At my old job, they had an HR person that was not qualified to be an HR person, and she "accidentally" sent an Excel spreadsheet of everyone's wages and salaries to the entire company email distro.
She was not fired, but put on a suspension.
Don't know why she had an unsecured Excel file of important information like that.
as someone who had worked in transparent jurisdictions: everyone should absolutely be pissed about not having this info available publicly always in real time.
One of my favorite things to do as a leader is encourage my employees to discuss their salary. Superiors often get pissed before I tell them that "well it's too late now, and asking them not to is literally illegal."
It was the way the information was presented, plus it made everyone realize that there was a pretty huge gap in several people's salaries, even those in the same job (ie, one engineer made 50k while another made 70k, doing the same job). I agree though, employees should not be punished for discussing pay.
It shouldn't matter that she revealed wages. Letting the company act like wages should be secret empowers the company to screw employees who don't realize their value.
In fact, it's illegal for them to tell non-management employees to keep their wages secret.
As a government employee - everyone's wages are public record at my job and it causes zero issues.
A friend who is senior by two years found out that a new hiree was getting paid more than he does for the exact same role. Understandably, he was pissed and left.
And that's exactly why wages should be transparent. So people can make an informed decision if they are valued enough at the company or if they should go somewhere else.
I'm aware that the pay increase for new hires had been to do with the pandemic, as it was employees market. But if you are low rank and file employee as my friend who was senior for two years, would you also not be upset?
I wouldn't call her a hero. She was wildly incompetent, and screwed up half of the employees' tax info. I was a single filer with no dependants, but she had me down for married with 4 dependants. She also lost all the forms, so I couldn't prove I messed up my W2s (or whatever those forms are).
Our hr had an unsecured excel file with every employees private personal information like emergency contacts, address, social security number, etc... And it got "got" by a ransomware attack because people still open email attachments blindly...
Well at least if it was ransomware, the information was still probably safe.
Ransomware blocks the company's access to company files by either locking the system or encrypting the files. It usually remains locked until the company agrees to pay a large fee to unlock it. So they may have lost access to that file, but the information isn't stolen, it's just unusable
Probably, but the message said if the company didn't pay the data would be "auctioned off on the dark web."...
I dunno the liklihood of that actually happening but I don't see why it wouldn't be possible... After all, they have the key to decrypt it and no reason to assume they didn't also have the files... Something was hitting cpu and network usage to 100% for several days across several locations... It was a bad time. It's probably more likely a feint to just install crypto bs on servers while IT is distracted, but still I have no reason to believe it wasn't possible.
I personally got an Excel sheet emailed to me from HR when I asked how much vacation time I had left.
She didn't remove the sheets for everyone else though, so I was able to see how much vacation time and sick hours people all had accrued.
The one guy everyone was always pissed at for never being at work of course had like 3 hours of sick time accrued while everyone else had around 200-400 hours (it was union). He used every hour of sick time he accrued whether he was sick or not and let everyone else pick up his slack.
When you have as much sick time as we were able to accrue it was there for emergencies like not being able to work for a month due to a surgery or something. Not taking a month off every year for the hell of it.
Sure we could take mental health days and personal days and sick days easily whenever people were very understanding and encouraged it. That one employee very much abused it though and it was no secret. People like that are why most employers are stingy with sick time as they can't be trusted to be responsible with it.
If you only get 5 days of sick leave every year sure go ahead and make sure you use that, but we weren't in that situation. This employee basically took every second Friday off, and in a job where you can't just put off your work until the next day someone else had to do your work on top of their own that day.
There was enough people to be comfortable even with one or two out, but it's still inconsiderate to your coworkers to take the day off and make them do your work. People have plans to use their time on their own shit and that gets messed up and interrupted when sick time is used unnecessarily on a regular basis. They don't care to do the work for some other lazy ass.
Jesus dude. This isn't an argument on the merits of having sick time available it's just a dick move to use it when you don't need it when there's more than enough time to use when it's actually needed.
Sounds like the last company I worked for. The only payroll clerk for over 800 staff members was analog as she had been around for so long. She wanted everything faxed or sent by FedEx. She would accidently email these types of files all over the company. The company was in such disarray it was just another day of disfunction for them.