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Human resources horrors: When HR goes bump in the night

Guest post by: Cori Maedel

Article Overview: As an experienced team of human resources consultants we have confronted many HR horrors in our time. Although Halloween is a short-lived occasion, the horrors of human resources gone wrong can be anything but. Our experiences have shown that many businesses don’t just have cobwebs in their employee handbooks; they’re often hiding skeletons in their closets, monsters under their desks and all sorts of scary practices behind closed doors.

Human resources horrors: When HR goes bump in the night

As an experienced team of human resources consultants we have confronted many HR horrors in our time. Although Halloween is a short-lived occasion, the horrors of human resources gone wrong can be anything but. Our experiences have shown that many businesses don't just have cobwebs in their employee handbooks; they're often hiding skeletons in their closets, monsters under their desks and all sorts of scary practices behind closed doors. That's why we're offering businesses a free risk assessment to help identify potential HR horrors before they happen, saving employers both time and money, as well as boosting efficiency, productivity and team morale.

Here are some tales of human resources horrors we've experienced:

"I was once interviewing a male staff member who was accused of inappropriately touching a female co-worker. He calmly explained it was not him who had touched her but that it was Fred...the sock puppet he often wore and spoke to at work. As I continued to question him about the incident he began to respond in Klingon. It was a long, difficult and very serious conversation."

"It's incredible what can be going on when employers aren't paying attention. We once audited a company only to find out that one of their employees had been stealing. No one had even noticed the money was missing and, if it wasn't for a payroll audit, it's likely the employee would have continued to steal and get away with it."

"I know of a company (and I'm sure there are many) who didn't keep proper track of their employees' vacation days and just randomly increased vacation time. It got to a point where some senior people didn't have enough vacation and others had too much. In an attempt to resolve the situation the company wanted to arbitrarily take the vacation days away from those who had too many and give it to those that had too little."

"One company had three employees on short-term disability. In an effort to try and save costs they terminated them. Given the importance of accommodating disabilities (whether short- or long-term), this seemingly simple mistake could have cost them a lot more than they thought they were saving."

"Inappropriate relations among work colleagues are more common than employers like to think, and relations between senior management and employees can be devastating to a company. One organisation in which this was happening really suffered when the woman involved started receiving preferential treatment, allowing her to circumvent normal practices and procedures. Her colleagues were left to pick up the things she felt she no longer had to attend to which badly affected efficiency, productivity and team morale, and ultimately cost the company a valued employee."

"An employee once contacted an employer admitting to having done something he regretted, implying that it might have been a result of a mental disability and that he would be away for some time. Although the letter sounded very similar to a resignation, their initial reaction to terminate could have been both an inappropriate and costly decision."

These may all sound like extreme HR horrors but they can happen whenever an employer's focus is elsewhere. If you need help with your combwebs, skeletons or monsters you may want to consider a free risk assessmentto help identify the risksbefore hiringan out-sourced agency.

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Article Tags: HR consultants, human resources, human resources consultants



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