Whistle While You Work

Everything has a time and place, including doing the right thing. The time and place a worker chooses to blow the whistle on employer wrongdoing can make the difference between continued employment and unemployment. This topic was the subject of a lawsuit that made it to the US Supreme Court this past year. In May, the Court ruled against a worker who sued after he was fired for writing a document that included the worker’s opinion that some actions by his employer were not constitutional. At first blush, the ruling seems to be horrible news for workers. But in real life, the Court didn’t say anything that really hurts workers. This guy just chose the wrong time and place to toot his whistle.

Workers who report what they believe to be illegal activity by their bosses are called whistleblowers. In the old days, blowing the whistle on illegal activity could get you fired. Then came laws that offered job protection to workers who came forward with information about illegal activities by their companies.

Whistleblowing is about shining a light on businesses or their executives that are breaking the law. Think toxic waste dumping. Deceptive accounting practices. Hiring illegal workers. These are the kinds of things that cause major societal damage and raise nearly everyone’s eyebrows.

Whistleblowing is not about telling the world that a company has poor business practices, or is unfair to its employees. People – including companies and their managers – do stupid things all the time. Some stupid things are illegal. Most are not. They might make a good cartoon strip, but they won’t get a worker legal protection if that worker gets fired for saying embarrassing things about the boss. Nor is whistleblowing about protecting workers who merely complain in a general way about how things are done – even if that way is illegal.

Which brings us back to the Supreme Court case. The worker in this case believed that some procedures required by the Constitution had not been properly followed. He had told his bosses, who didn’t respond to his satisfaction. He apparently threatened to include his concerns in an official document he was writing on behalf of his employer, and he was told not to do that. He wrote about his belief of the wrongdoing in that memo anyway, and that was what got him fired.

This case was not so much about the fact that he voiced concerns and was fired, as it was about the way in which he voiced those concerns. If he had written a memo specifically to notify an appropriate person of what he believed, the outcome probably would have been in his favor. But because he included his opinion in a company document that was going out in the company name, to people who had no authority to do anything about his concerns, the Court thought that this worker had merely ignored a legitimate work related directive.

The public definitely has an interest in keeping companies honest, and workers have an interest in being able to report wrongdoing. On the other hand, companies have an interest in maintaining some control and authority over the people in their workplace. Whistleblower laws have never been designed to let workers make their own decisions about how they do their jobs. Rather, the laws are designed to protect workers when they report their concerns about wrongdoing – sometimes to higher level supervisors, sometimes to police or regulatory agencies, sometimes even to the press, depending on the particular state. But the law generally does not protect a worker who merely ignores directives about how to perform the job.

The worker here simply chose the wrong time and place to blow his whistle after his bosses ignored the first whistle blast. If you find yourself in this situation, consider who has the authority to fix the problem. Consider the type of problem and determine whether your information should go to higher level management, local law enforcement authorities, IRS officials, or state and federal agencies that regulate the particular violation. If you whistle while you work, make sure you have the right audience.

Breaking Up Should Be Clear

I hate listening to the radio while I’m in the car. Actually, it’s not that I dislike listening, it’s more that I dislike having to turn it off just because I got to my destination, instead of turning it off when I’m ready. My husband has found me many times sitting in my car in the driveway listening to the last notes of a song before I can bear to turn it off. There is almost nothing worse that having a song stop in the middle and leave you hanging for the last notes. I really can’t stand it.

Almost as bad as that is getting terminated from your job and being left hanging as to why. No law says that a company has to tell you why you are being fired. But just like listening to a song that stops right before the end, if the boss doesn’t resolve the last note, someone else will. And it may not be the right note. When a worker is not clearly given the reason for a firing, they will fill in their own. And that’s when bosses and companies risk the headache of illegal discrimination charges.

Workers tend to believe they’ve been fired because the boss doesn’t like them, not because their work was somehow below the bar. Bosses say they took action because the worker just wasn’t getting it done.

