Today we had a very funny incident at our agency. We used to work with marketing interns and their usual job responsibility was to write blog posts, update our company facebook, twitter account etc.
They would come to our office a few days per week and help us with the above.
We worked with three inters in total and all of them were excellent. These young graduates are very bright and resourceful. We usually work with them for a few months only as it is a pure internship position.
Today, however, one of them behaved in a quite shameful and inappropriate way.
She logged in to our company blog that she had an access to and deleted blog posts that she has written.
Why has she done so? From some reason she believes that she should be paid £30 for her travel expenses. When we told her to come in and discuss with us why she thinks we should pay her that and what for, she of course never did. Everyone is a hero over the emails. Why not to come in and talk to us face to face if she believes she’s right? I think I know the answer. Do you?
The whole incident is funny on one hand as we restored the blog articles immediately but it’s also totally unacceptable and disrespectful. I personally find this behaviour outrageous and am ready to report these attacks to the police and her current employer. What surprises me even more is why is she doing it? One would think she must really hate us for those £30 that are in dispute. 30 pounds!? It’s almost scary to watch such a dramatic change in her behaviour from one moment (working for us) to another (after she left).
Have you had similar stories with your employees?
One of my business gurus calls this “management training in practice”. You won’t be taught how to react to these situations when you do your MBA. One would have difficulties to make up such a story. It simply has to happen to you one day and you need to learn from it.
The incident made me realise once again that every business needs to be seriously protected against failure and mean behaviour of its staff or suppliers. In order to perform their job the employees often need serious powers (access to databases, passwords, keys to the office) and that can be easily misused. What I’ve noticed when reading similar stories from other entrepreneurs is that these employees often don’t realise they’re committing a criminal offence. One might suggest that if you treat employees nicely, you don’t have to worry about that. I would think so too before I started to run my own business and realised that you can try as hard as you can to be super nice but you won’t avoid these things from happening. The only solution seems to be to become super protective over your property (including intellectual) and think about what-if situations before they happen.
What a world we live in 
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