To wonder if every workplace has that person who is unsackable?

[Whistleblow2024]

Because honestly one of DCs workmates seems unsackable and I'm curious if this is normal.

They are constantly late, they don't care, they make regular inappropriate comments to others they work with but also in front of clients and at training sessions.
They ignore management frequently, which has resulted in incidents which could have become much larger.
They have left things in an area with clients that shouldn't have been there which again could have been more serious.

They also did something pretty major after being not to which again could have been very serious

Trying to be intentionally vague for obvious reasons but before I worked from home I remember people like this too!

So do you have a cheeky fuck at your work and what can they get away with

This is so true

We have someone similar. Meant to be full time. Started “working from home” a lot after Covid without any real output. Told she wasn’t to be working from home so is now “sick” at least 3 days a week. Still seems to manage to have sick leave despite this so god knows what’s on the time sheets. When the boss asked if he could talk to her about attendance she said she felt harassed (before any actual conversation) and then took another 2 days off…
She has a list a mile long of things she hasn’t done and the company is suffering but it has taken HR a YEAR to agree to even start looking at it.

I've known people being promoted 'out of harms way' and senior management haven't made a secret of it. They've been just as awful at managing people as they were actually doing the 'shop floor' job.

No. Not every company has someone who is unsackable.

But quite a lot of companies have extremely poor lower mangement who are not trained or supported to deal with poor performance effectively. Often because the HR department is in some way responsible for the risks of taking action (i.e. being sued) but not responsible for the poor productivity and lowered moral of not taking action.

Yes. The golden bullet.

One of ours actually was sacked recently, though there's a rumour that his appeal has succeeded.

An epic HR scandal

Short of committing murder it is virtually impossible to get sacked by the Civil Service. We had one woman who skived, stole, fiddled her flexi, caused so much trouble that our manager nearly had a breakdown & got away with it all. When she finally handed in her notice, we had a party the day after she left.

Normal.

Usually arse kissers. Sometimes they're actually good at the job/the company is scared to lose them. Often not.

Often but not always they are the bottleneck between top dog and everyone else, so the top dog doesn't want to lose them as they think their life will be harder when they can't filter everything through them/give them all the shit

theres one (at least) in every workplace isnt there? I work in a large retail store & one newish women has taken it on herself to tidy & sort systems & also whold specific areas (not in her or our JD) rather than actually do the work we're assigned.
Super frustrating to the rest of us on time based work & she seems able to swan about at leisure.
We have complained about this to various levels of management but she has told the MD she feels bullied so he has apparently taken her under his wing & "will look out for her".
I put myself in a deep hole a few days ago when I told her off (not in my remit apparently) asking her to pull her weight & be more of a team player.
So currently watching my back as if this woman takes it back up to the MD I've been told it could be disciplinary action for me.

So basically, super poor management of lazy staff, no support to those actually trying to do their job & "carrying" the lazy ones & she gets to do as she pleases.
She'll often leave the building to go buy a coffee off site but then only counts her 15 min break from when she gets back to our tearoom -
I just wish they could find a way to encourage her to find another job, not with us.

Yep, refused to use teams because she believed management were recording the calls. 'Worked' part time and remotely in hours she made up, from 3am - 8am.

When I say refused to use teams I mean really refused - I never met her despite being on a six-month project in her team.

On this thread and similar threads I have seen in the past there seems to be a real pattern of this in the NHS and civil service which is concerning...

Oh this is definitely the nhs way!

Dangerous to patients? Don't know your meds? Can't do procedures?

Here's a band 8 and a nice office 👏🏻

Absolutely.

The department I worked in my colleague was the head of department’s sister.
Constantly off sick from the first week, always 15 minutes late and once didn’t come in because it was snowing - another colleague lived on the next road and came in on the bus.
I once had to drop my car off at a body shop and explained I may be 20 minutes late to my manager. The next morning I was late but my manager was furious and told me I would have to stay an extra 30 minutes. As she was ranting my colleague walked past her, 20 minutes late and not a word was said.
Up until then I had always started work when I arrived, usually 15 minutes early. From that day on I never started until my contracted time, they lost over an hour a week of goodwill.

Another colleague treated work like a hobby he could pick up when he wanted.
He would come out with ridiculous excuses to leave, usually 30 minutes after he had arrived. Once his front door lock wasn’t working, fair enough but his dw was a sahm, we used to make up names and descriptions for illnesses and at least twice he called in sick with the same. He was an absolute liar, about little things too.
He eventually got the sack when he got caught removing his annual leave slips from the drawer so they wouldn’t be recorded by the manager.

Yes and unfortunately for me that person has a huge bearing on my job role. We do the same job on paper. The reality is they are never contactable. off sick half the time, don't communicate things, forget to do important parts of the job. It's an endless list which I have been complaining about for 8 months but it's always 'but we have a duty of care to them' what about your duty of care to me!

but besides the lazy useless ones, I think the worst type is the one who does their job, and does it technically well. But they are rude, obnoxious, know it all, bossy, micromanaging nightmares and make life miserable for all colleagues. Here there are no performance issues as such, it's really hard to make a case out of 'nobody likes them'

Years ago I worked with this woman who was just shit at her job. So shit, that I was asked to do all her work for her. She told me she was going to sit it out and wait until retirement (she was about 45!). She'd be off ill all the time and take the piss by being late saying she was arranging the flowers in the doctor's surgery etc.

It was at a university so impossible to get sacked from. But I wondered quite what one would have to do to get fired.

