The abruptness of the message made me realize that this was a situation where the person had been let go. But, why?
This is the same person that I had the 'uncomfortable situation' with.
It happened to be our monthly Town Hall on this particular day, when the whole company meets and all senior managers report on the status of their projects to let all staff know what their department has been working on. When it came to one senior manager's turn (the one that had sent out the announcement), she stated that she wanted to talk about two company policies:
1) Email Policy -
'Inappropriate' email is not permitted; we were asked to consider the content of jokes before sending them interoffice and consider who would be receiving them
2) Harrassment Policy -
Any complaints about harrassment are seriously investigated and the necessary action is taken to resolve the issue
The mood was speculative; we'd never had such stunned silence at a Town Hall before.
Afterwards, I approached the manager and asked her what happened: The person that was 'let go' had been warned on three separate occasions not to send inappropriate emails interoffice and especially not to the person (let's call her 'J') who he was managing. A complaint of 'harrassment' was filed against him because the content of the emails made 'J' feel uncomfortable. When the senior manager approached him and confronted him, he denied that he'd sent the email. He was shown the 'proof' which had been documented and was asked to leave, since he had broken one of our company's core values which is 'honesty & integrity'.
What a shock to the system.
On a positive note, our company just ranked among the top four entrants for best governed private sector organizations in Canada by The Conference Board of Canada/Spencer Stuart 2007 National Awards in Governance. Other finalists in the private sector category were Royal Bank, Talisman Energy and Nexen.
It's good that we have a whistle-blower policy so that employees feel safe to speak out. Also, people need to be accountable for their actions.
1 comment:
:-) Those are some strict policies that your company has. But it's normal. Behaviour such as that would be intolerable at my company as well. :-) We actually have a LARGE handbook for our Code of Ethics. Any breach in "the Code" would result in immediate termination.
Post a Comment