Cut Their Hours, Make Their Lives Miserable, and Hope They Quit: Why Pushing Employees to Quit May Backfire
I have talked to many managers who said that rather than firing an employee whom they don’t want to stay, they take actions that make their lives difficult at work. Now, this AHI article describes the potential danger of this strategy.
In this particular case, the manager was displeased with his employee’s (his name was Maywood) choice of candidate to promote.
To express his displeasure, the manager monitored the employee’s use of the phone and computer and carefully examined every aspect of his performance. Unhappy to work under those conditions, Maywood quit and filed a constructive discharge claim.
What was the source of the manager’s displeasure? The employee recommended an African-American employee be promoted. The manager disagreed and chose a white employee instead. Maywood filed a complaint with HR, which prompted the manager to seek revenge.
The lessons?
Beware of overmonitoring;
Make sure that managers engage in appropriate guidance and training of employees;
Pressuring employees to quit may cause more problems than effectively terminating them.
Go here to read more.
This approach of trying to force an employee out does have the advantage of creating an additional legal issue for the employer’s defense: whether the employee was constructively discharged. If not, the claim may be disposed of without going into the merits — because the employee simply quit.
On the other hand, if it is found to be a constructive discharge, the employer is in the awkward and inconsistent position of arguing first that it didn’t intend to force the employee out and then that it had good reasons for doing so. Not something that would be fun to present to a jury!
The failure to be direct about terminating would feed the suspicion that the employer had something to hide, supporting an argument of pretext for discrimination.
This was the common practice in the city of maywood. chief hauffman had many employees he disliked. Ones who “did not go with the program.” He would get sgts. to ride the employees for any little thing. The problem they had was that everyone already knew that there were two sets of rules in maywood. One for the “big mouths” and one for chiefs cronies.