Depressing thread! When I was in my 20s (in the 1980s and early 1990s) I worked first for a large accountancy firm and then for a private sector company. In both cases poor performance led to people getting the sack, and there was no hanging around either. Performance was monitored continuously and managers were expected to act promptly to deal with problems. At the company, twice in the three years I worked there colleagues simply disappeared and we were then told that they had been fired and had left with immediate effect. It had a very galvanising effect on the rest of us. We were treated fairly and very well paid, but a lot was expected in return, and that seemed perfectly reasonable to me.

After a career break when my children were little, I took a part-time job in a university. The culture change was immense. People were aghast at the idea that managers were going to conduct appraisals every year, and in fact in the entire time I worked there (17 years! glutton for punishment) the appraisal process was always a complete joke. It didn't feed into pay and although we sat down and talked about how the year had gone and objectives for the coming year no manager I ever had actually bothered to monitor progress towards those objectives in the succeeding months.

I had a colleague X in my first post there who was a part-time admin assistant. She had worked for the university for many, many years, based at one campus she could walk to from home. Not long before I joined, there had been a reorganisation and some staff in our department had been transferred to another faculty, based on another campus. I don't think there had ever been any question of transferring X, but she had got it into her head that she might be, and ended up taking six months off sick with stress. She returned from this just after I started and explained to me that she had had to get the union involved to get a guarantee that she would never have to work on the other campus, because she couldn't get there on foot. Then she said to me in the most matter of fact way possible 'I can't use public transport, you see'. This was an able-bodied woman in her 50s who had lived and worked in Inner London all her life. I was gobsmacked. I assume now she had some serious anxiety disorder around public transport, but I'd never come across anything like this before and I'm still amazed that she hadn't tried to get help for it. It must have been utterly disabling.

Anyway, she was safe from the appalling prospect of the 10-minute bus ride or the two stops on the train that would have been required to go to the other campus, and now she started counting down to her retirement date, which was not far off. She 'worked' 2 or 3 days a week. I have no idea how she was filling her time. She seemed to spend a huge amount of time every week tidying the stationery cupboard, which was largely untouched otherwise. She took time off sick, including for dental appointments. Another colleague tried to suggest that maybe the dental appointments could be fixed for a non-working day, which didn't go down well.

When she retired, she was not replaced, and it made not an iota of difference to the smooth running of the department. I often think of the time she said to me 'Don't you work a minute over your time, Gasp, because you won't get any thanks for it'. I wondered how she knew ...

Oh,I forgot about 'malcom'

Malcom started at the same time as me,he was a bit odd but I got on with him just fine (which says a lot about me!)

One day,I was talking about my eldest dd and called her by both her first and middle name,in jest

Didn't think that much about the look he gave me,until a week later,when he rocked up in a skirt,bra (stuffed with tissues) and stockings-he was calling himself by my dds name

OK,can cope with that-i don't own a name

We used to have a system where if one of us used the loo/changing room,we would leave it as we'd want to find it for the next person

That worked just fine until 'sophie' decided he was to use our loo (the disabled/mens loos where much closer)

He's (not a she) would go in,do a shit,stink the loo out and leave skids all over the loo (if it was flushed at all) and then leave shitty loo roll everywhere-in the loo,all over the floor,on the sink etc

He'd wank all over the floor and walk away so the next woman to go in there would see it/step in it

He'd also shave in there and refuse to clean up his bristles/pubes

I came to dread that evil smirk I'd get when he came out of there-he knew what he was doing-it was a power play

Work where terrified of upsetting him in case he ran to the papers with his daily mail sad face and the headline 'fast food worker discriminated against' and then to court

All us women got together and had a word with the top management and where told that if it upset us that badly,we could set up a rota to clean up after him!

You can imagine how well that went down-23 of us quit at the same time-I was one of them

They seemed to be so scared of having a word with him,let alone sacking the filthy little scroat

Some people seem above the law-our rights as women didn't count

It was all about not upsetting him-as far as I know,he's still there and they find it hard to keep female staff

Wonder why?

Yep worked with a guy that was completely incompetent. I worked with an organisation that had a lot of disabled people as volunteers and his actions put them at risk so many times. Did not get anywhere with the CEO or trustees. He would not park on the car park everyone else did and pay £2 a day. Instead he would park on the street that had restricted parking so he would have to move his car 4 times a day and take at least 20 minutes each time to do it.
When he left he was asked to go on the board of trustees. We soon realised it was because he never rocked the boat or had any options of his own so he was easy to manipulate. It was a small organisation so staff had to give their opinion on things quite often and he just went along with the managers.

I meant other staff did not get anywhere with the CEO or trustees complaining about him

Yes - definitely. And they always seem to make it through organisational restructures unscathed (though, so have I which I promise isn’t related…I don't think!).

What always strikes me is their boundless, unfounded confidence. I spend my whole time at work with massive imposter syndrome but the unsackable ones seem oblivious to any form of self-doubt. How do they do it?

There could well be a logging g of incidents and their time will soon be up?

Civil service is full of them. i have experience of many staff / team who are fire proof. its maddening , the procedures are so outdated the guidance confusing and the senior leaders couldnt care less. the less you do , the more you take the piss the more invisible you are.. Late/ sickness / poor work ethic /bad attitude/millitant/ institutionalised - it's no wonder this country is in the shit .

Yep and more than one of them. We have a team leader who has "managed" nearly every department in our area. He's no good at any of them but they just keep moving him.
We have one person who is signed off on jobs she can't do but likes to open her mouth about other people who's jobs she can't do. She practically bully's one member of staff.
Then there's plenty of rude people that have worked there for years and when you complain get told "oh thats just how blah blah is".... yes they are rude and it's not acceptable, well apparently it is.