Wtwmyem? Topic: Business - Employees

[Chicken]

This Wtwmyem? topic is: Business - Employees

What's the worst mistake you ever made regarding employees? Did you wait too long to hire one (or more)? Did you let one go and then regret it? Did you hire one that turned out to be a nightmare? As a hosting company owner/manager, post your experience(s).




What is Wtwmyem? Wtwmyem stands for: "What's the worst mistake you ever made?"

I'll be posting a few of these in various forums here and elsewhere and emailing some of the hosts I've talked to and haven't talked to, for the purpose of writing some articles on the subject for the new Ping! Zine. The goal is to help others not make the same mistake you did. Please indicate how you'd like to be listed as the source, or if you'd prefer to be anonymous in case your comments are used.

More Wtwmyem? to come soon!

[allan]

UGH, we hired the absolute worst employee in the history of the world :).

Part of the problem is that we were too lenient. We had two high school kids helping us out after school -- and they were great: they came in, did their work, did grunt tasks and loved the work.

We needed to hire someone part time to help out during the days -- but couldn't pay a lot, we figure the trade-off would be the training we could give to someone and as we grew they could move full-time.

This woman we hired interviewed really well, and we had had good luck with female employees (my wife ran the company) so we took a chance on her, even though her computer experience was minimal.

She was miserable, she showed up late constantly, she spent half the time writing letters to people (by writing letters I mean with a pen and paper -- she rarely turned on her computer) and she never learned anything, she would pass things on to Roseanne without even trying to help people.

We tried training her, but she refused to learn and she would not work with me, or our other techs, she would only work with Roseanne, who was so busy taking care of billing and business related stuff she did not have time to train her.

After two weeks we finally had to fire her -- we dreaded doing it, but made it easy for us. The day we decided to fire her she walked over to the 7-11 grabbed a paper and started looking for work (we hadn't fired her yet).

Roseanne can give you some of the best horror stories about this woman -- she was really a mess.

[Chicken]

Errrr... OK that's one (thanks Allan!). Not exactly enough to write an article about (though I haven't spammed people about it yet). Maybe I'll pick a more general Wtwmyem? next time to start things off. I suppose this is a bit specific.

[interactive]

There's a big government contractor in town, and one of my friends works for them (don't know if this counts but found it funny). They decided to hire a few more network techs, well they found a particular one from costa rica. My friend said his resume sounded real good, the guy was supposidly mcse, a+, ccna, and ccnp certified. They hired him, paid for his flight (he was resting on some sort of a visa while he was in the USA), the first day at work, they wanted to see what he could do. They gave him two machines ready to go to be setup on a network, the guy goes down to the supply room, takes a patch cable and goes back to his office. Hooks them up, and then he goes and uses the msn network setup utility i think is what it's called. Well course they were direct connected so you would need a crossover, he calls down to supply and tells them they gave him a defective cable, after about 20 cables (poor guys in supply had to keep making new cables and such), his boss comes in and asks what's going on. The guy blatenly accused the supply guys, until his boss walked over and showed him what he did wrong. Needless to say the guy was fired.

[dynamicnet]

Greetings:

"What's the worst mistake you ever made regarding employees? Did you wait too long to hire one (or more)? Did you let one go and then regret it? Did you hire one that turned out to be a nightmare? As a hosting company owner/manager, post your experience(s)."

Wow... where to start <LOL>

Lessons learned:

1. Don't force a square peg into a round hole.

The 2nd employee (not counting me as the founder -- Peter), we hired was an intern heading for a degree in Marketing and Communication.

We felt he could work out by developing our marketing department (we had none <smile>).

It turns out having a college degree (he did graduate) does not mean you can spell or know grammar.

After numerous problems including several (low end) thousand lost on material, we had him concentrate on ads (he was an artist).

Well it turns out his form of art was abstract <smile>, and it took longer than it should have for us to get the HINT --> if he has to explain to the board of directors and myself what the advertisement is trying to get across, it is probably to abstract.
Then we tried to have him in sales because we believed he had good people skills, but didn¡¦t think about the lack of his self discipline.

Lesson learned: don¡¦t try to make a person fit a position, and if there is not a fit, say good bye.

2. Interns, while free or low labor costs, may have hidden costs

We have had a number of interns over the years (we currently have one now from Penn State University helping in our marketing and new business development department), but we made the mistake a few years back concerning accepting an Intern from overseas.

While Surya and I exchanged a number of emails and phone calls going over the cost of living, what his pay would start out at (we had paid interns back then), and what he could expect over his 90 to 120 days, it was a different story when he got here.

He was a marketing student, and we felt he could help with International marketing. Well, he wanted to learn every aspect of the business we could teach him; which does make sense.

Well to our shock, when he was working in sales and marketing doing calls to set up appointments for our sales people, low and behold¡K

Surya „³ ¡§If you allow us to make an appointment with you, you will get a free modem¡¨

I can laugh about it now, but he had no understanding that we had no modems to give for free ;-)

I could go on, but it ended terribly when he demanded to be paid the same as our lead application developer (full time, not an Intern).

3. If a person up and quits, get them to sign a resignation letter.

We had a programmer up and quit during a staff meeting (long story). They then filed for unemployment. Was turned down, and appealed to the court system.

