Rules That Were Supposed to Help But Ended up a Big Fail
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The Call for Responsibility
As GM of a small business, I had an informal ‘Just shoot me a text if you will be late or are sick and can’t come in’ rule.
That policy backfired when one employee texted me 5 days in a row being late. They lived closer to the office than I did, and I only had a 7-minute commute. They got all pissy when I finally wrote them up for being late, claiming, ‘I thought we just had to send you a text!’
So the rule went to ‘Just call me if you are sick and not able to come in.’
That worked OK until this past week.
First, one employee called in 3 days in a row, intentionally calling before the office opened, knowing that I and my location manager wouldn’t be there. He got rid of his cell phone about a month ago and claimed to not have a landline. He would call from an ‘unknown caller’ ID, so we couldn’t even call him back.
Second, I had a very early morning flight on Saturday, and all my staff knew I would be out of town and when. I landed after 3 hours to find my phone had been blowing up. One employee decided to wait until he knew I was on the flight to text me that he would not be coming in. That left me trying to arrange employees at 9 am on a Saturday morning, without access to my computer or scheduling Excel stuff, in a city 1500 km away.
Now the rule is ‘If you are sick, you need to call and speak directly with either the GM or a location manager. Texting and voicemail are no longer accepted.
