does a grown man think that exposing your behind at work is acceptable? Not to mention, someone in a supervisor role who also doesn’t seem a problem with this behavior!! Being Sexual Harassment Prevention Captain for this plant was giving me a ulcer—-I have worked at my new job for almost 9 months and I have no stories from here that involve anyone’s butt! :) Other Great Submissions:I recently interviewed a 6′5″ 250lb part time cage fighter for a delivery position. We conduct very thorough background checks. In the process, we discovered that the candidate received a probation violation from another state with no mention of the previous crime. There was no other information on his criminal record. We used another background check resource to double check out of curiosity ( I am new to HR and wanted to know the difference between our background check provider and one we were considering using due to cost). I discovered the person was a registered sex offender and the probation violation was because he moved and failed to register. We called up the criminal record vendor that we used initially to complain because that offense is EXACTLY what we were trying to avoid. If we hadn’t double checked… Anyways, long story short. After that conversation, the vendor reported the sexual conviction to our state police. The candidate got a notification in the mail… which was opened up by his significant other in the presence of his ex… who were in the middle of a custody battle. Long story short… within in 24 hours I had an enraged cage fighter twice my size at my place of employment looking for me… I got to use my de-escalation skills. Scariest moment was the time early on when an applicant who wore a t-shirt to his interview that prominently featured an unprintable EXPLETIVE DELETED on the front offered me a $200 cash bribe to halt the interview process then and there and hire him. At my last company, a sales account manager went on a medical leave of absence for several months. He’d been hired before I started working at the company. Several months after he was gone, the accounting department brought to my attention that his company-issued and company-guaranteed credit card was past due by several months in the amount of $25,000. Our policy was to not allow any personal expenses to be charged on the card. When looking at the details of his charges, most were to several liquor stores to the tune of $400-$500 per day, and $2,500 bail paid to a jail in Las Vegas. When I looked in his personnel file, I saw in his background check that he had been convicted of credit card fraud and had done jail time. It’s not that this was overlooked as it was highlighted with a marker. Incredibly this guy had gotten hired anyway and was given a company issued credit card. He was immediately fired. The company took the hit for the $25,000 liquor and bail expenses. I was in the process of interviewing for a position and had spent all day asking potential candidates the normal round of questions, one being name three of your biggest strengths and three of your biggest weaknesses, this one candidate looked at me and said: “well I sunbath too much so I am concerned with getting cancer, I tend not to shave as much as I should and end up with too much stubble and my third is that I spend a lot of time looking out of the window wishing I was on the golf course”. I managed to keep a straight face and reiterate that the weaknesses I was actually looking for are related to the work environment and not personal, could he give me three more? That candidate made my day, of course they didn’t get the position but they certainly made the whole process that much more enjoyable! Some people say that telecommuting and web conferencing has opened up access to an entirely new workforce and new possibilities, and who could argue. But sometimes it opens up far more than we bargain for. Many of our teams have regular web conferencing meetings in which everyone can use our nifty webcam technology to be present virtually. Unfortunately, because web cams are now built directly into your laptop, you can sometimes forget that they are even there. For example, take the case of Richard (not his real name). Richard attended one of his managers regular weekly web conference meetings from home, only he forgot about the camera and the fact that it is automatically enabled when you join a meeting. If he had only been dressed inappropriately, say shorts and a T-shirt, that might have been merely embarrassing and everyone would have had a nice laugh. But Richard didn’t have shorts and a T-shirt on. In fact, he had nothing on. It soon became apparent to the other shocked participants - who unbeknownst to Richard could see everything. When his manager said “Richard, what are you doing!” the world stopped. The fallout was so bad and the story spread so fast that poor Richard had to leave the company and move his family to an entirely new area of the country. Even though this happened some months back, I still don’t think everyone is yet over the shock. I first began doing corporate training in 1975. I was going to college and working for a major retail firm. Training consisted of an 8 hour New Employee Orientation plus 8 hours of hands-on cash register training. Training materials consisted primarily of printed booklets, filmstrips, and 16mm films. i was thrilled with my new position, and went over all the training in my head until it flowed smoothly and naturally out of my mouth. During the first actual training session, I made the introductory remarks to set the stage for a film to follow. I carefully threaded the film through all the nooks and crannies of the projector, put the 16mm film reel on the projector, turned out the lights, and turned the projector on. The only small detail I had forgotten was to lock the spindle that held the reel on the projector! The reel slipped off, bounced a few times, and rolled the entire length of the room. I turned on the lights, ran to the front, and began manually rolling the film back on to the reel, while trying to make small talk, keep my