re: Jobs, Attrition & Layoffs in IT companies Quote:
Originally Posted by vb-san ..even though she could sabotage the program/client relationship (quoted below)….I would think a troublesome (or underperforming employee) would be dealt with the same set of policies and procedures, irrespective of gender. | Quote:
Originally Posted by vedirah This is seen as an asset in my industry. Employees are encouraged to be critical of everything.: |
@vb-san Where did I say she underperformed? If she had, that would have given us cause for sure. I was sweating the external manifestations; but ‘could sabotage’ isn’t the same thing as ‘did sabotage’. She didn’t. By the grace or God.
The issue was her attitude and general conduct. Criticism is perfectly fine as long you come to the table with sincerity; and you follow the processes and procedure for improving things for everyone.
In this case, she walked around running her mouth to everyone she met at the office; talking trash about the team and about the management and also about how some people on the client side aren’t good enough to run our team. This last statement in particular was dangerous. All this sowed discontent in the team and sunk morale. It is only when my PM questioned her did she start throwing out the minutiae to come up with material. He then pulled in his boss and HR, and the issue started getting bigger. Most of her criticisms were rubbish as neither the client nor our internal quality teams had a problem with anything. And by the way, our internal quality teams are a proverbial thorn in every team’s flesh. So if they themselves had nothing to be unhappy about, there really wasn’t much there to address.
I mentioned that the treatment would have been different if it had been a guy, because it certainly would have. In that case we wouldn’t have to worry about a attitude conversation snowballing into a tangent about sexism and such. That would have been the death knell. We could have legitimately cited attitude as the cause and it would have been acceptable. He would have gone somewhere else and we would have given him a good reference to boot. This is not possible with a lady employee.
By the way, male or female employee, we could easily manufacture cause if we wanted to. But most teams never do that because that would be a.) be unethical and b.) be a disproportionate response to the issue at hand (in this case). Performance related setbacks in work history have a way of following you for a long time and no one wants to destroy someone else’s career.
We tried asking other teams to take her as she had no major work problems; not a single one of our teams accepted. No one wanted the headache.
She was young and I chalked her behaviour up to her inexperience. No one who is older ever thinks that they know it all. When you think that you are smarter than everyone else and that everyone else is stupid, that is the start of the end for you.
An example. We had a very smart HR guy. One fine day I hear that he got sacked because he along with some ex-colleagues had started their own staffing firm with which they were feeding our recruitment requirements without going to the open market for those resources and while charging our org hefty fees. This was blatant malfeasance and conflict of interest.
When I heard about it, I was very surprised because I had always come away impressed by this dude. The issue was that he had slowly started to lose respect for our executive management; and over time resented the fact that he had to report to them. This seed of discontent led him astray to the point where he was unceremoniously fired.
At the end of the day, you have to accept your position in the org hierarchy and then move forward while operating within it. No point harbouring resentment that others are getting things easy while you have to toil for those very same things. No one said life is fair. But you aren’t without opportunity. Make the most of what you have and your circumstances.
Last edited by Sheel : 24th November 2022 at 10:02.
Reason: As requested.
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