updates: coworkers want me to spend the night at their house, employee refuses to do her job, and more

by Alison Green on December 10, 2024

It’s “where are you now?” month at Ask a Manager, and all December I’m running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past. Here are four updates from past letter-writers.

There will be more posts than usual this week, so keep checking back throughout the day.

1. My boss and my employee won’t stop asking me to spend the night at their houses

A few little details to clear up things that were brought up in the comments and one big one that I think ended up being the root of the issue (maybe). I am in a large metropolitan area on the east coast, and it is not in any way normal for people to invite other people to spend the night at their house in this area. I grew up Mormon, so my views on alcohol are a bit skewed. I do drink but I find it highly unusual to drink at children’s activities, holidays, and other times when a lot of people think it is normal. Also, when I said I can be a little wild on the weekends, I meant smoking pot and swimming naked in my pool, nothing more.

The biggest thing to clarify, which I think was the root of the invites, is that I actually lived three hours away, but my boyfriend lived about 30-45 minutes away. We (the kids, him, and I) split our time between the two places. We have been dating for many years and the kids had bedrooms and friends in both locations. When I needed to be in the office, I would stay at his house. Most of the time, we were at my house. We referred to both places as home. Since then my kids graduated and went off to college, we sold both houses, and bought a house together that was near his old house and are thoroughly enjoying empty nesting! My coworkers all knew about all of this, but for some reason after the move the invites stopped. The only thing I can think of is that they for some reason thought I (and/or the kids maybe) were not 100% comfortable staying at his house … maybe? Or they didn’t understand that I was only driving back to his house somehow … We stayed there regularly, so I really don’t know.

I definitely agree with you that there are some loose boundaries and sometimes an assumption that everyone else feels the same way. I did say something to my boss about my employee inviting me to spend the night after I had been drinking at a work event and she responded, “I invite you to spend the night too and it isn’t weird when I do it.” To which I just blinked and changed the subject.

As far as my boss and my employee spending too much time together outside of work — my employee has given notice that she is retiring soon. I have been promoted and am being groomed for the C suite. My boss is still my boss, but as the only two women on the leadership team we have developed a very close bond and genuine friendship. All of this makes it feel less awkward to spend time with them outside of work.

2. Should I accept my employee just isn’t well suited to a task?

For the second/final meeting of 2024 where the note-taking was needed, I reassigned the task to someone else, a recent part-time hire we’ll call Sally. Sally did great; she was able to immediately pick up the process, keep up with the conversation, and she tracked edits accurately and with apparent ease. I am really hoping she remains available to do this for 2025 meetings.

I approached the reassignment pretty straightforwardly with Callie, who was, interestingly, surprised and a little embarrassed (I’m not sure that’s quite the right word to use, but it’s in the ballpark). She asked if she’d been doing a bad job and I let her know it just wasn’t a task she was well-suited for and, more importantly, wasn’t using her strengths to their best advantage. She has plenty she’s good at and it makes more sense to have her focus on those tasks than this one. She did say she wasn’t sad to not have to do it anymore, because she found it stressful and difficult. The fact that she was surprised that she wasn’t performing the task satisfactorily did open my eyes to the fact that perhaps I was being less direct than I thought I was in coaching her/giving feedback on her performance, so that was definitely a learning moment for me.

A lot of the commenters focused on how weird the overall group review process was and offered some interesting alternatives, which I appreciated! I don’t have immediate plans to shake things up, but it’s always good to hear (or in this case, read) the outsider perspective to see where there may be room for improvement. While any given chapter of the book itself has a single author and a single technical reviewer, the group review process is a needed third step. The type of stuff we’re writing about is open to interpretation, in many instances, so it’s a case of more heads are better than one to ensure we’re covering content completely and accurately. Person A could read the guidelines and come to Conclusion A, leading them to Implementation A. Person B could read the guidelines, also come to Conclusion A, but they’d choose Implementation B. And Person C could read the guidelines and come to Conclusion C, leading to Implementation C. And so on and so forth. There is usually one right answer, and the group discussion leads us to home in on it and write about it correctly. There are also times where multiple interpretations could reasonably be accepted and it’s important to have that captured in the book as well. All that is to say, it’s content that benefits from discussion more than just multiple people editing the same Google doc or something.

I really appreciate Alison’s reply and all the comments!

3. My company announces employees’ babies … but skipped mine (#3 at the link)

First, I appreciate the supportive comments on my post! (And in terms of the conversation it sparked about work-life boundaries, I’ll just say that I’m on the reserved side of things for my team/organization, and I’m quite confident that no one I work with would call me an over-sharer.)

