One of the Greatest HR Twitter Threads Ever

htt

Warning--some bad language below.

Thread by @zaktoscani: "Co-worker got his lunch stolen and they’ve agreed to let him watch the security camera tape. This is the most excited I’ve ever been at any […]"

20 tweets a day ago

Embed Zak Toscani @zaktoscaniFollow Read on Twitter

Co-worker got his lunch stolen and they’ve agreed to let him watch the security camera tape. This is the most excited I’ve ever been at any job ever. Ever.

The lunch in question was shrimp fried rice which means this escalates from a misdemeanor to felony no doubt

Case facts:
Lunch was in fridge for less than an hour before it vanished. No shrimp smell remnants in the microwave or kitchen area. This was a professional hit no doubt

HOLY SHIT. He’s back. He watched the tape. He knows who did it.

So the man who’s lunch was stolen sits across from me. The person who stole his lunch sits RIGHT NEXT TO ME! She left for the day before the investigation started

According to the video, this psychopath DIDNT EVEN EAT THE FOOD. She took it out of the fridge and threw and buried it in the trash

Her motives remain completely unknown. In lieu of what he saw on the tape he has decided to not to press the matter anymore. I can’t say I blame him. We don’t know what this women’s fully capable of

Points to clarify: he bought the shrimp fried rice around 11:30am (carry out) and put it in the fridge to chill until he takes lunch at noon. So she had exactly a 30min window of time to do what she did. There was no intention of microwaving the food

Update: Ok so when dude watched the video with HR they asked “what do you want to do about it?” he told them he was solely interested in who did it and that he didn’t want to be responsible for someone getting fired

After charges were dropped, HR sent a company wide email about not stealing people’s lunches. She is scheduled to arrive at work in 20min. My blood is on cocaine

She has walked into the room. And the room is dead silent. Dead fucking silent yet there is a palpable explosive energy pulsing through everyone but her

From the moment she walked in, I’ve just been staring at her. Watched her open her email and now she clicked on the goddamn HR email! Holy fuck strap in - here we go!

I can’t move. I simply cannot move, anything could happen right now

!!!! After seeing the HR email she says out loud “woah. Someone stole a lunch? Who would do something like that?” !!! I may have to run out of this room

After she said that, shrimp guy responds “well yea it’s not ok to throw someone’s food away” we’re all about to start screaming

This shits about to get crazier. After he says that she goes “oh it was your lunch?” BEAT she continues “well why would you go to HR about that?!”

She has simultaneously denied her involvement AND called the guy who saved her job a snitch!!!!!!!!!

Dude just sighed and went back to work after she said what she said. She looks frighteningly calm

I’ll keep updating if anything else occurs but all I can say is that EVERYONE in the office from the janitor to the founder knows what she did. She now carries an invisible scarlet letter.
Unbeknownst to the guy and the woman, I just ordered 3 shrimp fried rice plates for lunch and will be hand delivering them.


https://twitter.com/mims/status/979765018580475904

This is real. This is happening. We know who did it but we don’t know why. It’s a post production company so we’re in fact open today. She’s been sitting 3ft from me this whole timephttps://twitter.com/threadreaderapp/status/979772705904975873s://twitter.com/threadreaderapp/status/979772705904975873

Towards an Effective Sexual-Harassment Training Program

I despise sexual-harassment training. At least, I despise the kind of training to which I've been subjected and to which most of my clients workforces are subjected. You know what I mean-the boring recitation of legal standards followed by a review of the company policy stating don't do this/that/or the other thing, and if someone does it to you, here's whom to call.

For number of years, I've maintained that companies should ditch this type of universal sexual-harassment training and instead use it as a disciplinary tool. "If you send one more inappropriate email over the company server, you're going to spend three hours in sexual-harassment training." My guess is that such a practice would stop more harassment than what we do now across our workspaces.

For it's no secret that sexual-harassment training generally is ineffective. The EEOC knows it, its people have studied it, but it will probably take them another generation (based on their case processing times) to come up with any kind of remedial suggestions. So, in a burst of immodesty, let me offer a teaching paradigm that might prove helpful.

People dealing with sexual harassment in the workplace-victims, observers, human resource professionals on the receiving end of the complaint-are not approaching the issue from a perspective of what is legal, what can be proved, or how it fits within the world of Title VII or some state law analog. They are not asking whether the harassment is quid pro quo or hostile work environment. What people confronted with sexual-harassment are trying to do is solve a problem, a problem of a bad employee, customer or manager acting outside business norms or even societal norms for personal conduct. Most sexual-harassment training does not come at this problem solving directly, but only tangentially. We don't approach the issue the way somebody in the workforce does, namely, in a way that looks for means to stop the conduct.

