Also it seems it may be (although not clear from the information given) that originally she was simply fired for cause and not made to pay anything back.

Then she sued for wrongful termination and got that result.

Because the first thing I thought was: What kind of petty employer sues for $2000 instead of just letting them go.

Yes, that's correct [1]. It's also worth noting that it was handled in small claims court where both parties represented themselves.

[1] https://decisions.civilresolutionbc.ca/crt/crtd/en/item/5230...

Reading the details of the civil suit completely changes the tone of this story. So she also owed ~$3k on the unforgiven portion of an advance from the company for her CPA course, which would have been fully forgiven after 24 months. They withheld her final ~$1800 paycheck due to that. So she was actually ~$1100 ahead and then decided to sue. It also looks like the 50 hours she billed that couldn't be accounted for occurred over 6 weeks or so.

I really wanted to be upset with the company here, but it sounds like she shot herself in the foot.

> I really wanted to be upset with the company here, but it sounds like she shot herself in the foot.

Both of these things can be valid at the same time. She was certainly technically in the wrong and made some questionable choices (with the huge caveat that it’s possible context we don’t have may change the story entirely), but I still think the company is overbearing to the point of absurdity.

If she slacked off for 50 hours over 6 weeks, that’s like an hour and a half a day (which may not have been contiguous). I can’t think of a job I’ve ever had where I didn’t have an hour of down time a day on average. Even working crappy manual labor jobs I’m sure I dicked around with my coworkers for like an hour a day.

She may be a bit on the high end there, but not so much that I wouldn’t have worked with her to correct it before firing her.

Slacking off, as you call it, is part of working. What she did was claim to have worked on clients' files without having opened them. She didn't claim that a job had taken her six hours when it took her 5.5 plus some downtime. She claimed to have worked on accounts that she had barely perused the data for.

That does seem like an important piece of information. I would be pretty upset if I hired a lawyer and they billed me for 100 fake hours.

Never hire a lawyer, then.

I hired an attorney once. I reviewed the invoices, the hours looked reasonable. Cue 4 months later with him saying he had forgotten to generate an invoice from a second record in his billing system - it had around 70% of additional hours. Between this and that he had been apparently ignoring one of my main concerns the whole time, only to wring his hands of responsibility when it ran aground, that relationship went south real fast.

It’s billing fraud, and a critical part of the film version of “The Firm”.

Law firms know this, and get around it by delegating everything they possibly can to paralegals and junior staff while representing much more hands-on involvement by senior, experienced staff.

Sorta like software outsourcing, actually.

That's a huge change in context. My initial assumption was that it was just a salaried employee caught not working

Was she billing clients hourly or at one of those places that requires everybody to track their time down to some very small unit?

She was an accountant. I am not sure whether she was hourly or not, the issue is that accounting firms often bill clients by the hour, so internally they need correct records of the time employees are spending on jobs.

So even if she were not being paid hourly (though the court ordered repayment implies she was?), the company would have required accurate recording for billing clients.

The company also didn't just arbitrarily install the monitoring software. She was already underperforming, and on some PIP-equivalent setup when they got her consent to add monitoring software - I would guess that they were already thinking she was falsifying her time sheets at this point.

> This headline needs more context

Yeah. It is called an article. Typically provides the context for the title.

The article is beautifully written and links to the actual small claims decision. Which is honestly so rare that I don’t even know when have I seen in non-specialist media.

What the headline needs is people reading beyond it, and not reacting from first instinct. Grumble grumble :)

Genuine question: what makes you sure I didn’t read the article (because I did).

Nothing in the article contradicts my post. The lady was almost certainly billing time she didn’t work, but I would still ask myself what I’ve done to enable that before I just fired her.

I’m disinclined to assume the good faith and intention of a company using invasive software to monitor every minute of the day.

> Genuine question: what makes you sure I didn’t read the article (because I did).

I was not sure that you didn’t read the article. I was just suspecting it.

> Nothing in the article contradicts my post.

Au contraire. You wrote: “The idea of weaponizing ‘time theft’ as a first recourse is just sickening to me.”

That is not what happened in this case at all.

The company was unhappy with her performance and they let her go. She sued them. Does that sound like the company weaponised anything?

