National Clothesline

On the television show House, the main character — a brilliant but rather sociopathic doctor — constantly says: “everybody lies.”

Ronald Reagan, when asked about his approach to treaties between the Soviet Union and the United States, he said: “Trust, but verify.”

Groucho Marx once said that his brother, Harpo, was an honest guy, but that “you had to keep your eye on him.”

And as I write this, the most popular new reality show on television involves strapping people up to a polygraph machine and asking them questions like: “Do you always wash your hands after going to the bathroom?” and “Have you ever thought about killing your husband.”

Why is this show so popular? Because everybody lies.

By the way, polygraph evidence is inadmissible in most instances.

There are state and federal laws prohibiting the use of most lie detector tests in the workplace. Yet, these tests are still widely used in many other situations.

The reason they are inadmissible in court is because they will not uncover the best liars, namely those who lie without any physical reaction. I am not sure why they are prohibited in workplace investigations, especially since the government allows law enforcement agencies to use them in screening their employees.

Because of these restrictions, many companies use personality tests to screen for honest people.

Of course, do you really want to have people working for you who are radically honest or honest to a fault? “Yes, Mrs. Jones, we thought it was funny when John spilled his grape slurpie on your silk blouse. It was even funnier when he used it to clean up the mess.”

Regardless, lies are an essential problem in the workplace. Frequently, there is no direct evidence of misconduct, and the circumstantial evidence is, after all, circumstantial.

Employees do not like to rat on other employees, and employees certainly do not want to admit that they did not come to work on a busy day because they went to the movies.

Many times, employers do not have evidence that the employee engaged in misconduct, but they do have evidence that the employee lied. In those cases, employers will frequently discipline the employee for the lie, not the underlying misconduct.

Unfortunately, in situations where employers have agreed to binding arbitration, arbitrators will overanalyze discipline based on lying to the point of absurdity. Let me give you two examples.

In one reported case, an employee was disciplined for lying about a visit to the doctor’s office on the day he called in sick.

He told the employer that he had “seen” the doctor that day. It turns out that the employee did, literally, see the doctor, but was not examined by him.

The arbitrator, incredibly, found that the employee had not lied because he had, in fact, had a visual encounter with the doctor. In other words, the employee picked a good lie.

In the other case, the employee was fired for calling in sick for a crippling headache, then being videotaped most of the day working in his yard.

The arbitrator found that the employee did have a headache when his wife called, that he took medication for the headache that might have prevented him from working under the company’s prescription drug policy, and that the medication would have worn off before the employee’s shift was over.

Yikes. Now, that’s a really good lie. There are so many moving parts that it is impossible to “prove” or “disprove” every element.

Even if you do not have an arbitration agreement with your employees, it never hurts to ask the right follow up questions. If you suspect an employee is lying, you need to probe further to confirm or refute your suspicions.

If the employee said he “saw” the doctor, ask him if the doctor examined him.

If the employee says he cannot come to work, ask what he can do while he is home, especially if you intend to check up on him.

As the number of lawsuits increases, employers have to be mindful of judges and jurors, like arbitrators, who get bogged down in technicalities and lose all of their common sense.

Treat lying like other misconduct, and investigate the facts before you discipline an employee for lying. It might spell the difference in the outcome of the lawsuit. While “everybody lies,” no one ever says he likes a liar.