Desperate for Basic Training

Two articles caught my eye recently.  Both deal, in part, with the subject of firing.  One is about good firings.  The other is about bad ones.  The lesson from both for human resources professionals and employment lawyers, however, isn’t so much about firing, as the desperate need for new workplace training.  Not job training or employment law training–but basic training about decency and fairness. 

The good firings were obviously good.  A female patient suffering from agitation and psychosis was involuntarily admitted to a Brooklyn emergency room.  After waiting 24 hours without receiving treatment, she collapsed, fell face down on the floor and convulsed.  For another hour, several staff members looked on.   One prodded her with his foot.  At some point, she died.  The documentation created by the ER staff was inconsistent with what happened, which became a problem, since the entire incident was caught on a hospital surveillance video tape and is now on YouTube. 

New York’s mayor expressed shock.  The New York Civil Liberties Union filed suit.  The hospital fired six staff members, including the director of psychiatry and an on-duty physician.

We’d all say we would never act like these ER employees.  If the ER employees had been asked about this situation hypothetically, all would’ve said they would never do what they did.  But it did happen–to a patient who was poor, had no health insurance, and was mentally ill.  For her, it was the fatal trifecta. 

The bad firings don’t involve anything as dramatic.  There’s the firing, after less than a month, of a technology vice president who’d been persuaded to leave his employer of ten years–because his new company decided to scrap plans for the new line of business he was supposed to run.  There’s the firing of a successful employee without any reason being given.  In a firing reminiscent of the recent Willie Randolph situation, an employee was flown three hours to be fired by a superior at the airport.  There’s the firing by voice mail.  By email.  In a group meeting called unexpectedly. 

You don’t have to run a hospital for the indecent, the unfair to happen.  You can run any kind of business where employees are fired in twisted, inhuman ways.  Which brings me to the need for basic training.  Forget about your regular training.  Let’s start by making sure employees know how decent, fair people treat co-workers, patients, customers, and the public, regardless of their station in life.  Let’s make sure they know how to terminate employees with respect.  With the increasing use of video tapes in and out of the workplace, cell phones that can capture anything anywhere, and media reports about firings that significantly hurt your organization’s reputation and brand, it’s critical that your employees know the basics of decency and fairness.   

If you have employees who don’t know and can’t learn these basics, they need to be fired.  If you don’t see the need for this kind of training, you need to be fired.  

1. 

   Lauri Shemwell says:

   July 15, 2008 at 8:25 pm

   God Bless you for what you have written!!! It amazes me that we have laws that establish that an employer is entitled to have a cheerful employee, but yet there are no laws that establish that employees are entitled to a cheerful employer! In fact, the employer can be the utmost bully, but if he doesn’t cross certain lines, then that is the employee’s problem.
   Wishing it weren’t so…dealing with a bully that fired me then lied…the last might be the undoing..
2. 

   John Phillips says:

   July 15, 2008 at 8:57 pm

   Thanks for your comment. Hang in there.