my employee refuses to reveal her online status

by Alison Green on August 6, 2024

A reader writes:

I manage a small customer-facing portion of a broader team. The 10 of us are responsible for being on the frontlines, understanding our customer needs, and responding to questions and new requests.

Since the pandemic, our company has switched to using Slack as our primary mode of communication. While the company is based in the midwest, my team is highly distributed over multiple geographic locations and most of our partners use Slack to ask questions and make new requests of the team.

One of my newest team members, who joined about six months ago, puts her Slack status as perpetually “away” so that you can never tell if she’s online or not. I waited a few weeks to see if this was temporary, and when it seemed clear it was not, I asked her if this was intentional. She said it was — that she didn’t want people to know if she was online because she didn’t want to feel pressure to respond right away. I told her that this being a client-facing role, it is important to signal when you are available / when you are not, and that perhaps she could do that by using status messages instead. She told me that was too much effort for her, and she will think about what she can do instead “that works best for her.” She also suggested I was not respecting individual work styles/preferences/autonomy and not assuming good intent.

I was super taken aback by all of that and quite upset since I’m actually quite a hands-off manager by nature and have to force myself to be more prescriptive at times (have been working on that with a coach!). I rarely message her during the day or send her time-sensitive requests, partially because I assume she’s not available or I won’t get a timely response. I’ve also received feedback that some of our customers don’t reach out to her because she never appears to be online. As a result, she is likely handling a smaller volume of work and requests than my other team members. When I mentioned that wasn’t fair to the rest of the team, she accused me of making “unnecessary comparisons” between her and other team members.

My HR rep has confirmed it is within my purview to make signaling online availability a requirement of the role and has suggested I schedule a time to set team-wide norms and expectations, which I plan to do next week. But in general, her response to me made me feel like a total jerk and a terrible manager. I’m also worried that if I let her keeping doing this, than there’s no reason I couldn’t let the rest of my team do so — and a client-facing team that appears perpetually offline would be a super bad look.

Your team member is messing with your head, and you’re letting her.

It’s completely reasonable and solidly within your purview to require that people not set themselves to perpetually unavailable on Slack — in any role, really, but particularly in ones where (a) customers use Slack to contact them and/or (b) the team uses Slack as a primary communication tool. You have both factors in play. There’s nothing remotely heavy-handed about your request.

What is ridiculous is your employee’s announcement that being available to colleagues and clients is “too much effort” for her, and her attempt to frame this as a you problem rather than a her problem. To be clear: it’s a her problem. (And believe me when I tell you that she’s going to be a problem in other ways too. If you haven’t seen those yet, brace yourself for them to emerge — in fact, assume they’re already happening and you just haven’t seen them yet. If you go digging into her dealings with coworkers and clients, you’re almost certainly going to find more problems. Take this as a sign to dig.)

There are of course times when it’s perfectly reasonable for someone to set their status to “away” or “unavailable,” like when they need deep-focus time and want to avoid interruptions. But it’s not reasonable to set it that way 24/7 in a job that relies on Slack to communicate.

Let her know what the requirements are for availability status on your team, and then hold her to that. If she wants to think about an alternative that works better for her, she’s welcome to propose one and you can consider whether it will work or not, but until then she needs to indicate her availability and meet whatever responsiveness standards your team requires. If that doesn’t work for her, then the job doesn’t work for her. Which would be perfectly fine for her to conclude! But she can’t expect to stay in the job and turn it into something it’s not.

You may also like:
{ 439 comments }

{ 439 comments… read them below }

  1. Peanut Hamper*

    This reminds me of the second grader during the pandemic who changed his screen name in Zoom to “Connecting…” so his teacher thought he was having internet connectivity issues instead of not paying attention. I can’t help but think it’s for the same reason, given that she does a smaller amount of work than everyone else.

    I do believe her time with this company is going to be limited.

      1. Ess Ess*

        Not completely smart… I recall that story. They were caught because they spelled “connecting” wrong. LOL

    2. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain*

      brilliant! Elementary school can’t fire you, but for adults in a job, even having perpetual internet connectivity issues would result in termination.

    5. Chzplz*

      Yeah, if she’s smart in addition to being lazy, she’s going to require monitoring for responsiveness.

      I had one employee set up a mouse jiggler program to defeat the idle timeout in Teams.

      I assigned him some general continuous improvement projects to put his smarts to good use, but in the end his laziness won out and I let him go.

  2. ThursdaysGeek*

    It’s not ‘arbitrary’ to be available for working when you’re being paid to work.

      1. Slow Gin Lizz*

        Yeah, listing yourself as available on Slack is about the lowest level of effort I can think of that a job might require. This is the Slack equivalent of the in-office employee who comes to the office late and leaves early in a public-facing service role (like this one!) and who, when told by their manager that they need to be on time and work their prescribed hours, retorts that being in the office all day cramps their style and they’ll come and go as they please.

        Reminds me of the recent story of the intern who was upset they weren’t allowed to have a laptop because then they’d be tied to an office all day. Um, yeah, that’s what this newfangled thing called “work” is.

        2. Falling Diphthong*

          Also the employee who, in person, radiates “I am fully occupied and will be annoyed if you interrupt me” and so customers all pass by and go to the other staff.

    2. KayDeeAye*

      I know this is irrational, but I find myself truly disliking this person. She just sounds so obnoxious and egocentrical. I am sorry the OP has to work with her, but I’m glad I don’t have to. I’d say the OP shouldn’t have to work with her for much longer, though, unless she ceases to think she is the one who gets to call the shots.

      1. I GOTS TO KNOW!*

        Oh I dislike her immensely. She’s absolutely playing mind games, using buzzwords that are not at all related to the situation to make it seem like an issue that it absolutely isn’t. I cannot stand people who coopt language like that. I bet she uses “emotional labor” incorrectly next.

        OP – you need to lay down the law with this employee and really start doing from digging like AAM suggested. I bet this is the tip of a very deep iceberg.

        I have a very strong feeling she is not long for your team.

        1. I Have RBF*

          Seriously.

          “As a condition of your continued employment, you will set yourself as ‘active’ (available) in Slack at the start of every shift. You may be ‘away’ for lunch and after your shift ends. This is not negotiable or subject to your perception of effort or need for autonomy. It is part of your job. If you do not comply with this requirement on s regular basis you will be subjected to an increasing level of discipline, up to and including termination. Do you understand this now?”

          I would not give her any wiggle room, including telling her that if her “lunch” extends through the entire afternoon she will be docked pay for not being available to do her job. I don’t know if Slack has any way to monitor someone’s ongoing status (8 hours active, 16 hours away) but you will have to check her every hour for at least a month.

      2. Van Wilder*

        I mean, the absolute gall, to be the newest hire and think that you’re going to dictate how you do your role (different from every other person on the team) and then to tell your manager to her face that it’s her job to let you work however you want.

      3. MigraineMonth*

        I don’t think it’s irrational to dislike someone who is this emotionally manipulative. She responded to the LW pointing out that she was dumping most of her work on the rest of the team by accusing the LW of “unnecessary comparisons” to colleagues. She acts like being asked to do a core part of her job (be available for requests) is the LW being overreaching and a micromanager.

        1. I Have RBF*

          I would expect that her attitude would have gotten me walking papers at just about every job that I’ve ever had. Yes, I was young and stupid once, but never that stupid.

          If she was still on probation this would get her fired – it’s actually insubordination. She has refused to comply with a workplace expectation, and was a bit arrogant in the manner of her refusal.

      4. Artemesia*

        She is someone who has learned to use the language of abuse, and therapy and such to bully the manager. Like the people who think ‘hostile work environment’ is the magic frame to stop from being managed. I’d be thinking about both clamping down on the behavior, closely monitoring productivity and planning to fire or manage her out unless magic happens. It isn’t this one thing. This is someone who is going to be a nightmare to her colleagues and her boss as long as she is there.

        1. Fluffy Orange Menace*

          “he is someone who has learned to use the language of abuse, and therapy and such to bully the manager.”
          I had the exact same thought. She reminds me of my niece who has learned to do this with “boundaries”. Setting boundaries is great…except when they aren’t really boundaries and are used manipulatively. For example, asking her to put her dirty dishes in the dishwasher, or clean her room violates her personal boundaries and is an attempt to control her, etc… You cannot tell, or even ASK her to do anything w/o “no, I’m establishing boundaries and this violates them,” or some such nonsense. It is EXHAUSTING dealing with it.

          1. I Have RBF*

            Oh, FFS. Asking someone to pull their weight is not a boundary violation. I would tell her “My boundary is that you will pull your weight in chores or you will need to find a different residence, like juvenile hall, that will put up with your abuse of their boundaries with your recalcitrance. My boundary is that in my house, you will obey my rules regarding chores and cleanliness. I will not live with a slob or a brat. Choose wisely.”

            I pulled something similar as a teenager, and my mom shut that shit down hard.

            1. allathian*

              Yeah. I didn’t dream of pulling that sort of shit when I was a teenager because my mom would’ve come down on me like a ton of bricks.

              I’m very glad that my mom taught me the chores I needed as an adult when I was a kid. Sure I sometimes complained about them, but she had no time for that nonsense. She was like “I don’t care if you complain and gripe all the time you do it, but I expect you to clean this bathroom to my standard by X o’clock.” I eventually stopped griping because it just made me feel worse about the chores I had to do. We also had an old-fashioned fuse box where you have to change the fuse rather than flip a switch, and my parents taught me to do that and to change a lightbulb, and hang a painting, and unblock a drain, and…

              We didn’t have a dishwasher so my sister and I washed the dishes every day after dinner and on weekends and vacations after lunch and dinner. Our mom usually washed the breakfast dishes because we left for school before she left for work. My dad didn’t do household chores, except Sunday dinner when he felt like it, and then he’d use up all the dishes in the house and he clearly expected someone else to wash them. He cooked elaborate 3-course meals, even if the dessert was usually ice cream from the freezer or something mom had baked, and only when he felt like it. Our mom cooked every day because the family needed to eat… In 7th grade everyone regardless of gender has a year of home economics, including cooking. So when we were old enough, we helped with that. My mom was keen on baking and she usually baked something at least once a month. We often helped with that, but I don’t remember helping her much with food prep before 7th grade.

              When I worked in customer service jobs, I wouldn’t have dreamed of pretending to be unavailable when I was expected to work. In my first retail job I had a prickly store manager, but she was very protective of her young female staff. When a particular customer came in, she’d tell us to take a break in the back room, even if we’d just come from one, and deal with him herself. It’s rather amazing that he never seemed to catch on, he never spent more time than necessary in the store. Obviously we had to deal with him when she wasn’t working, but I really appreciated her understanding. He was a creepy middle-aged man who kept asking for every young woman’s phone number. I mumbled something about not giving out my phone number at work, and “stop asking, or I’ll tell my dad.” Thankfully that store closed and I got transferred to another store in the same chain and I never saw him again.

          2. Anonymous For Now*

            Does she work or is she a full time student? If she works, setting a boundary that she will not do part of her job will get her put on a PIP or fired. If a student, not doing all of her assignments will result in a lower grade or possibly an F in the class. If she were a tenant in a place not owned by her relative and she did the equivalent, such as not paying the full rent, she’d be tossed out.

            You cannot set a boundary that involves not doing something that is required by your job, your school, or your rental agreemnt.

          3. IReallyNeedAName*

            “ For example, asking her to put her dirty dishes in the dishwasher, or clean her room violates her personal boundaries and is an attempt to control her, etc”

            A lot of the employees that we have hired in the past few years are like this. They’ve said they don’t like being told what to do or being “controlled”.

      5. Oregonbird*

        It sounds like she’s one of the recent graduates, a covid shut-in graduate. They’re flooding into public life with the social graces of 7th graders. Businesses are going to need managers with the ability to set solid boundaries and coach bear-children into adulthood, or they’ll find an entire generation has been dropped off a cliff.

        1. Clorinda*

          They’ve had three or four years of full time schooling since then. Covid seventh graders are my current high school juniors. These young people just out of college were fully online maybe 12th grade and college freshman year, or maybe third first two years of college. There’s no reason for them to act like some catastrophe stalled them at the emotional age of twelve.

          This one, in particular,isn’t stalled at all. she knows what she’s doing.

          1. Emily*

            There is nothing at all in the letter that indicates age, and this sort of speculating is not helpful. There are great workers of all ages and there are terrible workers of all ages.

            1. Wonderland*

              further to this, I worked with someone in their 60s that absolutely would pull this kind of stunt. then go to the highest level of arbitration (skipping all the steps before that) for any perceived slight. so that’s what I pictured: a tedious, middle aged piece of work.

        2. Jess*

          I work with several recent grads and that hasn’t been my experience at all! The ones I work with tend to err on the side of being too available and very eager to work hard, and as a manager I have had to gently remind them that they should take sick time when they’re sick, don’t need to be available when they’re off the clock, etc. I don’t think it’s fair to generalize; you can find slackers like OP’s coworker in any generation.

        3. londonedit*

          We have a ‘Covid shut-in graduate’ working for us, who had a terrible end to their schooling with their final exam results replaced by predicted grades (which were then downgraded because teachers were accused of inflating results) and most of their first year at uni done online. They are excellent at their job and wouldn’t dream of behaving as this employee has done. I think we need to be really careful about labelling everyone who had their last years of school/uni impacted by Covid as having ‘the social graces of 7th-graders’. It’s simply not true.

        4. MigraineMonth*

          I don’t think there are any generational cues in the letter and I don’t think it’s helpful to speculate if you’re just going to make unsupported generalizations about an entire generation.

          Also, I think it would be a huge mistake to think that this employee “lacks social graces” or “doesn’t know better”. Manipulative people generally have great emotional intelligence and only feign confusion when it benefits them.

      6. Strawberry Snarkcake*

        I felt exactly the same way. I managed a person like this and I couldn’t have been happier when she handed in her notice for greener pastures. Of course those greener pastures turned out to be not so green and when she tried to return a very short time later she was gobsmacked that we didn’t want her back.

      1. But what to call me?*

        As opposed to previous days, when every person on the planet was kind and considerate and selfless and hardworking and never an entitled jerk?

        Entitled jerks are not a new phenomenon. Neither is declaring that they are a new phenomenon.

        1. Mangled Metaphor*

          I think the scale of opportunities to be entitled is newer though.
          Previous workforces could slack for a few hours here and there (hiding in the back room, the loo, extended smoke breaks etc). Current workforces on hybrid can have *two full days* to mouse jiggle and watch Netflix.

          This isn’t a generational thing. I work with a Millenial who is the most workshy AH I’ve ever encountered, and another, only a couple of years younger who I have to remind that its lunchtime or she would forget to have a break. And for completeness, just at my company, you can also replace Millenial with GenX or GenZ and the rest of my previous sentence would remain almost unchanged (the AH is uniquely him though – the other generations can be lazy and entitled, but he’s elevated it to a whole other level.)

          1. tinyhipsterboy*

            I’m a bit confused as to how needing to remind someone to take their break is comparable to someone not wanting to work, as well as how that results in two full days of Netflix. Some surveys have shown that working from home makes the majority of people *more* productive overall, as well as less stressed.

            Some people absolutely will take advantage of that, but there are always people who have done and will do that. Like, the reported percentages of workers using social media on the job IRL and workers using social media on the job remotely are comparable.

            1. Polly Hedron*

              They’re not comparable. I took Mangled Metaphor’s examples to mean that stereotyping generations is wrong because every generation includes individuals showing many different levels of effort. E.g. the two Millenials are opposites:
              • the first Millenial is very workshy
              • the second Millenial is so workaholic that she forgets to take breaks

  3. Sloanicota*

    The fact that you can easily see she’s doing a lower volume of work means that you have an extremely easy metric to point to here. Establish guidelines for what volume you expect a team member to handle on an average day, make it clear to the team that this is your expectation for any person in their role, and then get rid of this employee if she continues to do visibly less than anyone else. You can find a new employee who will be available.

    1. Resume please*

      Right! There’s no “assuming” of intent, and there’s no “unnecessary” comparisons when actual numbers support that her Away status is affecting the volume of work for her and the rest of the team.

      2. CLC*

        I understand the problem with respect to messages from clients. But I’m wondering why the OP doesn’t just message her when her status is set to away anyway? I guess not following why the op has cut down on sending her stuff just because she’s set to away and knowing that it’s always set to away. Can’t they contact her anyway? (We don’t use slack but we message each other when we’re yellow on teams all the time).

        2. Kevin Sours*

          So as a remote manager you need to be respectful of people’s time and work/not work boundaries. Messaging people when they are “off work” creates pressure to respond even when you might not mean to. This employee has forfeited that consideration but the instincts become reflexive.

          1. TootsNYC*

            true!
            But the moment I found out she was using “away” all the time, that goes out the window.
            (I also have the respectful assumption that if someone doesn’t reply immediately on Slack, they’re busy in some way—concentrating, in a meeting, in the bathroom…)

          2. Cmdrshprd*

            But in this situation it seems like the employee in question has set hours like 9am to 5pm, so a message during that time is fair game.

            In this situation I do think OP needs to just message the employee still and not hold back.

            Being respectful is one thing, but being able to send things when needed is another. I work as an hourly employee M to F, but work with salary employees that work a lot of hours and weekends. they still send requests when it is best for them and I handle/respond to them when it is my work time.

          3. Fluffy Orange Menace*

            Yes, but presumably this isn’t 9pm… it is during her core working hours so “not work” time shouldn’t be a consideration. I’ve had to tell people on my team that they are showing offline on Teams at 10am and they need to be online and other than when in meetings, at lunch, taking a 15min breather break, etc.. they need to show as available so our customer (the gov) knows they are reachable. It is not unreasonable to message someone during their working hours and assume they are working. There is “respecting their time” and there is “expecting them to be working” for the bulk of the work day.