In terms of the baby announcement itself: I followed Alison’s advice pretty much to the letter. I emailed the HR person, said I realized an announcement had never been made when my son was born, sent a few up-to-date pictures, etc. The update was posted, I received a few well-wishes, and it made me feel like there was less of a weird silence around the topic of my baby. So all good there.

As is often the case with these types of questions, and as I knew to some extent at the time, this small thing was made bigger by the fact that it was a difficult period overall. My son’s medical condition required him to have some surgeries that I needed to take time off for, and some recovery time where he couldn’t be in daycare and I was juggling caring for him, managing a part-time home health aide, and still trying to perform at work to the same level I always had. I felt like my director manager was emotionally supportive but still expected me to get my work done at a busy time of year. My grandboss, who I have worked with for years and with whom I typically have a very good relationship, was clearly so uncomfortable and unsure of what to say about my son that he completely ignored anything to do with my personal life. It was hard logging in to a casual team meeting the week after my son’s surgery and hearing all my coworkers’ weekend stories but not having anyone ask how my son was doing. So it was a hard time, and I felt unsupported at work in general, and the lack of baby announcement fed into all of those feelings.

But: my son had his last (for the time being, and maybe/hopefully forever!) surgery in late April, he resumed full-time daycare after Memorial Day, and he is THRIVING. He is a happy, rambunctious 15-month-old who keeps me very busy and I am so grateful. Now that his health and my home life have stabilized, work is back on good footing as well, and the coworkers who were clearly uncomfortable asking about my son are now comfortable asking the typical “is he walking? what is he being for Halloween?” type questions. So that feeling of having a big thing going on personally that was unaddressed at work has receded.

4. My employee refuses to do her job and leads me in circles about why she won’t (first update here)

I am the manager of Bartleby, who, a couple of years ago, would prefer not to do a lot of the work that was part of their job. Since you asked for updates, even uneventful ones, I thought I’d send a quick note.

I can share that the transformation seems to have stuck for well over a year now: Bartleby has continued to be cooperative and collegial, and they communicate in appropriately-sized chunks of generally pertinent information. If they don’t have paying work, they stop by to let me know that they have time available, and when pointed in the direction of things to do, they do them well. They’re not gonna win Employee of the Year, but they remain solidly on the higher end of “Achieves Expectations.”

I remain more than a bit surprised, but the absence of unnecessary drama has been such a relief.

Thank you, as always, for one of the most interesting and useful sites on the internet.

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{ 34 comments }

{ 34 comments… read them below }

    1. Zona the Great*

      I really am surprised Bartleby was able to keep it together for over a year! Their responses were so out of the norm that I didn’t think they could get back to center.

      1. Inkognyto*

        It seems like they either reflect or realized on the fact a HR rep sat on their performance review.

        Or made a comment to someone else in their life about that and got a bit of a wake up call that if HR is in a meeting with you and your boss the “Things R Serious” Sign is lit.

      2. commensally*

        I strongly suspect Bartleby had come from a management situation where their responses were, if not reasonable, then at least both accurate and effective (and it sounds like they were in fact still working with LW in the moment, so they had no reason think the new situation was all that different!)

        Sometimes people need to be jolted into noticing their screwed up coping mechanisms aren’t needed anymore, and it sounds like they were.

        It also sounds like LW backed way off from Bartleby after the meeting with HR, and that may have been what was needed – I know it’s usually a terrible idea to do less management with someone who’s underperforming but it sounds like Bartleby’s main issue in their own head was with how they were being managed, and sometimes sitting back and letting the person concentrate on the work rather than the manager is what is needed to let them untangle things.

      3. Grumpy Elder Millennial*

        I wonder if part of it was that nothing catastrophic happened after there were changes. Like, her fears were not realized and maybe she’s self-aware enough to have taken that information in and changed her perspective. This would particularly make sense if she had previously been in a situation where she was left without adequate support and got hung out to dry when things went wrong.

  2. Dhaskoi*

    LW1: I will just say that plenty of people with a more culturally relaxed attitude towards alcohol would still have found your coworkers’ attitudes towards drinking a bit off (witness the original comments). You weren’t the problem in that situation.

      1. MigraineMonth*

        Have you read the OP’s comments in the original letter (somewhat confusingly under both EMW and EME)? The suggestions to spend the night were happening with the invitation, not at the party/when the OP was intoxicated. It was also happening after kids’ volleyball games where no one was drinking. Unless the OP is *completely* misrepresenting the entire situation, this is a very skewed interpretation.

