Last week, this series, which focuses on what companies should do in challenging situations, highlighted an organization struggling with how to decorate its headquarters during the holiday season. Click here to discover how the company resolved its problems.
This week, I have a new scenario for you to contemplate:
[dropshadowbox align=”none” effect=”lifted-both” width=”600px” height=”” background_color=”#ffffff” border_width=”1″ border_color=”#dddddd” ]At a tech-support company, a worker refuses to service a client that creates video games that she feels are too violent. To help the client, she claims, would violate her Christian faith. You would simply switch her to another account, but there aren’t any such openings at your organization. Nonetheless, she insists that she will not assist the client. What should you do?[/dropshadowbox]
Check back next week to discover how the organization addressed this problem. In the meantime, please offer your solution below…what should you do?
[dropshadowbox align=”none” effect=”lifted-both” width=”600px” height=”” background_color=”#ffffff” border_width=”1″ border_color=”#dddddd” ]
Prior to this incident, Frances Wagner, a customer-service representative for tech-support provider Sykes Enterprises, worked for $7.10 an hour on all sorts of accounts at the company’s Sterling, Colo.-based call center. “I’d stay after work and talk with other techs,” she told Florida’s St. Petersburg Times. “I loved the idea of problem-solving.”
Now it seemed, at least to her employer, that she was causing problems.
When Sykes assigned Wagner, then 51, to help GTI, which put out video games like Doom and Duke Nation, Wagner refused to comply. Judging GTI’s games to be too violent and pornographic, Wagner told her boss that servicing the account would be at odds with her Lutheran faith. She explained that “to help children put trash in their computer was an abomination in the eyes of God.”
Sykes consequently assigned temp work to Wagner and then fired her a month later, claiming there was work for her on other accounts. As a result, Wagner sued. In a settlement, a court ordered Sykes to pay Wagner $80,000 and develop a religious anti-discrimination policy.
As Wagner lamented in the Times, “This was a shattering experience for me, I can’t tell you. I’m over it now, but I went through some stuff.”[/dropshadowbox]
