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The order here is what I’m taking issue with. - The 1-1s should have been happening from day 1 of employment, especially for a remote employee. - The manager

The order here is what I’m taking issue with. - The 1-1s should have been happening from day 1 of employment, especially for a remote employee. - The manager should have initiated them, not the employee. - When the employee asked for help, the response was to install time monitoring software on her computer From my perspective, the time software was absolutely weaponized against the employee. I call this a “first recourse” because it precluded an improvement plan. I’m reading this as “oh, you’re not getting enough work done huh? Well let me just stand over your desk and scrutinize your minute to minute work for a month to make sure you’re not slacking off”. Sure, it’s legal and a court didn’t find issue with it, but that doesn’t make it ethical, and it has zero chance of helping a struggling employee. If I had one of my direct reports reach out to me and say they felt unproductive I can simply not fathom responding to that by treating them like a delinquent. Edit because I clearly don’t know how HN formatting works

krisoft 4y ago
Thank you for your response. > The 1-1s should have been happening from day 1 of employment, especially for a remote employee. I agree with you on this here. On the other hand I can’t find any source to tell if they had 1-1s from the begining or not. If they hadn’t that is a serious mistake. (If you see this somewhere mentioned I’ happy to see a reference. But do not worry either way, no pressure.) > The manager should have initiated them, not the employee. I agree with that too! Again I don’t know if that happened or not. The court case suggest that it was the employee who initiated the chat. I can also imagine that if I am an employer and I am being sued I would stick to the hard facts. The things I can prove. And if there are enough of these hard facts to show that I did not commit what I am accused of (unfair dismissal) the I wouldn’t bring up all the informal and thus undocumented instances where we talked about performance. It is possible in my mind either way, and I can’t say for sure. Maybe it is an instance of bad management, paird with over reliance on a time traking software. Maybe it is good management paired with a regetably underpeforming employee. Maybe something in between! But here is the thing: This is not the reason why this case was thrust into the public spotlight. It is in the public spotlight because the outcome has the appearance as if she got sued by the company to extract money from her. I certainly started reading with that assumption! But then reading the article I have noticed that this is not the case. I have also noticed that many commenters, not necessarily you, seems to have fallen into the same idea and did not read the article carefull enough to see that this doesn’t seem to be the case. Which perhaps is the fault of the article. (But of course we all understand that “woman sues company, company vindicated” is not such a catchy title, so I even understand why they went for the angle they did.) Truth to be told on the general managerial advice and recommendations I agree very much with you. Cheers
- tsuujin 4y ago
  > On the other hand I can’t find any source to tell if they had 1-1s from the begining or not. From the court findings: “In February 2022, Miss Besse began having weekly meetings with her manager to help her better manage her files. She says she initiated the meetings because she felt unproductive and that she was not performing as well as she should have been. On February 21, 2022, Reach installed a time-tracking program called TimeCamp on Miss Besse’s work laptop.” This is actually the point where I got angry and felt that I needed to comment. Usually these articles are filled with one-sides opinions, but here we have a formal accounting of events from the court. According to the court, Besse went to her manager because she was struggling and the response could be called intimidation. I’ve been managing for long enough that this, to me, calls into question the cause of the events here. It’s possible this lady was just lazy and is entirely at fault; but when I see a paper trail indicating a failure of management to engage I wonder if the whole thing could have been avoided with some empathy and servant leadership.

krisoft 4y ago

Thank you for your response. > The 1-1s should have been happening from day 1 of employment, especially for a remote employee. I agree with you on this here. On the other hand I can’t find any source to tell if they had 1-1s from the begining or not. If they hadn’t that is a serious mistake. (If you see this somewhere mentioned I’ happy to see a reference. But do not worry either way, no pressure.) > The manager should have initiated them, not the employee. I agree with that too! Again I don’t know if that happened or not. The court case suggest that it was the employee who initiated the chat. I can also imagine that if I am an employer and I am being sued I would stick to the hard facts. The things I can prove. And if there are enough of these hard facts to show that I did not commit what I am accused of (unfair dismissal) the I wouldn’t bring up all the informal and thus undocumented instances where we talked about performance. It is possible in my mind either way, and I can’t say for sure. Maybe it is an instance of bad management, paird with over reliance on a time traking software. Maybe it is good management paired with a regetably underpeforming employee. Maybe something in between! But here is the thing: This is not the reason why this case was thrust into the public spotlight. It is in the public spotlight because the outcome has the appearance as if she got sued by the company to extract money from her. I certainly started reading with that assumption! But then reading the article I have noticed that this is not the case. I have also noticed that many commenters, not necessarily you, seems to have fallen into the same idea and did not read the article carefull enough to see that this doesn’t seem to be the case. Which perhaps is the fault of the article. (But of course we all understand that “woman sues company, company vindicated” is not such a catchy title, so I even understand why they went for the angle they did.) Truth to be told on the general managerial advice and recommendations I agree very much with you. Cheers

tsuujin 4y ago
> On the other hand I can’t find any source to tell if they had 1-1s from the begining or not. From the court findings: “In February 2022, Miss Besse began having weekly meetings with her manager to help her better manage her files. She says she initiated the meetings because she felt unproductive and that she was not performing as well as she should have been. On February 21, 2022, Reach installed a time-tracking program called TimeCamp on Miss Besse’s work laptop.” This is actually the point where I got angry and felt that I needed to comment. Usually these articles are filled with one-sides opinions, but here we have a formal accounting of events from the court. According to the court, Besse went to her manager because she was struggling and the response could be called intimidation. I’ve been managing for long enough that this, to me, calls into question the cause of the events here. It’s possible this lady was just lazy and is entirely at fault; but when I see a paper trail indicating a failure of management to engage I wonder if the whole thing could have been avoided with some empathy and servant leadership.