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agonyaunt2022-10-31 03:15 pm
minoanmiss) wrote in agonyaunt2022-10-31 03:15 pm
Entry tags:
Ask a Manager: My Employee Sent a Memo To Management About Ghosts In The Building
An older letter linked to today's.
I’m a relatively new manager and some of my inherited employees have, well, pretty questionable judgment that I’ve been trying to address since I started. They’ve made some odd decisions in the past, and as their boss, I’ve had to deal with the fall-out, but I’m slowly training them towards a better understanding of what I actually need from them.
We are in the hospitality industry, and my department is on scheduled shift-work to cover a reception desk, among other duties. A new CEO started taking over right around the same time I was promoted, and she is making a lot of changes to how we document particular things. She has requested that my department prepare a daily report regarding any significant issues that occur in the building over the course of each shift, such as maintenance problems or emergency calls, either medical/police, or for repairs such as plumbing.
I’ve had some trouble communicating with my staff what exactly they need to put in this report (which gets sent to my boss, my boss’ boss, the CEO, and the owner), that small things like regular old incandescent light bulbs being out in the lobby floor lamps do not need to be detailed here, and that it’s fine to just write “no issues today, everything went well.” We’ve been doing the report for just over two months now, and although we had a rocky start I really thought we had gotten this particular new duty down as part of our routine.
Well … Monday morning I came in to work and was greeted by my boss, when he asked to have a quick chat about the all-staff memo that went out Sunday afternoon. Apparently the staff member who works weekend mornings sent out an email that included several things that did not belong on her shift report, including that the department was out of printer paper and staples, and that the desk calculator was starting to break. I’ve already addressed these things — clarifying that office supply requests should be directed to me, or to any of the managers on duty when I am not in the office, and that this sort of thing doesn’t belong on an incident report. I was stumped, however, on how to address the other thing that was included:
Apparently multiple guests asked her “if we have had any reports of ghosts,” and she thought that this was a reasonable thing to mention on her daily report! She didn’t just mention it, actually — she went into full detail about what the guests told her. According to her long paragraph describing the incident, multiple people claimed to see “a shadow of a silhouette outside [the door],” “including children” so “they don’t think it was because they had too much to drink.” This was in a section labeled “Issues to be Addressed”!
I’m really blindsided by the level of judgment that was shown in thinking that she should put this on a report that went to not only her grandboss, but to the owner of the entire company. Belief in the supernatural aside, surely she should have realized that guests asking about rumors of a haunted old building wasn’t exactly an actionable complaint that needed to be elevated to management?
I have already prepared a note to her about this (she doesn’t work until Saturday). In it I stressed that although I do think she should report serious issues with guests such as (repeated) complaints about food or cleanliness, there are some things that guests will bring to her that don’t need to be reported to the entirety of upper management. I used several examples, not just this incident, but I did conclude with telling her that ghost stories probably fall into the latter category.
But I have to know — am I being the stereotypical skeptic jerk here? It’s not even that I 100% don’t believe in ghosts (I certainly lean skeptic but I’m willing to be convinced!). I just think that maybe paranormal rumors in the context of a workplace need, I don’t know, a less credulous approach if you feel the need to mention them to your bosses? Do I need to take into account that some people’s beliefs in this sort of thing are very sincere and border on a spiritual/religious view?
I was eager to hear more and wrote back to this letter-writer and asked, “I’m so curious — is your building rumored to be haunted, or this just all come out of the blue? And why so many reports on this one weekend and never previously? I am dying to hear more.” Her response:
It’s an old building, originally built in 1925. We have overnight staff, and some of the employees who don’t work third shift say they wouldn’t want to be alone in building this big and old, but I think it’s just a general sentiment because giant dark empty ballrooms with floor-to-ceiling windows that look out onto more darkness are creepy as hell to walk through, ghosts or no ghosts!
I’ve absolutely never heard of any ghost stories involving us in particular, and this is in a town that was incorporated in the 1600s and has tons and tons of local ghost stories. I feel pretty confident in saying there’s no rumors of the sort among our client base and I’m fairly sure the employee who made the report hadn’t heard anything either. It seems to me like the guests just experienced what some employees (and I myself) have experienced in the past — a hundred-year-old building on a windy February night, a dimly lit hallway, and the adrenaline of just having left a big party, all adding up to a spooky experience. And then my employee took their spooky tale of their spooky experience very sincerely.
