I Find it Depressing

[Liz Ryan]

Dear folks,

Every year I write a Ten Best and Ten Worst Corporate Practices list
for Business Week. Every year, it's far easier to come up with the
Ten Worst list than the Ten Best! And I'm keeping my eyes open, all
year!

My favorite Ten Best item for a long time has been the employee
referral bonus program. Paying our employees to bring us talent seems
like one of those win-win-wins we're always looking for. Today, I
have a new Ten Worst list item: requiring employees to prove their
absence for a family member's death, by way of a note from the
funeral home.

Ay carumba! If we haven't hired people whom we'd trust not to
fabricate a family member's death, can we call ourselves managers? If
an employee is bereaved and chooses not to attend a funeral, is s/he
any less entitled to a day off to grieve?

I heard about this policy today (it was called a Best Practice by a
member of a discussion group, not one of our groups I'm happy to say)
and I must say that the news seriously depressed me. What have we
come to, when we say to employees "You'd better bring me proof that
your Aunt Mabel died. Maybe she didn't die. Maybe you don't even have
an Aunt Mabel." That's not an employee failing - that's a leadership
failure, if we even have to have that conversation. I'd rather bite
my tongue in half.

How can anyone justify these Medieval HR policies? Got any idea?
Please fill us in! Cheers -- Liz

[Christina Bavaro]

Unfortunately I work in a company that if this edict was handed down, I would not be suprised.

I think it all boils down to trust. My company is a 5th generation family owned business. The feeling employees get is that the family does not trust its 10k employees, so there are many useless policies and practices in place to guard against bad employees.

The real result is a general feeling of working to line the pockets of a family that doesn't appreciate your work, nor trust your morality enough.

Some examples... at the only yearly company outing, we have to sign in and out of the outing to prove we were actually there. Also, when the water main supplying water for the building broke, we were asked not to go to the bathroom for thee hours, and then finally sent home without pay. And lastly, after a bad storm knocked out power overnight our company's hotline said that the office was closed until further notice. The office reopened at 10am, but the only way you'd know that is if you called the office hotline after 10am. The decision was made to dock any employee who didn't make it to work by 10:30am that day. Many people lost a days pay because they heard the first message and thought the day was lost, only to find out they were penalized for not calling back to make sure the office was "really closed all day".