A few weeks ago, Suraksha called me on my extension to say that a gent has been on the phone from the morning, insisting that he talk with me. On asking for details, her response “I am really sorry, he is refusing to give any details, just keeps saying this is personal, this is urgent, I need to talk to Elango, and he really sounds desperate” . She sounded like she was going to cry herself. So I took the call and what i heard is the reason for this blog.
This gent is an ex employee, left the company a few months ago and struggling to find another job. He was in tears, a grown up man, with a family and very upset. What happened? He lost his job with us a few months because he was caught at work under the influence of alcohol. He admitted he made a mistake, was really sorry, can i please help reinstate him! I promise you I will never do this again.. please please.. This is a tough one, you want to help but you can’t, these decisions are irrevocable! It took me a while to shake this incident off. Then another happened, a new graduate was apprehended surfing inappropriate sites and obviously had to go! This person accepted, understood he made a mistake and took the disciplinary action on their chin.. and moved on. However this person made a comment that stayed..
“i wish I knew, I would have never done this”. That is when i started writing this. I have tried to dredge every silly action that employees in different companies I have worked in have done to get themselves out of a job. I have had Gokul, Claudine and Priya Manjooran and many others chip with their experiences.
Forged petrol bills or medical bills! This tops the list, employees submitting bills to claim tax deduction. I have seen employees submit petrol vouchers they have printed, bills for two tank fills the same day, fake medical bills, facial bill passed as physiotherapy bills… The logic is always this money is anyway mine! But hey the tax exemption is for genuine expenses not for making it up and forging, faking, misrepresenting are all integrity violations.
False expense claims – team lunches being claimed as client entertainment! Or sometimes taking out family and friends and submitting the bill for reimbursement.
Accessing/viewing inappropriate (read X rated) sites, using company desktops and laptops in office from or on office networks! Recently we had one person who had more than 10 Gig of objectionable videos and pictures stored in their laptop. Some smart Alec, used their data cards, to override network controls, little realizing that we all work out of cubicles and glass offices and electronic footprints are easily traceable!
Sharing passwords and log in ids, whatever the reason. The person who shares, who uses and the person who approves all stand to face the music. Sharing company confidential information, forwarding internal mails to external parties! , posting company, employee information on blogs, external media.
Forwarding inappropriate material on email to group ids or text messages! Seems harmless but dangerous when it lands in an inbox you didn’t want to!
Proxy attendance – getting somebody else to enter your attendance on LAAS(our online attendance system). Recent case a manager found requesting his team member to enter proxy – we had to let go the manager and the employee for complicity. Very sad! I wish the team member had used the open door policy or whistleblower policy to report this coercion. Many a time they had leaves that lapsed and marking a day off would have hardly made an impact.
Like the story in my introduction, getting to work under the influence of alcohol. It always starts as a harmless; let me go with my friends on the way to office, one sip, and another and the inevitable. There are of course serious offenders like a manager who took his team out for dinner, had a few drinks got back to work, doing reviews, smelling like cotton soaked in spirit! I am given to understand this same manager was involved in terminating a junior employee a year ago for the same reason! If that is not daft what is!
While on alcohol, I have seen some curious cases of harmless, quiet persons at work, transform to garrulous, aggressive, brash people under the influence of alcohol in office parties. It didn’t lose them a job but did tarnish some reputations built over years of hard work.
One common theme among all the above are, they are all avoidable, none of them have a material impact.. will not make us millionaires or give us any undue advantage, but instead leave us irrevocable tragic consequences, after effects of which may linger a working life time.
The reason I write all of this to insure each of us are aware of such situations, avoid them in our personal conduct and take time to educate our teams and colleagues. Let us avoid what happened to the gent and the young person in this blog.
A few suggestions when in doubt, go to the intranet check the code of business conduct, or ask your manager. Still in doubt don’t do it , or write to ethics email id or call the ethics helpline…they will guide you. Finally remember a few rupees, dollars, pounds, yen, euro or renminbi, an extra day leave, a night out in the bar with friends, a few thrills surfing sites on the internet is not worth the loss of a job, reputation and worst of all letting your family down.
The annual code of business conduct refresh is a great way to enhance your awareness! This is around the corner – you should hear from Sivaram and Shalu around the third week, take quality time to complete this certification. It is well worth the time spent.
Remember my blog on positivity and don’t read too much between the lines, this is a genuine attempt at increasing awareness, influencing a lever within my control, with the hope that we all will read, internalize and carry out in our professional lives.
