Employees have been delivered a warning from Australiaās workplace umpire, which has ruled that an insurance brokerās decision to change her title in a legal document justified her dismissal.
On Friday, the Fair Work Commission ruled that broker Foula Dendroulakis, who had been employed at Victoria-based insurance company CCIB Services since 2021, was properly dismissed after she dropped the word āseniorā from her role as an account manager in formal correspondence.
Dendroulakis was at odds with the company over seating arrangements, productivity and working from home when she wrote to the Fair Work Commission alleging she had been forced to take on a more senior job without more pay.
But in her correspondence with the commission, she did not include the word āseniorā in her title, which CCIB Services viewed as an act of dishonesty and used to dismiss her.
The commission upheld that move, though in part because the insurance broker was a small business, it did not look at whether the employersā beliefs were ultimately correct or whether the dismissal was harsh on Dendroulakis.
When Dendroulakis started at CCIB, her employment contract labelled her only as an āaccount managerā. But the company said she was recruited to a āsenior account managerā position and paid accordingly, and that her business cards and email signature also reflected this. Dendroulakis also referred to herself as a āsenior account managerā, including on her LinkedIn profile.
In 2022, Dendroulakis sought a pay rise in which she referred to herself as a āsenior account managerā and was given a pay increase alongside a copy of her position description labelling her as such.
In 2025, one of CCIBās directors, Kurt Alder, decided Dendroulakis was not being productive while working from home. When she was in the office, she was spending ālots of time on personal calls in the boardroom during the work dayā, he concluded.
On one occasion, Alder said Dendroulakis had left the office early and did not return. When another co-director, Ryan Fisher, raised the issue with her, he said Dendroulakis ākept changing her storyā, initially claiming she had left early to take a lunch break, then saying she was too busy and worked from her phone in her car.
In a later email, Dendroulakis said she had left early to allow extra time to arrive at a clientās premises due to poor weather conditions.
Later that year, when the company altered seating arrangements in the office, Dendroulakis raised concern about the temperature of the location allocated to her and its impact on her ability to focus and work efficiently.
She said that, as a senior team member, she would appreciate an opportunity to ādiscuss an alternative seat, a private office arrangement, or a work from home agreement for two days a weekā.
The company said it would not be revisiting the desk issue and that Dendroulakisā āproductivity metrics did not support working two days from homeā.
In what the commission termed a ālengthy responseā, Dendroulakis then expressed concern about the job title in her employment contract.
The company acknowledged the word āseniorā had accidentally been omitted from the employment contract and that it had āno concernsā about formally changing her job title.
The same month, Dendroulakis was issued a first and final warning about her āinability to perform effectively while working from homeā.
In December 2025, Dendroulakis made a legal claim with the commission. She alleged that the firm had changed her role without a lawful basis or more pay.
Dendroulakis claimed she had been underpaid and that she was required to perform duties of a āsenior account managerā when her title was āaccount managerā. She also attached a copy of a letter she had previously sent to the company around the time of her pay rise, but removed the word āseniorā from her job title in the document.
CCIB also got a copy of Dendroulakisā claim and noticed the omission.
Dendroulakis said she had removed the word as a āreflexive correctionā in line with her employment agreement, but that it was not deliberate and that she had not intended to mislead the commission.
Her lawyers said she was āsincerely remorseful and apologeticā for the oversight, and that āsignificant work-related stress and anxietyā had affected her attention to detail.
Fisher said in evidence that Dendroulakis had become a āliabilityā to the business and its workplace and had been āblatantly dishonest on more than one occasionā.
Alder claimed Dendroulakisā conduct was āeffectively fraudā designed to bolster her claims against the company in an attempt to mislead the commission and falsely support her general protections claim.
Dendroulakisā conduct was āsufficiently serious,ā the commission said ā with the employer holding a genuine belief on reasonable grounds about the gravity of the conduct ā for immediate dismissal to be justified.
This masthead attempted to contact Dendroulakis for comment.
CCIB declined to comment.
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Millie Muroi is the economics writer at The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age covering workplace and economics. She was formerly an economics correspondent based in Canberraās Press Gallery and the banking writer based in Sydney.Connect via X or email.From our partners
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