Depending on where you work, it can sometimes seem like firings occur at random.
After all, if you haven’t seen employees who do nothing skate by while hard workers get fired for petty reasons , you may not realize how many people out there would love to work where you do.
As much as many of us would like to think the world runs according to systems propelled forward by rational decision makers, there are always some people who reach their positions of influence by chasing their greed. And it’s hardly unheard of for these folks to get lucky after making a major decision through their personal whims.
So while the profits the manager we’re about to hear from has secured would have made him irreplaceable in a rational world, his story illustrates what really mattered to his bosses.
Over the last five years, this manager worked at an unspecified medium-sized retail chain and led a team of 18 people.
And as he explained in a Reddit post, in addition to going full bore during the pandemic, he turned his store around from a 3% loss year-over-year to a 32% increase.
Not only is this obviously a massive improvement on its own, but it amounted to 20% more than the company’s average.
Better yet, his store had one of the company’s lowest turnover rates because he created a respectful and even fun environment for his employees.
And an important part of that environment was the expectation that when an employee couldn’t make it in, they wouldn’t be pressured to try anyway.
Instead, the manager would offer overtime for someone else to cover their shift and simply take a temporary loss if that wasn’t possible.
But as time went on, this practice increasingly ran afoul of the corporate office’s crackdown on sick leave, which saw them implement a demerit point system if an employee called out for any reason after they ran out of sick time.
And considering that the manager was forced to suspend one employee after her grandma died and fire one worker after he had to take care of his father with PTSD and addiction issues, they did mean any reason.
Naturally, the manager found this policy abhorrent. So he regularly argued and pleaded with his district manager and area managers to loosen it.
However, this didn’t accomplish anything aside from painting a target on his back for not being a “yes man.”
As he put it, “I remember our District Manager literally saying to me ‘Why can’t you just sit quiet and nod your head like everyone else.'”
But the final straw came when the manager’s best employee was 16 seconds late to clock in after her car broke down, which would have earned her a three-day suspension.
And despite receiving every raise the manager could give her, she couldn’t afford this as she still lived paycheck to paycheck.
So the manager went into the system to change the time clock so she would be marked as on time.
However, an area manager happened to be looking at that clock at the time and saw what he did.
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In the manager’s words, “I was fired that same day. No prior warnings, no prior HR issues, no customers complaints, no employee complaints.”
And while he understood that his own firing was the result of him breaking a rule, it’s still hard for him not to feel as though the five years he spent there was meaningless.
It also hurt to feel as powerless to stop an unfair policy as the employees he cared about.
h/t: Reddit | Durncha
