Are you aware that she'd be "clocked out" if she took FMLA?

You run something efficiently so that you have a higher profit margin. Otherwise they could easily up staff a bit and cover these situations. They just don't care about these people because they don't have great options.

This. If it's that big of a problem, allow her to work extra. Especially if the "time away from her desk" is what the fuss is all about.

I'm not sure about every state, but a lot of states you have to be clocked out for a full 30 minute break or you get paid for it. 29 minutes off the clock, they legally have to pay you.

And some employees will exceed expectations and be rewarded. Others will meet expectations and fall in the middle. And the bottom performers will gripe.

She was willing to clock out in order to go to the bathroom. They fired her for a 12 cent error. I don't know that whole story, if she had priors and whatnot, but, according to the facts as presented, it just sounds like there was retaliation on the company's part. Of course, I don't know what the company policy is on having errors.

http://ts2.mm.bing.net/th?id=H.4689903422015261&pid=1.7
Problem solved.

This seems a little more classy.

I work for a major media company that is hugely profitable but isn't really growing their core business. So naturally they are trying to squeeze more $$ out of their employees by offshoring a bunch of development work. But they're also trying to implement new technologies and innovate at the same time. It's squeezing the life out of the few good developers we have left.

And good companies allow their managers freedom to bend the rules when it obviously makes sense. I'm going to take a wild guess that a chunk of her manager's bonus is directly tied to 'adherence' metrics.

Yeah, or she actually was a crappy employee that caused problems before this and the manager just decided to dump her.

That is kind of what I'm thinking.

Sometimes they look for reasons to can someone.

The bottom 20% of all performers should be seen as expendible. If they know what is expected and choose to not change and be more productive then out they go. 80% of problem employees are in that group as a general rule. You also have some top performers who create issues as well. Management has to make tough decisions that some employees will never agree with or attemt to understand. Those who do and perform do well in most companies.

I feel like nobody that has posted after Duncan's extremely well stated post actually read Duncan's extremely well stated post.

We have a call center in my office. The job looks like it sucks something terrible but those time standards exist because they have to exist.

"Well just let her work more later..." isn't a viable answer - someone needs to be there to take those calls and if the calls don't get taken timely, call centers default on time-standards and end up fired.

Yes, it's only one person and 5 minutes here and there may not be the end of the world, but the rules exist for a reason and the rules in these instances are not arbitrary and mean-spirited. They're generally built around the requirements put in place by the people that have contracted out with these call centers.

The alternative? Everyone gets fired when the contract gets cancelled.

Sometimes your boss has a reason to do what he does. In fact, most times that's the case.

But by all means, continue raging against the machine.