I came across an interesting situation this past week. I had to attend a regional sales meeting for 2 days. This was a mandatory meeting that involved 2 full days of meetings and an evening with a dinner that involved both my boss and the VP of Sales. The evening dinner fell on the night of Game 6 of the Stanley Cup finals. I personally do not care about hockey and even if i did I would have handled this differently.
It came to my attention that one of my co-workers asked my boss if it was ok to miss dinner since she had tickets for the hockey game. He, of course said no she had to attend the dinner. A few things to note, the meeting's attire was to be business casual and dinner was to be nice jeans and a nice shirt, we ate a very nice restaurant in the Borgata in Atlantic City. After this employee was told she could not attend the hockey game she proceeded to post as her status on facebook how she hated her boss and was very upset about missing the hockey game. After people made comments to that she made multiple responses bashing our boss. Another co-worker brought this to my attention and after these events unfolded I felt it an interesting situation to bring up to the class. The day of the dinner and the hockey game she made another post talking about her stupid boss and a stupid meeting, again way over the line for the whole universe to see on facebook especially with numerous co-workers except for my boss being her friend on facebook.
When we got to dinner that night to make the posts on facebook even worse, she showed up to dinner wearing a flyers jersey, in my opinion very inappropriate considering the VP of Sales was going to be there. My boss was unaware of the facebook posts, and I do not know how he felt about the jersey at dinner but If i was the manager I would have made her take it off after the direction was to wear nicer clothes.
My question for you is how would you handle the situation and have you ever encountered an employee bashing an employer on facebook and what were the ramifications?
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David, you always have interesting stories of things that happen to you at work.
ReplyDeleteI have seen many posts on facebook about poeple's bosses and thier organization that I feel are completely inappropriate. None of these have been my co-workers, so I have never have had to deal with the situation personally. When people do this, I feel they leave a bad impression more so of themselves rather than of the person they are bashing.
What to do about it is a great question, and a difficult one. It would depend on many different factors. Word gets around pretty fast, so I wouldn't be surprised that your boss would hear about it sooner or later. I am interested to hear how other would handle this situation.
Wow. Incredibly unprofessional! I've - fortunately - not encountered that situation myself. But in putting myself into that manager's situation, a few issues came to mind.
ReplyDeletePeople always have and always will complain about their bosses and/or employers. Do we, as manager, have the right to censor their ventings? If it's opinion (i.e. "my boss is a jerk because she made me work instead of going to the playoffs"), is that something you can discipline her for? I personally don't think I would, unless something libelous was said, or she was violating a company rule about using Facebook. Instead, I would focus on her violation of my rules: mandatory attendance at the meeting, dress code, and perhaps using Facebook during company time. That way she's being reprimanded for violating standards that everyone was held to, and she could not claim that I was either violating her right to her opinion, or getting back at her because she complained about me.