It is a tough world but that is the price we pay to work in a civil place where integrity is a given, respect is the hall-mark and prudence and propriety in behaviour is a part of our DNA. Even if we save one person from committing any of the silly mistakes above – this blog is worth the effort
Good luck, as always leave your comments, give your thoughts, thank me, curse me.. but interact J
Cheers
Nice one. Very well written.
I am sure every employee should read this to make sure they pretty well understand that they need to protect their own jobs by maintaining integrity and corporate ethics by avoiding silly mistakes which could prove futile to themselves and their families.
I am sure i would be one among the readers who would take every effort to save a person from committing a silly mistake.
Thanks for the nice note on your Blog:-)
Well said and I completely agree with you. Thanks a lot for such a nice blog.
I feel you missed one major point. That is attitude. I may be wrong.
We are all educated and all of us know what is right & what is wrong. Then why do few people make such serious mistakes in their life? We need to look at that. I feel individuals attitude towards their professional work matters. Albert Einstein said “Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character”. Do you think the same person mentioned in your blog who was caught red-handed under the influence of alcohol at office will do the same thing when he is performing any functions at house? Do you think he will go to Temple under the influence of alcohol? No…right…then why did he do this when attending office…..it is simply because of the attitude he has towards his professional work. I feel really sorry for that person because now he and his family is in trouble for his behaviour. Now that he has realized his mistake, I pray that he get a job somewhere as soon as possible.
Hope I have not written too much. Last but not least….to compliment your blog….a small famous saying…..”Live so That When Your Children Think of fairness and integrity, They Think of You.”
This is a good one Elango. Many a times in our day to day work, a lot of us dont pay attention to such things and take things for granted, assuming we will never get caught. When we hear of our colleagues getting reprimanded for such action, we laugh at them or feel sorry for them for having made such a silly mistake.
While Code of Conduct is a good way to make sure that we make our people and ourselves understand the DOs and DONTs and promise to adhere to it, many a times this gets lost somewhere – probably because we do this exercise only once a year. While doing it more than once a year might be a logistical nightmare, but we need to find out ways to reiterate this message to our teams, especially the young workforce, most of them straight out of college on a regular basis (unfortunately defining this REGULAR is definitely not an easy one)
One of the probable ways is to educate our Front Line Managers and Middle Level Managers and ask them to further educate and reiterate this message to their teams. Not too sure if this is practically possible and we can add to the work load of our managers by adding this to their kitty, but just thought of putting it down to you. Maybe we as leaders can tweak this to come up with better suggestions to improve (read create) awareness amongst our people so that they dont loose their jobs because of such silly reasons….
If any of my team members looses his job for a silly reason like this, I will personally take this as a failure for myself. I am sure all our leaders feel the same way. Net Net – its our responsibility to ensure that such a situation never arises for any of our team members….
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this one…
This one is close to my heart Elango. For those who have had to take a decision on such violations – be it a Team manager , an HR person it brings with it agonising thoughts- If only some one had advised the employee right , if only some one had observed a tendency and nipped it in the bud, if only the employee knew the seriouness of the action without getting carried away on the spur of the moment..
I think this is a great medium to spread awareness and get people talking on the right thing to do ! The COC sometimes gets relegated to a status of a mere rule book to be referred – what we need is that each of us play our part in reinforcing the right behaviours. I repeat, “each of us” – we all need to do our bit in spreading the culture of ” doing it right”
A good read for everyone. I have gone ahead and shared this with everyone in my team.
One of the points that I would like to mention is quite often we tend to discuss and focus
on employees behaviour within our office/work and in the process forget about what our behaviour should be outside office . We as employees are also ambassadors of our organization to the outside world. So the way we conduct ourselves also holds good outside the confines of our organization as well. I have always seen many of our colleagues mentioning that their behaviour outside the organization is something personal to them and no one should worry about it. I am sure we would disagree depending on what the situation/incident is.
I would like to share this incident that happened a couple of years back. There was this employee who was working at onsite and he picked up a 2$ stuff from a store without paying for it. He was caught by the security folks and then let off on a warning. On being questioned about his behaviour he said that was something personal to him and outside work.
The question here is as a manager if you come across such an incident from one of our resources would you let it go as something personal to him/her?
My view is its our behaviour/actions that form and shape opinions about our company. So as employees everyone must conduct themselves with the highest level of integrity even outside the walls of the company and there is nothing personal about it.
Yes I agree to most of the cases.
Rules are rules for end/last user to the CEO in any company.. my/your/our immediate manager is no exception.
