After hours conduct
josieB
16 Posts
An employee just celebrated her 30th birthday and a group of employees rented a limo and took her out of town to celebrate. The group included a V.P., 2 Managers, a subordinate of the managers' and the birthday girl. Some of the behavior went over the line,(drinking to excess, and pairing off of supervisors with people other than their significant others, who were left home), but not with any employee. The behavior was in bad taste, but not illegal.In additon,the limo was supplied by our customer's company. Should any disciplinary action be taken against the VP and managers, since this occured on their own time? The birthday girl is upset, because one of the paired off couples included her date! All parties involved have socialized often in the past.
Comments
The other angle you could look at is the limo...was it supplied free of charge? or did the birthday girl pay for it like anyone else? If she paid for it as any other customer would, then you may not have a lot of ground to stand on. Again, this is where a personal conduct policy would be helpful.
It would be so nice if ee's could keep themselves out of trouble when they are away from us!!!
edit...I see rad beat me to the limo angle!
The rumor mill will find something else soon...
Unloess you prohibt employees from socillizing wiht eahc other during off hours, or you have a policy prohibiting managers from socilalizing with their subordinates, I don't see a major problem.
The use of the limo may be interesting. Why did the client pay for a limo for some of your emplyees. You may want ot chekc into that -- whether they "invoked" the name of the company to get th euse of the client's limo for their socilizing.
By the way, assuming there is no job nexus and nothing they did was illegal as you state, if this were California, your company would be prohibited from discharging them. There is a provision in California law -- Labor Code Seciton 96(k) -- that no legally permited activity that is not a violation of company policy may be used as a basis for discharging an employee and of it is done, the State Labor Commission can sue for lost wages on behalf of the employee.
They should be careful that their "pairing off" does not involve employees, especially those they supervise. I can see where this might lead to a sexual harassment charge if all the conditions were right.
Let me give you an example. Party going on at a restaurant here in town involving a physician. Employee and spouse happen to show up at the restaurant - saw their co-workers and the doc. Went over to speak. The doc was intoxicated and started trying to stuff dollar bills down the front of the employee's shirt. Of course, she slapped his hand away - made an excuse that he was drunk, yada, yada. Anyway....the employee's spouse took issue with this conduct even though he knew the doc personally as well. The doc called and apologized to employee and spouse and everything was hunky dory.
This employee had to be terminated because of performance which had been well documented before this event happened. Anyway....she filed a sexual harassment suit against this doc and we had to go through all the gyrations. The investigation into this event was well documented, our prompt response and reply to the incident was well documented...so we were able to put this matter to rest. This employee had been a long term employee and had a "friendly", social relationship with this physician before her untimely termination.
This is just an example of how after hours conduct can turn into an ugly mess very quickly.
We found that if you take action on this issue you could find yourself drawn into legal action such as defamation of character, significant other involement and etc. A policy maybe asking "a question you don't want to hear the answers to" such as other going ons. The position we took was to counsel the VP and managrs only on professional conduct and document the conversations.