Short version: A hospital's outsourcing services. Outsourced managers are abusing hospital employees to induce employee turnover and replace those employees with their own firm's workers. Hospital management is enjoying the reduced costs reflecting positively on their own performance metrics while not witnessing the employee abuse firsthand.
Question: What can employees do if an outsourced manager is trying to push them into leaving or get them fired?
Background
A hospital is in the process of outsourcing some of its internal services. If an outsourced firm can drive employees away or get them fired, then the firm may get to replace current hospital staff with their own employees. Managers from outsourced firms seem to have an active interest in doing so, some more than others.
An outsourced firm's strategy seems to be a combination of:
Provide ample documentation of alleged issues to make it easy for the hospital to fire current employees on a whim.
Facilitate current employee turnover by making the work environment as unpleasant as possible.
At current, a particular outsourced firm has been successful in having several long-time employees in related departments leave while bringing in more of their own staff. Continued abuse is pushing more current employees in that direction.
Situation
A manager from this particular outsourced firm has adopted aggressive tactics. As I have friends and family in the hospital, I'm now involved in regular discussions about these problems, and I'd like to offer some helpful advice on how to deal with this manager.
This outsourced manager's tactics appear to include:
Reporting anything that they can make sound problematic in some way.
Example: Manager entered hospital kitchen area, where crammed aisles mean that employees occasionally bump into each other. Manager got an employee to bump into them. Manager is threatening to report employee to HR for intentional assault.
Example: Employees have desk work and visit patients. Manager threatened to report employees for allegedly fooling around in the privacy of their offices.
Behaving in a rude fashion under the guise of professional concern.
Example: Manager pulls employees off to the side and criticizes employees for arbitrary decisions in a non-constructive fashion.
Example: Manager interrupts employees as they talk to "correct" their word choices in fairly silly ways. Such as, if an employee says something happened "a day ago", manager may correct that it was actually just 20 hours ago.
Complication
I'm not exactly sure how hospital management feels about these issues, but realistically, they might be inclined to look the other way. The issue's that the outsourced firms might be able to replace current staff for less money.
The issue exists for the current staff and patients, as both are suffering due to this artificial-turnover environment where employees are being demoralized and hindered while trying to deliver patient care.
The hospital's management is currently enjoying the cost-cutting, as it's leading to successful performance metrics while hospital employees are burning themselves out trying to pick up the slack. While the overall situation is unsustainable, there's no apparent personal reason that the hospital's management should care. For them, correcting the problem will mean hurting their own bottom line, effecting a major conflict-of-interest that's probably inspiring them to look the other way and give the outsourcing firms the benefit-of-the-doubt.