        3. MigraineMonth*

          If it’s an urgent task, it’s a lot faster and easier to send it to Julie, who I know isn’t in the bathroom or in a meeting, than to spend time determining if Mary is actually available even though she’s set to “unavailable”.

          It’s also a weird balance to strike, where you don’t expect Julie to always be immediately available (because sometimes she’s set as “unavailable” during focus times, breaks or meetings), but you do have to expect Mary to always be immediately available because otherwise you would never assign her urgent work.

        4. allathian*

          Yeah, we message each other on Teams when we’re yellow or even red. It’s up to each individual to manage their Teams settings appropriately. When we’re sharing a screen, messages don’t show as popups. I only see the messages from my manager and close coworker when I’m flagging DND for deep focus stuff. But my coworker and I have agreed not to message each other when one of us is on DND unless it’s genuinely urgent.

          But regardless, this employee is setting inappropriate boundaries for the job. Because the boundaries are inappropriate there’s no reason for the LW to respect them.

          1. Project Maniac-ger*

            Message culture is so interesting – I wouldn’t even acknowledge someone’s teams status unless it’s do not disturb or out of office, because at my work messages are asynchronous. It’s crazy to me that this supervisor is afraid to message their subordinate, during work hours, while they are at work (because the supervisor would know OOO since they approved it) just because their bubble isn’t green.

    2. Dust Bunny*

      I was just getting on here to say this: Those other problems that AAM predicts? There is one right here. She’s not doing her share of the work.

      I also have a client-interactive job (although Slack isn’t our primary means of contact). I cant just be unavailable all the time.

      1. GythaOgden*

        Yeah, totally. Our job is also heavily based on being available when people need us to be. It’s incredibly childish of this person to baulk at normal requirements like this and I wonder how long she will last and whether she’ll get it when she’s fired.

        (Full disclosure — even the working rights here in the UK wouldn’t protect you. We have a probationary period at our org and only four or five months in I saw someone in this mindset crash and burn in spectacular fashion. I must say it cured me of any imposter syndrome I might have otherwise had in the transition from reception to team admin — at least I was actually making myself available and getting my work done.)

          1. GythaOgden*

            Sadly it is related to a HR case so I don’t want to go into too much detail for the privacy of those involved. But it definitely involves shifting goalposts in the same manner as OP’s employee is doing. Basically ‘Zoe’ was the metaphorical cat among the pigeons on her team and she lasted about three months because she alienated just about everyone on her team, each over a different thing.

            I was writing the minutes and watching her dig herself into such a deep hole I was glad my camera was off, because my face tends to show my feelings. I wondered if she was also fairly young because she did have the same sort of approach as OP’s employee, but then she made a comment which pegged her as at least 30 and possibly a bit older (a bit of internet ephemera which was retired over ten years ago, meaning she must have come of age during the 00s), which surprised me because she was acting like someone in their first ever job.

            But…I also know someone who’s the complete opposite of the person OP is concerned about (let’s call her Amy). She’s earnest, very friendly, nice to know and conscientious, but she’s the victim of the Peter Principle thanks to an org that didn’t care much about facilities and just promoted someone who wasn’t suited to the job at hand to be a butt in a seat, and when an org that did care about facilities took over, they were struggling to help her succeed where she was. We actually gave her the best sort of PIP we could — which ended successfully when she transferred to be a reception supervisor, which was where her big heart and enthusiasm for the health service really came out.

            At the end of the day, for every one Zoe, there’s a dozen Amys who are struggling in the wrong job and just need a better fit. I’m glad we could actually help Amy — but you can’t help the Zoes among us unless they are prepared to help themselves.

    3. Person from the Resume*

      That is why she’s unavailable … because people don’t reach out to her and she gets less work.

      Not only guidelines for amount of work she does, but the amount of time that she needs to be available so people can reach out for help.

      But document because you’ll probably need to fire the person for poor performance soon.

      1. Willow Sunstar*

        Agreed. The employee might be newish to the working world and unaware of standards, but IRL, you have to actually do the work, unless you’re a recent Powerball winner. Sometimes it takes firing a person before they figure out they can’t get away with stuff.

      2. MigraineMonth*

        Document and move to firing immediately, because this is far beyond a performance problem. The employee is finding ways to foist her work on other employees, refusing reasonable directions from her manager, and is emotionally manipulative.

        The thing about manipulative people is that they can poison a team culture *very quickly*. Don’t let her stay long enough to do so.

    4. Not Tom, Just Petty*

      But, but, but…you can’t compare her to her colleagues! It isn’t necessary! It isn’t FAAIIRR! /s
      OP, I hope you wrote in for a smell test and not advice.
      This employee does not pass the smell test.
      You don’t have to change your management style. But, unfortunately, you do have to manage.
      This is one of those times where you tell her what you need and you stop talking.

    5. metadata minion*

      Yep, exactly. I’m glad there isn’t the expectation to mark our availability on Slack at my workplace, because that’s the sort of thing I have a hard time remembering, but a) if it were a requirement I would *make a dang effort* and b) within my very regular working hours, I respond pretty promptly to Slack messages so my coworkers can assume that if I’m working, they can send me a message.

      1. I Have RBF*

        We use Zoom chat, and I am pretty much available from when I log on to when I log off. Even in the bathroom, I have Zoom chat on my cellphone. I check to see that I am marked available when I log on and say ‘Good morning’ to my teammates. If I am out of the office, busy or away, I can set that too.

        We have one guy who is set mostly away, because he’s pretty busy, but I will ping him to see if he’s available if we have a meeting. He’s an outlier, though.

        This person is insubordinate in her refusal to comply with a workplace requirement. Also, it is perfectly reasonable and quite fair to compare her to others with the same duties. That’s the way the world works. The OP could tell her that, instead of comparing her to the others, she will be held to a standard decided by her obvious high opinion of herself. But either way, she will be held to a standard, and she does not get to set the standard. Her employer pays her for a certain level of work. If she is not willing to meet that expectation, she will be fired.

        1. allathian*

          Yeah, well, I have to say that this doesn’t look as good as you think it does. There’s something deeply wrong with your workplace culture if you feel it’s necesary to check your Zoom even in the bathroom! People are allowed to go to the bathroom while they’re working. I mean, if someone has such severe GI issues that they spend half the time they’re supposed to be working on the toilet, that’s one thing, but otherwise… Do you mark yourself unavailable for lunch?

    6. Caz*

      I absolutely would not assume good intent, because her stated intent is to be less available, and that’s inherently *not good*.

      I would not respect her autonomy, because she is abusing the autonomy she has been given.

      I would be putting her on a PIP, with clear stated goals around availability, output, and sustaining a high level of quality work when she shows improvement and is taken off the PIP.

      1. Artemesia*

        She has no autonomy to decide if she will do the job or not — and yes unless after one clear directive she is transformed, I’d be moving to a PIP. She needs to go. The longer you wait, the harder it always gets.

      2. owen*

        why not assume good intent? It doesn’t change the actions required: she still needs to be available. if she truly cannot handle being marked as available then there needs to move to a ‘this job is not for you’ discussion of one kind or another, it doesn’t really matter what the actual intent is, and assuming good intent benefits you as much as her (fewer ill feelings to squash whenever you have to talk with her)

        i’m not suggesting not holding her accountable, i’m just suggesting that assuming good (or even neutral) intent rather than intentional malingering should improve your state of mind while you go through whatever processes of documentation is required by your company / location, and the ‘is this job right for you’ discussions.

        and if those work out so that she does eliminate the unacceptable issues and performs at the required level and responsiveness, you’re not left with a ‘she tried to mess with me’ mindset you then have to work through while managing her.

        1. Fluffy Orange Menace*

          …. that’s nice… in theory, but what “good intent” can there possibly be in stating that you intend to always show as Away, so that people can’t ask you to do your job? I’d have to do a whole lot of wrapping my brain around the axle to come up with any possible way that the employee has good or neutral intent.

    7. Zircon*

      But the letter doesn’t say she’s doing less work – it says she’s “likely” doing less work. Why can’t her manager (OP) easily see her out put?

      1. MigraineMonth*

        It’s possible they have metrics, but they’re easy to game. I worked for a company where they measured the number of tickets you handled, but the tickets could vary wildly in the amount of time/effort needed to resolve. You could get great metrics by cherry-picking the quick ones.

        1. Artemesia*

          The IRS used to promote based on cases closed, so easy cases — bullying grandma out of $100 — were snapped up and closed by climbers who got promoted while complex cases worth millions languished.

          1. MigraineMonth*

            Unfortunately, thanks to budget cuts, the IRS still goes after the tiny amounts over the millions of dollars. You are far more likely to be audited if you claim the Earned Income Tax Credit (for working families near the poverty lines) than if you’re a millionaire. The IRS is too underfunded to sort through complex cases, so billionaires can get away with anything.

        2. Star Trek Nutcase*

          Agree. In accounts payable, it’s very easy for the supervisor to pull metrics of invoices processed. I had a coworker, S, who consistently only processed the “simple” ones (set price, complete invoice info, etc.). Her numbers looked okay (not great cause S still did as few as possible). Once the supervisor assigned vendors to evenly distribute workload, S’s slacking was extremely noticeable and also lead to many of her errors showing up (e.g., she had paid one vendor an old & higher contract price for months). Unfortunately, S wasn’t fired because upper boss was a wimp.

        3. Testing*

          With companies doing this, I’ve also noticed that the first answer you get to your question is likely bullcrap. Because all that counts is speed and the number of tickets handled, the customer services people don’t read the message properly and just reply with what they think is the answer. Then you as the customer has to reply back to politely ask them to actually read and think, since your question was actually about something else. It’s immensely frustrating! Usually those messages also also very polite and friendly, since I guess that’s also something they look at, but the actual problem requires several messages to be solved…

        4. Teej*

          All Metrics become objectives and cease to be valuable. No matter how good the employee is, if you tell them to meet a number, they will meet it, but not in the way you truly want.

      2. Tio*

        I once had an employee who was measured in large part on number of files worked per month. I discovered that what he was doing was opening a number of essentially blank files around the end of the month to have a high count, then deleting them on the 1st and reopening them at the beginning of the next month, so that each file read to the system as two files. We didn’t figure it out until he was off at the end of the month and I went looking for a file and found it hidden in a drawer and blank, and then looked into the specifics of some of his last months works and discovered a bunch of the previous month’s files were deleted ones. No idea exactly how long he was pulling that before I came in an caught it.

      3. Fluffy Orange Menace*

        The OP says they need to be available to answer questions and new requests, so it doesn’t sound like it’s a metric (e.g. tickets) driven job, so, I can see how they wouldn’t really be able to quantify the employee’s output. However, I think it’s common sense that “If you aren’t showing available, people won’t be reaching out to you, so they have to reach out to others to pick up your slack.”

    8. iglwif*

      Yes! She’s actually made it very easy for you to justify requiring a change in her habits, because it’s now so clear that appearing unavailable is directly affecting her productivity. (I am 99% sure she is doing this on purpose, but it doesn’t matter: you are not making any assumptions about her intent, you are naming the problem of her low productivity.)

      It’s a client services job. Clients need to be able to contact you, and they also need to feel comfortable contacting you! That means you need to signal when you are and aren’t available. If you are unwilling to do that in either of the two very easy ways available to you, then you are in the wrong job.

    9. Meghan*

      Using specific metrics could get hairy quickly since:
      1) the manager doesn’t micromanage so this would require significant mental lift to the manager
      2) if the employee determines someone else isn’t doing the same volume due to other tasks they may have she’ll use this to say that manager is being unfair
      3) in order to say “I expect people to do X volume” manager would have to apply this minimum standard across everyone who doesn’t have issues/require micromanaging

      Clearly this employee is a problem but adding the “very easy” metric could be its own huge headache and a half

  4. Dawn*

    My direct manager in my last job was perpetually set to “busy” on Teams and, to no surprise to anyone, was perpetually unresponsive, even when I knew that she was actively in the office at her desk doing nothing much.

    I sympathize! I keep all of my non-work-life chat options “invisible” or as close as I can get! But you have every right to set this as a basic requirement. “I don’t want to feel pressured to respond” doesn’t really work when needing to respond to people is literally your job, and you can’t really talk to your manager that way, either.

    1. Molehills*

      Same – I vastly prefer to worth through email, and find instant messages to be a focus-destroying annoyance, so I make liberal use of not available/do not disturb statuses.

      But I’m not in a customer-facing role where it’s my job to be, y’know, available to respond quickly. I can respect different ways of working, but OP’s team member demonstratively isn’t working.

      1. blah*

        And even in your example, you would provide a different way of contacting you – email! If you were then unresponsive, your manager would have to revisit using instant messages. The employee in this letter hasn’t proposed anything, just that they’ll think about what to do.

        1. allathian*

          Yes, or set expectations that instant messages, in spite of their name, don’t require an instant response.

          For standard tickets that aren’t genuinely urgent my coworker and I have a first response time of one day for my job, which is providing a service within our own organization (all internal emails/tickets have that sort of delay time). That’s just to confirm that we’ve received the request and will be taking action (the requester will receive an auto-reply to tell them that their ticket has been accepted by the system). There’s often some messaging back and forth to fix a deadline. For IMs the response time is about an hour. If it’s truly urgent the message’s marked with ! and the person is tagged. After that, if there’s no response within a few minutes, it’s time for a Teams call. Generally there’s an expectation in my org that we don’t call each other without asking them by IM if they have time to talk about X, but true emergencies override that requirement.

    2. SheLooksFamiliar*

      Heh, Teams statuses are almost universally ignored at my company. Customer-facing or not, you will get messaged if only for someone to have proof of ‘I tried to reach you about such-and-such…’ We do seem to respect ‘In A Meeting’ but even then, I get pinged.

      1. TootsNYC*

        I ping people “In a Meeting”—I assume they’ll ignore my Slack until they’re free.

        1. Ess Ess*

          Same. They could be just listening to a meeting and available to answer questions. If they have ‘dnd -do not disturb’ or ‘presenting’ then I don’t reach out

      2. Sillysaurus*

        Right? My status could be out of office with a status message of “in a coma” and I’d still get messages.

        1. Leave my teams alone I’m trying to work*

          I had to put a message in teams that gave the number for the helpdesk. I’m available for my team but unless I am working on an issue for the person pinging me I will ignore messages from others.

      3. Hot Flash Gordon*

        I set my Teams notifications to not ping when I’m in meetings and it’s wonderful.

        1. Mangled Metaphor*

          DND is my friend. Especially as if I’m in a Teams meeting, I’m usually screen sharing and really dont want the notifications distracting everyone.

    3. Artemesia*

      ‘but you are pressured to respond, because that is your job — to be available and to be responsible to clients and colleagues.’

    4. I Have RBF*

      Yeah, the “I don’t want to feel pressured to respond” is kinda special. It’s her goddamn job to respond when contacted, so of course she is going to be “pressured” to do her fucking job! She’s essentially saying “I don’t want to feel pressured to respond do my job.”

  5. Elle*

    I’m glad this came up because at work we’re seeing a similar pattern with new employees not wanting to do the job they applied to and accepted. Hopefully the letter writer is able to set equal standards for the team that the staff will follow. Or is able to cut them loose if it’s not happening.

    1. Anna*

      Same experience here. I had to chuckle a little at the jargon this employee is throwing around (“not respecting individual work styles autonomy,” “not assuming good intent,” etc.) because I had an employee who employed EXACTLY the same kind of gaslighting in response to any effort to… you know, get her to actually do her job. My advice is to fire her sooner rather than later. This kind of person only gets worse the longer you try to work with them.

      1. Grumpy Elder Millennial*

        This person from the letter is spouting pseudo-therapeutic nonsense. And it sounds like they did assume good intent! Or at least no ill intent. The LW checked to make sure this was intentional, rather than a technical glitch. Sounds like the lady doth protest too much.

        1. Not Tom, Just Petty*

          And unfortunately these seeds of nonsense are sprouting in OP’s mind. OP is working on perceived, and probably real, weaknesses in his/her own leadership abilities. Employee using pseudo-therapeutic terms is giving OP pause…”maybe I didn’t get to that point in my self improvement yet.”
          I assure you, you did.
          You are being played.

      2. Elle*

        Ours escalated to accusations of racism. How dare we expect the worker to meet deadlines and show up to meetings when being a woman of color living in America is so difficult.

        1. Prof’s wife*

          My husband worked at a community college where he was told by administrators that as a white man he needed to give students of color more consideration (chances). He had caught two Dominican students plagiarizing twice. They had gotten a warning the first time. He failed them on the paper the second time, and they were protesting. He had printouts of the websites they had copied and pasted from, but the administrators sided with the students. This is not unusual in the community colleges—so some young people have learned to work the system this way. Of course he also had some incredibly hard working and talented students of color. I always felt it was a disservice to them when the administration acted this way.

          1. MigraineMonth*

            Given the absurd number of chances I’ve seen wealthy white guys given, this actually does seem like it’s leveling the playing field.

            Story time: I grew up in a mostly-white and wealthy school district where some senior boys broke into the high school on a weekend to steal the final exams. The boys were arrested but all charges dropped. They failed their exams, but weren’t expelled or forced to repeat the year.

            The community was OUTRAGED. How dare anyone destroy the futures of these promising young men by holding them accountable? The principal lost their job because reporting a break-in to the police was considered such an overreaction to boys being boys. There were countless op-eds mourning the fact that the boys’ college acceptances had been withdrawn when they failed and they might be forced to go to *gasp* community college.

            So yeah, lowering the bar for POC probably isn’t the best way to achieve equality, but believe me when I say it probably still isn’t as low as it is for rich white boys.

            1. Boof*

              I think this is a case of two wrongs don’t make a right; the outrage in your story wasn’t that the kids failed the exams and got arrested for breaking and entering*, the outrage was that parents/community sidelined standard consequences to a pretty major bad behavior.
              *in the scenario where an arrest is seen as a potentially life threatening move tho I can see the outrage, but not sure that’s what was going on at the time?

