Employee Headaches: You dodged a bullet on these!
I work with a lot of different businesses which means I get a ringside seat to all the ups and downs that business owners experience.
And there’s no greater source of ups and downs than the nutty employee stories I’ve seen. You may think that you’ve hired some bad apples, and maybe you have, but hopefully you’ve never had any experience like what some of my clients have!
So enjoy a few of the best doozies from the field today. I hope they make you smile and you find comfort to know that you’re not alone in the craziness you may face.
Employee Ghosting
A business owner arrives at the office around 9:30 after attending an early networking event. As she gets on the elevator she bumps into one of her employees coming out of the elevator carrying boxes. “I’m just running out to feed the meter,” says the employee. When the business owner arrives upstairs the whole office is gathered around the receptionist talking about the employee who was in the elevator. She had told the rest of the team that she quit and was never heard from again.
Is that Wrong?
My client hired a new college grad from a prestigious university — his parents were “friends of the family”. I checked in a couple of weeks after he started to see how it was going. “Brad, I don’t know what to do! He’s texting all day. He works in like 10-minute spurts between texts,” the business owner tells me.
So we sit down to address it with him and he replies, “Well, I don’t know how I’m supposed to arrange my social life if I can’t text during the day.” The business owner freed up ALL of his time to attend to his social life…
I’m Good to Work!
One business owner got a call from an employee to tell him that despite a fall earlier in the day where he may have broken his ankle he’s good to work. “Yeah, the pain was bad but we had some oxy in the medicine cabinet, and I started to have a panic attack about it, but the valium really took care of that — I’ll be back to work this afternoon, if it’s really broken I can go to the hospital tonight.” We told him to take the rest of the day off.
Not in the Truck!
As my client walked through the warehouse he smelled the smoke of a particular herb, but he couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. He searched all over and finally noticed that the cab of the delivery truck was full of smoke. His delivery crew was hotboxing in the cab of the delivery truck. “We didn’t want the smell to distract folks in the office upstairs,” they said.
Working Overtime
It was a small team, so when two employees kept finding reasons to work on Saturday it was unusual. The business owner decides to stop in one Saturday to see what was up and — you guessed it — found them naked on the couch in his office! Yes, they were married (not to each other) and using the office as their hook-up spot. Now he needed a new team and a new couch!
No pictures needed for that one!
Do any of those stories make you feel any better about your team? Or do you have a story to top those? Let me know.
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