Employee sabotages outsourced consultant’s job in order to hire his friend instead, company finds out, leading to him getting fired: ‘He was taken out of the building by security’ – FAIL Blog

Never delete a work-related email, you never know when it might come in handy.

If you go into my work email inbox right now, you will find it filled to the brim with different emails. I have thousands, if not tens of thousands, of emails on there, dating back to my very first day on the job. On slow work days, I might try to sort them out into different folders and categories, but I never, and I mean never, delete an email, no matter how unimportant it may seem.

The thing about work is that a lot of your reputation depends on evidence. You constantly have to prove your worth and prove that you are genuinely doing a good job by providing evidence of your work. You show your boss stats that you are making an impact, you create reports that show your work has value, and you have meeting after meeting, ensuring everyone knows what you do and why it is important.

That is where emails may also come in handy. Emails are where most of your conversation in the workplace takes place, which means we all have countless pieces of correspondence all about different tasks and instructions from different people in the company, and those can be great evidence in a time of need.

Take the employee in the story below as a perfect example of how important it is to keep your emails in your inbox. This IT consultant was hired as an outsourced employee to provide tech support to a company. They were told by the head of IT, in an email, that they are to communicate with the head of IT alone and never to provide support directly to anyone at the company. The consultant complied with the odd demand, but that meant that no one ever saw them working. All they could do was email the head of IT directly and hope he follows their advice. 

Soon enough, someone in the company noticed that the consultant was not, well, consulting anyone, which led to a huge, public confrontation. Luckily, the consultant came prepared and showed everyone the email evidence that they operated exactly how the head of IT demanded. All the proof was right there, in clear writing. This led the company to uncover more of the head of IT’s alarming actions, which inevitably led to him being let go. Keep scrolling to read how that happened.