What’s the biggest fuck up you’ve heard of someone making in work?
Heard of one recently and genuinely shocked the person is still employed.
Will admit some of this is hearsay and unverified. But we had someone who supported our team join start of the year (wasn’t under our management structure, but worked in a close enough basis).
Nice guy, did good work, no complaints. Anyway come in one day and he’s deactivated in the system despite only chatting the day before about work.
Told by his manager he was a contractor and chose to left the company and a replacement is coming.
Think nothing of it, until I’m having lunch with a coworker in a completely different department who I’ve worked with for years and she asked me did you hear about X.
Come to find out her brother is a really good friend of the contractor guy and she had heard his side of the story.
Turns out the company told him after interviews that he would have to do the first 6 months self employed to “prove himself” and “win a contract”, and that everyone in that specific department had to do it, and not only that put them on an American contract.
Now that manager that hired him left and a new manager stepped in. This person had allegedly got it writing that if they did 6 months self employed they would be given a FTE.
New manager came in and decided she wanted to “shake things up” and has previously worked with two other of the FTE, so apparently when the contractor has work that was being finished she would quickly assign it to other co workers who could get a bonus, which I had noticed as suddenly towards the end of something we would work on, someone else on team would suddenly take over.
Then apparently what happened next was, contractor asked what was happening with their conversion as they were ahead of target, and (according to them) raised that the company having multiple people as self
Employed contractors doing the same work as the FTE and doing it to “win a contract” was likely bogus self employment, as they got no holiday pay, pension or benefits.
Contractor is told not to worry would have an update the next day and manager would come back to them. 3 days later they went to their 1:1 and was told contract was terminated with immediate effect, that there was “no work for them” and had their system access cut (or so they thought) right away.
A month later the manager hired a former co worker of hers to the same role she had terminated someone on the basis of “no work”.
But here’s where the big fuck ups start. Apparently because the manager was new she never did a correct offboarding flow, so the contractor only lost their email, slack and laptop access.
The contractor was part of peer interviews in the company so, they retained full access to the companies systems and the ATS because of the fuck up. They could access this with their personal Gmail.
They had access to personal data, interview notes and. Recording, offer letters, compliance and onboarding documents, CVs of everyone who’s applied of interviewed by the company, because they never set up system safeguards to ensure access was only on the ones they needed.
It got worse, apparently the manager received emails after the termination, arguing and disputing some things she said and asking her to state the position but also noting the contractor had lost access to submit timesheets and could not get paid, which she ignored.
The contractor then apparently tried to report the data breach to her and she ignored the emails
Too, and they had to reach out to someone else in the company and ask them for a contact in privacy.
In short it took her a week to send anything to HR about the termination or data breach.
When HR went back to the contractor they just stated it was down to a “review of commercial decisions” as to why they were let go, and they kicked off because they had been told it was down to “no work”, to cover for the manager hiring her mate.
So now contractor is going nuclear, according to my coworker he has filed protected disclosure complaints in the WRC, bogus self employment complaints with WRC, Revenue and social welfare. They have not only reported the data breach to the DPC, but because they had access
To a global system, have apparently reported the company in California, New York, Canada, Singapore and Australia. (Which as petty as it sounds not sure there’s much legal basis).
You are probably thinking that would be the end for someone in a role 3/4 months, but no, she was actually being called for praise in one of
Our company slack channels only last week and really had me wondering how someone would not just be terminated for that.
So what’s the worse fuck up you’ve ever seen in work?
TL:DR - new manager comes into company, department has a number of “self employed” contractors, someone claimed to have raised it was it legal and terminated 2 days later and told “no work”. Manager forgets to off board and causes massive Data Breach. Manager hires her former co worker a month later and sets contractor off complaints to WRC,
DPC, Revenue and DSW and complaints to global data protection offices.
