Yahoo Finance Boss's 'passive aggressive' guilt trip that caused half of staff to quit exposed: ‘Horrible’
The experience was so awful that she handed in her notice shortly after.
A staff member called in sick recently to her job and her boss did not take the message too kindly. But the guilt trip moment backfired massively as it led to half the team quitting.
Entrepreneur Ben Askins has revealed the message exchange between the staffer and her employer in a social media video.
The employee, named Katie, sent a text to her boss saying she was ill and was unable to work that day.
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“Hi, I'm so sorry to do this, but I don't think I can work today. Been up half the night and feel absolutely awful,” she said. “Really sorry. I'm hoping I can shake it today and be okay for tomorrow.”
While most managers would cop that on the chin and set about finding someone to cover the shift, this boss put the spotlight on Katie.
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“You know the rules if you are too ‘ill’ to work, you have to find someone to cover your shift,” the boss replied.
Askins called out the manager for putting ill in inverted commas, as if to question whether Katie was actually sick.
“That's so passive aggressive,” he said. “And also, no it's not, it's your job. You're the manager. You're in charge of the [roster]. It’s obviously your job to fill it if someone's ill. I mean, that's just like such a basic element of it.”
Katie told her boss she had already messaged another staff member and they couldn’t do the shift, and she even asked the manager for a list of numbers so she could see if others could cover her while she was off.
But the boss dug in his heels and said he was “busy” and insisted it wasn’t his problem to fix. Askins said the manager was going about the situation all wrong.
“This is in your best interest and much as it is hers,” he said in the video. “Why on earth should she be hitting everyone up, that’s literally such a basic role of your manager. And it kind of breaks my heart a little bit that she's really trying to do this.”
Despite Katie saying she wasn’t able to find someone to cover her, her boss was furious when he walked in and saw no one there.
“This is not good enough Katie, I have now had to do the shift for you. How do you think that looks to the team?” the boss said.
Askins said it actually would have looked better if the manager stepped up to the plate and worked the shift to help out Katie and would have sent a good message to the rest of the team.
Katie said she was too sick to communicate to her boss that day and he replied saying it was not up to her “when to speak” and was “not something you can just decide”.
She insisted she wasn’t going to talk about the issue that day and two weeks later she had quit. But not only that, Katie revealed that half the team had also left the same job because the manager was “awful to work with”.
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