A supreme court ruling last week made it a little easier for companies to monitor employee cell phone and text use. The court ruled that employers have the right to read its workers text messages  if they believe workplace rules are being broken.

The ruling came in the case of The City of Ontario v. Quon. Sergeant Jeff Quon sued the city, the police chief and the police department in 2004 claiming his supervisor’s search of his text messages violated his Fourth Amendment rights. Quon had been using his government issued pager to send sexually explicit messages. When Quon went over his allotted 25,000 character limit per month, his supervisor reviewed his pager use to determine whether the limit was enough for official purposes. That’s when Quon’s sexually explicit messages to his wife at the time, and his mistress were discovered.

Quon sued claiming that the city didn’t have a text-message policy in place when the pagers were issued. The city did have official policies about computer, Internet and email use that limited the use to official purposes.

While I typically come down on the side of the employee in many matters, I can’t side with Quon on this one. If Quon had been using his personal pager/cell phone to send messages, that would be a different story, but I think any adult who’s spent any time in the workforce should know that employers typically monitor the use of any equipment they’ve issued, whether that’s a laptop, cell phone or pager. And, while I might get a lot of heat for this, I think that it’s within their right to do so – particularly if there are limits on the amount and type of usage they allow. As an individual, if you want to send sexy text messages until the cows come home, by all means do so, but do it on your own phone, on your own service plan where your expectation of privacy is legitimate. Read the full story on Quon and the court ruling here.

Do you agree with the court ruling? How do you feel about privacy issues in the workplace? Share your thoughts in the comment section.

“…your pants are too tight.” That’s one of the things Debrahlee Lorenzana said her bosses told her before firing her from her position at Citibank. Lorenzana says that she was told that the combination of the shape of her body and the clothes she wore were ‘too distracting’ for her male colleagues.

The list of clothing Lorenzana couldn’t wear included turtlenecks, pencil skirts, fitted suits and three inch heels. So now Lorenzana is, you guessed it, suing Citibank for wrongful termination. And to bolster her case (?), Lorenzana’s attorney got her to do a photo shoot seen here (Lorenzana shown left.) But the thing is, in my opinion, the photos are intended to look sensual. They don’t look like the photos of a woman fighting to get her job back or to make a stand against women being discriminated against in the workplace. They look like the pictures of a woman auditioning to be the star of the next big and stupid reality show. Am I wrong?

Offices have dress codes, and whether you’re tall and curvy or short and fat, a too tight skirt is a too tight skirt. Citibank’s stupidity comes in singling out Ms. Lorenzana and basically blaming her because her male colleagues can’t keep their mind on work. We once had a woman come into the office on casual Friday in biker shorts and a tank top. Men and women alike were distracted – not because she was this tall, voluptuous model type, but because you just don’t wear biker shorts and a tank top to work unless you’re working at the Tour de France.

It’ll be interesting to see how this case pans out. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to find Ms. Lorenzana showing up on a reality show sometime in the very near future. Image Credits: Carrie Schechter

Source: NY Daily News

Despite pleas and statements from friends and family members portraying former ClearOne Communications CEO Frances Flood as a compassionate woman who’s even earned a ministerial degree, a judge sentenced Flood this past Wednesday to 4 years in federal prison for artificially inflating the company’s 2001- 02 revenues to increase its share price. ClearOne’s CFO Susie Strohm was sentenced to 2 years  probation for perjury. ClearOne is a Utah-based maker of video and audio conferencing equipment.

Flood maintained her innocence, claiming that board members knew about every decision she was making. Prosecutors however, convinced jurors that Flood persuaded ClearOne’s distributors to accept products they didn’t order by promising them that they didn’t have to pay for merchandise until it was sold. ClearOne then reported those shipments as sales, artificially inflating revenue.

Source: Salt Lake Tribune

Almost six months ago I posted a story about Haley Tansey. Tansey was the Halifax, UK HBOS worker who last year filed a sexual harassment claim against her former employer citing repeated sexual harassment from as far back as 1998. In one incident, Tansey claimed she awoke in her hotel room one night to find a male colleague sitting in a chair in the corner. The colleague then went into the bathroom and emerged a short time later – completely naked.

This week the employment tribunal reviewing Tansey’s case accepted her version of events, but ruled that she should have spoken up sooner. Tansey didn’t complain until August 2007 – the time limit for reporting sexual harassment claims is three months after each incident. The tribunal stated, “Although the tribunal understood that it is difficult for a woman who has been subjected to sexual harassment to make a complaint, it was satisfied in this case that Mrs Tansey’s reasons for delaying so long before taking action were not such that it was just and equitable to extend time.”

Damian McCarthy, representing HBOS, told the tribunal: “This is not a claimant who is a cowering wallflower.” He added, “It’s a claimant who did not actually believe these were acts of sexual harassment at the time.” Tansey is considering appealing the ruling.

Read the full story here.