So why are you talking about “weaponising” and “first recourse”? How can it be “weaponised” when she was the one who was suing the company What is first recourse about this?

In fact if you read the small claims court case (linked from the article), you can see that she started working in October 12, 2021. They first talked about performance problems with her manager in February the next year. That is when they installed the time tracking software! She was put on a PIP in March 16. And she was dismissed on March 29th.

So clearly they were not weaponizing time theft, nor was it their first recourse.

Maybe you were just commenting in general how sickening it is to weaponise time theft as a first recourse. In which case I would have expected some mention that you are just speaking in general, noting that in this specific case that did not happen. Since you didn’t say that I suspected that you either didn’t read the article carefull enough to understand the case, or didn’t read it at all.

The order here is what I’m taking issue with.

- The 1-1s should have been happening from day 1 of employment, especially for a remote employee. - The manager should have initiated them, not the employee. - When the employee asked for help, the response was to install time monitoring software on her computer

From my perspective, the time software was absolutely weaponized against the employee. I call this a “first recourse” because it precluded an improvement plan. I’m reading this as “oh, you’re not getting enough work done huh? Well let me just stand over your desk and scrutinize your minute to minute work for a month to make sure you’re not slacking off”. Sure, it’s legal and a court didn’t find issue with it, but that doesn’t make it ethical, and it has zero chance of helping a struggling employee.

If I had one of my direct reports reach out to me and say they felt unproductive I can simply not fathom responding to that by treating them like a delinquent.

Thank you for your response.

> The 1-1s should have been happening from day 1 of employment, especially for a remote employee.

I agree with you on this here. On the other hand I can’t find any source to tell if they had 1-1s from the begining or not. If they hadn’t that is a serious mistake. (If you see this somewhere mentioned I’ happy to see a reference. But do not worry either way, no pressure.)

> The manager should have initiated them, not the employee.

I agree with that too! Again I don’t know if that happened or not. The court case suggest that it was the employee who initiated the chat. I can also imagine that if I am an employer and I am being sued I would stick to the hard facts. The things I can prove. And if there are enough of these hard facts to show that I did not commit what I am accused of (unfair dismissal) the I wouldn’t bring up all the informal and thus undocumented instances where we talked about performance.

It is possible in my mind either way, and I can’t say for sure. Maybe it is an instance of bad management, paird with over reliance on a time traking software. Maybe it is good management paired with a regetably underpeforming employee. Maybe something in between!

But here is the thing: This is not the reason why this case was thrust into the public spotlight.

It is in the public spotlight because the outcome has the appearance as if she got sued by the company to extract money from her. I certainly started reading with that assumption! But then reading the article I have noticed that this is not the case. I have also noticed that many commenters, not necessarily you, seems to have fallen into the same idea and did not read the article carefull enough to see that this doesn’t seem to be the case. Which perhaps is the fault of the article. (But of course we all understand that “woman sues company, company vindicated” is not such a catchy title, so I even understand why they went for the angle they did.)

Truth to be told on the general managerial advice and recommendations I agree very much with you. Cheers

> On the other hand I can’t find any source to tell if they had 1-1s from the begining or not.

From the court findings: “In February 2022, Miss Besse began having weekly meetings with her manager to help her better manage her files. She says she initiated the meetings because she felt unproductive and that she was not performing as well as she should have been. On February 21, 2022, Reach installed a time-tracking program called TimeCamp on Miss Besse’s work laptop.”

This is actually the point where I got angry and felt that I needed to comment. Usually these articles are filled with one-sides opinions, but here we have a formal accounting of events from the court. According to the court, Besse went to her manager because she was struggling and the response could be called intimidation.

I’ve been managing for long enough that this, to me, calls into question the cause of the events here. It’s possible this lady was just lazy and is entirely at fault; but when I see a paper trail indicating a failure of management to engage I wonder if the whole thing could have been avoided with some empathy and servant leadership.

Yes, but that is not in opposition to what I said above.

Hours were certainly logged fraudulently, I’m not debating that. I’m saying that rather than firing her, I would have asked a lot of questions about the situation and if I pushed her to feel like she needed to.

The software they were using sounds like what I have seen myself in the past, and it is a huge burden to try and justify every moment of every day the way they want you to. It’s basically a guarantee for burnout and lack of loyalty.