The home office offers employees a lot of freedom – get up later, do smaller household chores on the side and save time for the commute to work. As long as productivity doesn’t suffer, many employers turn a blind eye. But Suzie Cheikho overdid it – and that’s why she lost her job with an Australian insurance company.
The reason for her expulsion: Cheikho is said to have typed too little at home, reports the Australian site “news.com.au”. Her company found out because special monitoring software was installed on the employees’ laptops. This enabled the company to track who was typing how much on their keyboard. Cheikho is said to have averaged only 54 keystrokes per hour. For the insurance company, this was clear evidence that she neglected her work in the home office – the result was termination after 18 years in the company.
Ironically, Cheikho’s responsibilities included coordinating remote work at the company. Apparently she didn’t take the job too seriously. Through the monitoring software, her employer found that she only worked the specified number of hours 44 days out of 49 and only started work on time two days. There was even no activity at all on four days.
However, the 38-year-old did not want to accept her dismissal and went to court. She questioned the accuracy of the data, claiming she “never failed to work.” She did go shopping during working hours, but never “all day”. Her boss had planned long in advance to get rid of her because of her mental problems. However, she was unable to provide any evidence to support her assertion that the data was not accurate.
So the court agreed with the employer, the dismissal is valid. Cheikho “didn’t work the way she was expected to.” The fired employee went after the verdict on TikTok against her company and accused her of a “personal attack”. “I’m being treated like a criminal,” she complained. Now that her case has become public, she is concerned about her future on the job market: “No one will hire me anymore,” she told the Daily Mail.
Sources: news.com.au / Daily Mail / Suzie Cheikho on TikTok
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