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

My manager.

She has none of the skills her job needs (and were in the Job Description when she was hired), is generally not very bright, and is a nasty bully, visibly, to those of us who are forever having to mop up after her. She has all the chat though. talks a good game even though it's not hard to see that she has no idea what she is talking about most of the time.

And yet somehow she keeps her job, even though the business is going down the pan because of her.

I just don't get it.

I work in education. We have a staff member who posts the most inappropriate videos on TikTok. Minimal clothes, so raunchy her fanny is almost on show, filtered so much is changes her whole look. She has so much filler in her face she looks like Pete burns. Add to this her incompetence in her role, makes mistakes, fucks up quite important procedures yet still has her job??!!!!

Many years ago when I was a staff nurse once of my colleagues (another nurse) was like this. She was a genuinely unpleasant person who had racked up so many complaints it was unbelievable. About the only good thing I can say about her is that she was competent at her job, despite rubbing up everyone the wrong way with her unpleasant personality.
After I left I believe they eventually 'got her' on some kind of professional technicality after she pushed the wrong person too far and she was sacked. It was all a bit underhand IMO and I even felt a bit sorry for her.

I worked in a college where Osted graded needs Improvement from the slt, a month later lots of lectures left and the slt was like a cabinet reshuffle. Everyone took on a different role and kept their jobs 🙄

The place I work now, we have someone who has been doing the job for about 6 years, making the same mistakes for six years and was dismissed because they put someone's life at risk. They got reinstated again after they involved their union, they are is still making mistakes and giving out clinical advice, this person is an administrator and very dangerous.

This thread reminds me of a HCA on a ward where I've been admitted several times due to an ongoing condition

She's been there a minimum of 15 years if not more and is just the most unpleasant nasty woman how she continues to survive despite complaints is beyond me.

No. I live in Denmark and it's much easier to fire someone. I've been at my current job for 5 years and I've seen 2 people fired. It's unusual but not unheard of.

@daffodilandtulip I can imagine. Everyone in my part of the NHS seems to ignore tackling the dangerous lazy incompetent ones. It’s soul destroying!

So what….
….incompetent nurses?
….childminders?
….tattooists?
….pilots?
….firefighters?
….teachers?
….baristas?

Sounds pretty grim!

Guy at my work very openly had a work meeting whilst he was in a health spa…he was recently promoted. He has a disability that the organisation exists to support, so he is untouchable

I don't disagree —there are plenty of important jobs out there. But there are also a lot of bullshit jobs. Society isn't harmed if Tracy in sales, Geoff the bid writer, Dom in marketing, or Janet the efficiency consultant are a bit naff at their job. The country clearly does muddle along with a lot of useless people having meetings about meetings and replying all to emails.

Yes. And I've just sacked them. Well orchestrated the sacking. I'm senior and quite new to the business and was absolutely shocked by how totally incompetent and downright dangerous they were.

Not on my watch. It brings whole teams down - and in their case, very nearly the business.

Yes they were expensive to get rid of. Totally worth it.

The lad with, you say, Autism is not quite what I would expect behaviour wise. I’ve had 4 team members with a diagnosis and the only difficulties we’ve had are the result of them being extremely hard working and showing the others up a bit. They can be extremely literal so you have to be explicit in your instructions but the job gets done.
ADHD is different. Those poor guys can be doing their utmost and not achieving a hell of a lot but with reasonable adjustments can really improve .
I’m very wary of anyone who uses an ‘autism’ label as a reason for poor or criminal behaviour , it is a wide spectrum and said diagnosis does not automatically mean you are useless or bad.
Apologies, it’s a bit of a sore point with me . I have had to work with many, many more neurotypical devious,lazy incompetents who were much more damaging for the company.

My DC frequently complains to me about the 'innovation manager' they work with, who doesn't innovate anything, in fact, this is actually a big part of everyone in the team's jobs.
This person tries to take credit for everyone else's work, but never comes up with ideas for new products of their own.
This person is considered to have the proverbial 'brown ring around their neck' because they're so far up the bosses a**e, so no matter how badly they do their job (that's if they actually do do it at all), there's no way the company will get rid.

Sadly the unsackable waste of space at my last job was the general manager- his parents owned the company.

I've seen a lot of this. Frightening.

Yup, the person in question even throws proper hissy fits if they don't get their own way with management. The amount of times they have quite and then next day back at work expecting the world to revolve around them in unreal. Most other staff hate them because they demand so much and are rude to colleagues. But they are good at their job, it's just they take great pride in telling everyone else, even owners of their demands and management just caves in every time. People have left due to them, they have set a witch hunt on various people and they are just untouchable apparently cos management is too scared they will flip it in a tribunal and say they were the ones who were bullied out. The person in question is narcissist and very good at manipulation, although people see through it after a while.

For me, the worst unsackable person wasn't the unproductive one but the one who was known to bully people and shout at people. He was "too valuable" so they wouldnt get rid of him. But they lost scores of talented people (myself included) as a result

same here, Windsurfing. Every single one of my unsackable's reports have left because of her bullying and micromanaging. But she is smart and works hard...

https://giphy.com/gifs/moodman-jan-brady-bunch-tran-MDxuzRvxF39VwnYu9B

Yep, everywhere I've worked. Constantly late, don't pull their weight, on their phone, off sick a lot, inappropriate etc, etc, etc. They could get away with murder.
I remember being told off for wearing inappropriate footwear (years ago when I worked in a bank) - they were flat sandals from M&S, a subtle bronze colour. We were allowed to wear sandals (all the women did), but apparently mine weren't suitable. It was ok for someone else to wear stiletto mules though...

Yep lots. Police. Impossible to get rid of most.

.in DPs workplace there were 2 such people….they put them on a 2 man team together …..so that they didn’t bring anyone else’s work down…..what they didn’t achieve in the week was written off……this was a LA department…..very rarely is anyone managed out of the council in my experience …

Nepotism maybe

I've experienced a few in my time.

One was a receptionist who was simply the most awful cow and rude to everyone. Quite often she would not even answer the phone and would say 'why should I?'. The CEO was standing right in front of her when she said that (we ALL heard it) and he just walked away. They restructured and tried to make her redundant and she just refused to be made redundant. Literally 'Nope. I'm not being made to redundant'.

Another one was my line manager who actively sabotaged others in a variety of ways - quite openly. We were paid based on time recording and she would go into the system and change people's time records to make it look like they were not working. Management knew this, mind you and did nothing. She would have screaming hissy fits in the office (one was about how the office employed an American and she screamed so much about 'British jobs for British people' that we had staff members come running because they thought something tragic had happened and someone had fallen down dead or something. The company got taken over by another company and she went absolutely batshit crazy that she had not been consulted and yelled 'I'll quit if you let this happen' and our MD just quietly opened the front door to the street and gestured her out then slammed it behind her.

We all erupted into clapping and cheering.

It comes down to weak managers and fear I think. In my experience- not just in the workplace- everyone tiptoes around the most difficult person in the room.

If they continued to pull sickness stints like that in my work, they be on a sickness monitoring programme from HR……