Their defense (they lost by the way) was that they had a bad heart condition, and the stress of being asked to answer the phone if no one else answers (there were eight other people to answer the phone before this person) might cause them to have another heart attack. They felt they had to do the lesser of two evils.

That was the only fun court hearing I had to participate in.

I was called as a witness against our company by virtue of my programming background. His lawyer tried to paint a picture that programmers go into a ¡§mystical trance¡¨ (his words, not mine in order to program. Any interruption can be extremely stressful. LOL.

4. If you have sales people and change commission structures, get them to sign the new structure.

We still have an ongoing case since 2001 where a sales person is claiming we owe them a large sum of money based on 1) a sale they didn¡¦t make, and 2) based on a commission structure that didn¡¦t exist at the time the alleged sale took place.

5. Don¡¦t allow inter office dating

Long story, but the two left to start a competing company.

6. Don¡¦t loan money to employees even if you have a promissory note.

We made the mistake of loaning money to the one employee who ran off with the other employee so they could get a used truck (the sob story was they had no vehicle in which to go out on sales calls). We thought we had the title by virtue of the promissory note and the acknowledgement of the auto insurance company.

But shortly after he left, he declared bankruptcy, and we found out we didn¡¦t have the ¡§physical¡¨ title to the vehicle; therefore it was an unsecured loan.

7. Don¡¦t allow employees to borrow company property.

The same employee involved in the loan and inter office dating borrowed a PC to do work at home. We had the paperwork that we owned it, but no paperwork that he borrowed it.

He claimed it was given to him as part of his compensation. The sad part is that even though we had bounced checks, and other evidence of his ¡§true¡¨ nature, the police actually refused to take it further.

BTW, on the bounced check issue¡K my wife and I loaned him money personally. His check bounced in July 2001. We held his last two paychecks until a court hearing (that was at the end of August 2001).

He claimed the check that bounced in July bounced because we held his paychecks in August. Now, hopefully everyone reading this knows that is a joke. But sad to say our court system allowed him to file the complaint for which we had to defend.

8. Even if the person checks out, don¡¦t hire a family member of the person you are dating.

Before I got married I had a very unhealthy relationship that ended up bad. We had hired the sister of the lady to be our in-house accounting assistant.

When our accountant moved on, they became our full time accountant.

We made the mistake of trusting her too far; and to this day, I¡¦m not sure if what happened was because of the break up with her sister or just pure incompetence.

Close to two years after she started, we found out that bills where not getting paid, certain clients not invoiced, and almost had to declare bankruptcy because our accounting was that far out of whack.

We figure she cost us over $50,000 in costs we could nail down. There was no embezzlement that we could find, just a large amount of stuff she was able to hide.

BTW, the last act she did was call our #1 client asking if she could charge approximately $32,000 to their credit card 20 days in advance of their next invoice / bill.

We terminated her for willful misconduct. We didn¡¦t believe we would have to pay unemployment due to the gross misconduct.

However, in the state of Pennsylvania we found out the hard way that you have to know of the misconduct prior to termination in order to avoid unemployment.

Because we found out about the credit card incident 15 minutes (literally) after we terminated her (we had other evidence, but according to the judge, it was more evidence of total incompetence than willful misconduct). Had we waited 15 minutes, found out, we could have avoided unemployment.

---

Ending, over the past eight years (come June 2003), we¡¦ve only had five bad full time employees, and one bad intern.

We¡¦ve had more good employees than bad; and sometimes I do wonder if all of the HR issues (from vacation scheduling to people calling off sick to health care companies merging et all) are worth it.

But then I am reminded that without employees, we would not be able to service all of our customers to the extent that we do.

Thank you.

P.S. Notes:

1. Have an employee hand book. Have a lawyer review it.

2. Keep the employee hand book up to date as you make changes; document changes.

3. Consider having an ¡§add on¡¨ hand book for sales staff so you can go into extra details explaining any compensation differences they may have compared to non sales people. Have that book reviewed by a lawyer.

[Chicken]

Forget Allan, I'm writing the book on you ;) :D

[CompCity]

Back in the day (when I actually owned a few companies) I was heading on a business trip and needed someone to watch the desk. My cousin, not a tech by any means, asked me to hire him and show him the ropes. I didn't figure it'd be a huge deal, since he could just SMS me when something was too much for him. Well a client needed his account upgraded, so Chris went ahead and logged into WHM (I only showed him some basic stuff) and upgraded the account (quite successfully). He got a little interested, and decided to play around a bit... well when I got back it wasn't too terribly easy to explain to 2 clients why they had their accounts downgraded, but it was even more difficult explaining to 3 more why they got there's upgraded, and then downgraded again.

Moral to the story: never hire family members, even if it's only for 2 days.

[Living Media]

I count myself extremely fortunate that I have a retired HR director in the family (hi Mom!) She advises me of all the possible ways that people can attempt to screw over employers, and helps me prepare to block those moves. Since she used to work in both the California school system and the manufacturing sector, she knows all kinds of tricks: the passive aggressive; the rules fetishists; the armchair lawyers; the hypochondriacs; and more.

...which means that when I start getting more employees, I'll make mistakes in some new, interesting, utterly boneheaded fashion, and everyone will ask me, "Howinell did you manage to do **THAT**?!??" and where my brain was.