Two hundred and fourteen employees of Dunmore Gribble Integrated Solutions, a mid-sized facilities and document management firm in Telford, have been told to attend a mandatory ninety-minute course explaining why they are not getting the pay rise they were emailed about last Tuesday. The email was fake. The course is not.
The message, headed “Confidential: Your Salary Review Outcome”, promised a 6.5 per cent increase backdated to April and invited recipients to confirm their bank details via a link. It was sent by the company’s own IT department as part of what internal documents call a “phishing resilience exercise”, timed to coincide with Cybersecurity Awareness Month. Of the 386 staff who received it, 214 clicked the link and 131 entered their bank details, in several cases twice, to be safe.
A learning opportunity
Those who clicked have been enrolled on “Understanding Your Remuneration: Why Nothing Has Changed”, to be held in Meeting Room 4, which has no windows and a projector that only displays in shades of green. Attendance will be recorded. Anyone who fails to attend will be required to take a second course, covering the importance of attending the first.
Gillian Marsh, Head of People Experience, said the company had been surprised by the tone of some of the feedback.
\u201cI want to be clear that nobody has been misled. The pay rise was always theoretical. It has been theoretical since 2019, when it was first discussed, and it remains so. If anything, the fake one was the most generous communication the company has issued in years. It had a figure in it. It had a date.\u201d
Ms Marsh added that the course had been designed with sensitivity in mind and would open with a short slide titled “Managing Expectations”, followed by a longer one titled “Gratitude”.
Darren Pickering, a senior accounts payable clerk who has worked at the firm for eleven years, said he had read the email standing up. \u201cI rang my wife from the car park to tell her. I then had to ring her back from the same car park about forty minutes later, which was the part I found difficult. She had already looked at conservatories.\u201d
Only nine members of staff reported the email as suspicious. Each received a certificate of vigilance and a five pound voucher for a coffee chain that closed its Telford branch in 2022. One of the nine, a payroll assistant, said she had known it was false because it was addressed to her correctly, which had not happened in the company’s correspondence since she joined.
The exercise cost \u00a311,400, a figure staff have noted is roughly what a one per cent rise for the warehouse team would have come to. Ms Marsh said the two budgets were entirely separate and that comparing them was the sort of thinking the course was designed to address.
Dr Helen Okafor, a lecturer in organisational psychology who has written on workplace security culture, said that official guidance was fairly consistent on the matter of simulated tests. \u201cThe advice is that blaming staff for failing them erodes trust and makes people less likely to report real incidents. Sending them to a windowless room to be told that the thing they wanted does not exist is, I would say, a novel way of handling that risk. I would not recommend it, but I can see it has a certain internal logic.\u201d
Several employees have asked whether the 6.5 per cent figure might be honoured, given that it was, technically, issued by the company. Ms Marsh said this had been considered and that the answer was contained in slide seven.
A further exercise is planned for November, in which staff will receive an email offering a free lunch in the canteen. Ms Marsh said she expected strong engagement, and that the company had already booked Meeting Room 4.