              1. MigraineMonth*

                I believe the “arrest” was one of the town’s two police officers calling their parents and asking them to bring the boys to the police station to ask them some questions with their parents and lawyers present.

                The system works differently for you when you’re white and wealthy.

            2. Artemesia*

              I taught in a district where a group of white scions of the rich and famous were an after school burglar ring breaking into homes and stealing stuff. This also got swept right under the rug very very quickly — fine young men, boys will be boys, don’t want to ruin futures, concha know.

              The solution is not to let minority miscreants cheat (while their minority peers are working hard to succeed) but to hole white twerps accountable.

              Where I taught that level of plagiarism would mean at minimum flunking the class and quite possibly being suspended form the school for a semester. So getting a second chance IS accommodating different cultural backgrounds etc. First time — maybe unclear on the concept; after that, they are just cheating.

            3. Also*

              Have to agree.

              I don’t have any patience for those who have the system rigged against them from the start being held to higher standards than those who benefit most from that rigged system.

          2. Boof*

            There are so many reasons that this is not how to fix a leaky pipeline, but I have to wonder how they think they’re doing any favors preparing these folks for whatever else they’re doing next in life if they’re answer to mistakes is “ehh just let ’em chug along! They deserve it!”

      3. I AM a Lawyer*

        If OP’s employee went on TikTok to complain about OP and told the viewers that this is how she’s responding to OP’s requests that she do the bare minimum of her job, like 90% of the commenters would commend her for “holding to her boundaries” or similar.

        1. Arrietty*

          I was thinking r/antiwork, but yes. There’s a section of the Internet promoting this mindset.

          1. I AM a Lawyer*

            It’s great for engagement from people who hate The Man, but I think it can be actively harmful for folks new to the working world.

        2. Not One of the Bronte Sisters*

          I am a lawyer too, and I would hate to think that’s true. My response would be, Then this isn’t the job for you. Because, news flash, this is literally what the job requires.

          1. I AM a Lawyer*

            There are always a few brave souls in the replies who suggest that the person in question is not actually in the right, but it’s mostly “yaaaass, queen, you tell ’em!” in the comments. It’s disheartening because it’s not helpful to anyone who is watching/reading and doesn’t know better.

            1. Boof*

              One really overwhelming problem with social media is it’s easy to find an echochamber if that’s what you want. Probably feels good but doesn’t actually make life better.

        3. WeirdChemist*

          What LWs employee (and everyone who tries to implement advice they see on Tik tok or r/antiwork) fails to take into account is how many of those stories are complete and total fiction!

          Drama sells. Success sells. “I had a measured convo with my boss and we came to a compromise” doesn’t sell. “I totally f-ed up and got fired, which in retrospect was totally reasonable” doesn’t sell. So people make stuff up, or at the very least wildly exaggerate

          1. I AM a Lawyer*

            They’re always telling people to sue their employers over totally legal actions, too. Again, for the drama.

          2. MigraineMonth*

            They’ve banned quite a few formats (e.g. the “screenshots of totally real texts between me and my boss”) because they were getting so much fake ragebait.

          3. Disappointed Australien*

            It’s also content farming. Telling someone “go to work. Do your job” doesn’t generate anything worth repeating.

            “Do this egregiously unhelpful thing” is much more likely to result in an outcome that can be turned into a whole new TokTik episode.

        4. ThatOtherClare*

          I’m sure those people will enjoy and thrive on running their own independent small businesses, because clearly being in a position where they have to follow directions from others that they may not like is not for them.

          The rest of us don’t have to put up with and cater to people who are unwilling to cooperate, though. Healthy cooperation means a constant series of small compromises on both sides, like the constant micro-adjustments one makes to a steering wheel while driving.

          If healthy cooperation is too much for this employee she needs to be moved on to a place where she can thrive before her manipulation poisons the environment for everyone around her. I know that sounds very dramatic, but these are exactly the sort of people who move in and create toxic environments, because the less subtle ones get moved on before they can cause too much damage. More overt people do find places in already damaged environments of course, but subtle manipulators are the source who bring the first few little mould spores into the healthy barrel of apples.

    2. Busy Middle Manager*

      I am glad it came up. My coworker claims “teams status issues” but never responds when he is yellow for long periods of time. So if it’s a teams issue, that means you are there and can respond, no?

      I like the change of tone in the comments today. I actually took a mental health day because I’m burnt out picking up the slack for MIA WFH coworkers.

      I feel like many people online have pushed back hard on any criticism of things like this, probably because they thought it would threaten WFH overall. But now since WFH has been here for over 4 years and isn’t going anywhere, perhaps we can start being honest about some people abusing it? I mean, if nothing else, I think some of the WFH abuse stories I’ve seen/heard IRL would make pretty crazy reads

      1. OlympiasEpiriot*

        It’s not WFH. I have plenty of memories of people who always manage to slack off while appearing they aren’t even on a construction site.

        1. Peanut Hamper*

          Agreed. At my last job we had a guy working in the warehouse who would just disappear for long periods of time. And there weren’t any places to hide in there!

          1. SheLooksFamiliar*

            I’ve said it for years: some of the most impressive slackers and time-wasters I ever knew were in the office for 10 hours a day. We knew this because they had to sign in at the guard’s desk, otherwise we might known have known they were in the building.

            I swear, some of the more talented slackers could dematerialize before your very eyes, they were that slippery and evasive.

            1. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain*

              I actually think WFH during the pandemic is what finally got one of our worst slackers finally fired. He didn’t need to disappear at the office. He could sit at his desk stretching a 5 minute task into a full day and mastered the art of watching tutorial videos and professional development webinars to fill in the rest of the time, all while he was very visibly in the office working. Couldn’t keep up the charade when he was at home. I think having a comfy and private place to nap was too much of a temptation at that point.

            2. JustaTech*

              As Prince sang “doing something close to nothing, but different from the day before”.

              I had a coworker who took advantage of the fact that he was getting an advanced degree while working to disappear for hours on end, even when he didn’t have classes. When he finished that degree he slurped up a huge amount of bandwidth watching CrunchyRoll at his desk and just not working.
              I had another coworker who took advantage of the fact that we had two buildings in one city and whenever you went looking for him (the lone IT guy) and couldn’t find him it was always “I was at the other building”. No, no he wasn’t, he was somewhere else.
              I had a coworker who came into the lab seven days a week (!) and accomplished *nothing*. (He wasn’t truly slacking, he was just wholly ineffective at his job.)

              They’re memorable because they’re annoying, but I don’t think the true slackers are actually that large a proportion of the population.

          2. sparkle emoji*

            Once in a childcare job(meaning there were ratio concerns I had to pay attention to) I had someone on my team who’d sneak off and nap in the kitchen. Got to the point he might spend up to 50% of the day MIA. If someone really wants to slack, they’ll find a way.

      2. Peanut Hamper*

        WFH isn’t four years old. Remote work has been around for a while now. This definitely is not tied to WFH.

        I don’t see anything in the letter that this employee is working from home. I couldn’t even tell if they are working in the same office.

        But even if they were WFH, WFH is not the problem. You can manage remote employees. Slacking WFH employees are the same employees who would slack in an office. It’s 100% a management problem, and not a WFH problem.

          1. Irish Teacher.*

            I think there’s a reflex towards blaming WFH for stuff simply because it’s…well, not new but new to a lot of people. And people are naturally somewhat unsure when trying something they haven’t done before, so if problems arise or an employee slacks off, they start wondering “is this because we are WFH?” rather than looking at what the issue really is.

            I think this is even more true because a lot of people started working from home at a time when there was a crisis on and people were making allowances or were dealing with a whole lot of other problems, so for people who hadn’t previously worked from home, their initial experience of it had a lot of teething problems or was associated in their minds with other problems.

            But just as we don’t say “this is the problem with in-office work” when we find a couple of colleagues spend their whole time chatting and distracting each other or worry that “people might push back on any criticism of this in case it threatens in-office work,” we shouldn’t start thinking it’s about work from home when people slack off online.

        2. Lana Kane*

          Absolutely. I first started WFH in 2011. And I’ve also supervised WFH staff – expectations were always super clear not just in terms of productivity, but availability when someone calls or messages you. In some ways I didn’t find it that much different than managing in-person staff. I was running the same productivity reports and seeing the response rates to messages. So if WFH staff is dropping tasks and not available, the manager needs to address that ASAP. Heck, I’ve known managers who don’t even do this for in-person staff. I not-so-fondly remember coworkers taking 17 smoke breaks a day and hardly ever being at their desks.

          1. I Have RBF*

            Yeah, I regularly had in-office colleagues who were never at their desks, but had no meetings on their calendars. Slacking off in the office is older than the internet.

      3. MassMatt*

        This would be an interesting idea for one of Alison’s calls for comments.

        My former company started work from home several years before the pandemic, and there were definitely some who abused it, or didn’t take to it well.

        IMO WFH is definitely here to stay but the sustained hot job market (in many areas, at least) has lulled many into a false sense of security as the many articles about “quiet quitting” where people brag about watching Youtube all day instead of working attest. At some point the economy will turn and unproductive people are going to find themselves unemployed.

        This employee probably among them, and rightfully so, and sooner rather than later.

        1. Morte*

          That’s not what “quiet quitting” means. it’s when you do not go above and beyond your normal assigned workload, don’t volunteer for projects, don’t stay late, don’t work unpaid, etc etc… You do your work and that’s it. Which is what you’re paid for.

          1. STAT!*

            I thought that was called “work to rule”: do your job well but only within its prescribed criteria. I thought “quiet quitting” was just doing the bare minimum to keep out of trouble, which might mean you don’t do the entirety of your job.

            1. Morte*

              work to rule and quiet quitting are pretty much the same thing. Most people in the US don’t have work contracts/union jobs so the idea seems new to many and gained traction under the new term.

              Regardless, if you’re not ambitious I don’t see anything wrong with it under either name.

            2. Irish Teacher.*

              I’ve only heard “work to rule” used in terms of industrial action. I thought quiet quitting was working to rule without a union order that you voted on beforehand and without everybody else doing the same thing.

            3. iglwif*

              It’s called “work to rule” in union contexts, where it usually happens in a collective way as a form of protest less drastic than a strike.

              But “quiet quitting” is essentially the same thing — doing the job you were hired for, meeting the expectations of your role, but not staying late / jumping in to help / taking on extra work / etc. outside of your job description.

              In other words, it’s not quitting at all, but defying the norm that being a good employee always means doing significantly more than you’re being paid to do.

        2. Elle*

          There’s always been slackers in the office. To me what’s new is the defensiveness of the employee and trying to put the problem on the manager. That’s what we’re seeing at work recently from newer staff and we’re not sure what to make of it. We work in a non profit and do a lot of community outreach. It’s in our job descriptions, discussed during interviews and all over our website. We’re getting people that love the idea of the work during the interviews and then refuse to go into the community when they’re hired. That’s when we get the gaslighting.

        3. Chocolate Croissant*

          I thought Quiet Quitting was doing your job to standards without making yourself a physical and mental stress case working extra hours or taking it home with you. Working, but not centering your life around work.

          Regardless, that’s not what the problem employee is doing here. She’s willfully not performing to standard and being insubordinate.

          1. londonedit*

            I don’t understand ‘quiet quitting’, and maybe it’s a cultural thing, because the expectation in every job I’ve had is that I do my job. I work my contracted hours, I make sure the books are published on time, I build good relationships with people, I go home at 5pm. That’s the definition of doing my job properly. It’s bizarre to me that ‘doing your job’ is now seen as ‘quiet quitting’. That’s not what I’m doing at all – I’m just doing the job I’m expected to do.

            1. Irish Teacher.*

              I think it depends majorly on the job. In teaching, there is a whole load of voluntary stuff for which people receive no extra pay – organising extra-curricular activities, giving extra classes after school, supervising homework clubs, breakfast clubs, after-school study, taking students on trips…

              Now, obviously, plenty of people do none of these things so it’s not like somebody “quiet quitting” would be likely to even be noticed, but I can see somebody who did a lot of that stuff deciding to pare back to the basic job expectations.

            2. My Useless Two Cents*

              My reading of quiet quitting is do no more than and no less than what an acceptable worker would do in that job. Not a good worker, and definitely not an excellent worker, but an acceptable worker.
              -work your hours, and make sure to take all of your breaks and lunch and arrive at 9AM on the dot and leave at exactly 5PM (or whatever hours you were contracted for), not even an extra minute of work goes to the company
              -make sure the books are published on time, but also make sure there are reasonable deadlines and output expectations and stick to them no matter what (ex. if “typical” is 3 books a week, you only publish 3 books a week. Oh, it’s the busy season and there are 5 books this week… “sorry boss which 3 do you want published, I’m unable to get all 5 out”) keywords are reasonable and typical

      4. Irish Teacher.*

        I don’t think this is about abusing WFH. This is just somebody avoiding work. She would, almost certainly, do the same if she were in the office. I mean, she’d have different ways of avoidance but she’d still avoid work and weaponise language when told to do it.

        It’s not about WFH versus work in the office. It’s just about people who don’t do their jobs. If you scroll through the archives you’ll see similar stories of people in the office. And the tone in the comments was no different. People here have never been supportive of weaponising language to get out of work.

      5. JSPA*

        this isn’t WFH specific. Everyone here is remote; the problem person is dodging work remotely in the exact same way people dodge work while sitting in the same office building.

      6. INTPLibrarian*

        TBF, Teams is weird sometimes. This doesn’t sound like what’s happening with you, but I had more than one time where I was very actively working (typing, using mouse, etc.) and my supervisor or a coworker would ask where I’ve been.

        WHILE I ANSWERED THEM ON TEAMS, it still showed me as yellow/away. No, it wasn’t set that way; it was on “auto” or whatever you’d call it. Ugh.

        1. Orv*

          Facebook Messenger is the opposite. I’ve seen my wife show up as “active” when she’d been soundly asleep for two hours.

        2. iglwif*

          Yeah, Teams is extremely weird that way. (Well, tbh it’s janky in general, presumably because it was Macgyvered out of Skype for Business and Sharepoint and who knows what else for a captive audience of companies already using Microsoft products for everything else.)

        3. H3llifIknow*

          Other than when it changes to Red when I’m in a meeting/on a call, I always have to manually change my Teams status for some reason. My colleagues will be like “You’ve shown AWAY all morning, FYI.”

      7. I Have RBF*

        Remote work has always had slackers – one guy I know of literally didn’t log in to any workplace systems, either through the VPN or a jump host, for weeks at a time. When he got canned, his “workload” came to me and one other guy. It was negligible, and neglected.

        But so has office work – see the comments about the guy watching YouTube all day in the office while other people picked up all the tickets.

        WFH is not the only place that people can be lazy.

    3. She*

      Last month, one of our cooks quit because they didn’t realize how much cooking they would have to while working in a kitchen. Quote: “I didn’t know that I had to cook all day.” Instead of what exactly? A knitting circle?

      1. Not One of the Bronte Sisters*

        Like, seriously. Are you really that stupid? And I know there are jobs, and I’ve had them, in which you are told to perform duties that are WAY outside what any sensible person would believe the role was. I was an in-house attorney for most of my career. I cannot tell you how many times someone brought me a problem and I said, Excuse me, but how exactly do you believe that’s a legal problem?

      2. NurseThis*

        Yup, there have always been lazy people. They just have more jargon now. Says the nursing manager who routinely found night shift nurses asleep and was told “I didn’t know I’d have to stay up all night”. Why yes, you do.

        1. Orv*

          It reminds me of how sending an abuser to therapy usually just results in abuser who knows how to justify their actions using therapy jargon. Suddenly it’s not “throwing you out of the house in the middle of the night,” it’s “setting healthy boundaries.”

  6. Petty Betty*

    I am going to bet this person isn’t actually doing a whole lot of work on company time, and if LW does any digging at all, they are going to find that out.

    Putting this worker on an improvement plan to hold her to work standards is going to probably cause her to try to find other ways to slack off, or leave, but I would think the end goal for this kind of person is that they leave. Much easier than micromanaging and constantly having to be on guard for the next trick to slack off.

    1. Ellis Bell*

      Yeah. If being available to clients isn’t her bag “possibly this role is not for you. But if you choose to stay, you will be held to this standard”.

    2. GladImNotThereAnymore*

      I was curious as to what the approach should be… If it is from the perspective of “you are doing less work than your peers” I could imagine a PIP saying “you have X weeks to increase to Y level otherwise you will be fired.” Here it is (partially) “you are doing less work than your peers because customers won’t engage with you because you indicate you are busy all the time” – sounds like more than a PIP. More like a “you must do X in this job” (be available) and the response is “no, I won’t, and these are my reasons” … Is that simply a “thanks for your time, but today is your last day” kind of conversation? Seems abrupt, but… is that simply it?

      1. Dawn*

        I think that even if you can see that she’s doing less work than other team members, basing it on amount of work done is problematic because it sounds like the work is given to them by clients, and many have already been turned off contacting her. So she could start doing exactly what you ask and still end up completing less work than others just due to the vagaries of chance, or clients already trained not to reach out to her.

        No, the answer here is “you need to correct the behaviour and flag yourself as online when you are online, and not take that tone with me again.”

      3. BethRA*

        Given that this particular employee has only been with the company 6 months, yes, I’d probably move to terming them more quickly. I would probably want to do a formal, written warning first, but if they’re still giving a lot of pushback on even the most reasonable requests and expectations? If they don’t immediately start showing their online status as instructed? Buh-bye.

    3. Sava*

      I think this person has multiple jobs. They are going to keep on doing the minimum until they get fired.

  7. Ellis Bell*

    So…” she accused me of making “unnecessary comparisons” between her and other team members”. This one is so brass necked, she must need help finding things on the floor. The effrontery!!