cool, and act like I wasn’t mortified. After a short, awkward pause while I frantically re-rolled the film, I rethreaded everything, locked the spindle, and pressed the start button again. It was a great learning experience because I realized that that’s about as bad as things can get. If I can keep my cool and get through that situation, I can get through almost anything! Health Insurance Renewal for 5 union groups, the non-union group, retirees under 65, retirees over 65–with only two Human Resources staff members for all functions. Changed third-party administrator (TPA) for self-funded plan and changed COBRA service. Held about five employee meetings–different shifts for different departments–to educate about new plan. All 350+ employee enrollment forms had to be coded by the two HR staff before being sent to new TPA. Worked 7AM-10PM some days as forms came in. Forms were bundled and overnighted to new TPA for entry. First package ended up in a different state; had to be copied and re-sent while overnight mail service searched out originals. COBRA service decided it MUST review its procedures before January 1 effective date, so called New Year’s Eve. Office had just been declared to be closing early but they would not reschedule. We tried to print out Adobe version of procedures manual, but department printer decided not to cooperate–it would accept commands to print one page at a time but not the command to print All. HR Assistant printed one page at a time, took it in to HR Director for phone conference, came back out and printed next page, etc. Did NOT leave early. This is all I recall; the remainder is a blur… We once had a receptionist write to a college she believed used animals for testing. The email was quite obscene with colorful four letter words throughout the message. She threatened them with a horrible death if they did not stop using animals for testing. The dean of the school forwarded the email to our Managing Partner letting him know what she had sent and indicated they do not use animals for testing. The email had the firm’s standard signature which included our logo and website along with her email address and was sent on company time. She was not the brightest hire we have had and shortly thereafter was fired. It was time to conduct performance reviews. Our organization does upward and lateral reviews and posted the blank forms in a share drive where all employees had access. HR received a request for a form (lazy employee) and when I attached the form to the email. I have a habit of opening the attachment to always ensure it is the right version, I was surprised to see that the form had been filled out and filed in the public share drive. The full review on a Manager was saved as the public access form. It was difficult to know how many employees had accessed the form before I found the error. Oops! We have many types of employees in our organization. Some of these people will be brand new to the system this year (including managers and reporting staff), they are also offsite for roughly 95% of the time. It was decided at the last minute by the “powers above” that these guys would be included this year. Normally this would not be much of an issue, except for the small problem of….”them not being here to train” Needless to say, with 1 week left to complete the self evals (of a possible 3.5 weeks), the manager of this group (who is also brand new to the system and also had no formal training) decided that they would log in as their employees and complete their self eval for them. EEEEEK, are you kidding me??? Who would EVER think that this was a good idea? Anyone ever hear of legal documents…. Yikes, so I explained to this individual that I would MUCH rather see incomplete self evals than this scenario. I also explained that is any of these employees disagree with ANYTHING written in this self eval that they can get in a LOT of trouble. The moral of this story is…. Even if your employees have the best intensions, it’s might be a nightmare for you later on. Having an applicant show up for an interview as someone who just got out of a horror movie - with ripped up jeans, black nail polish and piercings in all kinds of places…frightening! Having an applicant show up for work and then disappear throughout their shift better than any ghost could, can’t even find them when you play the camera’s back….scary! Having an applicant howl at you during an interview for now reason and then proceed to finish answering the question asked, and as the interviewer keeping a straight face and finishing the interview…..creepy! Love HR! My worst appraisal story is of a manager who always started a serious performance discussion with the phrase “don’t worry you’re not fired” and wondered why he had trouble with the employees listening to him. Once they heard his opening phrase, the fact that they could have been fired was the only thought their heads could contain. All other discussion of specific performance issues fell on deaf ears. We had an employee who was suicidal so we put him out on a leave so he could get his much needed help. Two days later he walked into the office with a gun. My co worker took off leaving me with this employee. I was sure she was off getting security did not panic too much. . I talked to the employee for about ½ hour about where he can get help and that yes we were keeping his job open for him. When he left, my co worker came back into the office. I asked why it took so long to get security here, she told me she had been hiding in the closet and had never called security. There is so many how do I choose one? These all happened at a previous place of employment… and no, I’m not just saying that! There was the time I was interviewing and a mouse ran through my office - both the interviewee and I jumped up onto our chairs! Oh and then there was the time when a gentleman came into apply for a job and brought his 2 year old son with him. As the gentleman (I use this term loosely) was filling out the application form the son said a swear word. When the son refused to apologize (to