As for why so many reports? I honestly couldn’t tell you. We’re in our winter slow season so there’s plenty of contractors in and out of the building to report on and not much else — I imagine this is the first Weird Guest Thing she’s had to deal with since we started doing these daily shift reports, and hasn’t had a chance to exercise her judgement in passing on things that guests say to her? I don’t know! Her reports have been pretty much what I’m looking for since the beginning of the year — this is a pretty sudden bombardment of bad judgement!
Okay. Fascinating.
So no, I do not think you’re being a jerk here, and you are absolutely right that she needs to take a less credulous approach in a memo that’s going to her boss, her boss’s boss, her boss’s boss’s boss, the CEO, and the owner. And that’s true even if she has a religious/spiritual belief in ghosts.
I suppose it’s possible that she figured that if multiple guests were asking about ghosts, it’s enough of a thing that the facility might want to have an official response to give out in the future. And maybe that’s what she meant by listing it under “Issues to be Addressed” — not that some kind of paranormal investigation was warranted. But if so, she should have been clearer — and it still probably didn’t belong in this particular report!
I know you already left her a note, but that’s a limited, one-sided way of communicating. I’d also sit down and talk with her in person the next time you’re both in at the same time. By doing that, you’ll get a better feel for how she’s taking your feedback, and whether she gets why this was odd to do. If this is a sign of a broader issue with her judgment, a corrective note won’t fix it — so you need to have a real conversation to know if there’s a bigger problem here or not. Depending on how that conversation goes, you might come away feeling reassured that this was a fluke … or you might come away with more concerns about her judgment.
The thing is, as amusing as I find this, it’s happening in the context of you already having concerns about your team’s judgment, and there’s been a pattern of them making bad decisions and causing fall-out for you. Given that backdrop, this may be another flag that you do have serious judgment problems on your staff and need to figure out what you’re going to do about that. Judgment is a hard thing to train people on, particularly in the amount of time that you as a manager will generally have available to invest. So that leaves you either needing to monitor people far more closely than you’ve been doing (and probably more closely than you can), or considering whether you might need different people on your team. I’m not saying that you should fire your employee over this ghost report — I don’t think that. But it does sound like you’ve had a lot of signs that things aren’t running the way you want them to run, and you can’t let that go on indefinitely. If you’re seeing significant improvement from your coaching, then that’s great — but if it’s slow going (and it sounds like it might be), at some point soon you might need to change course.
I’m a relatively new manager and some of my inherited employees have, well, pretty questionable judgment that I’ve been trying to address since I started. They’ve made some odd decisions in the past, and as their boss, I’ve had to deal with the fall-out, but I’m slowly training them towards a better understanding of what I actually need from them.
We are in the hospitality industry, and my department is on scheduled shift-work to cover a reception desk, among other duties. A new CEO started taking over right around the same time I was promoted, and she is making a lot of changes to how we document particular things. She has requested that my department prepare a daily report regarding any significant issues that occur in the building over the course of each shift, such as maintenance problems or emergency calls, either medical/police, or for repairs such as plumbing.
I’ve had some trouble communicating with my staff what exactly they need to put in this report (which gets sent to my boss, my boss’ boss, the CEO, and the owner), that small things like regular old incandescent light bulbs being out in the lobby floor lamps do not need to be detailed here, and that it’s fine to just write “no issues today, everything went well.” We’ve been doing the report for just over two months now, and although we had a rocky start I really thought we had gotten this particular new duty down as part of our routine.
Well … Monday morning I came in to work and was greeted by my boss, when he asked to have a quick chat about the all-staff memo that went out Sunday afternoon. Apparently the staff member who works weekend mornings sent out an email that included several things that did not belong on her shift report, including that the department was out of printer paper and staples, and that the desk calculator was starting to break. I’ve already addressed these things — clarifying that office supply requests should be directed to me, or to any of the managers on duty when I am not in the office, and that this sort of thing doesn’t belong on an incident report. I was stumped, however, on how to address the other thing that was included:
Apparently multiple guests asked her “if we have had any reports of ghosts,” and she thought that this was a reasonable thing to mention on her daily report! She didn’t just mention it, actually — she went into full detail about what the guests told her. According to her long paragraph describing the incident, multiple people claimed to see “a shadow of a silhouette outside [the door],” “including children” so “they don’t think it was because they had too much to drink.” This was in a section labeled “Issues to be Addressed”!