    1. Specks*

      I know, right? OP’s got a master manipulator on their hands. And a very brazen one too.

      OP, you have to shut her down hard when she starts trying to manipulate you like that to take the focus off literally not doing her job. And start documenting her refusals and her poor performance (sounds easy, since her volume of work is literally lower). Maybe start tracking her average response time. You will likely soon need a case for firing her.

    2. Peanut Hamper*

      Remember that scene in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan when David Marcus says “Who in the hell does he think he is?” That’s what flashed through my mind when I read this letter.

    3. Ultimate Facepalm*

      That was …impressive. It is literally a necessary comparison and a requirement for OP to do the job. The employee does not get to decide what the professional norms are at the company. Nor does does the employee get to decide what your intentions are.
      I would keep a close eye on her because I think she’s going to pull all kinds of nonsense and argue the whole way out the door, then contest why she is uneligible for unempoyment pay.
      Good luck and let us know how it goes!

    4. Not on board*

      She certainly has a lot of chutzpah. And her ability to turn herself into a victim is also very good. The OP wants to be a good and understanding manager and this person is using it to their advantage.
      Having your status set to available on slack when you’re available is a requirement of the job. If you can’t do that, then maybe this role isn’t for you. Period.

    5. House On The Rock*

      This reminded me of a situation at an old job where a coworker who was clearly struggling and not good at her job complained that she was being held to a “different standard” than the rest of the people in the department after our boss asked her to start documenting her work, coming in on time, etc.

      Unfortunately, HR was very risk averse and told our manager that everyone in the department should be “treated the same”. Which meant that the other three of us who did our jobs had to email our boss when we got to work every day and send summations of what we’d accomplished each week. Unfortunately for the struggling employee, this only helped to highlight how little she did and that what she claimed to do was actually being done by others!

      1. CowWhisperer*

        I actually really enjoyed a situation like that when I worked in retail. We had a young associate who simply refused to work when he didn’t feel like it or didn’t want to do the job. Occasionally, he’d do some form of malicious compliance that probably seemed good to him – but usually left a paper trail of time wasting. We essentially ended up having to write down everything we did in the department and were scrupulous about signing out of computers so our completed orders were in our names. He didn’t last long after that; it was a really bad look to be less effective than people who joined the department after him.

  8. Trout 'Waver*

    Can we talk about how lousy HR’s response was here?

    “My HR rep […] has suggested I schedule a time to set team-wide norms and expectations”

    Providing a group coaching session when one employee is clearly the problem is demoralizing and poor management. Everyone already knows what the team norms are here. You’re going to make your conscientious team members nervous and second guess themselves and the target audience is just going to blow this off like everything else. Address the problem person head on instead of this vague collective bull@#$#.

      1. Lea*

        I so hate when managers do these ‘group’ chastising deals when we all know it was one or two people

        All we do is gossip about who these things were directed at

        1. Slow Gin Lizz*

          Yeah, our CEO used to do this at ExJob. And he’d throw it into an all-staff mtg when he was doing his usual blathering about mission, what a great team we all were, and then he’d say something like “Oh, and you know that fall is our busy season so we really shouldn’t have people taking such long vacations in the fall.” Um, what? Since when are fall vacations off-limits? I had taken two vacations that fall and no one had said that I couldn’t, and a bunch of other people had too because we have, you know, lives. (My uncle’s 90th birthday, for instance, or a coworker going to her kid’s college parents weekend.) So I asked my supervisor about it and she said the comment wasn’t meant for me. Turns out he really just meant one C-level employee who’d taken a two-week trip in the middle of the busy season and he was a bit unhappy about it. Well, ok, then, my man, tell her that and stop making the rest of us paranoid that we’re going to get in trouble.

          TL, DR: don’t make a blanket announcement when you have an issue with just one employee. It only makes the good employees worry that they might be doing things wrong even when they are pretty sure they’re not, and often the employee with the issue won’t realize or care that you’re talking about them.

        2. Lab Snep*

          This used to happen at a former workplace. ONE person made a constant, particular error, never documented things. ONE.

          We would all get chastised.

        3. I Have RBF*

          This, so much this.

          After some really bad experiences, any time there is a group chastise and blame thing done by management, I dust off my resume. Because they don’t know, or care, who is the problem, so they just spew shit and see what sticks, and I don’t enjoy being collateral damage to a slacker’s issues.

          If a manager has an issue with my work, schedule, or whatever, I won’t get any correction from a group “hint” session. I’ll just get paranoid, because I suck at knowing what “hints” are aimed at me, versus a boss having a burr up their tush. Tell me personally and privately, and I’ll do my best to fix it. Yes, I can be pretty oblivious sometimes, and hyper aware at others, and neither accomplishes the supposed goal.

    2. Bookworm in Stitches*

      Makes me think of the whole class losing recess because of one or two students.

    3. Peanut Hamper*

      A better response would have been “Did you make sure to communicate the team norm and expectation? Because if so, the next step is…”

      Because yep, this is just going to go over this person’s head, either deliberately because they feel they can get away with something, or simply because they don’t see themselves as a problem.

    4. Not So Super-visor*

      I don’t think that it’s a lousy response. It’s a fair response. While “everyone knows” is great for workplace norms when everyone is following the norms, it only takes one person who “doesn’t know” or to claim that there isn’t a written policy or that no one told them the policy to ruin that. The only way to enforce it and to hold people accountable when that happens is to be able to point back to written policies that have been set for the whole team. Out of fairness, the whole team needs to be made aware of the expectation so that no one else falls into that same gap. Once set for the whole team, the manager can now fairly enforce the policy and hold a problem employee accountable.

      1. The Unspeakable Queen Lisa*

        It’s a lousy response unless it was Step 1. Since it appears to be the entire HR suggestion, yep, lousy.

        1. Green great dragon*

          Yeh, I don’t think it’s an egregious first step. HR didn’t say lecture the team, they said make sure the team’s aware of expectations, and presumably everyone else will be meeting those expectations already (and may be well aware of who isn’t, too). I’m envisaging a quick “reminder”, not group coaching.

          And once it’s done, LW can hold everyone to that standard, by which I mean address it with the one person who isn’t already meeting them.

      2. Red Reader the Adulting Fairy*

        It’s absolutely a lousy response. The solution to “one person is not following the expectations as directed and is in fact arguing with them when they are expressed” is not “lecture everybody else about the expectations even though this one person is the only one dropping the ball.”

        1. Archi-detect*

          or to require every possible rule to be documented. If someone tries to burn the building down, you don’t question if it is in the handbook, you fire them.

      3. ThursdaysGeek*

        “I want to remind the entire team of our team norms and expectations…” “And most of you are doing fine with these. I will contact you one on one if you are not meeting these standards.”

        Because yeah, reminding people of standards are fine, but a generic warning to everyone is most definitely not fine. The good workers worry they’re not doing a good job, and it goes over the heads of bad workers.

          1. MsM*

            +1. My overactive imagination would probably be mentally rechecking everything I’ve done unless told no news is good news.

        3. Polly Hedron*

          I like Crencestre’s naming below of this person as Bartlebyetta.
          I recommend starting the progressive discipline process, for which you will need HR’s cooperation.
          • Go ahead and “schedule a time to to set team-wide norms and expectations” as your HR rep suggested, using ThursdaysGeek’s excellent script:

          I want to remind the entire team of our team norms and expectations…. And most of you are doing fine with these. I will contact you one on one if you are not meeting these standards.”

          (I agree that the meeting is a lousy suggestion, but if you use that script, the meeting won’t do any harm, and it won’t alienate your HR rep)
          • Have the formal one-on-one conversation with Bartlebyetta
          • If Bartlebyetta doesn’t snap into line, progress as necessary through a PIP and a firing
          • As others have suggested, carefully document each step
          • Keep touching base, very respectfully, with HR
          • Do not display any malice toward Bartlebyetta; proceed in sorrow, not in anger

      4. Peanut Hamper*

        Since OP wrote in about this employee and not her entire team, it seems like it is just this employee, though. The rest of theme seems to be aware of this expectation.

        You put the ointment on the boo-boo, you don’t slather it all over like sunscreen.

      5. Dawn*

        Nope! Everyone else gets that they need to be available to clients while on the clock doing their job based on being available to clients. There’s no need to trot everyone out for a “group meeting on that expectation” because, in fact, everyone already gets it – even the problem employee – and we don’t treat our employees like children.

        Frankly we shouldn’t even treat our children like that, but it would be more understandable if this were a grade school classroom.

        1. Dawn*

          And you never need to “have a written policy to point to in order to enforce” anything, but especially something that’s blatantly obvious; if your job is Customer Service Associate, it shouldn’t actually need to be written down anywhere for it to be understood that you need to be available to assist customers.

        2. Don't You Call Me Lady*

          I don’t disagree in this case, but having a reminder overall isn’t a bad thing – people are intelligent enough to know if they’re doing what’s being discussed or not.

          1. Dawn*

            See, I would disagree with that; it’s completely unnecessary in this instance, as everyone else gets it (and I think she does too,) and that makes it borderline-infantalizing to act as if they need the reminder when they clearly don’t.

            1. Don't You Call Me Lady*

              I meant in general I think it’s ok to review policies every so often without the team getting upset or thinking they’re doing something wrong.

              In this case yes there’s no need – I mean being available is about as basic as you can get

        3. PotsPansTeapots*

          I agree. This isn’t a good faith misunderstanding or slipping standards or a change in policy; this is an employee refusing to do their job.

      6. Saturday*

        I don’t think this suggestion is fair to most of the team. Talking with the whole group will make conscientious employees wonder if they’re not meeting expectations in some way. And the good employees shouldn’t have to deal with a bunch of new written rules when everything seems to be fine except with this one person.

        1. Don't You Call Me Lady*

          I agree that it’s unnecessary to have a meeting like this. But as an aside, don’t most people know whether they’ve been doing the thing that’s being discussed?

          If my boss sent out an email to everyone reminding the team not to do XYZ, I’m pretty sure I’d know if he was talking about me or not

          1. Potato Potato*

            It depends on how clearly the manager words it. “A reminder to all employees: Please don’t set your status as offline every day” wouldn’t concern me if I wasn’t doing it. But if the message was vague like “Be mindful that your Slack status reflects your availability” then I might get concerned that it was about my bathroom breaks when my status was green

          2. Yorick*

            Here, you’ll get the one person who set herself away last Tuesday so she could focus on the XYZ report thinking she’s being micromanaged about her status updates, while the employee in question will just ignore the group communication even more easily than she ignored the one-on-one conversation.

            1. sparkle emoji*

              Yep. Telling the group might be reasonable if this was a knowledge issue but its not. She knows better, all these excuses are disingenuous. LW needs to have a direct conversation with her about the expectations of the role and ask if she’s willing to meet them.

    5. BethRA*

      This assumes that there aren’t other areas where norms are slipping. Which may not be the case.

      I absolutely agree OP should have a direct conversation with this specific employee either way, but based on the letter I wouldn’t be surprised if there are other areas where OP hasn’t been clear about norms and expectations.

        1. BethRA*

          ” I’m actually quite a hands-off manager by nature and have to force myself to be more prescriptive at times (have been working on that with a coach!). ”

          We all have room for growth. Based on this, I don’t think it’s unfair to consider the possibility they need to be more direct in general, or that their HR had a reason to make that suggestion.

          1. sparkle emoji*

            According to the letter, only one person has issues with this specific norm. Sure, hypothetically other norms could be slipping with the team, and a group meeting could help with that, but it’s not a solution to the problem in the letter.

    6. Lizzianna*

      Yeah, this was the advice that my HR gave us when we were dealing with an employee abusing some of the flexibilities we’d put in place as we were coming back to the office. The vast majority of the team was making a good faith effort to meet the hybrid requirements our leadership had put in place, but needed some flexibility, which I was happy to grant. But a small handful of people were using every single loophole they could find to avoid meeting the policy. Instead of dealing with those people, HR told me I needed written policy for everyone so I couldn’t be accused of singling someone out.

      I regret taking that advice, because it made the good employees feel micromanaged, and the employees who were trying to get around the policy just found other loopholes.

      It sounds like most of the team is already meeting the norms. I don’t understand why everyone needs to be part of the conversation if 99% of the team is already there. I do think it’s a good mental exercise to make sure that you’re holding everyone to the same standards and it’s not personal, but I don’t think you have to have a training session to show that, the standards can be communicated one-on-one as an issue arises.

      1. CommanderBanana*

        Instead of dealing with those people, HR told me I needed written policy for everyone so I couldn’t be accused of singling someone out.

        Ah, it’s Terrible HR Tuesday, I see.

        HR isn’t wrong in that you do need written policies, but they’re wrong in presenting it like you can’t address individual performance issues. That’s not “singling people out,” that’s managing.

      2. allathian*

        It’s not inappropriate to single people out if they need it. It’s called effective management.

    7. Sparkles McFadden*

      Yeah, I always hated when we’d have a department meeting or get directives on basic job requirements because the manager didn’t want to look like she was “singling anyone out.” Sorry but that’s the job. If you don’t want to deal with it, don’t become a manager.

      1. CommanderBanana*

        Or the emails to everyone about a specific policy. I can guarantee you that the people who are violating the policy will just ignore it and everyone else will be confused/upset.

    8. Acronyms Are Life (AAL)*

      I was more thinking of how one of these group sessions went in my world. Everyone except the person they were talking about knew who they were doing the training for. Amusingly in ours the employee in question asked ‘oh, but who doesn’t know not to do x’ and one of my other coworkers yelled out ‘YOU! IT IS YOU!’ probably before thinking it through. Mangement was not happy that day, but the rest of us were.

    9. TheBunny*

      This wasn’t an awful response at all. It sets norms for the team and gives them a chance to participate in setting of those norms. Maybe a day to be unavailable is good for all.

      This is actually a great response as it’s giving all a chance to participate in a conversation about what those team norms should be.

      1. Kay*

        If I was already performing at norm standards (as it sounds like the rest of the team is) I would be pretty irritated that I needed to have a conversation about obvious norm standards so my managers could feel better about not managing. Good managers and good employees don’t need this.

        1. TheBunny*

          I see that. But any time a new member is added to a team, at least a few minutes should be spent recalibrating the team, the expectations and the norms.

          1. Dawn*

            I don’t know why you’re so hot on this, but you really shouldn’t regularly be telling the team their job if they already know it. It’s just a bad practice. There’s really no debate to be had here.

    10. Zircon*

      But this is just one interpretation of HRs suggestion. HR could mean “make a time with this individual to convey team-wide norms and expectations”. It doesn’t have to be a meeting with the whole team.

      1. Trout 'Waver*

        Why yes, if you add the word individual it does change the meaning. But HR used the word team-wide. Given that clearly communicating policies is a core function of HR, I’m not giving them a pass on this.

    11. iglwif*

      I came here to say this!

      I feel like HR is maybe doing a “once you’ve established those norms with the whole team, you have better standing to hold this one person to them,” but really? The norms exist! You have already told this person she needs to abide by them! She just doesn’t WANT to.

  9. AppleStan*

    Oh, OP, absolutely not.

    First, as Alison said, do not let this employee mess with your head. Just because she says it doesn’t mean it’s true.

    Secondly, signaling your availability status is a job requirement. Period. If it is her work hours, she needs to be showing as available. Period. There is no discussion, there is no “accommodation” — this is a part of your job.

    If she said it didn’t work for her to spell-check her written communication with clients, and that you were messing with her work preferences when you insisted she spell-check her written communications, would you entertain her shenanigans? Absolutely not.

    This is the same principle. Don’t give her whining / manipulation a second thought. Set the expectation for the job, and be clear that if she cannot meet that expectation, you will help her transition out of this job/company.

    1. Volunteer Enforcer*

      Exactly. It would easily be seen as an absenteeism issue if she didn’t show up at the office, don’t let the remote aspect on Slack confuse you OP. Source: availability on Teams is a basic requirement for all of my hybrid team.

    2. Molehills*

      I once had an editorial assistant who insisted she didn’t need to spell-check her emails or otherwise make an effort toward professional communications. Helpfully, she was still in her probation period when she explained that standards were oppressive.

    3. ThatOtherClare*

      AppleStan is right. Just because she’s weaponising language that is similar to language recommended for those who are trying to maintain healthy boundaries in an abusive situation, doesn’t mean that her boundaries are reasonable or that you are trying to use your power to control her. You’re just informing her of the job requirements. If yours was the only job on the planet that would be control, but it’s not. She can leave if she doesn’t like the requirements.

      It’s not like she was tricked into taking the job, either. This is a very normal requirement of remote jobs and even if she claims not to have known that, you didn’t intentionally trick her. It’s just one of those bad luck things that happens in life. If she wants to leave now that she’s aware of the job requirements, I’m sure you’ll act fairly by giving her a good reference and giving her a reasonable length of time to find a job before you terminate her employment. That’s all anyone can do in these kinds of bad luck situations.

  10. spcepickle*

    Fire this person. Not to be a mean jerk but because this is a bad job fit.
    I firmly believe that my roll as a manger is to pair people and positions. When it is apparent early on that the fit is bad there is no reason to jump through hoops. Call it and let everyone move on.

    Trust me it sucks to fire people – it is my least favorite part of my job, but it is also part of my job that makes a huge impact. The rest of your team is picking up slack and this person is messing with your head – your team will be better without them.

    1. Audogs*

      Along the same lines, and because we’re always talking about interviewing, what in the name of everything happened at this diva’s interview?

      1. Dawn*

        Highly manipulative people can actually be very good at making themselves appear great in an interview.

        There is this thing called “lying” that manipulators are, in fact, quite expert at.

        1. ThatOtherClare*

          This. There’s no way to avoid manipulators and honest people aren’t at fault for not spotting them immediately. The only thing to do is part with them once you become aware of what they are. Kind of like dodgy skin moles, in a way.