me), the father proceeded to the washroom (just around the corner from my office) and washed his son’s mouth out with soap! I’m sure you can imagine the rest of the scene - soap flying, son crying and father yelling - very scary indeed! Probably the scariest was when my boss found out he was being terminated via a fax that was intended for his boss (from the a board member confirming the termination details), but was delivered by an admin assistant to my boss. Since I was the Manager of HR at the time, my boss came to discuss “the situation” with me. Talk about awkward and uncomfortable! Thankfully my boss was very gracious (and somewhat relieved about the termination), but I was still horrified about how he found out. I discovered that a manager had not submitted $12,000 worth of vendor invoices. The invoices spanned 5 months worth of deliveries. I terminated the manager. As a result of the termination the former manager has brought an EEOC law suit against us. There is nothing about this case that has any true EEOC implications. It was and continues to be a scary situation for myself, my resident dining director and my office manager. There is nothing funny about it but it is a freakish horror show. I think my scariest HR story is related to an employee termination. The employee was terminated for (twice) leaving work for several hours while remaining punched in (he was warned after the first occurrence). This employee was a large man, who previously worked as a “carnie”. He was very outspoken (read: obnoxious), demanding, and often times angry. His manager was intimidated by him, which resulted in his remaining employed far longer than he should have. After the second incident of time fraud, I took the bull by the horns, and we went ahead with the termination. The termination meeting was bad all by itself - the employee was loud, angry and extremely intimidating to both myself and his manager. After about 20 minutes of dealing with him, we finally were able to get him off property. Both of us heaved a huge sigh of relief that he was gone. I thought that was the end of him, but to my surprise, I saw him again the following morning. My employer had a “manager’s” parking area, which I typically used. On that day, my oldest daughter was with me, as she had a medical appt. in about an hour. I had planned to have her help with some filing until her appt. time. I pulled into the parking lot, taking a space next to an unfamiliar van. I didn’t really pay attention to it, until my daughter asked who was the mean-looking man in the van. I looked to my right and was greeted with the nastiest stare I have ever encountered. This parking lot was unattended, and no one was around. Thinking we were better off to get into the building, I picked up my cell and called my boss, while also getting my daughter out of the car, and telling her to run to the building. She did so, and I was right behind her. I was met at the door by my boss, who returned to the parking lot with me (my daughter went to my office with my assistant). The van was gone. While I was at my daughter’s medical appt., the ex-ee returned. My boss intercepted him, and was able to have him removed from the property with a warning that next time the police would be called. I truly believe that this man would have attacked me, had my daughter not been with me that morning… Kind of gives new meaning to the phrase “thank heaven for little girls..” The Excuse Gremlin Employee! But have no fear, there is a way to get rid of the Excuse Gremlin! It seems the Excuse Gremlin disappears after you no longer accept the excuses and seek out the valuable and hard-working Pixie of the Month Employee! Imagine having to make a phone call to a gentleman that was scheduled to start with your company and informing him you were rescinding his offer. The gentleman had resigned his prior job and was very exciting about starting his new career with us — not only a better position for him but at a big salary increase! This happened at a previous company I worked for when they cancelled a project we were staffing. Talk about having to make a hard phone call. I felt like the grim reaper! Fortunately, there was a happy ending. His manager, tore up his resignation and said as far as he was concerned, it never happened. But, I will never forget the sick feeling I had having to make that call! I can imagine a worse nightmare! I’ve had so many… it’s hard to choose… Sex during work, sleeping on the job, text sex, pornography on the computer terminal, drinking on the job, stealing the company vehicle and losing it, stashing drugs in the company locker and charging expenses on the company AmEx, and the list goes on…. Once when I had oversight a series of group homes for the disabled “someone” called the overnight staff pretending to be “an administrator” (no name was given). The staff person was instructed to put all the petty cash ($300) and all the patient medications (some good stuff) outside on the porch and “someone” was going to come by for a “secret” audit. The staff person did as they were asked and we were faced with a host of issues when the cash and meds disappeared. While dealing with the stupidity of staff is one thing, we also had to take a serious look at our culture. What kind of direct management had this staff been exposed to? Why would they think this is normal? The direct manager had recently been suspended for a host of other issues and it was suspected that he was in fact behind this incident. Earlier this year I had to term an individual for inappropriate behavior, i.e. taunting and intimidation towards co-workers. About four months later, while eating dinner with my wife at a restaurant outside in the patio area, this person and several of his hoodlum friends walked past our table. As luck would have it, he spotted me instantly and stood about 50 feet behind me. I could see through the reflection in my wife’s sunglasses, that he was very angry and was in the process of informing his little gang of why he hated me so much. My wife said, “Well, we can’t sit here forever”, to which