Ask a Manager: My Employee Refuses to Lie to Customers -- How do I fire her?

[minoanmiss]

My employee is refusing to abide by company policies due to religious conviction and I’m not sure how to handle this.

I am the owner of a very small company, around 15 people total. We are a niche online retailer. We do the vast majority of our sales through a popular online marketplace, but also have a company webstore where customers can order our products.

Because we are so small, we cannot accommodate order cancellations, and we rarely offer refunds. All of our products are warrantied and we use high quality shipping carriers to minimize losses. Refunds are granted in very limited circumstances. We only cancel orders in cases where our security system detects fraud, or if a duplicate order was placed in error. Again this is a decision that has been made for the good of the company, as we operate on very, very slim margins.

Our customer service policy is posted on our website, but does not explicitly mention that we do not accept cancellations or offer refunds. Our internal policy is that when a cancellation is requested we tell the customer their order has already shipped and therefore cannot be cancelled. In situations where a customer has not received their order, we will reship it or they can forfeit their order, customer’s choice.

My employee has worked here for over a year and will not answer order cancellation emails. She says this is because she cannot tell lies due to her religious beliefs. She feels that if the customer has requested a cancellation and the order has not shipped, that we should not be telling them it has. I have created a canned response in our email tool so she does not need to type the message herself, but she says because her name appears in the signature she will not send the email. She will not use a different person’s signature as this too would be a lie. Her proposed solution is to tell customers in this situation that we do not accept cancellations and to tell them why (our company cannot handle the losses). The problem with that is obviously the optics are terrible, if a screenshot of such a message were to make it onto social media.

Her committment to exclusive truth-telling extends beyond these scenarios, and she will often leave me drafts of her emails for me to edit before sending to the customer as she knows that she cannot say what she wants to say. I am the primary backup person for customer service emails and need to deal with the tickets that are left over after her shift. The number of emails that she leaves takes up at least 30 minutes of my day, every day, and I am already working 12+ hours daily running the company and have young kids at home too.

I am not open to revisiting the customer service policy.

Ultimately, I would like to replace her with someone who can execute our policies as I instruct, without needing to proofread excessive numbers of emails daily. However, because she is objecting to this duty due to religious conviction, I feel my hands are tied in keeping her in the role or at least within the company. We do not have another vacancy that she could move into that would be appropriate to her skillset, nor can I afford to hire another employee without first letting one go.

Is there a way I can manage this employee so that she will be able to do the job as it needs to be done? Should I start subtly managing her out?

I know it’s annoying when you say “I’m not looking for advice on X” and then you get advice on X anyway … but there’s no way to respond to your question without doing that.

That’s because your policy is the problem, not your employee. Not the no-cancellations policy — lots of small businesses have that — but your policy of lying to customers. That’s a shady thing to do, it’s understandable that your employee wants no part of it, and it’s utterly unnecessary.

You could solve this by just posting your no-cancellation policy on your website. Use language explaining that as a small business, you can’t accommodate cancellations. Hell, have people check a box when they’re ordering to confirm that they know they won’t be able to cancel the order once placed. Then if someone tries to cancel anyway, you can point them back toward that policy.

That’s much better service than what you’re doing right now. People deserve to know the terms of their purchase up-front so they can hold off if those terms don’t work for them, and this way you won’t need to lie to them later.

You said you think the optics of a screenshot of such a message would be terrible — but again, plenty of other small businesses have this policy. The optics aren’t terrible when you clearly state your terms up-front. What would be terrible is if customers find out that you’re lying and saying orders have shipped when they haven’t, in order to avoid fulfilling requests to cancel. That’s the kind of thing that, if it spreads, could destroy your business. Honesty up-front will not.

I know that’s not what you came here looking for. Feel free to ignore it! But your employee has made it clear that she’s not willing to lie. That’s a reasonable stance for her to take, and I can’t in good faith help you figure out how to push her out for it.

Comments

[sathari]

Somehow, I am not surprised that this person's business is operating on a razor-thin margin, if the only way they can think to handle the fact that they can't afford to offer refunds or cancellations is to lie to the customer. As Alison points out, plenty of small businesses don't do refunds/cancellations, and they just say so. And can they not think of freaking Amazon.com's wording of "your order has already been processed and cannot be changed"?

[azurelunatic]

It seems to me in this age of tracking, if they're using any modern shipping method there's a time stamp of when the label was created as well as a time stamp of when the carrier picked up the package. And somehow I doubt they are generating the labels the moment the order is complete.

I'm impressed that this employee leaves the tickets in a state that a mere 30 minutes of work can get them all sent.