Employee Problems

 

The majority of business owners understand the importance of having positive press. Many people may think that bad news is better than no news, but the small business owner knows that a little bad press can easily break their company. Employees often don’t realize that their actions have so much wait on the press that the company gets. The executives put out press releases and try to share a positive story, but that can easily be overshadowed by an employees wrong-doing. A great example of this has surfaced this month in the form of Rutgers University’s athletic program.

Rutgers University is a school in Newark, New Jersey that has spent a lot of time creating a good name for itself. It has received many accolades and is ranked highly for many of their degree programs. The athletic program as a whole has maintained a good reputation but the reputation of the whole department was tarnished this month because of the moves made by two men, Mike Rice, the basketball coach, and Tim Pernetti, the athletic director.

If you don’t know the story, a video surfaced that showed Coach Mike Rice abusing his players, both verbally and physically. Once this video surfaced, Rutgers athletic director, Tim Pernetti, was forced to fire his head coach. It appears that this action would have been enough to save the face of the program; unfortunately that was not the case. Why? This was not the first time Pernetti had heard about the abuse. This had been an ongoing problem of which Pernetti was aware and was attempting to handle. Pernetti thought that, rather than fire him, it was a good idea to try to “rehabilitate” Rice, at the cost of the players. It is fair to say that if this video would not have surfaced, Pernetti probably would have continued this “rehabilitation” process and Rice would still be in practice abusing his players.

As of late, the university has also fired Pernetti in an attempt to clear up their name. They want no relationship with either of the reasons for this tarnish on their record. This goes to show that acting too late can look just as bad for your company as not acting at all. This also shows the importance of hiring the right people and doing thorough background checks because an employee’s problems can become a company’s problems in an instant.