I said, “Let’s make a quick jaunt to the beemer and hightail it out of here.” As my wife and I started to walk through the parking lot to our car, I heard my name shouted several times. I kept walking and acted like I didn’t hear anything. We got in the car and I looked in my rear view mirror only to find that this person pulled up behind us to block our exit. The whole time, shouting obscenities and leaning out the window of his car. The car in front of me happened to pull away just at the time when these individuals started to exit their car for a confrontation. I punched the gas and the race in the parking lot was on. My wife was trying to get as low in her seat as possible and I knew that she was scared. I was confident that our beemer could out corner their KIA, so I stayed hard on the throttle and after a few high speed corners through the city and pushing my traction control to the limit, we lost them. Close call in my HR world! I had a person in for an interview for a records management position. We had asked for three references. When I contacted the references they had nothing good to say about the potential candidate. I was shocked at actually how bad the comments were from this candidates past employers. Needless to say we did not hire the person but when I contacted her to say she did not get the job she was curious as to what our reasons were. I nicely mentioned that we had many people (which we only had 5 - this was during the boom) but that she might want to rethink her choice of references. She was shocked to hear this because under her breath these employers where friends! I was interviewing for a software engineering position in a very creative software company. The process was going along fine and I phoned interviewed a great candidate. The candidate came in for an interview and met all the right people; everyone thought he was the perfect candidate. When we brought him back to meet the final decision maker, a woman appeared at his interview time. She stated that she was the candidate’s sister and that he was unable to accept the interview as he had accepted another position. She then handed me her resume and said she was just as qualified, in fact had worked together at a few different places doing the same work, would I give her a chance? After reviewing the resume with the hiring manager, we agreed that she was just as qualified, we interviewed her that day and had her meet with the final decision maker - everyone agreed, we hired her and things were awesome. A month later, after I had submitted all the paperwork to social security for her as a new hire, I received a name not matching notice. Her social security number belonged to someone else. Apparently, the woman we hired was undergoing a transgender change and was in the 1 year period where “he” was required to dress like a woman and, knowing he would become a woman during employment took the steps to start employment as she would be seen in the future, hoping to avoid the need to explain. Unfortunately, “he” did not know about social security reporting. The nightmare came along when the hiring manager, who was not very open minded, found out…..the rest of the story, well it ended very badly. The interesting part - not one person suspected. She was quite beautiful. When we had a fire in our printing facility, even though all employees had been trained on what to do in case of a fire. Leave the building, call 911! A huge number of employees ran into the plant to see the fire instead of leaving the building. One employee suffered minor burns and press had $100k damage, but everyone else was OK. In our organization, we have upper level managers who treat the appraisal process as a non-tool. They write one paragraph about the employee and call it a review. The employee has no direction and comes to HR to help them with direction. The scary part is in time, no one sees the Appraisal as a tool but as a HR pain. A few years ago the company was conducting sexual harassment training for all our employees. During one of the sessions, a male employee raised his hand and asked “so, what should you do if you’ve been accused of sexual harassment a few times?” Needless to say, he wasn’t with the company long after that! We hired a new employee who travelled with one of our executives to an off-site meeting. While waiting to board a flight in the airport the new employee took off his shoes and socks and started clipping his toe nails. As HR professionals we’ve all been involved in enough “horror” lately so I am going to focus on a positive story. Several years ago I hired a part-time CSR (teller) whom I thought had potential for a bright future at our company. This co-worker did have some deficiencies that I helped her with by serving as a mentor and working with her manager. Over the next year or so this co-worker applied for four different positions. After being turned after the second time the co-worker’s confidence and morale was dwindling. I spoke with the interviewers and received feedback as so why the co-worker wasn’t chosen. The reasons were not about her experience or performance but more about her interviewing skills! I meet with the co-worker, gave the feedback, and worked with her to improve these skills. After the third interview- the interviewer gave me much better feedback. The co-worker and I continued to meet on a regular basis and I saw her morale improve….there was progress! Even though on the forth interview the co-worker still was not chosen the interviewer stated that the co-worker was one of the top two and the choice simply came down to experience. The co-worker did find success during her fifth interview! She was chosen for the position- which was a great job and good fit. Since then the co-worker has been promoted three times. We continue a close relationship, and I can honestly say that I have learned more from the co-worker than she has from me. When I have a challenging day in HR I think about this positive experience- and it reaffirms why I love this profession. 
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
