I just found out my one manager has been doing drugs at work and is getting drugs at work. I asked my other manager if he noticed anything strange about the other guy and he spilled his guts telling me everything. I am really thinking the best thing to do is confront him and if he denies it I will impliment drug tests. I will give him 5 weeks off work without pay and have him come to me with his wife with proof that he is getting help and is off the drugs before he can come back. His wife doesn’t know right now.
Also if he comes back to work he is demoted to regular staff duties.
Am I being smart here or am I missing something?
Thanks for help, I am new at being the owner.
If you know for sure that he is buying drugs in YOUR business, why would you consider keeping him on. What do you think would happen if the leading story on your local 11 oclock news were “XYZ Pizzaria Busted with Drugs!” You think your business would survive? This guy doesn’t give a sh!t about you or your business and you should send him to the curb tonite. Anything less shows the rest of the staff that they have nothing to worry about even if they go so far as to buy drugs at work. Other than stealing your money, I see this as as blatent of a spit in the face as you can get.
Have proof before you get rid of him. He is a real liability behind your operation and you don’t know what he is really doing there at all. he could be treating customers badly, stealing money or whatever.
I would try to catch him in the act before you do anything.
you need to be careful because in some states they can collect unemployment because they consider drug addiction a disibilty and will aprove there unemployment.
I’ve heard that if you suspend an employee(“give him 5 weeks off”) and don’t have documented proof or a good enough reason to do so, the employee can go and make you pay those weeks that he wasn’t even there.
Just fire him.
This brings back alot of memories for me. Years ago we had a manager with a drug problem. He was great at hiding it and for some time we had no idea. The crew was silent because most were also involved. We actually caught him because he would go outside the building and smoke a joint and there are air vents in a closet and it sucked the smell into the closet. Another manager told me about it.
I wrestled with the whole proof thing…We decided to teminate him immediately. We had a discussion with him. We weren’t mean, went into the whole you know you might have a problem when it effects your work, we have a responsiblity to protect the teenager who work for us…etc. We had a few people write statements about what they knew. I figured the truth was the truth and if I ended up having to pay unemployment …fine. He filed. I disputed the claim and we lost. I appealed. We were suppose to go to a hearing and he didn’t show. We won.
We then had a meeting with each employee INDIVIDUALLY with a new zero policy they had to sign. There was not to be any discussion about drugs or alcohol in the store…ever. No more discussing the great weekends past or to come. When I talked to each of them I told them they are risking MY family and MY well being. I explained I am responsible for providing jobs for all these people and their families. I was very stern about my position on this. They all were very compliant. Many were relieved.
In the years after we come to find out we didn’t know the half of it. Ya know those calls "Hey will you have johnny deliver my food? " Well johnny was delivering more than just pizza. As another posted mentioned…thank the Lord we weren’t on the 5 o’clock news. It was a tough decision but the more truth that came out the more the decision was a no brainer. Or sales were significantly better in the weeks/months to come. Could have been a coincidence.
Years later the young man came by and had a talk with us. Apologizing. Thanking us for being who we are. Ended up working for us as a cook (this was a good 6 years later) while he went to college. He is now graduated, married and working a job.
Our zero tolerance policy is still in effect. Every new hire is given a “talk” by me or hubby during orientation. We explain while they are here I pay them to come to work sober and I pay them not to talk about drugs or alcohol. We have had a couple of other incindents along the way and handled them the same way.
Your job is to protect those that work for you…and sometimes it takes hard decisions. Imagine if your child was working her first job and was exposed to this kind of crap. They get enough of that outside my four walls. I am standing up for what is right and sometimes it takes hard decisions. This is one of them.
Those are all good points. Thank you for the advice, I will use it. I feel confident that things will be better off without him and that having a policy that Kris mentioned is a great idea. It shows how much my employees mean to me.
I really hope that he can get help and move on with his life. He has a degree in Chemistry. Hopefully he will use it to get back on track.
Thanks again, I will let you know how it went tomorrow.
I had an assistant manager steal the weekend deposits for a cocaine habit. He was the sweetest guy too. For the longest time he claimed the bank lost both the Friday and Saturday deposits that he put in the drop. :roll: One I might believe. Two separate deposit drops, I don’t think so. He called me some time after he was fired and apologized.
Well here is how it went:
My wife and I had a meeting with the manager this morning and told hime what we knew for a fact and he admitted things. We told him that we cared deeply for him and wanted to help him. He didn’t want to lose his position. I stuck to my guns and gave him two weeks off to get help. I told him he and his wife could come to speak with me and show me proof that he is getting help. I told him he could come back to work as a regular shift worker not a manager if he was clean. I told him that would give him an income till he found other work.
His reaction was very painful to me. I wanted to say that I believed that he could come clean on his own but I stuck to my guns. It hurt! I am sure he will come back to me and want things back the way they were. I do hope he will take this as a wake up call and get straight.
You simply can not afford to have him in the place if you are aware of drug use and drug transactions at work. Your liability there is HUGE. Don’t worry about unemployement; unemployment is pennies. All that happens IF you are found to have terminated without cause is that your rate goes up. If you have no other “no-cause” terminations you will not even notice the change.
Fire him.
Sounds like you made some decisions based on emotion. Those usually don’t work out very well.