I’m really blindsided by the level of judgment that was shown in thinking that she should put this on a report that went to not only her grandboss, but to the owner of the entire company. Belief in the supernatural aside, surely she should have realized that guests asking about rumors of a haunted old building wasn’t exactly an actionable complaint that needed to be elevated to management?
I have already prepared a note to her about this (she doesn’t work until Saturday). In it I stressed that although I do think she should report serious issues with guests such as (repeated) complaints about food or cleanliness, there are some things that guests will bring to her that don’t need to be reported to the entirety of upper management. I used several examples, not just this incident, but I did conclude with telling her that ghost stories probably fall into the latter category.
But I have to know — am I being the stereotypical skeptic jerk here? It’s not even that I 100% don’t believe in ghosts (I certainly lean skeptic but I’m willing to be convinced!). I just think that maybe paranormal rumors in the context of a workplace need, I don’t know, a less credulous approach if you feel the need to mention them to your bosses? Do I need to take into account that some people’s beliefs in this sort of thing are very sincere and border on a spiritual/religious view?
I was eager to hear more and wrote back to this letter-writer and asked, “I’m so curious — is your building rumored to be haunted, or this just all come out of the blue? And why so many reports on this one weekend and never previously? I am dying to hear more.” Her response:
It’s an old building, originally built in 1925. We have overnight staff, and some of the employees who don’t work third shift say they wouldn’t want to be alone in building this big and old, but I think it’s just a general sentiment because giant dark empty ballrooms with floor-to-ceiling windows that look out onto more darkness are creepy as hell to walk through, ghosts or no ghosts!
I’ve absolutely never heard of any ghost stories involving us in particular, and this is in a town that was incorporated in the 1600s and has tons and tons of local ghost stories. I feel pretty confident in saying there’s no rumors of the sort among our client base and I’m fairly sure the employee who made the report hadn’t heard anything either. It seems to me like the guests just experienced what some employees (and I myself) have experienced in the past — a hundred-year-old building on a windy February night, a dimly lit hallway, and the adrenaline of just having left a big party, all adding up to a spooky experience. And then my employee took their spooky tale of their spooky experience very sincerely.
As for why so many reports? I honestly couldn’t tell you. We’re in our winter slow season so there’s plenty of contractors in and out of the building to report on and not much else — I imagine this is the first Weird Guest Thing she’s had to deal with since we started doing these daily shift reports, and hasn’t had a chance to exercise her judgement in passing on things that guests say to her? I don’t know! Her reports have been pretty much what I’m looking for since the beginning of the year — this is a pretty sudden bombardment of bad judgement!
Okay. Fascinating.
So no, I do not think you’re being a jerk here, and you are absolutely right that she needs to take a less credulous approach in a memo that’s going to her boss, her boss’s boss, her boss’s boss’s boss, the CEO, and the owner. And that’s true even if she has a religious/spiritual belief in ghosts.
I suppose it’s possible that she figured that if multiple guests were asking about ghosts, it’s enough of a thing that the facility might want to have an official response to give out in the future. And maybe that’s what she meant by listing it under “Issues to be Addressed” — not that some kind of paranormal investigation was warranted. But if so, she should have been clearer — and it still probably didn’t belong in this particular report!
I know you already left her a note, but that’s a limited, one-sided way of communicating. I’d also sit down and talk with her in person the next time you’re both in at the same time. By doing that, you’ll get a better feel for how she’s taking your feedback, and whether she gets why this was odd to do. If this is a sign of a broader issue with her judgment, a corrective note won’t fix it — so you need to have a real conversation to know if there’s a bigger problem here or not. Depending on how that conversation goes, you might come away feeling reassured that this was a fluke … or you might come away with more concerns about her judgment.
