Chapter 9: The Cost of Doing Nothing
The policy comparison changed the next board meeting.
Until then, we had been arguing over a guide, a text message, and a stack of complaints whose details were still being checked. Now the directors had a table showing that a part-time housekeeper’s protections could vary depending on which region employed her.
No single employee’s experience proved the whole company had failed. But the differences were not hypothetical. They were written into our own rules.
The HR director placed the comparison beside the board packets. The COO brought an early outline of staffing procedures from several properties. Our finance chief had prepared estimates for different leave protections.
The board chair looked from the documents to me.
“Before we discuss costs,” she said, “I want to be clear about what the investigation has established.”
The HR director opened her notes.
“We’ve confirmed that written protections vary by region and employee classification. We’ve received reports of hours declining after emergency-leave requests, but those reports are still being compared with scheduling records. In several cases, we cannot yet establish who made a schedule change or why.”
“Do we have proof of retaliation?” one director asked.
“In some cases, we have evidence about timing,” the director said. “That is not, by itself, proof of cause. The investigation is ongoing.”
I appreciated her precision. We could not fix a problem by pretending to know more than we did. But neither could we use uncertainty as a reason to leave every rule untouched.
“Then what are we being asked to decide today?” the board chair asked.
I looked down at the notes I had prepared. I had rewritten them twice, trying to make them sound less like a defense of myself.
“A temporary baseline,” I said. “A minimum protection for every employee while the review continues. Emergency leave would not lower a person’s performance score or future access to shifts. Schedule changes during or after leave would require a documented business reason, reviewed outside the employee’s direct reporting line if the employee raised a concern.”
“And how would a hotel cover the absence?” another director asked.
“That’s what we’re working out.”
The answer sounded inadequate because it was. For years, I had been comfortable approving policies that described what employees were expected to do. We had spent less time asking what support managers needed to honor those expectations without passing the burden to somebody else.
Our finance chief turned to the first estimate.
“We modeled several options,” he said. “The direct costs include paid leave, administrative coverage, and the time required to review disputed schedule decisions. The totals vary depending on how the policy defines eligible family and how much leave is provided.”
He paused before moving to the next page.
“These are estimates, not a final budget. We don’t yet have enough consistent data across the properties to calculate the cost with confidence.”
“What about the cost of losing trained employees?” I asked.
“We can estimate turnover expenses when an employee leaves,” he said. “Recruiting, onboarding, and training. But we cannot reliably price the people who considered leaving and stayed, or the people who didn’t report an emergency because they feared losing hours.”
The boardroom went quiet.
A spreadsheet could tell us what a shift cost to cover. It could not tell us what it cost a person to sit through a funeral service thinking about whether she still had a job.
The finance chief pointed to another column.
“We also don’t have a dependable measure for reduced morale or distrust. Those may affect retention and performance, but assigning a dollar figure would give a false impression of certainty.”
“Yet we’re expected to approve spending without a complete estimate,” a director said.
“We’re expected to decide what level of protection we believe the company owes its employees,” I replied. “The cost estimate should inform that decision. It can’t make the decision for us.”
The director folded his hands.
“Is one Atlanta incident enough to justify a company-wide policy change?”
I felt the question land where it was meant to: on Emily, and on the possibility that I had turned her grief into an argument for my own reform.
“One incident would be enough to take a serious complaint seriously,” I said. “But it isn’t the only information we have. HR has received dozens of complaints across several properties. The accounts differ. Some have not been corroborated. Some schedule changes may have other explanations. We should not call every one of them retaliation.”
“And the policy differences?” the board chair asked.
“Those are confirmed,” the HR director said. “The written protections differ by region and classification. Part-time workers receive different treatment in every region we compared.”
The director who had asked about Atlanta glanced at the table in front of her.
“So we know the rules are inconsistent. We do not know that all those inconsistencies caused harm.”
“That’s right,” the HR director said.
I leaned forward.
“We don’t need to claim that every schedule change was punishment in order to decide that emergency leave shouldn’t quietly damage someone’s standing. We need a policy that applies before we know what happened in any one case.”
One of the directors tapped the staffing outline.
“A written rule can create another problem. If a manager is short-staffed, the work still has to get done. If one employee takes leave, another employee may be asked to cover.”
“Or pressured to give up their own time,” I said.
“Exactly,” the COO replied. “We can’t solve one employee’s hardship by transferring it to a colleague.”
That was the part none of our early drafts had answered. A promise of leave meant little if the person covering the shift paid for it with an exhausted double or an implied threat that refusing would affect their own hours.
The COO said property procedures varied. Some managers called available employees; others leaned on volunteers; several properties used existing float staff. We had not yet compared those practices carefully enough to know which ones were reliable or fair.
“We can set a universal minimum without pretending every hotel has the same staffing needs,” he said. “The baseline can be company-wide. Coverage plans can be tailored to each property, as long as they meet the same protections.”
The board chair looked at the finance chief.
“Can we cost that?”
“Not today,” he said. “We need the operations plan first.”
I looked again at the policy comparison. A universal minimum sounded simple until someone had to answer practical questions: What counted as an emergency? Who could an employee contact if the manager was the source of concern? How much documentation was reasonable when someone was grieving? What happened if a worker’s family did not fit the boxes on a form?
Emily had already raised the last two questions without agreeing to become our adviser. Her words had not been a substitute for work we owed employees. They were a reminder to ask who our forms made invisible.
The chair gathered the pages into a neat stack.
“The board is prepared to consider a temporary baseline,” she said. “But we are not approving a permanent policy today. We need a workable operations plan, a clear process for appeals, and a cost estimate based on the actual coverage model.”
No one objected. No one called it a victory.
The temporary rule remained a proposal. The performance metric remained in place.
I sat back and felt the space between what we had recognized and what we had agreed to do. The company had spent years making sure every room could be turned over on time and every department could be measured. We had not built the same consistency around the people doing that work.
“We’ll bring back a plan,” the COO said.
“Bring back the places where it fails, too,” I told him. “If the staffing model works only when a manager pressures someone else to skip leave, it doesn’t work.”
The board chair ended the meeting without a vote.
As the directors began to leave, the finance chief stayed at the table, studying the final page of his estimate.
I waited until the room had nearly emptied.
“What is it?” I asked.
He turned the page toward me. A staffing assumption had been underlined in the draft budget.
“We can put together a temporary baseline,” he said. “But the current draft assumes managers can cover absences without additional staffing support.”
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His finger rested on the line.
“If we rely on that assumption, the cost of this policy may be passed to another worker before we ever see it in the budget.”
