Former Toxic Employees

A good friend of mine blogged on employee issues for her practice management business. In it, she states that an employer should not put off an employee issue and they should be addressed in a timely fashion or take the risk of having them create a mountain out of a molehill.

I do believe in the above. HOWEVER, I also believe the employee has an obligation to do their job and not 'take their misplaced anger out on their employer'. I also know there are toxic employees. I sure wish I had foresight.

I have been doing an audit of our business. I have found so many many many mistakes that correspond to the date another toxic employee was fired. I actually didn't fire her but was blamed for it. I will admit that I didn't want anything to do with it because the year was 2010. I had just lost my mother suddenly and was coping with that. I had fallen and tore my meniscus and had to have knee surgery to repair that. I had 3 other ankle surgeries that year where I was non-weight bearing for up to 3 months at a time. My husband had purchased another office from a friend who we had learned had 6 months to live. We based our purchase price of said office on the information the sick friend's employee gave us. That said employee was also my employee but part time. We grossly overpaid for the office. We purchased the office within 2 weeks at the beginning of the summer. By the end of the summer we knew the figures given to us were grossly wrong and the business never warranted the price we paid. We hired that employee because she had a track record with me. How wrong we were. She was a cold bitter toxic woman who was no longer a doctor's wife and angry. She lied about the income of the business we purchased. She lied about her salary. She wasn't worth it. She started doing anything she could to work overtime to make more money. The other buyer had enough and fired her. I actually didn't want anything to do with that office purchase so I was the last one told this girl was being fired.

So this girl was terminated which caused a ripple effect in my own offices plus I was non-weight bearing and was brought into this 4th office to run it. I knew about the ripple effect but didn't believe it was that bad, after all the other employees had worked for me for over 8 years and thought they knew me by then and knew I would never have done what I was accused of my the toxic employee. And I thought I had convinced everyone I didn't have anything to do with the other girl being fired. No one believed me - they believed her. So the ripple effect was not doing anything they were supposed to do for me. Nothing was balanced. Nothing was checked. All accounts are wrong.

I have been doing nothing but going painstakingly through the years back to 2007 and doing an audit on the practice. Things were written off that should never have been. Things were not done that should have been. If those employees were still working for me, they would have been told to hit the door. Unfortunately I don't get to have that satisfaction. I believe in karma. They will pay for what they did to me.

So when I read about how I am supposed to suck it up and listen to my employee's whining. I refuse to. This is also why I will never hire another employee again. It is much easier to just do it myself. No drama.