You might know Joy Gendusa, the CEO of PostcardMania, from her April 2020 video in which she called out employees who had reported her company to the local authorities for not following Covid-19 safety protocols. But that's so 2020 Worst Employer.
Gendusa is back in the news, this time for asking her employees to bring their families and pets into the office so that they could continue working during Hurricane Ian.
In her words, communicated to employees during a Zoom call: "I honestly want to continue to deliver and I want to have a good end of quarter. And when [the hurricane] turns into nothing, I don't want it to be like, 'Great, we all stopped producing because of the media and the maybe that it was going to be terrible.'"
PostcardMania's public relations team told Vice.com that it was "not correct" that Gendusa asked employees to work through the hurricane. But they also didn't deny that she made the above statement to her employees, or that HR sent this follow-up email: "As most of you know, PCM was built to withstand a Category 5 Hurricane. And since we are a national company we would like to continue servicing our clients if we can. You will be allowed to bring your children to work those two days. We will have movies and other fun stuff in the common area to keep them entertained."
After this story went viral, PostcardMania told its employees that it would in fact close during the height of the hurricane, but employees told Vice.com that they were still expected to work a full 40-hour week. "I was under the impression that we were expected to work, and if you had to work from home or an evacuation zone, log in on your laptop. The messaging was 'production will not slow down,' consistently up until that post went viral."
If you require your employees to work through the worst hurricane to hit your area in decades so that your company can "make its number," you might be the worst employer of 2022.
* Thank you to the dozens of people who sent me this story for inclusion on this year's Worst Employer list.