HR Undercover

Last week an insurance worker lost her job after surfing Facebook while off sick. The employee said she could not work in front of a computer as she needed to lie in the dark but was then seen to be active on Facebook.

The company said it was an abuse of trust, rather than activity on Facebook, that caused her to be fired. The woman said she had been surfing Facebook in bed on her iPhone and accused her employer of spying on her and other employees by sending a mysterious friend request which allows access to personal online activity.

The accusation of spying was rejected. Rather the woman’s activity on Facebook had been stumbled upon by a colleague who told her supervisor. Now the Facebook site has been blocked in the company….

We had to quickly end the assignment of a temporary employee because our customers couldn’t understand what he was saying. Soon after, we received a call from a reporter who was working on a story about the plight of immigrant workers. It featured (you guessed it) the former temporary employee’s experience with OUR COMPANY. The story was never published. Months later, we got an email from that same temp. He reminded us of his brief employment with us, and told us about his new assignment where he could, with the flip of a switch, shut off the service of many of our customers. We figured out where he was and worked with their HR team to bring his new assignment to a quick end.

We hired a 24×7 security guard for two weeks to protect us from an employee who thought he was the messiah and wanted to be on a national talk show. As he waited for his second coming a few months down the road, he became more and more agitated, to the point of scaring employees and losing a few of our customers. We managed to deflect his attention away from our company, and fortunately have not heard back from him