If this guy is having a problem with drugs, there’s a very good chance that he still will be having those problems in two weeks. All you’ve done is allowed yourself to prolong the inevidible and have opened yourself up to more drama in two weeks.
Look at all the energy you’ve spent on this already. You could have been using this time, energy, thinking on ways to improve your business. I hope this guy does get help and does break free of the awful addiction of drugs. But you must also break free from these kind of issues and focus on running your business.
Hate to agree with the last two guys, but if I was to allow him back, it would only be after a year of sobriety.
Before owning my pizzaria… I worked for several large corporations…Wendy’s… Bk… Pizza Hut… Dominoes… Toyota… And I travel with several reps from other larger corporations…
Not to discredit myself I also worked for several Indy’s like us… And you know what there was excessive drug use at all of them… The question was who will give in and who won’t… I believe that just about every one of my staff… (accept for the ones from AA) use some sort of drug… some use weed… others Pills… While others drink. I think this is the life we have chosen… restaurants thrive on people who are elibriated why then would it not atract those types of people for employment… Why else would people out of high school and not in college be working in a restaurant as either a manager or better yet a line cook… Most likely but not always they are not overly modivated to take care of them selves and be personaly responible individuals…
I am an avid anti drug proponent… but to require that all of our staff members to be clean would be most likely proposteriouse… I think, I think as longa as it does not effect there job performance I say what they do on there free time is up to them…
However at work is a totaly different story… But I think making policy known 100% is the way to go… Common sense is not so Common these days…
I think I disagree about restaurants thriving on inebriated people. At least in my case, that is not true. We thrive on the small families in the marketplace. Sure the tokers will call in little cute orders, but not the $65 party orders parents make for their teens to have friends over. We have a clean and reliable group working for us right now, and they are not the “show up high” sort of people. we may eventually run into another one, but we’ve been fortunate this last year.
We take a hard line on this issue with employees, since we had a guy crawl into a bottle on us right when we reopend last June. Our policy is that if you show up with drug/alcohol inebriation on shift you get sent home. Second time it happens, you are asked not to come back. We instruct them to call for a ride, and will call the police if they try to drive away from our store intoxicated. No playing around with our community safety . . . I am a City councilman and a conscientious citizen who demands sober drivers.
We run a simple background check to find out if any drug or criminal history . . and let prospective employees know we are serious about sober employment. If we find out hat you are selling or using illegal drugs in our city, we will inform the Police Chief. Users beget dealers. Simple fact. We will not tolerate dealers in our small town, so we take that stance. Addicts are erratic, dangerous people around food and money. We take our customer health and safety seriously and do whatever we can to identify potential addicts prior to hiring.
I’ve worked with adolescent and drug rehab in previous jobs, so can identify many signs of active intoxication and patterns of addiction. People trying to dry out and get sober, we will help as much as we are able . . . but don’t show up high to my restaurant. I’ll work the shift myself with my wife before we will run it with intoxicated people.
honestly i cant think of a manager that we have that doesn’t imbibe in some form of drug(pot, liquor), granted we are a brewery too, and we give out a shift beer to every over 21 employee at the end of there shift. MODERATION, is the key word, don’t show up high, don’t show up stoned, don’t show up drunk. if you show up so hungover you can’t work the line, you will be ridiculed by every other cook and you get to make 5 gallons of roux with lard, bake off all the bacon, scrub baseboards in all 5 walk ins.(they never show up hungover again). if it actually interferes with your work, your gone, possibly rehirable at a later date depending on the circumstances.
sadly drug use is rampant in the service industry(all versions of it), hopefully everyone here has read Kitchen confidential by Anthony bourdaine(a must read for anyone in the restaurant business), he even talks about how the culinary world for various reasons attracts the fringe edge, no normal person wants to spend 8-14 hours over a hot stove/in front of a 500-900 degree oven, in a enviroment where getting burned is almost garunteed, expect to cut or nick yourself once a week for the first 5 years of your career until your knife skills become muscle memory. personally i have found myself addicted to the crazy busy times we get, i love a friday night with a full dining room(75 covers) a sold out movie(396 covers) and all three lines of to go ringing off the hook.
not entirely sure where im going with this, just kinda stating get used to dealing with drug use of some sort if you plan on working in the industry. i know here in Alaska if i did mandatory drug tests, i would have trouble filling the 100 positions we have company wide. plus drug tests are rarely foolproof. in my younger days i was a ski/snowboard instructor, federal law states anyone working on the mountain at a ski resort must pass a urine test. at least 80% of the crew that worked that mountain smoked pot. there are multiple ways to get around the urine tests, and hair tests are so spendy very few companies are willing to pay for them.
sheb
Zero tolerance is the only way to go.
There is no way I will endanger the lives of my staff, or me and my family or any other person with letting someone work drunk or drugged.
Come in either way and it is a quick turn around out the door with no return ticket.
I don’t care if I can’t deliver because I got rid of the driver or our orders are delayed because I sent a makeline staff home.
Like Nick I have moral standards - I am no angel but I don’t cross the line and don’t like others crossing the line - and to accept that these are the type of people who work in this industry doesn’t wash with me. They can work in other places all they like but not in this little black duck’s pond.
Dave