If YOU KNEW about questionable workplace activities, would you tell? How likely are you to leave an anonymous tip on your company's whistle-blowing hotline? Do you fear retaliation by your boss? Isolation by colleagues? Or did you report unethical, or irresponsible practices, or conduct and watch while nothing came of your complaint?
We've all seen something slightly off, not quite right, something a little sour, in our workplace and wondered if it was worth reporting, wondered if it were really an infraction, wondered if a law was broken, or if the person just exercised poor judgment, and if so, perhaps this was a one time thing.
Many of us, I think, brush off minor incidents because them seem insignificant, or we're really not sure if there's valid reason to lodge a complaint. Mostly, though, we don't say anything because we don't want to be labelled what we used to call a tattletale, or a stool pigeon. In today's language, we'd call you a snitch.
Jeffrey Wigand is a now-famous snitch. Myriam Bédard, a well-known one. But I doubt either of them did it for public attention.
Over the years, like you, I've heard of questionable actions/incidents including the following:
- a boss who obtains legitimate fund share certificates for unowned units of a mutual fund, having cancelled the transaction.
- a co-worker who follows the boss's lead and redeems her registered retirement savings plan without taxation penalty for a Home Buyers Plan, but fails to produced the required documentation.
- a co-worker who is claiming short-term disability, but is spotted by a coworker at a very public venue of a rock concert in the company of another coworker.
- an employee consistently calls in sick, but days later you discover his time sheet on the fax machine for a temp job he's working while collecting sick pay from your firm.
- a boss reads pregnant woman the Riot Act for taking a half-day off work following a genetic counselling session.
Agreed, not all of these incidents require management intervention or legal action, but in all cases, Human Resources should have been notified at the very least.
I reported misdoings once, but I'm not sure I'd do it again.
A few years ago, I worked on a short-term contract with a fellow technical writer I'll call "Sluggo" because he indeed looked like a slug; he was a bald, slimy, wormy kind of a guy.
Early into the project with a third-party payroll provider for a large beverage and snack firm, I suspected Sluggo was overbilling our mutual client via a micro employment agency (with less than adequate AP funding and familial ties to the HR provider) because once, during lunch, he proudly told me about his business practices of billing for his lunch hour if the topic of work was raised.
This was one of the most ridiculous things I'd ever heard. Even for someone as invidious as Sluggo, this was low.
And you can bet he raised the issue of work at each meal. Yep, he sucked me into conversation every time. How could I resist the opportunity to commiserate about working with such antagonistic SMEs, to compare notes on the rudest, or compare notes on the gal who was most helpful, or the one most bitter about her impending job loss?
Besides, what else were we going to chat about?
He was a 50-year-old Australian sexist, I am not. Even when our lunch-hour conversations turned from work to family (like his disdain for his homosexual son), to the weather (working off-site, we were making a thrice-weekly, 250 km round-trip commute), I doubt he deducted those minutes from his invoice.
Which was worse, I wondered, billing an extra hour per day, or billing unused mileage? Yes, indeed, our Sluggo took the bus to our out-of-town location and billed for the mileage, rather than the price of the ticket.
Rumour had it, he billed for the times he rode along in my car with me, too.
It may have been second-hand info, but knowing this guy's work habits and listening to him slag-off our colleagues, then take credit for their ideas, how could I not believe this to be true?
I reported the potential conflict to our employment agency, who seemed more annoyed by my grievance than in following up, which only made me wonder if the extra hours on Sluggo's invoice meant the small-time agency could also bump their hours and collect additional commission.
The lack of results was discouraging.
As time passed, I wondered if this was really worth reporting. Did I over-react? Was I just irritated and offended by this guy's disparaging comments about our out-of-the-closet boss and our Jamaican-born colleague? Mostly, though, I just wondered why no one else seem to care.
I wondered, too, if I would now be labelled a troublemaker? You can bet I was.
Would I do it again? I'm not sure it was worth it because I'm still not sure it mattered to anyone: not to agency, not to the end client, not to the firm for whom we were doing the work. All anyone truly cared about was that we met our deadlines.
And that's where Sluggo and I differed on our workplace philosophies.
He believed that his business practice was legitimate, that padding invoices was acceptable. And that it didn't matter to him if it was not. I believed that it did matter. In every way, it mattered.
However, this many years later, I'm afraid that I might be coming around to his way of thinking.
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