Workers will almost always tell you that they had no idea there was a problem with their work, while bosses will tell you there’s no way the worker could not have known there was a problem.

When it comes to difficult conversations, we tend to talk in code, hoping the person we’re talking to understands the code so that we don’t have to say anything uncomfortable. That way we get to pat ourselves on the back for saying what needed to be said, and if the other person missed it, well, that’s not our fault. Bosses frequently fail to be clear and unequivocal in their expectations for this very reason.

Workers are not off the hook here, though. While bosses are often guilty of failure to communicate, workers are often guilty of failure to admit they understood. If a worker repeatedly arrives late to work, and the boss repeatedly says in staff meetings that prompt attendance is important, the worker can’t reasonably believe that their own tardiness is okay with the boss just because the boss never had a one on one conversation about it. That’s teenager thinking. Teenagers are notoriously good at drawing a cloud of confusion over otherwise clear instructions. A teenage friend of mine got grounded for coming in two hours after his midnight curfew. His defense was “You told me to be in by midnight, and I was.” Mom then gave him what should have been the gotcha moment. “Then why does your traffic ticket say you were driving around at two in the morning?” To which the teenager replied, “You never said I couldn’t go back out again!”


About the only time it’s ever okay for a boss to be heard saying “I never told him specifically, but he had to have known,” is when a worker brings a paintball gun to the office and shoots paint splats on everyone. Then it’s okay for the boss to say “He should have known better.” Any other time, a boss has no moral right to do anything less than say, out loud, what you want from your worker.

Failure to sing that last note leaves room for a cacophonous chorus of improvised notes, and the only thing worse than not hearing the last note of a song is having to hear it in court.

Removing the Gas in the Workplace

Some relationships are naturally adversarial. Cops and robbers. Cats and dogs. Banks and customers. Bosses and workers. A phenomenal amount of time and money is spent on boss bashing, fueling an entire industry. You may have thought the dot-com rush was big, but the goofy boss product rush is just as big and has more staying power. Open the comics section of the newspaper, turn on prime-time TV, or surf the net and you’ll find boss bashing everywhere you look.

On the other side of the desk, bosses spend just as much management time and money on seminars, publications, training, and consultants designed to motivate and shape up their employees. No one actually asks whether the employees need to be shaped up. It’s just taken for granted.

Yes, it’s clear that bosses and workers are truly unmixable substances, just like oil and water. Right?

A few years ago a scientist in Australia, Ric Pashley, found a way to not only get oil and water to mix, but to mix spontaneously and even stay that way indefinitely. The trick? He first removes any gas that is dissolved in the water.

Bear with me for a moment, and let’s see if we can find any gas in the workplace. Let’s say the gas, or hot air, in the workplace is this: If you’re a worker, you have a tendency to believe that bosses are there to interfere with your ability to get your work done. If you’re a boss, you have a tendency to believe that the workers are at work to get away with doing as little as possible for their paycheck.

But if you ask people individually to tell you why they are there, you’ll never (alright, almost never) get those same answers.

Everyone that goes to work does so initially to make money, because we have to have money to survive. But what motivates people to actually do their work is often very different. In fact, if you boil down the results of hundreds of studies and surveys on what motivates employees, you find the same results for everyone, no matter whether they are a boss or a worker. And the fundamental thing that motivates people to keep coming in to the workplace and making an effort is that they want for the way they spend their days to matter.

People want their days, their time, their life, to matter.

Once you know this, no matter what your position is in the workplace, you can begin to remove the gas. If you’re a worker and you know that your boss wants his or her work to matter, and you know that the boss is judged in part on work that you actually do, you can begin to see why your boss may be over controlling.

If you’re a boss and your workers seem to resent your instructions, you might begin to see why those workers might feel like their own work doesn’t matter if they are never allowed to do it without someone looking over their shoulder every step of the way.

Removing the gas might let us stop spending so much time trying not to mix, which might lead us to a truly productive workplace. A workplace where all of our work matters.