And so when I train on sexual-harassment in the workplace, my focus is on how a line employee, manager, or a human resources professional can deal with the problem conduct. The legal definitions, recognizing sexual-harassment, company policies, all get wrapped up in the problem-solving angle.  but the problem solving remains the focus. Typically I do this through a series of scenarios that are tailored to the work environment of the company. Is it predominantly female? Then I describe settings and interactions more familiar to women. Is it a manufacturing operation or an office environment? That drives the likely problems and possible solutions.

These solutions are not couched in legalese or evidence-based language, but rather in commonplace terms that show a logical connection between cause and effect and cause and solution. Because they focus on things like workplace culture rather than legal analysis, this way of solving problems is generally more memorable and effective at the same time.

So, for example, a response to an employee having a scantily clad picture of her spouse on her desk is not approached as a hostile work environment issue, but rather as a professional workplace issue. Telling someone that the office is not an appropriate place for what amounts to soft core pornography is an easier solution to conceptualize-because it makes sense-than an analysis of who might be offended and why after seeing the picture. Similarly, advising employees on how to respond to bullying conduct-by telling the bully things like, "This office doesn't work that way", "Did you really mean to say that?", "I don't think you thought about what you were going to say before you said it", "I don't want to be treated like that and I'm pretty sure no one else does either", can be an effective way of defusing bully behavior at an initial level, before it escalates into a harassment problem. Sketching out possible approaches to human resources when making a report also is effective. Conducting a make-believe dialogue between the reporting employee and the human resources director, in my experience, works to ease the awkwardness that most employees feel when talking to HR.

Rather than trying to make pseudo-lawyers of our workforces, we should be addressing human resource issues like this for what they are-problems seeking solutions. Our presentations should provide solutions, first and foremost. The rest of the high concept training will take care of itself.

Chicago Legal Process

A recent ruling from Cook County Circuit Court demonstrates why litigating there is such a problem, especially for out-of-state parties.

In a case involving a Chicago Cubs fan who was struck in the face by an errant foul ball, there were two defendants-Major League Baseball and the Chicago Cubs. Even though there is a state law on point that specifically exempts MLB and its clubs from liability in precisely these circumstances, the judge ruled from the bench that while the local Cubs organization could be dismissed from the case, MLB could not.

Hometowned, anyone? Although in fairness, the Cubs may get dragged back in via an amendment.

Moreover, the court's handwritten order demonstrates another wonderful feature of Cook County practice. Because the clerk of court there has been inexcusably slow in implementing electronic filing and record-keeping (because shuffling paper requires a lot more employees, which means a lot more patronage, which apparently means a lot more donations to the clerk's private campaign fund), court orders are handwritten by the attorneys involved, using actual sheets of carbon paper. Yes, that's right, a reproduction technology that went out in the 1980s is still in daily use in Cook County courts.

It's a great place to litigate.

Drug testing on the Way Out for Employers?

In 1982 I was an Air Force captain starting law school. The US military was embarking on the nation's first large-scale drug testing program for its members. The first several years of that testing program revealed that approximately one in four individuals randomly tested were showing positive for marijuana or cocaine.

Over the years, drug testing moved into the civilian sector and it is now commonplace. Employer drug testing ushered in a wave of state regulation concerning employee rights, driven by concerns of invasion of privacy with respect to off work activity, disparate racial impact, and others.

Indeed, employee drug testing compliance was a major legal issue for many years. But we are starting to see another one of those seismic shifts in employment law that come along every decade or so. As more and more states legalize recreational marijuana, employers are starting to drop mandatory drug testing or applicant drug testing is a requirement for their employees.

This is driven by a number of factors, legalization being just one. According to at least one recent and reliable poll, 64% of Americans favor marijuana legalization for recreational use. Only 12% favored recreational legalization in 1969. In addition, it's getting harder and harder to find employees generally in this market, and drug testing weeds out,so to speak, a number of people who would otherwise be considered solid candidates. Failed drug tests reached an all-time high in 2017 according to SHRM data.

Excellence Health, a Las Vegas-based healthcare company with 6000 employees, no longer drug tests people coming to work on the pharmaceutical side of the business. AutoNation announced it will no longer disqualify job applicants who tested positive for marijuana. The Denver Post ended preemployment drug testing for all safety sensitive positions in September 2016. This likely explains the quality of some of the recent writing there about the Broncos quarterback situation.

Now, this drop in testing will be good news to some of you.

But lawyers need to start thinking about implications for their client base, particularly in areas of insurance coverage, if it starts becoming likely that a portion of the workforce is either actively or residually impaired. Or appears to be impaired. Drug testing still has a significant impact on federal contractor employment, and for federal contractors, drug-free workplace policies are going to become an increasingly important issue.

It's going to become even more important that employers are able to identify employees impaired by dope and not rely on postaccident testing. Employers will have to think creatively about how they deal with signs of incapacitation and what constitutes incapacitation at work.

These are all issues that companies need to start thinking about now. And understand that they may be looking at a workforce that is riskier than the one they have today.