Over at the Ventura County Star Ritch K. Eich, poses a great question – Were you meant to be a leader or just a boss? Well, which one are you? Eich makes several clear distinctions, including:

• A leader is a champion for his or her employees. The boss tends to see his or her employees as a means to an end.
• A leader shows congeniality and respect to everyone regardless of his or her rank. The boss may seek to be pleasant and charming to executives but is indifferent or even demeaning toward direct reports. The saying “smiles up the organization and frowns down the organization” captures the point well.
• A leader will prohibit his managers from being demeaning, disrespectful or verbally abusive to others. A boss often turns his back on such behavior and may exhibit it himself.

Eich rightly argues that any person in a decision-making capacity, formal or informal, who advances the strategic goals of the business, who contributes mightily to institutional performance and who treats people fairly, honestly and compassionately is a leader. Everyone else, by definition, is just a boss. And therein lies the problem. At a time when leadership is needed the most, our companies, schools and politics are rife with bosses and too few leaders. The long term effects of that will be reflected in our ability to do business and affect true change on a global scale.

To read Eich’s complete list of what differentiates a leader from a boss, click here.

Last week Buck introduced us to the idea of management style being introduced in adolescence. In Buck’s case, his bad bosses were all male, but the concept that management style, particularly bad management style, begins in adolescence, transcends gender – believe me I know from experience. Today Buck discusses “ganging up” as a management style…

As kids we called it “ganging up”, gathering together as much muscle as needed in order to demonstrate your influence. It’s a management style used by corporate bully-bosses and surely a behavior that these de-motivators learned as kids. Such corporate bullies have issues upstairs, so to speak, self-confidence vacuums that cause them to enlist the support of other bullies in order to force their influence and demonstrate their irresistible control over others. In short, they can’t influence or persuade you by themselves. They don’t have enough self-confidence for that, so they must gang up and do it as a team. If you don’t think that this is so, think again. It’s behavior that bully-bosses learned as kids and they’re using the same techniques today. The trouble is it’s a technique that’s overwhelmingly de-motivating to those on the receiving end.

I was in the lobby of the Hampton Inn at the Buffalo airport stamping the snow off of my shoes at 7:30 in the morning when my Napoleonic bully of a boss called me on my cell phone. I had just cleared eight inches of freshly fallen snow off of my rental car. It was still snowing hard and the sky was so gray and the cloud ceiling so low that it almost seemed artificial. I heard his voice and my demeanor stiffened as I braced for what was coming; I always dreaded talking with him. He was about to brow-beat me into convincing a customer to take several shipments of bad product and he had enlisted yet another bully to participate in the intimidation. This other guy was a yes-man sycophant and the two of them together surely could do some damage. My boss was in a particularly bad mood since previous attempts to strong arm me had failed; I had not acquiesced to his unethical demands – demands which could have been harmful to the customer – and obviously this pounding had been rehearsed beforehand by the two of them. They left me little wiggle room other than to do just what they insisted or no doubt face unemployment. The encounter left me red-faced and furious. It was a classic case of a pre-arranged ganging up, a desperate bully-boss technique when the guy needed to demonstrate his prowess. His confidence in his own persuasiveness was so low that he was compelled to recruit another to help with his dirty work.

This bully-boss would never confront a major issue alone and it nearly goes without saying that he surrounded himself with a few favored managers, trusted confidants that carried out his every wish. The trouble was that these guys were nearly all lesser figures, unremarkable characters who allowed this incompetent to shine. It was absolutely demoralizing to the rest of us; one of the favored had the IQ of a dolt, but he called the boss “sir” and was flatteringly responsive to his every need. These corporate courtesans were skillful at telling the boss what he wanted to hear, never gave him bad news or shared an opinion contrary to his. None of them would ever eclipse him with their mediocrity. And so the business was mismanaged into near extinction under this boss’s reign and no one in senior management ever ventured to peel back the layers and look inside.

Next Tuesday: Cronyism and its destructive effects

Buck Hamilton is a sales and marketing executive who’s spent over thirty years working in the paper distribution business. He’s a prolific writer who’s presently working on a book which narrates the stories of sixteen Vietnam War veterans. You can read his weekly series  “Managing the Meanies: A Survival Guide” every Tuesday here on Really Bad Boss.

A new survey finds that only 45 percent of Americans are satisfied with their work. And while not all the dissatisfaction can be blamed on a bad bosses, only 51 percent of workers surveyed say they’re satisfied with their boss. That’s down from 55 percent in 2008 and almost 60 percent 20 years ago.

In over 22 years of studying job satisfaction, the current job dissatisfaction rate was the lowest level ever recorded by the Conference Board research group.  The recession is partly to blame for the drop, but other reasons include:

• Fewer workers consider their jobs to be interesting.
• Incomes have not kept up with inflation.
• Health insurance costs eating into workers’ take-home pay.

The findings are disturbing for several reasons. Besides the fact that unhappy workers are less productive, the long term implications could include a negative impact on the way the U.S. workforce competes with the rest of the world.  Lynn Franco, an author of the report and director of the Conference Board’s Consumer Research Center says, "What’s really disturbing about growing job dissatisfaction is the way it can play into the competitive nature of the U.S. work force down the road and on the growth of the U.S. economy — all in a negative way."

Workers have been complaining about bad bosses and unsatisfying jobs for decades, but maybe understanding the impact that bad management and bad work environments can have on business and the competitive marketplace will motivate some to make much needed changes. Read the whole story at Yahoo Finance.