      2. Resume please*

        If it’s an entry level position, I’m sure she exuded confidence and charm. Not a lot of behavioral question digging when there’s not a ton of prior work experience

        1. Dawn*

          I would also guess that this employee is quite young based on the language and the attitude, yeah.

      3. 40 Years In the Hole*

        Or the on-boarding, or reviewing/confirming the job requirements after the formal job offer?
        Being a somewhat “hands off manager” doesn’t fully absolve management’s responsibility here.

      4. Daryush*

        I’ve had similar experiences with employees. People lie to get their foot in the door and hope we’ll give them a different job than the one they interviewed for.

    2. Sparkles McFadden*

      Yes, the LW needs to be prepared to fire this person. Unreasonable people don’t suddenly become reasonable.

      I’m guessing no one checked this person’s references because behavior like this would definitely come up in speaking with a former employer.

    3. TheBunny*

      Wow. Going to have to disagree here.

      As a manager, it’s your job to manage people. This includes performance development and coaching, setting of norms and having performance setting conversations.

      Deciding they are a bad fit for the job without any coaching isn’t managing, it’s the complete opposite.

      1. Dawn*

        After only six months? When pretty much the only thing you know about this employee is that she’s insubordinate and her response to a performance-setting conversation was, “First of all, how dare you?” and went on to explain “I’ll think about it” and continued to be insubordinate?

        No, cutting bait is exactly the right decision. Being a manager doesn’t mean that you owe everyone your time and effort indiscriminately.

        1. AngryOctopus*

          This 100%. Managing is for people who are trying to do the job and having issues grasping concepts or being organized. They can work on those things. This woman is insubordinate and is basically saying “you can’t make me do this job”. That’s a firing.

      2. ThatOtherClare*

        It’s not possible to coach manipulation out of people, they’ll just manipulate you to make you think you were successful.

        Coaching is for people who need to pay closer attention to their excel formulas, not manipulators.

    4. Cheap ass rolling with it*

      I formerly managed a team, and agree — this person should be fired. The surliness and bad attitude can affect the morale of your team.

  11. MechE*

    Two step solution:
    1) Fire her. Anyone who thinks they shouldn’t respond to urgent matters probably will have other issues. Also, “unnecessary comparisons”? This person is a lunatic. Just cut your losses and move on to someone sane.
    2) You are a manager, so just manage people. You don’t need the person’s permission.

  12. Llama mama*

    I’m surprised Alllison didn’t address the second interaction about ‘Unnecessary comparisons’. How is a manager to determine if a new hire is performing well in their role without comparing them to…other people in the same role? Or by a standard metric, which would presumably be set based on how other members or previous employees have performed in the role.

    1. ThursdaysGeek*

      And sure, a newer team member might need time to come up to speed, but she is only one of the newest team members, which means someone else also fairly new is working at a better level. (Because, yeah, I’m comparing.)

    2. The Unspeakable Queen Lisa*

      And also… how would a new employee know what’s unnecessary? The idea that you could tell your manager what parts of her job are actually unimportant – wow! And the LW fell for it!

    3. Dawn*

      I think that there’s just not a lot of point in addressing her whole statement point by point when the whole thing is patently ridiculous. Trying to come up with a clever refutation for these people just gives them more ammunition; decline to engage.

      1. portsmouthliz*

        Hard agree. This is in the spirit of the commenter above who said “You’re a manager, just manage people. You don’t need their permission.” OP isn’t obligated to entertain or refute this person’s (ridiculous) rationale.

      2. Dawn*

        Side note, you might possibly be the first person ever to manage to write Alison’s name with three Ls, haha.

        1. Llamamama*

          Eek. Having misspelled my own name more than once in handwriting, I hope she can forgive me.

      3. ThatOtherClare*

        Yes, but clearly the lies and manipulation are getting into the letter writer’s head. The refutations aren’t for the employee, they’re for the letter writer – and they’re vitally important for helping an honest person see through the fog when they’ve been unexpectedly bamboozled by an enthusiastic and seasoned bamboozler.

        1. Dawn*

          I don’t know about that. I think that there’s more value in convincing that person, “Actually, this is just creative BS and it’s all meaningless. You can safely disregard this as not in good faith.” Individual refutations treat the statement as if it’s somehow worthy of them; this is not and that’s the lesson we want the LW to take away with them.

          1. Dawn*

            And this because, that way, next time she spins a bunch of creative BS – which she will – the LW won’t feel that they also need to refute that point by point to invalidate it, because they’ll have been equipped with the knowledge that nothing which comes out of her mouth can be trusted.

            Otherwise you end up in a cycle where LW is constantly refuting them, only to have them come back with something new, that LW also feels that they must treat as legitimate criticism.

            Cut the Gordian knot. None of it deserves a response.

  13. Part Time Poet*

    I suspect she has a second full time job she likes better, or really doesn’t want to work at this job. I think if the OP takes Alison’s advice she will still get lots of push back and limited improvement if at all and more blaming her manager. The employee doesn’t seem interested in working full time and has a pretty awful attitude. I wouldn’t hesitate to let her go, and soon. I’m really annoyed at this employee, just reading this post!!

    3. pally*

      She’s working a second job was exactly what I was thinking too!
      Nice work if you can swing it. Clearly, this is not the case with this employee.

      There’s plenty of folks out there who are a better fit. OP, go get one.

    4. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain*

      I doubt she’s working at all, but probably does have a second job, and maybe third, on the hook who is getting just the same amount of Audacity®

  14. Mgguy*

    I use Slack for a few private, hobby related groups and DO have it set permanently to “away” because I often pop in to see what’s going on but don’t want to get involved in a conversation(which WILL happen if someone sees me there). That’s very different, as my participation there is entirely by choice.

    Post pandemic, we don’t have widespread use of instant messaging at my work(Teams is there but few people use it), although out-of-office and unavailable are used as appropriate in Outlook and email is a bit of a different medium anyway.

    With that said, I’ve reverted to pre-pandemic “office door” status communication. Basically if my office door is open, it means “I’m available” and if my door is closed, it means I’m not. If there’s a note on my door saying do not bother me(used sporadically, usually only for a few minutes if I’m briefly handling personal business, or for a longer period if I’m working against a tight deadline) that really means don’t bother me. Over-use of any of this tends to make people not actually truly believe you’re unavailable when you claim you are.

    And, to me, perpetual “unavailable” in a messaging platform is the virtual equivalent of screwing a “do not disturb” sign on my office door-something that I don’t think would go over well both for the optics and and just for the practical “I can never get them when I need them” aspect.

  15. Nice cup of tea*

    I mean this in the most supportive way, stop letting her upset you and stop letting her dictate.

    As her manager it is literally your job to tell her to be available to customers, and to point out that she isn’t pulling her weight on the team.

    It is your job to make comparisons.

    Don’t let her get away with this.

    2. ThatOtherClare*

      Warning: when you do this, she will make you feel bad. She’ll tell you that you’re feeling bad because you’re a good person with a conscience that’s warning you that you’re doing horrible things to her. You may be inclined to believe her – because if you were just doing the normal and rational thing, why would you feel so awful? Wouldn’t you feel neutral, or just a little disappointed that it didn’t work out? DON’T BELIEVE HER.

      You’ll feel bad because she’s emotionally manipulating you to feel bad so she can control you and get what she wants. She will be the source of the bad feeling, not your conscience. You’ll still be in good moral standing after you end the employment relationship from the viewpoint of any objective observer.

      In the words of my niece: “You can DO this!”. We’re all cheering for you! You can graciously bow out from the fight she’s trying to pull you into and move on. Do it for yourself, for the others on your team and for the rest of your business.

  16. CubeFarmer*

    Oooh, Alison is right–this employee is going to be a problem, find every loophole imaginable, and do the bare minimum (while also believing that she should be labeled a high achiever.)

    Address the problem with the person directly instead of doing a vague team-wide expectations meeting. The rest of your team understands the assignment. Do not waste their time.

    “It’s a requirement that our colleagues and clients know when we’re available during working hours, either by Slack status or messages. Can you do this by the end of the day tomorrow?” If the answer to that question is an excuse, then you need to take action. Honestly sounds like this person is a bad fit for the team if they can’t manage a slack status.

  18. Hyaline*

    I would not only set a clear expectation that availability must be communicated on slack, but that she must be available at least x% of the day (whatever is normal/average on the team). I can see this little weasel agreeing to the terms of clear communication and then toggling back and forth between unavailable and away all day.

  19. Really?*

    Sounds to me like this job is a bad fit for your relatively new employee, Since obviously the basic job requirement – being available to clients – is “too much effort for her.”
    And as a manager, your job is to make sure that she does her job and one of the ways you do this is evaluating her metrics against those of other employees. The answer is she’s a weak employee with a lousy attitude. As Allison has mentioned, you need to start giving her work a lot more scrutiny and supervision, and possibly manage her out.

  20. Michelle*

    This thing with HR suggesting you hold a meeting to set “team norms” is bad advice from them, if the rest of the team already grasps the norms. If it’s a one-staffer problem, take it up with the one staffer. No need to waste everybody else’s time, and no need to risk the one staffer who needs to hear it failing to do so.

    Sincerely, The Temp Who Genuinely Did Not Understand that the Big Talk to the Whole Team about the Dress Code Was Actually Directed Squarely and Solely at Her Until Years Later When a Chance Encounter with a Former Colleague Explained All.

    1. ?!?!?*

      Ei yi yi. I need to hear more about this. Were you wearing flip flops to work? Scuba gear? Superman costumes?

    2. Cardboard Marmalade*

      As someone who has always really struggled to understand dress codes, I feel this so hard! Excellent point, Michelle, I hope the LW sees it.

    3. Raida*

      I think that “Team Norms” is fine to define, separately from this staff member’s performance management.
      Preferably once they are gone.

      Then, in onboarding new (replacement) staff, it’s already outlined and everyone is on the same page and so will the new person.

    4. I went to school with only 1 Jennifer*

      Hi Temp. I had a situation just like this: I was a technical trainer attached to a branch office just for means of picking up my interoffice mail, and the branch manager was not my manager. I used to pop in to get my mail wearing whatever I was wearing that day, which on non-teaching days might be black corderoy overalls (very trendy that year). The manager mentioned to me that she was asking all her team members to always dress professionally in the office, even if they didn’t have appointments. I agreed that it was a good idea. I never never NEVER realized that it was directed at me. Weeks later, *my* manager told me about this and that I was seen as blowing it off, and I think my complete shock was apparent to all. (The year after that, I got my adhd diagnosis and it clarified So Many Things.)

    1. Dawn*

      Yeah, except I don’t get the impression she’s going to be found dead of starvation; she appears quite skilled at ensuring that her needs are taken care of.

    3. Silver Robin*

      Bartleby was very nonchalant though, as I recall. He just perpetually stated a preference to not, and then let the narrator tie himself into knots trying to figure out how to make convince Bartleby otherwise. Honestly, Bartleby may be the most successful grey rocker to ever grey a rock; he did it to food!

      This employee is on the attack, manipulative, and has OP doubting themselves which give a gaslight flavor to the whole interaction.

  22. Anon for this*

    I would add that there’s actually a reason to be constantly unavailable, and that’s when you aren’t supposed to be available to anyone outside of a select group of people. I get people pestering me asking me to escalate tickets ALL THE TIME, and I have to tell them they need to call the helpdesk and go through the official process for vetting whether a request needs to be expedited instead of going to me directly. Setting myself to unavailable forces them to follow the process they’re supposed to follow, so all their requests can be logged. Anything the helpdesk vets and hands to us is processed immediately.

  23. The Unspeakable Queen Lisa*

    This part really bugged me: “I rarely message her during the day or send her time-sensitive requests, partially because I assume she’s not available or I won’t get a timely response.”

    LW, you are the manager. How have you let yourself fall into this pattern so quickly? Why didn’t you address this right away? You are shirking your duties as a manager. I’m betting you are also conflict-avoidant. Hot tip, avoiding mild conflict always leads to bigger conflict down the road. The sooner you deal with a problem, the sooner you can put it behind you.

    1. Lea*

      Yeah, We don’t use slack, but I can’t imagine someone seeing I’m on a call and just never contacting me?

      I dislike the expectation of being immediately available that comes from life these days but honestly, treat it like an email and send it anyways and let people get to it.

    2. Female canine*

      Based on the lame HR recommendation OP probably knows at some level when push comes to shove HR won’t back up the manager

      1. Daryush*

        ??? They literally told her that she’s within her rights to make signaling online status a requirement of the role. I’m not in love with the idea of a group meeting either, but there’s nothing here to suggest HR doesn’t have her back.

    3. CLC*

      Yes! I don’t understand that part at all, especially since the manager now *knows* that her status is always set to away. Why can’t the OP just message them anyway? I understand the issue from the client facing side, but internally an away message shouldn’t stop you from communicating and assigning work.

    4. TootsNYC*

      I sometimes see suggestions here about “can you do this?” and I think that makes some people think they have to ask. Maybe it’s meant as a prompt to get the employee to confirm and submit, but I think it doesn’t really come across that way.

      I agree: being direct and politely confrontational earlier is far easier and gets better results.

      1. Dancing Otter*

        The tone of voice makes a huge difference with “Can you do this?”

        It’s possible to make the implied “Or I’ll find someone else who can” very, very clear.

        The manager is pretty much asking the slacker whether they’re willing to do their job or not.

        Of course, it’s possible this new hire is oblivious enough not to understand that.

      2. I went to school with only 1 Jennifer*

        But it’s good psychology: people tend to believe what they hear coming out of their own mouths. If you get them to say *out loud* (not in writing! Not by nodding their head!) that they can do whatever the Thing is, then you will have cognitive dissonance working for you. They will have heard themselves agree that they can, in fact, do the Thing, and now not doing the Thing will feel a little … itchy is the best word I can find here. (And yes, some people just lie and say yes and know they’re lying, but I think that’s rarer.)

    6. A Significant Tree*

      That bothered me too, since the job seems to be specifically “Be available and respond in a timely manner.” I mean, I get waiting for a clear pattern to emerge but this employee flat out said “I’m not doing the things you told me to do, it’s too much effort” and has quantifiably lower productivity so it’s not like OP had to wait for indirect evidence.

      I think OP just got knocked off balance by such a bold refusal to do the job as described, and it happened to hit the spot that OP feels is a weak skill. Sometimes it’s worthwhile to check your assumptions when you get feedback like that, but in this case all the evidence points to a poor employee who’s coasting on OP’s insecurity.

      In a perfect world, OP’s response to the employee saying “Still not going to show available, will respond when I feel like it” would be “That’s the job. We can’t keep you in the job if you’re unwilling to perform it as described, so let’s decide on your last day.” But it’s not too late to have that conversation now. OP gave the employee (too much) grace, but it’s not working out.

      1. Goldie*

        I’ve had that experience when you think you are going to have a normal conversation and someone comes into ready to defend their nonsense. It can be hard to pivot quickly

  24. Busy Middle Manager*

    I have thoughts. The few people I knew who obsessed over their statuses like this were not only slacking but faking moral outrage when others picked up on it.

    Working in data analytics / software stuff, I see many colleagues unfortunately too big for their britches during covid. Instead of being grateful that the jobs are well-compensated they’re getting further detached from things such as what a normal workload and response time is. While many people do a lot of work, I see that a not so small portion of people who must’ve watched too many “day in the lives” videos and are acting accordingly. They will ruin WFH and our higher-than-average compensation long-term and we should all be pushing back.

    I’ve seen people claim teams status “issues” repeatedly but when we meet in the office they are yellow when they are away and green when they are there. I’ve seen the “teams status issues” brought up here, but I have to ask at this point, if an application you’ve been using for four years has consistent issues, why haven’t you attempted to fix it?

    I’ve seen people regularly go missing after lunch but regularly coming back for 15 minutes at the end of the day, presumably so the “last seen” part of the status makes it look like they worked then entire day.

    I think a lot of people are taking advantage of the now-common “as long as the work gets done” line of thinking with WFH but doing less hours and taking on less projects and tickets, so they can technically claim their work is done.

    1. Lea*

      I am baffled by the teams status stuff truly, it IS creepy to me the way it gives ‘time away’ and all that jazz but I work all day so I just figure it’s all good and if anyone has an issue oh well

      1. ThursdaysGeek*

        Nah, it’s useful. If they’ve been away for 5 minutes, they’re probably still working, and should be available soon. If they’ve been away for over an hour, they’re probably already done for the day, so I should find someone else. (We do work in various time zones, with different start, lunch, and end times.)

    2. I would simply not encounter a bug*

      I’ve seen the “teams status issues” brought up here, but I have to ask at this point, if an application you’ve been using for four years has consistent issues, why haven’t you attempted to fix it?

      Because we don’t work for Microsoft?

      1. iglwif*

        Yes! And your username is ::chef’s kiss::

        Teams is genuinely janky. People do genuinely forget to manually set their status, and this is understandable given that Teams sometimes does the right thing and sometimes doesn’t.

        OP’s employee is definitely behaving nefariously (on Slack, not Teams), but that doesn’t mean everyone is????

  25. Plebeian Aristocracy*

    First off, good on you OP to recognize your growth areas and getting a coach to help you work through them. She is exactly the kind of employee who needs a more hands on manager.

    I’d also like to say that this letter is an interesting parallel to the one about the shouting manager today. Both are having problems with employees due to management styles. But this one has clearly worked hard to make a great team environment, so the issue seems manageable. The other seems to have created a toxic work environment, and is struggling with a mountain of an issue.

    1. Dawn*

      Yeah, except I don’t get the impression she’s going to be found dead of starvation; she appears quite skilled at ensuring that her needs are taken care of.

