Sydney: A 38-year-old work-from-home (WFH) employee Suzie Cheikho has recently revealed that she has been fired from the Insurance Australia Group after 18 years of service. The firing followed a formal warning regarding her performance and output in November 2022. However, it is the performance evaluation process which has attracted significant attention.
According to news.com.au, Ms. Cheikho underwent a performance improvement plan that involved monitoring her computer usage, including keystrokes, for 49 working days between October and December. On February 20, she was let go for missing meetings, not meeting deadlines, and not finishing critical assignments. The Fair Work Commission (FWC) discovered that she frequently arrived late and left early from work, frequently not working the full allocated hours. Her online behaviour even suggests that there were days when she worked absolutely nothing.
The FWC verdict states that Ms Cheikho had the word “F**k” scribbled across her palm during a Microsoft Teams meeting with her management regarding her performance. Ms Cheikho stated that she “did not believe for a minute” that the data was accurate during a formal meeting about the review. She did not, however, present any proof to the contrary. “I mean, I might occasionally visit the stores, but not for the full day. I need some time to think about this and I’ll present a response,” she told her supervisors by the FWC’s conclusions.
“Have been going through a lot of personal issues which have caused a decline in my mental health, and unfortunately, I believe it has affected my performance and my work,” she stated in a written statement. Having “a few things going on” because of an injury was what she indicated. She said she sent supervisors a Teams message informing them of her medical appointments and promised to “make up the time afterwards.”
After a month, Ms Cheikho asserted that the firm had a “premeditated plan to remove her from the business and that she was targeted due to her mental health issues.” Ms. Cheikho now claims that she needs welfare assistance and that the employer has just given her her last paycheck. Her online presence has suddenly gained notice due to her situation. She currently has close to 8000 TikTok followers, making her a sort of micro-influencer.
She told the site that she makes a small percentage of money off TikTok, just enough to cover her bills. She said that it’s all related to her emotional well-being. Because of the mental health problems she has had, she said that she advocates for others and talks about mental health in everyone’s lives. She now worries that she might never get a job again. She told the Daily Mail that it is embarrassing that this story has gone viral—nobody is going to hire her. In her 18 years of employment there, she said that she received one warning at the most.
Since the end of the Covid 19 pandemic, many companies around the world have reopened their offices again and people are back to working from office again. Some companies around the world have adopted a hybrid model of working which means that some days an employee gets an opportunity to work from home, other days it is work from office.
Also, some companies offer a remote working opportunity which gives an employee to work from anywhere around the world without being physically present in the office. The companies which are currently offering hybrid working models to their employees around the world are- Amazon, Disney, JP Morgan, Grammarly, Coinbase, Atlassian, Hubspot and Zapier are some of the companies which offer hybrid working models to employees.
Big companies like Apple, Microsoft, Dell, etc have stopped the hybrid model of working after the covid 19 pandemic ended. Employees in Apple joined the company back in February 2023. Apple said it will also roll back its sick leave policy, which allowed workers to take unlimited leaves while experiencing Covid symptoms. After the work-from-home ended, Apple’s corporate employees started returning to in-person offices in April 2022, after two years of remote work due to the pandemic, and were required to work in person once a week. Since September 2022, Apple employees have been required to work in person three days a week.
