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Chapter 1: What monstrous workplace behaviors are highlighted this Halloween?
Breakfast Business with Enterprise Ireland on Newstalk. Welcome back. You're listening to Breakfast Business with me, Tom McEnany, standing in for Joe Lynham. Halloween is here and that means it's time for your annual dose of monstrous workplace behaviour. Joining me now to give us the ghoulish details is Moira Glassick, Chief Operating Officer at Peninsula Ireland. Good morning, Moira.
Morning, how are you?
I'm doing very well. How are you doing?
I'm good, thank you.
Do you like Halloween?
Yeah, I can take it or leave it.
All right. OK. You're not dressing up then?
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Chapter 2: What horror stories can arise from social nights out at work?
Not dressing up today, no.
All right.
OK.
I must say I miss dressing up and going around doing trick or treating with my son. But the thing is, once they turn 17, it's harder to go around the neighbours begging for sweets, you know. But anyway, we're talking about horror stories. You give me a list of your own favourite horror stories. And of that list, Myra, what's your own favourite? What's the one that keeps you awake at night?
It's the one that comes up all the time and it's employees on social nights out and work. There is always a drama. OK. And people forget that when the drama happens outside of work in the social setting, it normally comes back into the workplace. So one of the ones that we've had this time around is two employees that went for karaoke. All right.
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Chapter 3: How can a karaoke night lead to workplace drama?
That sounds reasonable. Which is something very popular. A few drinks taken.
Absolutely. So there's always potential. But we had two employees at this particular event who wanted to be the star of the show. So unfortunately, it ended up with two employees fighting against each other on who was going to hold the microphone and who was going to do the most singing.
And when you say fighting, you're talking fisticuffs?
Fisticuffs, yeah. So they got into a bit of an argument over who was going to be the person up singing for the night. Unfortunately, it ended up back in the workplace and the employer ended up having to do a disciplinary and harassment investigation between the two employees.
Disciplinary and an harassment. Yes. So somebody, because they couldn't get the mic at the karaoke night, put in a formal harassment claim to their employer.
Yeah.
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Chapter 4: What are the consequences of inappropriate behavior at work events?
Yeah, I can see why that would be fun to deal with.
Yeah, well, it all starts out as fun and games. Ended up in a few tears back in the office after the offence from the night before.
OK. Throw in some others.
We've also had the employee who in the food industry was being very proactive or so the manager thought they were being very proactive until they discovered when they were making fries, they were actually putting some of their nasal waste in with the fries as well.
Picking their nose.
Picking their nose, basically, and throwing it in on top of them. Oh, oh, oh. Which isn't very pleasant.
Let's not mention the restaurant.
Let's not mention the restaurant. Definitely not. It was all sorted out anyway. So that's the main thing.
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Chapter 5: How do shortcuts in the workplace lead to dangerous situations?
Before you leave it, I remember there was a famous fish and chip shop up beside us in the north of the country. I won't mention the town in case there's only one in the town. And in order to establish whether the hot plate on which they cooked the burgers was hot enough, the guy behind the counter was just spitting it.
And if the spit sizzled, it was hot enough and he'd throw your burger down, you know. I'm sure they've stopped that practice now.
I'm nearly positive they've stopped that practice. They're very good at being checked these days. And I think the other one that we come up quite often is when employees are trying to create shortcuts. So they're trying to make their job much quicker. Which is fair enough. Which is fair enough. Which is fair enough. And find imaginative ways of trying to do that.
So we had one situation where an electrician decided to duct tape two power tools together to try and drill things quicker. Unfortunately, it caused a little bit of a few sparks.
Chapter 6: What is job stacking and why is it a concern for employers?
Wait a second, duct tape? OK, OK, OK.
So this is a drill. A drill. So duct tape, two drills together. So in order that they could drill the wall quicker. Unfortunately, it triggered an electrical fault in the business. But to make it even better, one of the other employees decided to video record him doing this and post it on social media. So as you can imagine, the employer wasn't too happy for the reputational damage that it caused.
Yeah, I'm not sure which is worse, the guy who did the video or the guy who decided it was a good idea to duct tape two drills together.
Yeah, it just shows that while you think people have common sense, sometimes that isn't always the case.
Right, OK. Can I throw you mine? Is that OK? It's something I came across during the summer.
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Chapter 7: How can social media reveal workplace misconduct?
It's job stacking. Do you remember this? It was where a gentleman in, I think it was India, and I've come across a number of other examples as I was doing my research this morning, and he was found to be doing remote working, tech worker, And he had four full time jobs. And he was earning about from India was earning over six hundred thousand dollars a year.
Now, that's the one that would keep me up at night.
Yeah, so I mean, basically job stacking is when you've got more than one job and you're trying to do more than one job in your normal eight hours work. So that's obviously a minefield for employers. Most likely the employer probably won't even know that they're doing more than one job, but can lead to different things like burnout, productivity consequences.
So the employer may wonder why somebody's not performing correctly, but ultimately they're doing more than one job at the same time and trying to keep all the balls in the air and keep all their employers happy. And look, normally they do it for extra money, etc. as well, so that they can keep themselves afloat in relation to different challenges they may have from a cost perspective.
Now, you have an example of a lady who quite reasonably turned around to their employer and said, listen, I need time off for a funeral. Yes. What's wrong with that?
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Chapter 8: What unusual complaints have employers had to address?
Absolutely nothing is wrong with that. And obviously people, unfortunately, take bereavement leave all the time. However, in this particular situation, unfortunately, the employee had said that her mum had passed away. However, it turned out that a day or two later that the employer was walking through one of the shopping centres and saw the employee and her mum was with her.
So she made a miraculous recovery. When the employer went to check it out, they found on social media that the mum was indeed still alive and the employee had just made it up to get some time off work.
In fairness, who hasn't invented a funeral in order to get a little bit of time off work?
We come across it sometimes.
It's usually an uncle though.
I've got to say that's not normally your mum. Particularly when they will know who they are or they'll see them around. Particularly now in the age of social media, there's normally a lot of social media activity. But this particular employee said they were quite private and they didn't want anybody else to know about it.
Yeah, I suspect the mother wasn't too happy to find out that her daughter had told everybody that she was dead.
Yeah, absolutely. But then again, she may be very happy that she's still alive. So the employer obviously had to address that as well through their disciplinary process.
And there was one of the case, the mysterious case of the moving cameras.
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