Employee Fired for OK Emoji Reply to Boss
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An employee has been dismissed from a bar in Central China, after responding to her manager with an OK emoji on instant messaging app WeChat.
The manager tagged the employee in the team’s WeChat group, requesting her to send over some meeting documents, and took issue with her response.
“You should use text to reply to the message if you have received it, don’t you know the rules?” the manager answered. “Is this your acknowledgement of receipt?” A few minutes later he told the worker to contact the human resources department and sort out her resignation.
“This is a real case, the resignation is still processing,” the employee told online media platform Btime. “I have worked for many years and this is my first encounter with this kind of stupid situation. I am good-tempered therefore I didn't retaliate,” she said.
The employee said her co-workers acknowledged that the manager’s behaviour had gone too far adding that, after the incident, he had sent out an official statement to the group requesting everyone use ‘Roger’ when responding to messages.
Gone viral
Screenshots of the conversation went viral on microblogging site Weibo, with 280 million views for posts on the topic, and widespread support among users for the employee.
Comments included: “Any reasons are valid if your boss wants to fire you”; “To be honest, I would not reply to his message” and, “I think a good leader should be able to accept different people’s communication styles and characteristics”.
“Of course this is an arbitrary reason to fire an employee,” said Wang Li-ping, a professor who specialises in management and human resources from the Renmin Business School.
“But this is what may happen in small and medium-sized companies as they may not have a comprehensive regulation or system related to this kind of situation.”
This is not the first time Chinese employees have been accused by managers of “poor discipline” in their text messages. An employee was scolded for “lacking basic WeChat manners” for replying “Um” in Chinese, which means “noted”, according to a report in Chinese regional newspaper.
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Source: SCMP
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