  27. Another Ashley*

    Be prepared to fire her. When she starts making accusations tell her that this is non negotiable job standard and ask if she is able to do it. If she is not, let her know that she will not be able to continue in this position. Then take whatever the appropriate steps are in your organization (ask her to immediately clock out, tell her that you will need to schedule a meeting with HR, etc)

  29. Crencestre*

    Time to start documenting every instance of Bartlebyetta’s refusal to signal her availability when she’s supposed to be available to the clients. Dates, times, verbatim statements, and of course save any emails in which she blithely states her “policy”. You’ll need them when you put her on a PIP!

    And this isn’t a matter of being a “nice manager”, either; it’s a matter of seeing that all of your team members do their jobs – that’s what being a manager entails! The less that Bartlebyetta does, the greater the burden that she places on her colleagues when they have to pick up the slack caused by her refusal to do her job. First those colleagues will resent her, then they’ll start to resent YOU for letting her get away with behavior that makes THEIR jobs that much harder. Finally, they’ll lose respect for both Bartlebyetta and you. Seriously, OP; if you don’t want that scenario to play out, rein in Bartlebyetta NOW!

    1. Polly Hedron*

      I agree, and I want Bartlebyetta to leave and get a job working for the yelling manager whose employees just walked out.

  30. Saturday*

    “My HR rep has confirmed it is within my purview to make signaling online availability a requirement of the role and has suggested I schedule a time to set team-wide norms and expectations.”

    Any chance you can still skip holding this meeting? The other team members sound fine – I think you should just talk to the one who is a problem.

    1. Lisa B*

      Maybe it’s just me, but I read this as sitting down with JUST the offender to say “hey, our team norm includes this, and by refusing to do it you’re refusing one of our core expectations. This is not an option.” So not sitting with the whole team to re-state it, but stating to that *one person* it’s a *team expectation*.

        1. I Have RBF*

          Yes.

          Make it clear that it is a requirement of the job, and that not doing so may mean that she loses her job. If she yaps about boundaries and psychological comfort, state that her meeting the requirements of her job as laid out by her manager is one of your big, firm boundaries, and if she can’t respect that boundary she will have to find another job elsewhere. Also point out that for the psychological comfort of the rest of the team she needs to pull her weight, and yes, she will be compared to her teammates as part of the job requirements.

          IOTW, turn her therapy speak around on her. Point out that she is crossing your boundaries as a manager and abusing the psychological comfort of her teammates who have to pick up her slack. The boundaries of her job are that she needs to do her job and comply with workplace norms. If this is intolerable to her, the solution is not changing the workplace norms to suit her, but her leaving for a different job that’s more in line with her “boundaries”.

      2. Saturday*

        I see what you mean – yes, I think you’re right.

        So I take back my earlier comment, OP. Good luck with your problem employee, and keep in mind that you’re in the right here.

    2. GythaOgden*

      We do regular check-ins because we have very hot weekly SLAs. The alternative to just a disciplinary sit down is to get the team together to discuss issues that might be arising in their jobs and ensure everything is going as it should be. (The act of knowing you’re presenting your site’s results on Thursday afternoon gives a great incentive to get everything closed off and reveal a 100% metric at that meeting.) It gives us the chance not only to share results but to raise issues, ask questions of others as to their recent experience and receive messages from the boss.

      Occasionally we’ll turn over a stone together and find an ants’ nest, but the point is that these meetings might serve a useful purpose beyond mere disciplinary issues if they act as a session where the whole team can come together and swap notes. Frontline colleagues and their union actually asked us to set these meetings up as a monthly thing because it was felt that they could air concerns more easily with a fixed, focused time to do that rather than on an ad hoc ‘have you got five minutes?’ basis.

      Regular check-in meetings may well mean that the weak link here either shapes up or ships out, and in our case with UK employment laws it might give us the sort of documentation we need and start fostering a stronger team independently of this specific issue.

  31. Fluffy Fish*

    So my status is permanently “offline”. I manage a particular widget and for whatever reason users lose their minds when they run into any range of problem (almost always non-emergency). When my status was available and I didn’t respond pretty much right away.they.would.find.me. No status lets me respond in a timely but reasonable manner.

    The difference is I’m very very available – pretty much always for my team and as a rule very responsive to everyone else.

    Should my manager ever decide they no longer want me to do that – well they’re the boss.

    It’s always a good boss move to consider your employee might have reasons or needs to do something outside the norms especially if its a benefit to them or at least of no detriment to others or the work. But her “needs” are causing an actual work problem affecting her actual work. That’s the line for you to be able to say absolutely not.

    Side note, she’s new and creating problems. Keep an eye on this to see if there’s other signs she isn’t a good fit. You want to terminate ill fits early, not be wondering in 5 years how to get rid of a nightmare.

    1. PotsPansTeapots*

      Yeah, many on my all-remote team are typically “offline,” but I’ve never had to wait more than 25 minutes for a chat response unless it’s the middle of the day and they’re taking lunch. I actually started out doing detailed status messages, then stopped when it became clear it wasn’t the culture.

  32. Grumpy Elder Millennial*

    One thing I’m curious about is whether the current Slack-based system is working for the organization, overall. Though this is 100% a separate issue from dealing with this employee.

    It just seems odd to me that the clients here are kinda in charge of determining different people’s workloads / number of requests, just because the clients have the choice in who they contact. It’s a recipe for burning out your best people, since they’ll get inundated with requests. Are there other problems with this process or is it generally working well except for the issue with this one person? Do other staff members have complaints about the process or are they pretty happy?

    Though a process change alone is unlikely to solve the issues with that person. They sound pretty creative at coming up with explanations why asking them to do stuff is unreasonable.

    1. Somehow I Manage*

      The traffic directing part is fascinating. I’m really curious to know more about how this works.

      You’re right though that the process may not fix the problem at hand, because it seems like this person is digging their heels in and fighting what seems to be a pretty basic expectation of the job.

    2. Caramel & Cheddar*

      Yeah, I was wondering about the Slack component of this as well. Independent of the particular issues with this employee, the clients having direct access to their customer support people like this feels like a recipe for disaster to me. There’s no way of queuing or prioritizing issues, and I don’t doubt a lot of customers probably feel like you have to help them RIGHT NOW because they have such direct access (rather than submitting a support ticket that allows for triage).

      Maybe this is working perfectly for everyone else and this particular employee sucks, but I can see why the employee wouldn’t want to make it known that she was available every second of every day. I appreciate that she should be doing whatever the policy on the team is but I understand why she doesn’t want to do that.

      1. GythaOgden*

        I work in facilities delivery. Yes, you really do have to be available. Our company handbook even says that people can’t flex time to get extra days off a week because we’re expected to be available during the whole working week. (Even when I was part time I still worked Mon to Fri, just shorter hours.) It’s kind of important in a lot of very reactive fields, and this sounds like one of them.

        1. Grumpy Elder Millennial*

          Makes sense, though I think there’s a distinction between being available for tasks and broadcasting to everyone that you’re available to be contacted. For example, I imagine it wouldn’t work out great if you were dealing with an emergency for one client and you kept getting DM requests from other clients who saw you were “available” on Slack, which you kept having to respond to.

          There is 100% a problem with the employee not being available to be assigned tasks. The concern is more around whether it makes sense for clients to have a direct line to individual staff members and the ability to see who is listed as available.

    3. jasmine*

      Yeah I started writing this comment but then stopped because I wasn’t sure how my tone was coming across. “send private DM’s to whoever you see is online on the team” is a really messy process. I do customer-facing work and you really don’t want work assigned across the team by your customers, you need clear expectations around timelines (clients expecting immediate attention can be a problem when you’re dealing with DM’s), and you want visibility into the asks coming in across the team (which you don’t have with DM’s).

      Something’s off with this employee, but it also sounds like some other things could change to avoid burnout on the team.

      1. Grumpy Elder Millennial*

        Exactly. Having this process is not helping the situation, but changing the process is unlikely to solve the problem with this person.

  33. Cool Papa*

    I understand very slightly the bad employee’s point of view. If they are working on very urgent project for Client A, they don’t want Client B reaching out with less urgent request and wondering why it’s not getting done.

    That said, a Slack-based, client initiated trafficking system seems less than ideal. Does everybody have assigned clients? If not, it seems like this might put a heavy workload on your star employees

    1. Peanut Hamper*

      Nah. I’m not sure about Slack but we use Teams and when I’m in a meeting with someone, my status automatically shows as “Busy” and people can message me, knowing they probably won’t get a response right away.

      Bad employee is very good at being a bad employee and also manipulative. She doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt here.

      1. Cool Papa*

        That is a bit different though than the issue I’m thinking of (see Grumpy Elder’s post directly above, as it looks like we had concurrent thoughts).

        Let’s say Client A sent me a Slack saying “space station oxygen low. Too weak to talk” I can be frantically working to fix that, but not be in a call (It’s likely the atom disintegrator as Gen 3 disintegrators are touchy). If Client B sends me a Slack while I’m resetting the Merman Valve saying their confetti tube is clogged (when it rains raccoons often take shelter in the intake hoopers). I’m going to not respond until I get Client A’s oxygen issue resolved.

        From an overall customer service standpoint I’m doing the right thing. Client B doesn’t need confetti until Chicago Med airs at 10 (9 Central), but Client B can still be wondering why I’m not as a responsive as I usually am.

        Meanwhile my coworker Superstar Sammi may have twice as much work as me, as every single one of our hair gel, blood transfusion, and after market truck parts clients reach out to her due to her industry experience and various PHds

        1. Peanut Hamper*

          Except that if I’m working on something for Client A, that would be an appropriate time to mark myself as busy. But the employee isn’t doing this. The exact opposite in fact.

          It’s one thing to assume good intentions on the part of someone who’s actually trying. Employee is not actually trying. They’ve shown their hand. No need to play delicate at this point.

          1. Cool Papa*

            I’m not really assuming good intentions here (I’m referring to them as bad employee). Even with mechanisms in place they’d still be bad employee based on their responses to the letter writer. I’m just saying I see a bit on why they b would want to do that

        2. GythaOgden*

          You have to know when to triage stuff.

          I work on numerous sets of minutes. They routinely take a while to put together because I have to be diplomatic towards the stakeholders involved. I can work all afternoon on one or two sets per month.

          But if another colleague needs a purchase order or a receipt or something that’s a short job but time-sensitive (if it involves someone getting paid, it’s usually pretty time-sensitive!), I do it and go back to the main project. Part of me actually prefers that because I’m used to doing a variety of different things, but I got the job on the basis of an interview in which it was made very clear that I had to know how to triage things appropriately.

          I’d also suggest we give OP the benefit of the doubt here that she /knows/ where the employee should be when. She’d know if there was a lot of focus work on the employee’s plate and adjust her expectations accordingly.

          1. Cool Papa*

            I’ve done client work a ton, that’s why the client reaches out directly to sign work seems weird to me. I think some people think I’m defending the bad employee. I’m absolutely not. I’m just interested in the ticketing system via slack. See above thread for people with the same questions.

            1. GythaOgden*

              Sure — that’s valid. But it seems to be crossing a line even if you didn’t intend it to, and let’s assume that the system generally works for the purposes OP needs it to (I’m sure other people do have questions but Alison generally does ask us to take OPs at their word because it makes it easier for them to engage with us if we’re not treating their letters like a forensic investigation). It’s very similar to how I work as well — we don’t have a formal ticketing system for my role either either, just email and Teams, and for our needs it works fairly well.

              1. Cool Papa*

                I also assume it works. I’m just curious about Slack as a ticketing system. I’ve never seen it used that way.

                I can also see the path Bad Employee took to get where they did. That doesn’t mean it’s right, or that LW should let them get away with it, or even give them leeway.

    2. Myrin*

      But wouldn’t you just put your status as “busy” or “unavailable” or whatever while working on very urgent project for Client A?

      1. Cool Papa*

        Right, but then you’re asking clients to determine whether their ask is urgent or not, which tends to be yes every time.

        Also, it seems like there are only a handful of partners. They could legitimately ask be working on something at the same time. It clearly works for LW’s company. I’ve just never seen anything like it before.

        1. Myrin*

          Right, but then you’re asking clients to determine whether their ask is urgent or not, which tends to be yes every time.

          I’m afraid I’m not following. If you are shown as being “unavailable” the clients don’t have to determine anything because they can reasonably assume that you are away – obviously they can send their request anyway but they would (or at least should) then be aware that they won’t get an immediate response because, well, you’re unavailable to them at the moment.
          What am I missing here?

          1. Cool Papa*

            This was my line of thinking (partner=LW’s company employee, because that’s how they refer to them in the original letter). I’m assuming 4 partners and 6 clients, but in general I think it’s safe to assume more clients than partners

            Partner 1 working on Client 1’s issue so marked busy on Slack
            Partner 2 working on Client 2 marked busy
            p3 on C3 marked busy
            P4 on C4 marked busy

            Client 5 and 6 come in sees everybody busy on Slack. They’re still going to send their request to somebody. They may both pick Partner 1 because they’re their favorite. Now when P1 gets done with C1 they still have 2 in their queue. Compare that to a ticketing system where all go into the same queue and people generally grab the next ticket. Even if P1 asks P2 to grab C6’s ticket, it’s still more work.

  34. Czech Mate*

    Haaaaaa. She sounds like a piece of work. She needs to be told “Your job is x. This means you must be immediately available to your customers to do x. You have said you want me to assume good intent, and that is exactly why I did not bring this up before. However, when customers cannot tell if you are online, it affects your team by….and affects our customers by…” You may even need to tell her that if doing the basic functions of her job is “too much effort,” then you need to discuss transitioning her out of the role.

    Sorry, people like this just bother me.

  36. CeeBee*

    just fire her already – she is clearly not a team player and has told you nicely to go eff yourself with your requests of her. She’s gotta go – you’ll invite resentment from the rest of the team if you don’t

  37. BellaStella*

    As noted above, the HR comment and “Providing a group coaching session when one employee is clearly the problem is demoralizing and poor management” are important for the OP to reflect on. Have a 1:1 each week with her. Set goals for four weeks and explain to keep her job she must meet them and use it to measure her work. Require her to show as online and to reply. End of four weeks… if she shows no improvement fire her. Also address in first 1:1 the attitude and disrespect and tell her it is not acceptable and write her up for that too. She is manipulating you. Deal with it. You are paid to be the manager.

    1. Somehow I Manage*

      I agree that group coaching is unnecessary here and probably will end up with people rolling their eyes, maybe HR wants to have this just to cover their butts.

      But from there, I don’t think I’d have any 1:1. Lay out the expectations. And then as soon as she doesn’t follow the instructions, give one reminder that it is a requirement of the position and not negotiable. Then if it happens again, fire her. I wouldn’t invest four weeks and more coaching when this is a pretty basic expectation. If it was something more nuanced, maybe you give some coaching. But it isn’t difficult or extraordinary to set your status so you can actually do your job.

  38. Sybil Writes*

    1. Begin process of termination as soon as possible. In addition to not doing the basic requirements of the job (being and indicating available/responsive to clients and team), not carrying equitable portion of workload, this person is also not taking feedback well to the point (arguably?) of insubordination. Maybe she’ll survive a PIP, but especially since she’s in her 1st 6 months, don’t put it off. Without intervention, her performance is unlikely to improve and every week it is allowed to continue, the morale of the overall team is likely to go down.
    2. Set goals in writing so that you will have the ability to indicate that she has not met expectations when it comes to review time.
    2a. Indicate availability to partners via Slack
    2b. Respond in a timely and effective manner
    2c. Respond to 20-25% (or what makes sense for your team) of customer requests
    2d. Maintain professional demeanor / attitude in dealing with clients, team members and management (including handling training and performance feedback professionally)
    2e. Show improvement when direction/correction provided by management

    If you keep her on, you will likely need to document why she is not getting same ratings or raises as teammates. If she makes the connection between these expectations and her compensation/reputation, she will hopefully either improve or decide to move on to a different job. Either way, the team wins.
    Best of luck

  39. Cranky Old Bat*

    If being available and showing it on Slack is too much effort, perhaps she is better off not working there and putting her effort into finding someone who’d put up with this BS.

    If she’s not handling her share of the work and going against directives, a PIP is a reasonable next step. These are performance issues.

  40. sofar*

    I recently started at a company (100% remote organization) that has a crystal-clear Slack policy in the handbook. You get the handbook with your offer and are expected to review it. At first I thought, “OMG 3 pages dedicated to Slack? What in the micro-managing heck?”

    But I really like it! The expectation is everyone sets their work hours on Slack (based on their time zone, but it must overlap the company core hours. Your default during the work day must be available/green. If you’re going to step away for more than an hour, you need to put up a status. At the end of your work day/before the beginning of your next work day, you are to put it as unavailable/gray AND mute. On vacation? Status with your return date, unavailable, mute. In a meeting: MUTE with little calendar icon (which you can set up to automatically happen).

    If someone is away and muted, or has a vacation status, you are to NOT message them (and find someone else) OR schedule a send to when they’re back.

    If you are regularly acting outside of those norms, your manager is going to talk to you about it, and that’s clearly stated in the handbook. It’s a company-wide expectation for everyone.

    At my old company, people did “whatever they wanted,” and it was a chaotic mess of people “never” available, “always” available but never responding or communicating they were on vacation for two weeks, people resenting getting pinged during their time off, etc.

    2. Lurker*

      My company has pretty clear expectations about Slack, too. They’re not in our Handbook but are part of the Staff Documents/Policies/Procedures folder on the shared network. The other nice thing about having clear expectations is that it’s the same for everyone – you don’t have to guess or remember that Sally never indicates when she’s in a meeting or Wakeen is working onsite even if his status is greyed out.

    3. iglwif*

      I really like that. I’ve only ever worked at one place where the expectations were that clearly documented, and I found it very helpful!

  41. Dashwood*

    Sometimes, when someone insists upon dying on a hill, the correct thing to do is let them die on that hill.