        I think it’s far more likely that the two coworkers are bad at professional boundaries and had it in their heads that OP lived 3 hours away, so assumed OP couldn’t attend an evening social event if staying the night wasn’t offered. (Even so, the report in particular was very pushy about it!)

    1. different suedonym*

      Yes.

      I did once have a roughly analogous experience, and it eventually transpired that the avoidant person had a deeply held, and deeply irrational, belief that certain kinds of requests were always veiled comments, or attempts at manipulation. They weren’t irrational, or no more so than anyone else, but they couldn’t see that their assumptions were faulty via their own reasoning alone.

    2. ferrina*

      I am absolutely fascinated by this update. I was sure there would be more drama, and I find it very interesting that the changes have stuck.

      Very true words from Alton Brown’s Evil Twin.

  4. Seashell*

    I suspect the answer to #1 is that the coworkers knew you lived 3-4 hours away and either didn’t know or previously knew and later forgot where your boyfriend lived. Sometimes people aren’t paying that much attention to what’s going on in other people’s lives.

    1. Mentally Spicy*

      I feel like that was an extremely pertinent detail that was missing from the original letter. I’m willing to bet it was nothing more than her co-workers giving her an alternative to, in their minds, having a multi-hour drive home after a party.

      1. amoeba*

        Yeah, and even a 30-45 min drive isn’t exactly short – I might offer my couch to somebody with that commute!

    2. Hlao-roo*

      Yeah, I think this is right on the money. I’m glad the LW wrote in with this update, and glad to hear that the spend-the-night requests have dropped off now that the coworkers know/remember the LW isn’t facing a multi-hour drive after get-togethers.

    3. Sloanicota*

      Yep, that was an important piece of the puzzle to me. They knew OP lived far away so figured that was a barrier in her hanging out with them, so they offered her a place to stay to incentivize her to come. They probably weren’t clear on the situation with the other house.

  5. FunkyMunky*

    I’m a little confused by #3 and why everyone was so damn weird about the baby and chose to ignore/never inquire about it when OP clearly needed support. what a bunch of weirdos

    1. I went to school with only 1 Jennifer*

      They were worried that if they asked “How is your baby?” the answer would be “He died 2 days after he was born”. LW3 was pregnant, was on maternity leave, returned to work… and there was never any kind of announcement about the baby! Nobody wanted to be the one to ask the difficult question with the horrible answer, and they were probably assuming there was some bad news announcement that they had missed.

      1. MigraineMonth*

        Or that maybe LW3 requested that no announcement be made because there was a tragedy. Some people want their workplace to be a place where they get support during difficult personal circumstances, and some want there to be one place they can go and pretend to be normal with no one asking questions or offering sympathy. As a coworker, I’d have to be pretty close to someone before I’d ask something more personal than “How are you doing?” and let them decide how much they want to share.

        I think that her managers had a greater responsibility to check in with LW3 and to specifically offer to reduce her workload, but I think the coworkers not bringing it up was probably because it’s a sensitive personal topic and people are really bad with handling those.

    2. Shiara*

      People are bad at knowing how to support other people through difficult times, which can result in just not asking/talking about the awkward thing.

      It complicates things that there are people who would prefer not to have to talk about the difficult personal life thing at work. But I can totally see how OP was left feeling unsupported and overlooked under the circumstances.

    3. Sloanicota*

      People *often* avoid uncomfortable subjects. You don’t realize it until it happens to you. It’s very isolating and feels like you’re toxic now, like people are afraid your misfortune and sadness are contagious. To be fair, it’s not necessarily bad intentioned; they don’t know what to say and think saying nothing is better than saying the wrong thing. Also when bad things have happened to me, I frequently do NOT want them brought up out of the blue, myself! I’m trying to get through the staff meeting, not cry into my blazer.

  6. Inkognyto*

    for LW #2,

    Why are these sessions not recorded?

    If you cannot miss something and you want to do it for accuracy you can just record them, and if you miss something you go back over the discussion and them make sure you got it all.

    Modern technology is there, please use it.

    When done, delete them. This has also been done for decades.

    This issue is going to come up again.

    1. Mentally Spicy*

      I think that during these sessions they’re making edits to documents. So although the LW describes the role as “note taker”, I think it’s more that the employee is the one making edits to documents based on the SME’s directions. Merely recording the discussion would, in this case, be inefficient in that the note taker would still need to listen to, what sounds like, very long discussions but without being able to ask for clarity in the moment if something’s not clear. And, in the case of a large group of people talking, most types of recording technology are generally not good enough to capture everyone’s distinct contributions. They’d spend a lot of time just trying to parse what they’re hearing.

