A workplace disciplinary policy should provide the employees with clear guidelines and what consequences they can expect if the rules are broken.
On paper, it sounds like a good thing; it protects the company from wrongful allegations and ensures equal treatment of all employees. Win-win, right? Maybe somewhere. Just not where Redditor Alternative_Hunter34 works.
A few days ago, they made a post on the popular subreddit r/AntiWork, talking about how their organization deals with late and sick employees, and it’s clear that the situation is a lose-lose there.
A company’s ridiculous punishment policies are going viral
Image credits: CuriousMarc (not the actual photo)
After one of the employees publicly explained how everyone is exploiting them
Image credits: Alternative_Hunter34
We managed to get in touch with Alternative_Hunter34 and the Redditor was kind enough to tell us more about their work.
“At the time of leaving my previous job, nearly ten years ago, [this] company was doing well and growing steadily,” Alternative_Hunter34 explained to Bored Panda the reason they came here.
“They had ample job opportunities, and I walked in with ease. Essentially, I was drawn in by inertia. The path of least resistance.”
All in all, the employee is quite happy with their position. “The job would be fine if not for the management situation. As I did post in a reply to one poster, the job is well paid. Above minimum wage by a significant degree, and we have been steadily well paid since I joined.”
At this point, Alternative_Hunter34 doesn’t plan to go anywhere else. “As my company well knows, they offer the best paid, entry-level, no skills jobs in a wide radius,” they said. “We all moan, we all rant and rave, but most of us will be in the next day, week, and month regardless, and without breaking step, we will fight to keep the jobs we complain about should we come under redundancy or disciplinary.”
It’s a predicament the Redditor calls the money trap.
“Having collected and acclimated to our wages for some time now, it would require significant changes and personal sacrifices that the majority of us, myself included, are simply unwilling to make in order to break away and accept a lower wage,” they explained. “Our employers are as aware of this as we are, and therefore, we all know that until the conditions are absolutely intolerable, the majority of the workforce will remain firmly in place.”
Sue Bingham, the author of Creating the High Performance Work Place: It’s Not Complicated to Develop a Culture of Commitment, agrees that too often companies’ HR policies are overly restrictive.
“Such policies are often convoluted and overly paternal, and attempt to control the behavior of regular people through rules designed to rein in the ‘bad apples,'” Bingham, who has consulted with hundreds of company leaders on how to create high-performance workplaces over the past three decades, wrote in the Harvard Business Review.
“Although a small percentage of employees may try to take advantage of more flexible or generous policies, designing your HR policies with such people in mind isn’t the answer. It won’t help boost the performance of the majority of employees – employees who have the organization’s best interests at heart. It will only make them feel distrusted,” she said, which sounds exactly like what happened in our story — people who are intelligent adults were treated like children you can’t take your eyes off for one second. No wonder they retaliated after receiving such a message from their employer.
“Communicate one standard of conduct that states, ‘Everyone is expected to act in the best interest of the organization and his/her fellow employees’ as a replacement for a long list of conduct rules,” Bingham said.
A global poll conducted by Gallup has uncovered that out of the world’s one billion full-time workers, only 15% of people are engaged at work. That means that a whopping 85% of people are unhappy in their jobs.
But employees everywhere don’t necessarily hate the company they work for as much as they do their boss. Yes, they join a company, but they often quit their manager. Sometimes it’s due to that exact person, others because they have not been prepared to lead the workforce.
People think these practices are at the very least appalling but could also be illegal
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