But in reality when you say something about your manager in a particular forum you are in the bad books of your manager and your following year apprisal goes for a toss, you will be corner’d till you go out of the company.
Even though the Whistle blower policy and all other policy states that the identy of the employee who complaints about other is kept confidencial i agree, but how long do you think it is going to take to find out who complaint against who within a small team especially??
Just a thought on the other side (pls forgive if I am wrong and take it in a positive spirit)
1. proxy attendance – online attendance system
Why do we give a chance to misuse the online attendance system, we can use the same ID (proximuty) card as long in/off. I personally feel that i am working on a factory and type my emp code on a computer at the enterance of the building.
Because of this online system we use more resource like computers,table, power, maintenance, etc.. insead we can globaly monitor/report the attendance using the proximity card. I have personally implemented in my previous orgnisation with the help of G4 security. Yes one time investment is little high.
2. influence of alchacol
I dont drink while driving and i dont drive when i am drunk.
two incidents i would like to say.
a. we were in a middle of a team gettogether in my previous company hosted by our MD we informed all stake holders that we will not be available for that evening. but there was a critical call from the client we couldnt refuse , we clearly informed that we consumed alchacol and it is not the right time, but the customer was ready to allow us even under the influence of alchacol.
so we went there and apologised to the client again (the person who drove did not consume alchacol) we fixed the problem in less than an hour and client was really happy, and still my ex company has the same client till date because the client says that these guys will be there at any time at any suituation when in need.
b. in the middle of a weekend party we got a call from a close friend who met with an accident so we had no option so we went, luckily the impact was less and less number of stitches. I had alchacol but i had to break my own rules and i did it for saving a life.
Most resignations happens only becase of the immeidate manager not because of the rules of the organization. (said by one of the Indian CEO’s)
But I am damn sure an investigation were there before terminating any employee in any organization.
3. For internet misuse:
I would catch his leader for not giving him work make sure he is not idle, “idle mind = devils workshop”
use proxy servers efectively block all unwanted sites or remove his internet access, and still if he finds a way then we have to take action with a warning.
Couple of suggestions:
I humbly request you to take it as a suggestion and not as a complaint
1. we say every were to save paper but we are spending more than Rs.400/- per day for transport department itself. => why can we keep an interactive display unit at the transport logout area instead of route list.
2. submiting our telephone bills to finance with a proof.. i get my ebills instead of printing it, i can attach it to the system. if required while auditing then we can print it.
3. encourage employees to work from home to reduce city traffic, company resources etc.
It is a easy world full of choices, we make it tough.
Lastly as you correctly said, behaviour is a part of our DNA.
And it is good to see a person at your rank spending time at the blogs to enhance the awarness in a positive way, I am also with you, and count me in.
Elango, Would request this particular blog content should go to every employee. It is very well written. The following statement had made it all;
“Finally remember a few rupees, dollars, pounds, yen, euro or renminbi, an extra day leave, a night out in the bar with friends, a few thrills surfing sites on the internet is not worth the loss of a job, reputation and worst of all letting your family down”
Hi Elango,
My leader and I were talking along the same lines just the other day. I am going to share this with my whole team. Thanks for taking the time to post this. I think its something that every employee has to read and understand. They also need to understand that the decision to let go of someone for such reasons is just as painful to the immediate managers and HR as it is for them. It is unnecessary and puts a lot of people in an uncomfortable position. I am glad to see an open blog on this.
Keep posting! 🙂
Ranju
Good one… but there are people who still take it very lightly. There needs to be a mechanism in office too to find out if someone is intoxicated. I hope we do not have any threshold levels to pardon or punish them. This should be taken seriously by every employee. I do appreciate the way it is narrated and in the end how signing the code of conduct becomes more serious, the message was delivered well. Like the way you address your townhalls.. it was nice reading. thanks.
The top most reason for being chucked out of job- forging bills for petrol, medical bills etc.- let’s deliberate on this.
why do people do that – to save tax
why do people want to save tax- cause they feel that in India the tax rates are very high.
absolutely a wrong reasoning to have. I do not have the statistics handy, but look at the percentage of the population in india paying taxes in comparison to any other growing economy.
pathetically low!
tax department has allowed some ways of doing ‘tax planning’ but we end up doing ‘tax avoiding ‘
my personal take is let there be only one salary- the CTC. No breaking it up to basic, HRA, sp allowance etc etc.
the whole gamut of forging the docs vanishes- come to think of it, it saves precious time which can be converted to productive time- both from the individual’s point of view and the company’s point of view.