She Took Maternity Leave After Years of Good Work—Then Her Boss Said She Needed Improvement and Cut Her Bonus
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If you work hard and do a great job, your company should be appreciative, but that is not always the case.
What would you do if you always did well at work, but then, when you took maternity leave, your manager turned on you and said that your performance needs improvement, and put you on a performance improvement plan?
That is what happened to the woman in this story, and when she looked at the documents, she knew that none of the criticisms from her boss were at all valid. She even spoke with an attorney who said she could sue the company if she wanted.
I don’t see why she didn’t go through with the lawsuit, as she could have gotten the money, kept her job, and even prevented this from happening again. Read through the full story below to see what you think she should have done.
PiP and lost bonus after returning from company-paid maternity leave
This happened years ago at a well-known public gambling company (An extremely toxic and unprofessional work environment).
Wow, this must have been serious.
I’m not a lawyer but I did call a few when this happened and they were interested in taking the case. All I had to do was provide a final signature.
However, after researching and thinking it over, I chose not to peruse this route out of fear of being “blacklisted” for future career opportunities.
This just isn’t fair.
After 1.5 years of “meets expectations” reviews and no indication whatsoever of “performance” issues, I took my fully paid, company provided benefit of 16 weeks maternity leave.
While I was out, quarterly reviews took place, where my manager gave me a “needs improvement” review, which automatically forfeited my bonus.
Her manager is totally just trying to save money.
My 12.5% bonus went to zero. I had just become a new parent and my manager stole it from me without blinking an eye.
The negatives/concerns in my performance review were so blatantly incorrect. Lies, exaggerations, simply fabricated. Interestingly enough, my previous performance reviews emphasized the inverse of those negatives – A paper trail of hypocrisy and false narratives.
They clearly don’t want her to come back.
Lastly, the PiP – Near impossible goals to achieve on top of the day-to-day work, toeing the line of legality.
I’ll be brief but to provide a highly illegal example of one of the goals was something like this:
How can she even work on this?
“Receive positive comments / compliments from coworkers when presenting during virtual meetings”
Anyway – this is long gone and in the past but I’d like to hear if anyone has went through something similar.
Honestly, if an attorney said that she should sue the employer, then she should. Not just for the money, but also so that the company doesn’t do something similar to people in the future.
Take a look at the top comments below and see what they have to say as well.
Honestly, this could be pretty important.
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This commenter has a good way to handle situations like this.
Wow, this is just awful.
If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a longtime bank customer who walked away after the teller gave them a hard time.
This person experienced something similar.
This is not only illegal, but it is completely heartless too. What type of manager would lie to prevent an employee on maternity leave from getting her annual bonus?
And then they will be surprised when morale goes down, or there are other employee-related problems.
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