This instalment of You Make the Call features an employee who sent an email denigrating a superior and then tried to take it back.
Yamina Hamlil joined Hercules Forwarding, a trucking company based in New Westminster, B.C., in November 2013, in its Calgary office. Her job involved analyzing data and creating reports for company management, reporting directly to the company’s president, who was the son of the previous president.
Out of several reports Hamlil prepared for management, the primary one was a sales scorecard that was used to track sales activity and promote friendly competition among the Hercules sales staff. In order to complete the scorecard, Hamlil had access to confidential sales data that was kept in company databases.
In January 2014, Hamlil began working from home after an interpersonal issue developed between her and other staff in the office. Later in the year, Hercules’ president became concerned he was unable to reach her during business hours. As a result, he had the company’s human resources department contact her in February 2015 and have her email her information on any absences or days off she planned to take or had already taken so the company could keep track of them. Hercules had a system where employees could accumulate four hours per month in sick time that could be taken with pay for a short-term illness.
In March 2015, a Hercules sales manager found some inaccuracies in the February sales scorecard. He brought them to the attention of the president and Hamlil, and Hamlil agreed to review the calculations. She made some corrections and suggested the sales team didn’t enter the data in a timely fashion, though the sales manager said the data had been entered on time.
Hamlil began to suspect the president was manipulating data to ensure certain sales staff received more credit than others. She sent an email to the former president — the current president’s father — accusing the president of “mean tricks” and falsifying the sales data. She said she didn’t feel like running the sales scorecard anymore and she didn’t want to provide her sick days and days off taken to the HR department because since she was working from home, she could do her work “whether I am sick or dead.”
Four days later, on March 30, 2015, Hamlil sent another email to the former president saying she had been assuming some things and the current president was in fact being kind to her. She said everything was fine and asked him not to mention it, though she would let him know if the same things were still happening.
The same day, Hamlil started to apologize to the current president, but said “never mind it is already done.” Curious, the president investigated the matter further and he discovered Hamlil’s emails to his father, including an unsent email that contained unflattering references to him.
On April 1, 2015, Hercules terminated Hamlil’s employment for insubordination causing Hercules to lose trust and confidence in her. The termination letter stated that her insubordination stemmed from her refusal to follow company policy and directions by not providing her sick days, and her “insolent and disrespectful behaviour in criticizing the president of the company,” including “serious allegations of wrongdoing against the president of the company including regarding his conduct and character” without any evidence.
Hamlil filed a complaint of unjust dismissal.
You Make the Call
Was dismissal too strong of a response?
OR
Was there just cause for dismissal?
If you said there was just cause for dismissal, you’re right. The adjudicator noted that honesty and trust were “the foundation of a viable and productive employee-employer relationship.” While Hamlil’s intention in her email to the former president of Hercules was to raise a concern about the scorecards to someone she thought was in a position of authority, she didn’t take the time to determine whether her suspicions were valid or whether she was actually reporting to someone who was still involved with the company. She didn’t have any real evidence supporting her suspicions and didn’t have a reasonable explanation as to why the current president would be deceitful to benefit some employees over others. This was particularly important because her allegations were serious and “had the potential of undermining (the president’s) integrity with an important shareholder,” the adjudicator said.
Hamlil also made it clear she intended to disobey the instructions from the HR department and the president to provide her sick days. Regardless of her reasoning, she unilaterally decided she would report no sick time, which was “a clear threat to violate employer policy, the adjudicator said.
The adjudicator also found Hamlil acted dishonestly when she tried to cover up her initial email to the former president, asking him to not tell anyone and being evasive when the current president wanted to know what she was talking about.
See Hamlil and Hercules Forwarding UCL, Re, 2016 CarswellNat 1566 (Can. Labour Code Adj.).