    2. Shhhh...The Robots Are Listening*

      Although I doubt it’s the issue here, one growing problem with this advice is that many recording platforms use AI for auto-transcription and note-taking. This can be a real issue when it comes to proprietary, confidential, protected, privileged, or politically sensitive information.

      As it stands right now, the legality of who owns the results of AI transcription and note-taking is very much unresolved. And even in the presence of contracts stipulating how that content is stored, used, and shared, there is little to no oversight to ensure the resulting transcription/note-taking is actually being treated that way. (It’s one reason there is a lot of pushback on doctors using AI systems for charging and note taking during visits, including tons of detailed patient medical information.)

      There is also the fact that information is stored within the software/service. Which means it’s vulnerable to security breaches, and it can also end up becoming part of that company’s future generative AI training database. So there’s even a legit risk that confidential information (including stuff like transcriptions of attorney-client conversations or medical visit charting) could be regurgitated to other third parties either via normal generative AI responses or via targeted prompt hacking in ways that are recognizable and identifiable.

      Because of all this, I personally know of one major public advocacy group (and no doubt there are many, may others) who have outright banned recording meetings to avoid the contents of said meetings being captured by AI and thus becoming property of companies who can do whatever they want with that information (or do too little, in the case of security and training data hygiene). And it’s likely that will become more and more common until this whole situation is resolved in a trustworthy and strongly enforceable (and enforced) way.

  8. Reindeer Hut Hostess*

    #3: So happy to see that your little boy is THRIVING! Sometimes, when someone is struggling, it’s just hard to know what to say. So my bet is, for your coworkers, saying nothing felt pretty safe. But yes, it’s totally understandable that their “nothings” made you feel like…maybe they just didn’t care??? On behalf of all of us who may struggle to find the right words in situations like this, I apologize. But this is a really great update, and thank you for sharing!

    1. MigraineMonth*

      Yes, what a wonderful update! Is it possible your coworkers were waiting for you to start talking about your baby first, instead of bringing up a personal (and for a while very difficult!) topic themselves?

      1. Gumby*

        That’s where I fell. I also think it’s likely that OP was stressed about stuff with the baby and people picked up on it. They didn’t want to bring up a touchy topic.

        In other contexts the advice is always model the type of response that you want. If OP was not talking about the baby, no one else would. If OP had thrown in a “these days [baby] is babbling up a storm” into a casual conversation, I suspect the strange reticence would have dissipated. If you have a cute baby and want to share photos then – share them! I don’t see any reason to wait for it to happen in an official corporate announcement.

  9. Grumpy Elder Millennial*

    Heya, LW2. It’s funny, I’m just at the tail end of working on a super technical document that also could end up being unclear if we’re not careful. Just because whatever I wrote makes sense to me, that doesn’t mean it’ll make sense to others. And sometimes there’s some weird nuances that we need to reflect. Or decide that reflecting the nuance isn’t important enough to justify the increased length to explain something that 99.9% of readers wouldn’t care about.

    All that is to say, I totally get where you’re coming from, with the need to get various people to look at it. It can be a bit of a bear to get things organized, especially when there’s various sets of SMEs to bring in. To use the classic teapots stand-in, imagine needing to make sure the technical report was all good in how it deals with the functional design of teapots, the benefits and drawbacks of different materials, relevant laws around teapots, the teapot art, the practicalities of actually manufacturing the teapots, how tea cozies can enhance the performance of teapots (and background on the design and manufacturing of tea cozies), etc. It has been quite the experience. Sharing my screen while having conversations, so we can all be looking at the same thing, has been super helpful. And doubly so when doing reviews with my boss and grandboss.

    Anyway, I’m glad to hear that there has been a resolution to your situation and that people seem happier and less stressed!

  10. Jack Frost*

    “I grew up Mormon…I find it highly unusual to drink at …holidays, and other times when a lot of people think it is normal.”

    Okay yeah now this all tracks.

    And like, I get that when you grow up in a very tight-knit culture with a lot of strict, hellfire rules about every little thing—Including that even caffeine and red meat are verboten—then I can see how you’d have a hard time around booze. I do think it’s a little weird that like, the very idea of having a glass of wine at Christmas seems weird though. Even Jesus was so desperate to get lit at a wedding that he turned literal water into alcohol (and who could blame him, dry weddings can be death depending on the circumstances).

    But like, the drinking parties in the original letter weren’t really the odd aspect—it was the sleepover invites. And maybe the “living 3 hours away” part?

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