How Not To Treat Employees

As I've mentioned before, I work at a retail furniture store just outside of downtown Orlando. In my job I handle everything from accounts payable to accounts receivable to inventory management to human resources. Out of all the various and sundry responsibilities I have, HR is, by far, the most challenging.

When I'm dealing with my employees, I try to treat them right. I try to give them respect. Mistakes are not acceptable, per se, but they are viewed as learning opportunities. They know that if they mess up, they'll have to make it right, but so long as they learn how to avoid it in the future everything is cool. I try to talk to them, to get to know what's going on in their professional life as well as their personal lives. This allows me to nip problems in the bud before they become real issues. And most importantly, when I ask someone to do something for me, I try to make sure that they have the tools and/or information necessary to succeed.

My boss, on the other hand, would manage to get kicked out of a Dale Carnegie course. She has not figured out how to talk to people to save her life - or her business. Here are some of the most poignant examples of her in action:

She completes a sale with a customer. She gives me the item numbers of what she sold so I can place the order (mind you, she did not give me any description or idea of what we were ordering). We order it. It comes in. We place it on her desk - and she promptly loses it for a month. After she finally finds them, she delivers them to the client, who turns around to complain that the parts are wrong. My boss' response: "I don't know why I pay eight of you guys when I just end up doing it all myself anyways."

She hires flamboyant, gay designers because they're gay and flamboyant and then threatens to fire them because they're too gay and too flamboyant.

She discusses hiring a replacement for me with a third party not affiliated with the store - while I'm at lunch with them.

When employees try to inform her of the actions of a certain ethically challenged employee, she threatens to fire everyone else for telling her what's going on.

She goes on shopping sprees in which she buys tens of thousands of dollars in new merchandise. When the bills come due and she doesn't have the cash for them (the store budget is on a tighter shoestring than my own personal one), she accuses me of "trying to ruin her credit."

In responding verbally to a racial discrimination complaint lodged against her, she tells the city human relations board that she can't be a racist because she has "lots of those people working for me."

She accuses honest employees of stealing from her and of trying to ruin her and thinks the ones who actually are thieving and plotting against here can do no wrong.

She hires people after five minute interviews (questions: "When can you start?" and "Is $6.50/hr OK?") and no reference checks and then wonders out loud, in front of them, why she can't seem to get good help.

A picture falls off a wall onto the head of an employee, breaking the glass in the picture. First question: "Is it [the picture] salvageable?"

I go across the street to get a drink from the store as a guy in a suit walks in and come back to find that she hired a new employee in the meantime. When he turns out to not be the ball of fire she wanted, she asks: "Why did you bother to hire him?"

She complains about inventory not moving, yet when we propose various basic advertising ideas, she refuses because we don't have the sales to make those expenditures worthwhile and we can't get the sales until we figure out how to increase the floor traffic. So we have to increase our floor traffic before we can begin advertising to increase the floor traffic.

I could go on and on (her daughter is getting divorced; she wants to know if she still can use her soon to be ex son-in-law's employee benefits), but I think you get the point.

The business is failing. It is failing mainly because she has no idea what is actually going on. She thinks that everything is going just fine; we all think that her favorite sport is kick the dog. No one will tell her what's going on. She doesn't just shoot the messenger; she shoves bamboo shoots under our nails before drawing and quartering - without the mercy hanging to start. I keep trying, but it's like talking to the wall - as it falls on you.

If she had treated her employees better, we would be on the verge of booming. Instead, we're on the verge of making a real boom - as we implode.

Managing the human resources aspect of a business is tricky at best. But it can be every bit as important as finance or advertising (and this is coming from someone with a heavy finance and accounting background). Look at the examples I gave above. Learn from them. HR is tricky enough without the self sabotage. Properly managed, HR adds little to the bottom line. Managed poorly, HR will crush it.