Bad HR

In my previous post, I commented on the lack of training that most frontline retail managers seem to recieve. This is based on both personal experience, having worked for a couple of different retail chains, and on the experiences of a number of my contemporaries. Being one of those Gen Y types just entering the workforce, a number of my friends also have experience working these types of jobs. Some of them still do; graduating university when we did set us all up just in time for the current job market, and finding work as a new grad has not been easy for any of us.

As a result, I get to collect stories of some of the truly bad decisions that are made by frontline managers/department supervisors/other untrained management staff on step up from the bottom. I think that mostly it comes down to a lack of knowledge on the part of management. Some of them do not seem to be familiar with labour law, let alone best practices! Some of them seem to have had even the little bit of power they do have go to their heads. And some of them are simply utterly lacking in self-knowledge, and have no idea what a pain they are to deal with.

One of my friends came to me the other day. He works for a multinational big box retailer who shall remain unnamed, and has a supervisor who does not like him. When she was first promoted and transferred in to the department, evidently he made the mistake of being more knowledgeable about their product than she in front of a customer. Ever since then, according to him, she has been out to get him. The other day, he made a mistake at work. Fairly minor, apparently; he was out of his allocated department in order to assist a customer during their peak customer service hours. Based on this infraction of the rules, a few days later, his supervisor presented him with a written notice. This level of discipline is normally preceded by documented coaching sessions as well as documented verbal warnings, according to the company manual that my friend was given upon hire. The written notice is just one step shy of terminatio, and effectively meant that any additional infractions would lead to his immediate dismissal for cause. My friend wanted to know if she could, in fact, terminate him for cause over this.

First of all, this happened in Canada. Unlike some of the states, there is no such thing as at-will employment. To terminate someone with cause requires documentation, because the burden of proof is on the employer in the case of a lawsuit alleging wrongful termination. In my friend's case, all his employer had was this one written warning. There were no incidents of any kind of discipline for anything prior to this, and indeed no performance reviews either, despite my friend having worked there long enough he should have had two already.

I advised my friend to speak to the store human resources manager about all this. I told him that, based on what he had told me, his employer would have a really difficult time in court proving cause since they skipped their own corporately-mandated progressive discipline system, and had no evidence of prior problems with his performance. His store human resources manager would know that, even if his supervisor didn't, and I thought the likely outcome would be a change in the disciplinary notice he was given, if it wasn't simply removed altogether (there were a few issues with the incident, minor inaccuracies and the like). I also warned him that this wouldn't exactly endear him to his supervisor, but it was already beyond that point.

In the end, he requested a meeting with the HR manager, and came in prepared with a written statement requesting to see his personnel file, and a signed and dated statement listing his issues with the written notice he had recieved. He got it reduced to a verbal warning, and went away happy.

Ultimately, a situation like this, that tied up the HR department for a while and prompted meetings with the store manager, assistant store manager, department supervisor and my friend, could likely have been avoided by coaching the department supervisor on their progressive disciplinary system and why it is set up the way it is. A basic primer on applicable labour law goes a long way, and it just goes to show that HR is equally important in basic retail as it is at Head Office.