  42. Workaholic*

    I’m guilty of having my Teams set to “busy” all the time, but that was to discourage front desk from sending all calls my way. With a plan to go green once all my huge projects are caught up. But I’m still very obv. there, working, and available. I hate when coworkers show away every time you check.

    1. 653-CXK*

      I’m also guilty of setting my phone to “Do Not Disturb” because I’m usually in deep concentration in work, and I don’t want to get thrown off track. I also screen calls.

      Once my concentration work is finished, I’ll set my phone to “Available.” If it’s urgent, I will accept the call, but often, I will let it to go voicemail, review it, and then return the call within 10-15 minutes.

  43. Justin*

    I have a colleague who I would ignore but need to work with. All of our calendars are visible to the company up to and including the CEO. If we have personal things to do it’s common practice to write “busy” or “appointment.” But for group meetings… well, we know what we’re all doing.

    She only ever has a few things on her calendar weekly (none of my business) but they only ever say “busy” despite the fact that I know that some of these calls are calls we’re both on.

    I just find it strange that there are people in the company who are allowed to do this, but I just wouldn’t care if she wasn’t always saying she wasn’t free to work on a project she’s a part of. (Yes I went to my supervisor, and he told me we’re just going to abandon the project if she won’t engage soon.)

    The common practice in the company is to say “my calendar is up to date” so we’re not all emailing each other for meetings, and to fill empty spaces with “Busy” or something generic if it’s personal (like I do).

    So, my point is, this is not “a work style” per se. You unfortunately have an issue that needs to be dealt with.

    1. allathian*

      Yeah, we have the same system, the only difference is that when we flag a meeting private by clicking the lock icon, it really is private, not even your manager can see it. IT could, but they’d need a really good reason to look.

      It’s great for me because I really don’t want to keep updating more than one calendar constantly. I put my private appointments outside of work hours in my Google calendar (on my phone) because I don’t carry my work phone around when I’m not working.

  44. H.Regalis*

    LW, be prepared for this employee to pull out all the stops trying to mess with your head, including co-opting therapy/social justice language to manipulate you.

      1. Aneurin*

        Given that OP’s head is already messed with, and the employee is already using therapy/SJ-adjacent language (respect, good/bad intent), maybe not such a leap!

    2. I Have RBF*

      IMO, the LW needs to flip the script on the employee, starting with telling her that her attitude is demanding excessive emotional labor from the LW – her manager, and stepping on her coworkers boundaries around doing their fair share of the work. Her unavailability is causing turmoil within the workgroup, and as her manager it is your responsibility to address it with her. Furthermore, it is a hard boundary for the letter writer to be treated with respect by all of her reports, and refusing to comply with workplace norms is disrespectful to the LW as a manager and to her teammates as coworkers.

      The LW can absolutely state the necessity of complying with workplace norms and doing their fair share of work in social justice and therapy language. It will clue her to the fact that the LW knows what she’s pulling, and that it won’t fly with them.

  45. Banana Pyjamas*

    If she’s still in her probationary period, I agree with firing her immediately. It’s clear the company expectations of the role and her expectations of the role are not a match. If this time period has already elapsed, and you did not issue a verbal warning during the first conversation, I would do that now. Let her know the next step is a written warning, assuming you have a progressive workplace policy. I would say something like “During our last conversation, I outlined that your away Slack status was resulting in a lower than expected work output. You were given an opportunity to offer workable alternatives and did not offer any. Your Slack status needs to reflect your availability. This is a verbal warning. If your status does not reflect your availability or your output does not increase x amount the next step is a written warning.”

  46. Serious Pillowfight*

    What an adversarial employee. She sounds like a brat. I don’t see her lasting long on the team, through no fault of yours, OP. She came in with a huge chip on her shoulder. This isn’t the job or team for her. Pure speculation, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she was working another job, remote or otherwise, while she’s supposed to be working with your company.

  47. Somehow I Manage*

    A manager making comparisons between team members may not always be the right move. But if someone is handling far less work because customers are actively not reaching out to them, that’s not an unnecessary comparison. The fact that this individual is not following clear instructions, not doing a reasonable amount of work, the lack of work is causing others to have to do more, and they’re giving you a weird attitude when you’ve laid out specific expectations says they’re probably not cut out for the job. And if this continues to fester, you’re going to have good team members see what they might be able to get away with, or they’ll leave.

    OP, good on you for planning the conversation. Following that, I’d give a very small window before you part ways. Have the conversation. Set the expectation. If it happens once more, give a reminder that everyone needs to set status appropriately. And if there’s another instance, it is time to end the relationship.

  48. TheBunny*

    Can I do this? Will it work for me?

    LW the bottom line is that it’s her job and you are getting feedback that people think she’s not available. She’s the problem.

  49. TootsNYC*

    and has suggested I schedule a time to set team-wide norms and expectations, which I plan to do next week.

    Don’t do this shit. Just tell HER: “You must put your availability on Slack. It is a job requirement. I am your manager, and I am requiring this of you. If you find it emotionally upsetting, we have an EAB program that can help you find psychiatric help. But I expect to see it.”

    Don’t bother all the other people who ALREADY know what the norms and expectations of working remotely are.

    1. DramaQ*

      Agreed I’d be pissed if I was drug into the meeting when we all know it is her. Why am I being put on the carpet like in grade school? It’s her performance that is an issue not mine.

      There are customers complaining about not being able to reach her. That’s enough of a reason to address it with her 1:1. Nobody else has customers coming to you with these concerns.

    2. Colorado*

      Yes!! Don’t make it a team issue when it clearly is not. Call her out. I’m a crusty gen-xer. Been working my ass off since I was 15. Cannot tolerate this “you’re offending me by making me do my job” BS.

    3. Raida*

      I would say that it *is* a good idea if it entails:
      Defining in writing the policies on Slack use – including Out Of Office, Signing out at the end of the day, setting for when busy on a task, if a status update is required for A, B, C.
      Distributing the Slack Policies.

      Like, if someone came in one day in… I dunno… a fish costume, and said “well there isn’t *actually* a dress code so…” Then I’d truly expect to get a formalised dress code in my, and everyone else’s email, within like a week.

      But I certainly wouldn’t tell the entire team in a meeting.

      Or I would, but after I’d fired this person, and then include it in Onboarding process so that everyone already there would be on the same page as a new person.

  50. Frankie Bergstein*

    Is this employee a master manipulator or just someone using DARVO?

    I think it’s the latter — defend (its individual preferences!), aggressive (you’re being too hands on), reverse victim and offender (it’s actually you that’s the problem and here’s why!)

    1. Name (Required)*

      DARVO is exactly the first thing that popped into my head while reading this, yes!

    2. Grey Coder*

      Yeah. Try these:

      “We’re not talking about anyone’s intent; we’re talking about being responsive to our clients”

      “We’re not talking about working styles; we’re talking about performing the requirements of the job”

      “We’re not talking about other people; we’re talking about baseline standards of productivity”

      In general “we’re not talking about (insert deflection), we are talking about you doing your job.” Bear in mind that the deflections are likely to get more and more personal and outrageous. I would honestly suggest role playing this so you learn to work past your natural instinct to defend yourself.

      1. H.Regalis*

        This is great! I am not the LW but I struggle with dealing with DARVO shit, and this is really helpful.

  51. Jeanine*

    Yeah this isn’t going to fly, they need to have an accurate status and be available when they need to be. I have the opposite problem, I am diligent about changing my status and even when I have it set to “away” people insist on messaging me, when it’s CLEAR I’m not there. Pay attention people.

  52. bbw*

    I think it’s totally reasonable to honestly let your team member know that you were “taken aback” and alarmed by her response to the suggestion that it would be too much effort to clearly communicate her availability, and that while perhaps there was a failure on your part to have clearly set expectations in that moment, nevertheless it’s important that you know she understands the nature of her role going forward, as her response suggests she does not. But maybe that comes from my own misguided desire to put down an “UNO Reverse” on her implication that you are the one being unreasonable here.

  53. The Gollux, Not a Mere Device*

    This employee certainly isn’t assuming anyone else’s good intent: she is treating anything she doesn’t happen to like as hostile. That’s not someone who’s trying to find a way to work with people, it’s someone who’s hoping you’ll give up on expecting her to do anything other than collect a paycheck.

  54. Seeking Second Childhood*

    Dang. And here I am feeling guilty when I use Do-Not-Disturb on a deadline day.

    1. Somehow I Manage*

      I was thinking something similar. I realized I’d set my DND last Friday while recording a podcast episode and I didn’t take it off until this morning.

  55. CLC*

    Once I was supposed to take a vacation day but my plans changed at the last minute and I ended up working, but I forgot to turn off my out of office. Most productive day I had had in years. There was something so freeing about having no expectation to be working let alone no interruptions.

    1. Kevin Sours*

      Sure. And if the employee wants to make that case and figures out how to make that sort of focus time work within the constraints of the job then she can do it. But the whole “I’d prefer not to” approach doesn’t work.

    2. pally*

      Yeah- and you ended the day with proof of your excellent productivity.
      That proof seems to be lacking here.

    3. Somehow I Manage*

      I get a lot of stuff done if I come into the office on a Saturday or Sunday. But I actually get a lot of stuff done. This employee is “working” but isn’t showing their work.

  56. Name (Required)*

    Ungh, it sounds like this employee is weaponizing therapy-speak in a way that excuses not being a team player. I am so pro-worker it’s coming out my ears, but this person seems like they are steamrolling any opposition with the fear of being unfair/ableist. If they’re only meeting valid criticism with defensive excuses rather than a willingness to compromise, or at least understand that they’re creating more work for their teammates, I’d be incredibly suspicious of what’s really going on here.

    1. H.Regalis*

      That was my take too. I’m expecting the employee to pull out some, “I feel unsafe [when you tell me I have to do my goddamn job]” bullshit.

      I knew guy who was convinced his boss was being ableist by firing him . . . he got canned because he screamed at her and punched a hole in the wall when she told him to do his job.

  57. DramaQ*

    “She also accused me of not respecting individual work styles/preferences/autonomy and not assuming good intent.”

    She keeps using that phrase. I do not think it means what she thinks it means.

    She’s weaponizing corporate mindfulness speak. And you are letting her get away with it!

    If your job is to be available to customers during work hours your job is to be available during work hours. If you cannot handle that then this is not the job for you. Period.

    1. Somehow I Manage*

      “If your personal preferences include making yourself unavailable to customers and me during your work hours, I have a difficult time assuming anything other than you’re not actually doing the job you agreed to do.”

  58. MuseumChick*

    OP, you may not see this being so far down in the comments but I’ve found this script like thishelpful. The key is to say it in a neutral tone. “(Name), we discussed your Slack status being “away” at all time. I wasn’t clear at the time and I want to be clear now, you cannot have your Slack statues as perpetually away. Not only is it important that you signal when you are available, it is required. Have it changed by the end of they day.” If she tries to argue with you “I need to be clear, this isn’t a discussion. This is me, as your manager, giving you a directive.” They hold her accountable if she refuses to comply.

  59. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

    This also sounds like overemployment to me. “Away” would simplify focusing on the other job during their overlap.

    I’ll join the chorus: LW, it’s a them problem, not a you problem.

  60. MistOrMister*

    OP lost me at the beginning when they said they suggested the enployee could indicate her status via message. That was the time to tell her that her status needs to be set to active unless she is away from her desk and to not accept any pushback. Why does this new person get to decide how to do things when everyone else has to do it a different way? There is no way the members on the team who have been around longer and have noticed this are not wondering why the new lady gets special treatment. And to let this person do less work than everyone else….I would bet anything they set their status as away on purpose specifically so people don’t know they are available and give them less work. This kind of thing is a serious morale destroyer to the rest of the team and needs to be handled immediately.

  61. Colorado*

    They’re definitely pulling one over on you. Second job? Entitled? Sounds like my 13 year old who doubles down at the slightest…interrogation. Tell her the job requirements. Give us an update on this one.

  62. el l*

    “The job is to respond to urgent client requests. Clients do us the favor of checking whether we’re available, which within reason we’re paid to be, and the way we indicate to clients we’re available is by indicating your Slack availability. That’s the job. Period.

    “We have already confirmed that you are not pulling your weight on the team, and that it’s because of this availability signaling. You will do that consistently every single day going forward, or we’re going to be parting ways. Period.”

    Enforce that. And given the unyielding and unreasonable attitude she has, I’d say enforce with zero tolerance.

  63. Nat20*

    Juat because you shouldn’t micromanage her time spent working (like a lot of employers did at the start of covid) doesn’t mean there aren’t ANY expectations for her availability, or that you can’t prescribe a system for indicating it.

    Based on the audacity of her basically saying no to instructions and berating you for them, I have a feeling she thought the autonomy of a remote job would mean that she doesn’t have to be managed.

    2. I Have RBF*

      This.

      I am a 100% remote worker. At least half of my job is being available during my working hours to answer questions and solve problems for internal clients. If I was always “away”, and not able to answer questions or work tickets, I would expect to get fired. My status automatically shows if I am in a Zoom meeting, and I have the option of setting my status to “busy” or “out of office”, depending on why I’m not available. I actually seldom use busy, because very little that I do is not atomic, and able to be interrupted.

      This person does not want to do their job, and is weaponizing language to DARVO their manager. They need to stop the shit and do their job as directed, or find another place to work. If I had a teammate like that I would be furious.

  64. Kay*

    Slack statuses are also super fun while also being useful/productive. Working for an almost entirely remote company, it’s part of my routine to choose which food emoji will mean ‘Lunch’ that day or uploading custom ones that dictate different states/messages. So it’s possible to make having those an expectation while also leaving room for individuality/expression, regardless of whether this employee stays on your team or not. Would recommend!

  65. Irish Teacher.*

    Honestly, this person is weaponising the language of social justice and such like.

    Bosses are not required to “assume good intent.” It is literally a manager’s job to evaluate whether somebody is meeting requirements or not; they usually shouldn’t be just assuming everybody is doing the right thing. Especially not when she straight up admitted that she wasn’t.

    I mean, bosses shouldn’t just assume the worst of everybody, but if somebody isn’t doing their job properly, “assuming good intent” and therefore not dealing with the issue would be poor management.

    Nor do you always have to respect individual work styles. As the boss, you have a right to set certain requirements. Now, yes, you should respect individual work styles when all work equally well, but this clearly doesn’t work equally well. And it’s not about what “works for her.” You get to set the requirements.

    If she is young, it’s possible she doesn’t know this. I’ll “assume good intent” there and not just assume she is deliberately manipulating you. It is possible, if she is new to the workforce that she has read a lot of stuff online about setting boundaries and not allowing your employer to exploit you and doesn’t quite realise where the line is. In which case, it is part of your role to teach her. The employees a couple of posts down who walked out when their boss verbally abused them and damaged the door were asserting boundaries. Refusing to do your job is just insubordination.

    2. I would simply not encounter a bug*

      TBH I’ve only ever heard “assume good/positive intent” in the context of corporate culture stuff. Is there a social justice angle to this language?

  66. Awkwardness*

    She told me that was too much effort for her, and she will think about what she can do instead “that works best for her.” She also accused me of not respecting individual work styles/preferences/autonomy and not assuming good intent.

    I never even tried to mess with my boss like that, even though it is obviously effective enough to make him write a letter to AAM.
    I feel a bit like a loser.

  67. Captain dddd-cccc-ddWdd*

    OP, you’ve been gifted an opportunity here to put into practice the stuff you’ve been working on in coaching – being more prescriptive in certain situations, etc. This is one of those situations. Ultimately you just have to take a deep breath and then have the conversation with her: “I’m going to have to bring up the Slack situation again. I do need you to use the online status to mark yourself as available. The normal expectation is that you’d be available about x% of the time. This is the way the workload is in this team and you need to follow it”.

    I wonder if she’s struggling with the constant interruptions and context switching. Some people thrive on it and some don’t. My hunch is she would do a lot better if she were to transfer to a more “back office” analyst role rather than client facing. It’s up to you whether you want to ‘reward’ her with that (if the other analyst work is more prestigious, or just by giving her what she wants).

    1. pally*

      If she is in fact struggling due to the interruptions, why not make this known to the boss?
      The ‘attitude’ she used sure doesn’t help matters.

      If this is the case, maybe there’s a way for the OP to establish regular times where she is not interrupted and other times where she is available for clients. Then see if that improves her work output.

      Otherwise, this is a bad fit.

  68. Harper*

    100% this employee is barely working/not working when she’s remote, and she’s gaslighting the LW to create a diversion.

    1. Ginger Cat Lady*

      I honestly wonder if she’s working two jobs at once and that’s why she won’t increase her availability.

  69. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain*

    It’s too bad this has been allowed for 6 months already because she should have been put on notice in her first 90 days, or whatever your probationary period is. I sort of get why HR is saying you need to meet with the whole team about expectations at this point because when you let bad behavior slide for a while, and then enforce it, there’s bound to be some sort of HR complaint and then they’ll have to go through a whole investigation, or wait 3 more months for a PIP to play out.

    Scrutinize that job description — don’t think that anything is assumed even if you think it’s common sense or “understood” — if it doesn’t explicitly state that X% of time is expected to be available for customer support, or availability must be indicated in Slack, etc., be prepared to rewrite the job description (unless you have a contract, that is completely within your right as a manager) and then present the updated job descriptions to the whole team.

    Just as an aside, my job description was wildly out of date at one point. I’ve been in my job for 17 years — technology and requirements have changed within normal expectations. My job description mentioned software and even hardware that we don’t use anymore, or even no longer exists. It didn’t mention anything about Teams/Zoom even Sharepoint. None of those things existed 17 years ago (I don’t think) but now they are an essential part of my job.

  70. Lol What*

    This reminds me of when I worked in a call center and my coworker just kept hanging up on people instead of taking calls.