The thing is, as amusing as I find this, it’s happening in the context of you already having concerns about your team’s judgment, and there’s been a pattern of them making bad decisions and causing fall-out for you. Given that backdrop, this may be another flag that you do have serious judgment problems on your staff and need to figure out what you’re going to do about that. Judgment is a hard thing to train people on, particularly in the amount of time that you as a manager will generally have available to invest. So that leaves you either needing to monitor people far more closely than you’ve been doing (and probably more closely than you can), or considering whether you might need different people on your team. I’m not saying that you should fire your employee over this ghost report — I don’t think that. But it does sound like you’ve had a lot of signs that things aren’t running the way you want them to run, and you can’t let that go on indefinitely. If you’re seeing significant improvement from your coaching, then that’s great — but if it’s slow going (and it sounds like it might be), at some point soon you might need to change course.
In which I am an annoyed frontline worker
She's dealing with micromanagement from above (hence the CEO wanting to read frontline workers' unedited reports) but I still think she's being unfair. I think the LW's skeptic brain hooked on the word "ghosts" and refused, perhaps deliberately, to think about what multiple reports of mysterious sightings might indicate (anything from a prowler to carbon monoxide poisioning) In any building where people are resident overnight, if multiple people report the same issue it needs to be logged and addressed. All that punishing the worker for reporting this will do will be to discourage her from reporting other weird issues that actually indicate real problems, and when a boiler blows up because of that LW will fire the poor frontline worker whom she mismanaged.
People said, "the worker should know better than to mention ghosts in a report that goes to the CEO!" but this report goes to the whole management structure by the CEO's demand -- it's not like the worker deliberately circumvented policy to say to the CEO "we have ghosts". I think it's unfair to censure a frontline minimum wage worker for not being able to translate "several people reported seeing ghosts" into "there is an issue which several people reported in the form of ghost sightings on their parts" -- that kind of judgement is literally above their pay grade. It is in fact the judgement the LW is being paid to have yet what she's intending to lecture her [minimum wage front line] workers for not having.
And Alison agreed with her.
I will never be a manager, but that doesn't mean I don't have opinions on management.
I hope that hotel's workers were okay.
Re: In which I am an annoyed frontline worker
Re: In which I am an annoyed frontline worker
Re: In which I am an annoyed frontline worker
But "we previously never had people talking about hauntings and suddenly we've had a lot" is definitely something I would pass up the chain! Maybe not if it only happened one night, but then again, I've never had management demand a daily status report.
Re: In which I am an annoyed frontline worker
Re: In which I am an annoyed frontline worker
Although according to other stuff in the AaM thread, LW never works the same shifts as these employees and is trying to manage remotely, which. Making "odd decisions" that other people have to deal with and sending in whimsical reports is one of the perks of working the graveyard shift on weekends with no management in the building. If they want the graveyard weekend staff to stop doing weird stuff, they need to pay to have a supervisor there overnight.
Re: In which I am an annoyed frontline worker
The sort of things they want to document seem like good things to document and that office supplies don't need to go on there seems like common sense to me.
Re: In which I am an annoyed frontline worker
fourfive different levels of management, including the CEO and the owner, on a daily basis, and all four of those levels of management critique them" does not seem like the right way to do that.I mean, where I work, which seems like it has about the same depth of org chart, maintenance calls and building repairs are tracked by maintenance tickets, emergency calls or anything that might end up needing follow-up with legal or insurance goes to incident reports, IT issues go to IT tickets, customer issues that aren't at incident report level go in the customer problems log, non-maintenance-related supply orders are put directly onto the supplies budget, and they are all accessible to the CEO but it is understood he doesn't look at them unless they become a CEO-level issue. The middle managers and relevant department heads track them, and if something does become CEO-level, they escalate. Figuring out which report goes where is a bit of a learning curve, and even experienced staff sometimes get it wrong, but if you pick the wrong one, the people on the other end just gently redirect it, they don't send you to coaching for being unprofessional to the CEO!
We also aren't required to do a written daily shift report that goes to the CEO regardless of whether anything relevant has happened or not. To be fair, LW seems to be mostly an absentee manager who never works the same shifts as these employees, and in that case a written daily report might make sense just to keep the immediate manager caught up and share concerns - but if it's meant to be the equivalent of the kind of regular checkins an in-person manager would do, things like "we are always out of pens" (and "people think there's a ghost") do belong on it. And it shouldn't go directly to the CEO unless the company's so small they're the entire management staff!