My employee refuses to lie to customers – but that’s our policy | Hacker News Reader

My employee refuses to lie to customers – but that’s our policy

askamanager.org

28 pointszac23or12 comments

I can't believe someone like this can grow a business to 15 employees in the first place. Just tell the customer all sales are final. Is this person out of their mind?

> Should I start subtly managing her out?

What does that mean? Last time I heard this it was in the context of firing, or rather preparing conditions to simplify the process.

Is it a euphemism for making their work life difficult so they are likely quit on their own (e.g. assign only difficult customers to her)?

Or is it more about establishing conditions that allow firing that are unrelated to the protected class aspect (e.g. assign all non cancellation tickets, than dismiss because they cannot keep up with the load)?

Whatever it is "managing out" just sounds shady.

With it coming from a small-business employer who already is obviously prone to shady and deceptive things, I'd assume it comes down to a constructive dismissal via intentionally lowering work satisfaction per your first guess.

...which makes me hope she found this Q&A online and works somewhere like CA that imposes good-faith requirements on at-will employment.

I'm fairly sure letting someone go over refusing to commit what's arguably low-level fraud (blatantly lying about whether fulfillment has already occurred in the course of a commercial transaction) might be treated as a bad-faith termination. In such cases the state can be very employee-friendly, especially if considering it as an official termination then puts the employer on the wrong side of other rules re: other employee protections, final paychecks, etc. The religious aspect would just be icing on the cake.

The most charitable version of "managing out" is the process of collecting up all the paperwork to cover your ass legally when you want to terminate someone. In tech that normally means putting someone on PIP (Performance Improvement Plan) with the eventual goal of them failing to meet the plan requirements and then you can terminate them and go, "We gave them a plan and they didn't meet our requirements."

People will tell you, well they could turn things around with the PIP and then we won't have to terminate them, but the term "managing out" makes it really difficult to believe that that's the desired end state. Normally those plans are set up for the person to fail or to make them miserable enough to part ways.

You know that awful practice where instead of breaking up with someone, you just act horrible until they break up with you?

That’s “managing out”.

On the one hand, this policy of "pretend the order has shipped as an excuse for refusing cancellation" versus an unwillingness to directly lie to the customer (saying "it's already shipped" versus, for example, "we're already working on it" or some other hedged statement that is not directly untrue) is an interesting way for this kind of conflict to come up.

But on the other hand (assuming that the employer is unwilling to change their policy), this is a pretty simple case from a manager/employee relation perspective. The employee has a particular set of work actions that they are unable to perform which they are expressing as deriving from a protected class membership. The employer has three basic options:

1) The employer can contest that this inability is truly related to a protected class and compel the employee to do the assigned work on pain of termination (which in this instance would lead to termination, most likely)

2) The employer can accept that this inability does derive from the protected class and determine that there is a reasonable accommodation available, such as exempting the employee from responding specifically to these tickets in some way. Maybe assign them a larger-than-equal-share of tickets to work on but then have a simple procedure to give away all order-cancellation-request tickets to others to work on.

3) The employer can assert that responding to these tickets is an unavoidable and critical component of the job and therefore assign the employee to a different role (or tailor a role specifically for them) such that they are not required to do this work.

Not a practitioner in consumer protection law or employment law, but my only-slightly-educated hot take is this:

Religious accommodation is probably a red herring. Most state laws are weaker than federal law, and federal law - RFRA and RLUIPA - don't apply here.

Arguably, the false shipping notification is a violation of the FTC's regulations on mail, internet, and telephone order sales. See 16 CFR Part 435 at https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/16/part-435.

The regulation focuses on a default deadline of 30 days or a representation about shipping dates at the time of solicitation, so it may not apply; however, the FTC has taken action against companies that print shipping labels in advance but don't actually ship for some time. I started going down a rabbit hole, but had to cut it off, so I'm not sure what the right analysis on this piece. However, I'm not sure it matters, because...

What we really care about is wrongful termination for being a potential whistleblower. And you can be a whistleblower without being right. Retaliation for refusing to engage in an act the employee reasonably believes to be illegal is the real area of legal risk here. However, until/unless the FTC Whistleblower Act becomes law, https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/6093..., this is a question of state law.

TL;DR: Classic lawyer answer: "it depends." If the state they're in protects employees who object to conduct they reasonably believe to be illegal, and the employee reasonably believes the false statements about shipping are unfair and deceptive trade practices, that's probably the ballgame. If the state they're in doesn't offer that protection, then maybe not.

Yeah, that's roughly where I was coming from in what I said re: bad-faith termination in my other comment.

Without chasing your link, I assume it's the one where anything backordered (i.e. paid for but not shipped, which would technically be the case here) must get status updates every 30 days and be fully cancellable. I couldn't remember if that applied to internet sales too, or just the old mail order sales laws it came from. If it is that law, I agree it'd be potentially a violation of that, hence thinking probably technically fraud to block that option by claiming fulfillment.

Yeah, that's the rule. Some nuance to it: must be fully cancel-able for shipments that cannot be shipped in (a) the timeframe provided in solicitation; (b) 30 days if none; or (c) a revised shipping date.

It's unclear whether the claim on the phone that it had already shipped is a revised shipping date. If so, then they obviously cannot meet it, which then would require them to notify the customer and allow them to cancel.

It's always odd when a statute or regulation makes unstated assumptions about the way a problem plays out, because it makes the applicability questionable.

Your employee is a good person - let's just call her 'honest'. And you are a liar. Any questions? Make all the excuses you want, your company policy is dishonesty, and I hope you fail.

You should fire the employee immediately and advertise for a liar, there are plenty of them out there.

Run your business as you wish, & I can't say what you should do w/ this employee. But you should be transparent with your customers on all policies regarding their interactions with you as a vendor.

One of the bricks in a business is trust. Not just with customers, but employees too. If you're willing to lie to customers, how do your employees know you're not lying to them?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com