  72. Dris*

    Honestly OP, if this was my employee I would sit down for a 1:1 with her about this, in addition to the team-wide setting of expectations. I’d say something like this:

    “[Team member], I’m quite concerned that you feel using Slack for basic work purposes such as client visibility is ‘too difficult’. this is something that very much relates to a core area of your work, and frankly it’s also part of the basic computer competency considered pretty standard across a wide variety of office jobs. Do you feel you would be able to reach this level in the near term with some additional training or support?”

    Then not only should you make a plan to set her up with basic Slack 101 training, but you should go a step further.

    “For the time being we’ll plan to meet regularly [personally I would aim for biweekly, and no less than monthly] to review your work and make sure there are no other areas where a core part of your work is too difficult for you to perform, and to address any areas that do come up.”

    Do not frame this as optional. Schedule the meetings and stick to them. Then dig through their work and see if there are any other red flags for this employee, and be prepared to put her on a PIP. The goal here isn’t to punish, it’s to manage; you need to know if the fact that she can’t handle Slack indicates there are any other parts of her job she’s ignoring because they are “difficult”. And my money says there are. Once identified you’ll have to decide if it’s something that can be practically corrected with training, or it she is dealing with some other kind of problem that can be promptly addressed. But if she is genuinely as incapable of doing her job as she is at using a simple app in a work context… you’ll need to let her go, and possibly re-examine your processes for hiring/oversight generally to avoid a repeat of this kind of employee in the future.

    Good luck OP, and really deeply understand that you aren’t in the wrong for expecting your team to use Slack correctly. Some management training or professional coaching might be worth looking into to help with internalizing that.

  73. Leslie Knope*

    “has suggested I schedule a time to set team-wide norms and expectations, which I plan to do next week.”

    OP – It sounds like you are saying you are going to set expectations with the entire team at once/in a meeting before speaking to her. She will take that to mean you are disciplining her under the protection of a group setting. Talk to her first, set the expectation, let her know you’re going to cover this with everyone to make sure everyone has the same expectation.

  74. Troubadour*

    When you’re talking with her you need to be very clear about the requirements of the role, and do talk about it in those terms. That way whenever she tries to derail you with talk about different work styles and assuming intent and unfair comparisons and what works for her, you can calmly cut her off and repeat, “What I’m talking about is the requirements of the role.”

    That means that before you go in to talk with her you need to be very clear yourself what you require of the role on a quantitative level. Not just the amount of time her status shows available, but also how many requests she’s dealing with (which might be a number per day/week or might be a percentage of requests coming in). You might want to think of both a minimum requirement and a preferred amount – or those might be the same thing.

    For each requirement it’s useful to be able to explain why it’s important to the role. That doesn’t mean you should get into a long discussion with your employee to convince her. (For many employees a brief explanation can be useful; for this particular one you could try it but be prepared for her to try to derail again.) But it’s useful for *you* to have clear in your head so that when she starts trying to mess with your mind again you’re firm with the reality that no, this is what her job requires and therefore your job requires you to stand firm.

    Your goal is to keep the conversation firmly in the realm of this is what the job requires, and block her attempts to derail, so that the only options remaining for her are to either agree to do it or to admit that actually she doesn’t want to do the job in which case you can switch to talking about how to wrap up her time with you so she can find a job better suited to her. (Again figure out in advance what you’d want that “wrap up” to look like, don’t let her think she can linger on for weeks while she’s job hunting.)

  75. Sara without an H*

    OP, I feel for you, but if you don’t get out in front of this situation, your employee is going to run all over you. Correction: She’s running all over you now.

    Don’t waste your time and energy trying to figure out why she’s like this or what you can do differently that will make her change. You need to start holding her accountable or preparing to fire her.

    Talk with your own manager. Make sure they understand what’s going on and have your back. Talk more with HR about what kind of documentation you’ll need to hold your employee accountable. Find out what their requirements are for PIPs, progressive discipline, etc. If your firm has an employee manual, get it out and reread it.

    Several upstream commenters have found fault with your HR rep’s response. Given that you apparently asked them to confirm that you had the authority to set work norms for your own team (!), they may be assuming that you haven’t set clear goals for the group as a whole. If that’s true, definitely make sure that expectations have been made explicit, in writing, for the whole team.

    Alison’s advice is good, and you need to put it into action right away. But don’t let the process drag on forever — this person has been getting away with this behavior for six months. Giving her another six won’t do you, or her, any good at all.

  76. Procedure Publisher*

    Reminds me of the colleague who was always busy on IM when she moved to a different team. However, unlike the employee in the letter, she had a message in her status about contacting her through email. I suspect her business contacts were constantly asking questions and interrupting her.

  77. DreddPirate*

    Another person taking lessons from Bartleby the Scrivener…

    Umm, yeah, sorry… I don’t care whether you prefer not to.

  78. The 80s Called…*

    This reminds me of the cashier at my local grocery store who regularly forgets to turn on the light indicating that his lane is open.

  80. Hedgehug*

    Hiiiiiiiiighly recommend you flat out tell her to keep an online status. Do not give her the option to manage her status throughout the day, because I guarantee she will go the “malicious compliance” route and spend most of her day changing her status.

  81. CraigT*

    I am constantly amazed by the number of managers who can’t manage the simplest of situations. Your employee tells you she’s not going to do a key part of her job, and you walk away from it? Correct that on the spot. Let her know in very plain English the consequences of not actually doing the job she’s hired to do. And then, make sure she suffers those consequences if she fails to correct her behavior.

    1. Sarah*

      I don’t think that’s fair. We’ve heard many tales on this site of managers trying to get employees to do their jobs and they don’t get the backing of the higher ups or rest of the business. As a new manager it can be hard to know how to find balance between micro managing and laissez-faire so I’ve got a great deal of respect for them writing in and asking for opinions on a) if it’s a reasonable request and b) how to handle it professionally.

      1. mbs001*

        Sorry but just no. This manager needed to nip this in the bud. Frankly, it’s insubordination. Yes I used that word. It’s ridiculous that employees think they have the right to decide whether or not they are going to do their assigned job.

    2. Goldie*

      I’ve been blessed with many great staff do when you find a stinker you sometimes need to recalibrate.

  83. NotARealManager*

    There are different working styles that can be accommodated in different kinds of jobs. This is not a working style that will work for this particular job. It’s a key part of *this* job that she remains online and available for customers and teammates.

    Additionally, comparing her workload to that of her teammates is totally fair as a starting point. That’s why bosses look at these kind of stats. There might be contributing factors you’re unaware of for why she’s handling a lower number of cases, but “Hey, I notice our team averages closing 20 cases a day and you’re only closing 5” is a very reasonable way to start the conversation about her workload.

    Finally, make sure you are clear with her about remaining available online before you hold the team meeting about it. If you just hold the team meeting, she’ll think it doesn’t apply to her because you’ve already had sidebar conversations with her where she told you she wouldn’t do it and you haven’t pushed back strongly enough on that.

    1. Somehow I Manage*

      Agree with your third paragraph. I worked with someone who NEVER picked up on the specific thing that was brought up in a team meeting, but was really directed toward them. So it would be good to be very specific with her in advance, so in the team meeting you’re reiterating for her what you’ve told her 1:1.

      That said, unless HR is forcing LW’s hand in having the team meeting, I’d forgo that entirely and just make it a 1:1 because you’re not having problems with others.

  85. TweedleDum*

    You let her Captain the ship right from the start. Address important issues as they arise. “You being available to customers during your working hours is a condition of the job”. Being respectful is important but this person sees you as a pushover. It’s ok to manage. It’s ok to fire.

  86. Jellyfish Catcher*

    You have two issues. First the employee, so document, document, follow the protocol, and she will be gone.

    The second issue is more important: confidence in yourself.
    When I see something in my life that I rationally know I should tackle or change, but I’m stalling, avoiding or hoping it magically resolves itself – it’s often blocked by Old Stuff, Old patterns, that we learned when our young brain couldn’t always distinguish what was helpful from what wasn’t.
    Think about anything that make you feel incompetent, or a jerk, and explore why you still sometimes feel that way, when it’s not the case. Some of that can be improved with work training and experience and some it could benefit by some sessions with a good therapist – you won’t regret it.
    You can do this.

  87. Em*

    I am someone who has the exact same reasoning as she does for having several messaging services etc set as perpetually offline. The difference is, they are all services I use in my personal life, and I’d never do that at work. Because yeah, it can be stressful having to respond immediately/quickly to messages when people know you’re online, but thats a part of your job. I don’t think that the employee is going to ever propose an alternative, as any alternatives would lead to the exact same ‘issue’ for her— she wants to be able to freely ignore messages for however long she wants without suffering any negative consequences. It’s not the specific form of online status she is avoiding, it’s the idea of seeming available at all

  88. Jellyfish Catcher*

    Some of your challenges in confidence may be due to lack of experience. Follow the protocol, document, document, and that employee will be gone.

    But, long term, some of your challenges and lack of confidence may be due to what I call Old Stuff or Old Learning. When I am facing some thing that needs resolution , yet I’m stalling, avoiding or hoping that it magically goes away by itself – I look at why my emotions are resisting action or resolution.
    We all have Old Stuff or Old Learning. It can be what we were taught or experienced earlier when we had a young brain that absorbs everything, but has no experience to judge the content.
    Or, it could be that we were never exposed to some experiences.
    Some thought on that or some therapy can be very helpful.

  89. Lizzie (with the deaf cat)*

    LW, this staff member is a very skilful manipulator, and she will keep you on the hop, constantly doubting yourself. But you are not alone! Look at Alison’s advice, and at all the commenters here saying this staff member has to go. I think her skills are so good that if you keep her on because she makes a small concession to your requirements, she will simply ramp up her manipulation in other directions. She is a threat to the running of your workplace’s business. And is at the beginning of a long career of being a missing stair in your workplace… you can’t manipulate her or play her game at all. You can only be very direct and factual about what is required, and meticulous record keeping of your directions to her and her responses/behaviour will undoubtedly be useful down the track. Best wishes to you!

  90. Distractable Golem*

    Already ready for the update.
    I want this one relayed in real time
    It might be on a smaller scale than CEBro, but something memorable is gonna happen n

  91. Also*

    I’d actually start with HR’s suggestion, and maybe get one of their DEI/well-being personnel to speak to the employee privately to see what’s up.

    She might be a jerk, she might have unrealistic expectations, she might be recovering from an unpleasant workplace experience (bullying, micromanagement, etc), she might have a health/personal issue that’s impacting, or there might be workload or team issues OP isn’t aware of.

    Lower work volume at first glance doesn’t always mean a smaller workload in reality. It could mean that this employee is handling the longer or otherwise more complex cases. Or she could just be a jerk.

    1. Somehow I Manage*

      I’m not sure I agree with this. While there might be other things going on for this employee, it isn’t necessarily management’s job to go mining for this. The LW states that the employee is always setting her status to away. If she was handling longer or more complex cases, there would be evidence of that. There would also be evidence that she was setting her status correctly outside of handling those issues. Given the actions, the response to course correction and the phrasing of her responses, I’d worry that a “what’s up” conversation might plant seeds for her to find “something” to latch onto as an excuse for her behavior. Not only does that not solve the problem, that also creates issues for employees who have a legitimate “thing” that they’re dealing with.

  93. sagegreen is still my favorite color*

    This would be known as work avoidance where I work. She’s done this before I think and you will end up firing her or she will quit within six months. Something like that is part of a customer service job. Accept her as a challenge to your managerial training.

  94. AnnieB*

    “Your team member is messing with your head, and you’re letting her.”

    I LOVE that. Such a reassuring reality check for leaders who tend to be too nice and are afraid they’re actually the jerk when they set expectations.

  95. SALC*

    What AAM said… but also, address it with HER directly instead of in a team meeting. It’s pointless to make everyone else sit through a meeting about expectations when they’re doing the right thing! You’ll have a few of your more conscientious people assume you’re talking about them because they dared to not respond one time while in the bathroom, and the person it’s actually about WILL NOT take it onboard at individual feedback that “hey you need to do something different because you’re failing at your job.”

    Have individual conversations for individual problems and group conversations for group problems! It does not work to address it in a group setting to avoid the person trying to argue. They NEVER think you’re talking about them

  96. Keymaster of Gozer (She/Her)*

    ‘Your status must be accurate and you must show as available more than X% of the day. This is not optional’

    Worked in IT for decades and there’s always one of these. The one who disables their phone. The one who insists they can’t access the system. The one who always has a reason for showing up an hour late and leaving two hours early and spend the entire day chatting to their mates.

    And I get it. I truly do. Working in any kind of customer service is relentless and sometimes you just want it all to stop for a bit. But if you’ve hit that point you take time off, you don’t refuse to do the job.

    If she was on her probation period here in the UK I’d give her one statement to shape up and start showing as available or we’d have to look into parting ways. Any refusal on her part and that’s it. Gone.

  97. FunkyMunky*

    my team status is always “away” unless it’s “busy” or “OOO”. If anyone asks, I just ignore them
    that’s how I signal I’m not engaging in mindless chat, and I always respond if it’s work related
    my actual work tasks completed speak for themselves, and people who have time to investigate other people’s statuses clearly need more work assigned to them
    #ISaidWhatISaid

    1. mbs001*

      Which is fine if it’s fine with your boss — if you have one. But if your boss insisted that you keep your status active, you do it or be fired.

    2. Somehow I Manage*

      The difference between your situation and the LW’s situation is that you’re getting your work done and you don’t have customers unable to reach you because your status is set to away. In this situation, the directive is that this team is supposed to mark their status appropriately because it allows them to actually do their job.

    3. 653-CXK*

      Those last two sentences were an odd thing to say.

      How do you know your bosses or colleagues aren’t scrutinizing your “speak-my-yourself” results? Sometimes, your perfect work can have a mistake that looks like piffle to you, but could cost your company millions of dollars – and your job.

      Perhaps instead of bragging about your own accomplishments and being dismissive and rude, understand why this is article is on AAM. OP has an insubordinate direct report who refuses to do her work and is manipulating her. If she were your direct report, would you stand for it, especially if it affects your “speak-for-yourself” results? Quite the opposite – you would be writing her up with a PIP or showing her the door, just like the OP is attempting to do.

      Tl;dr – this article is not about you. You obviously need more work to do too.

  98. Kesnit*

    While I agree with what others have said, one thing jumped out at me – “she didn’t want people to know if she was online because she didn’t want to feel pressure to respond right away.” There are two ways to read that.

    The first is the “she’s lazy” version – she does not want to work and is doing everything she can to minimize her workload. Given everything else she has said, that is a realistic possibility.

    The second is that she is afraid that if she does not respond instantly to everything and in the exact right way, she will be fired. I know that sounds extreme, but reading this site shows that there are employers who are that harsh. I did not see any indication in the letter that Employee is new to the workforce, so it is possible that Employee once worked at a site that had that environment. OP says that the employee has done this since she started working there.

    OP, a few questions (that you obviously do not have to answer publically, but popped into my mind).
    What kind of training did Employee get when she arrived?
    Has she does this kind of work before? If so, what was the nature of her previous employer? (I ask because I used to volunteer for a crisis-hotline, and the stress of knowing you have to get it right the first time is pretty high.)
    When you first spoke to her, what language did you use? (i.e. was it more like “you have to always be available and respond quickly” or “why are you always listed as ‘unavailable?'”)

    This is NOT to say that OP is at fault. As I said above, it is very reasonable that Employee is just lazy.

  99. kiki*

    I do think there are positions/roles/companies/situations where having your slack status icon permanently disabled (set to away) is fine or beneficial*, but this is clearly not one of them. Maybe this employee is bringing baggage from a previous role to this new one, but LW is completely within their right to make it a requirement of this job and their employee doesn’t get to say that it’s “too much effort.”

    * I worked with someone who always had their status set to away for a non-shady reason. He was an SME who had worked his way up in the company and had been a huge asset to all the departments he had previously worked in. He was so knowledgeable and helpful that a lot of people would go to him with any question they had and expect a quick response if he was online. But they shouldn’t have been asking him those questions— they have documentation and their own managers to help them. And all the questions were preventing him from being able to get his actual job done. Being set to away discouraged folks from reaching out to him for “quick questions” they could find on their own. And everyone who worked directly with him for his new role understood they could still communicate with him during business hours despite him being away

  100. Choggy*

    This is a case of when someone tells you who they are, believe them. You’ll want to nip this in the bud before the employee feels like they are being bullied and goes to HR. Once the paperwork is submitted, it will be a lot harder to fire this employee.

  101. Goddess47*

    In your team-wide norms, be sure not to ‘soften’ the language since that will be used against you.

    As in, “members of this team are expected to be available to customers at least four hours per shift” and NOT “team member should generally be available” — be as concrete and measurable as you can… it will be worth the hassle to come up with them that way.

    And it’s worth getting a ‘receipt’ for this, especially for your problem child. A specific acknowledgment of “I have read and will follow these rules” will be in your favor when, as you dig deeper, you find more problems…

    Good luck!

  102. Bill and Heather's Excellent Adventure*

    perhaps she could do that by using status messages instead. She told me that was too much effort for her

    Then this isn’t the right job for her. Imagine telling your manager that merely changing a generic status message is ‘too much’, my God!

    I agree with other commenters who’ve suggested she already has a job and took this one because it was fully remote and she thought she’d be able to get away with doing very little. ‘Individual work style’ means actually WORKING, and she clearly isn’t. That’s how you know there isn’t ‘good intentions here.

  103. Sonia*

    Monitoring productivity solely based on online status indicators is ineffective. Clients can contact employees regardless of their online status. I would suggest to the clients exactly that.

    We must cultivate trust with new employees rather than doubting their productivity. Assuming that a new employee handles less work without proper evaluation is counterproductive. Implementing a shared file where employees can document their projects and statuses will provide a clear and accurate view of their workload and progress. This eliminates the need to pretend a green light on the screen.

Comments are closed.