board volunteer makes everyone’s jobs harder, can I expect a raise when I’m on a PIP, and more

by Alison Green on March 18, 2025

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…

1. Our board volunteer makes everyone’s jobs harder

I was recently made the chair of the board for a local community service group. The board receives money each year to buy supplies for community service events, but being on the board is a volunteer position (no one is getting paid). Basically, anyone who wants to be on the board can be because we really need the extra help. Historically, people have only been asked to step down if there is an ethical concern. The parent organization that provides funds does not provide rules or guidance on staffing, only on how we spend the money.

We have one board member who is making everyone else’s jobs harder through no fault of his own. John has been the secretary for a very long time, and he’s in charge of scheduling meetings and taking notes (he doesn’t contribute to event planning or anything else).

John is a very kind, elderly gentleman who struggles with technology. He will take a week or more to schedule a meeting when I could schedule it myself in five minutes. This is an issue when an urgent problem or opportunity pops up that requires a board vote. We’ve been trying to use OneNote to track meeting minutes and event information, but John isn’t comfortable using it (he will only work in Word or on paper). He’s hard of hearing, so he can’t hear what anyone says in the meetings. We end up pausing every few minutes to tell him exactly what to write down (costing us ~20% of our meeting time). At this point, everyone is doing more work just so John can keep his position.

I’m not sure how to deal with this. On one hand, he is objectively hurting our outcomes and making more work for an already stretched-thin team. On the other hand, our organization frowns upon turning down volunteers and John loves being on the board because he’s “lonely and gets to talk to people at the meetings.”

Should I act like this is a paid position (set a performance improvement plan and ask him to step down if he ultimately can’t meet expectations)? I wouldn’t be able to replace him; I’d be eliminating the position entirely. I also worry that excluding him would be akin to discrimination based on age or disability (which is important to me even if this group isn’t bound by employment laws). I also wouldn’t have anyone to replace him with, so we’d just be getting rid of the position entirely.

Or should I try to find a different role/task he can reasonably complete without impacting the rest of us? That feels wrong too, like I’d be infantilizing him by keeping him busy but not letting him do anything meaningful. Is there a third option here?

A performance improvement plan would be overkill in a volunteer position like this.

But you definitely can’t spend a fifth of your meeting time coaching John on what to write in the notes. And if you’re already hurting for volunteers, you really shouldn’t risk making people not want to go to your meetings.

Can John stay on the board without being the secretary? Can he just be a board member who provides input into the direction of the organization without having a specific task list that affects other people?

If not, then at a minimum, it sounds like you need to just tell him that the board is moving to OneNote and no longer needs him to take notes. If he pushes back, be matter-of-fact about why: “We’re spending a lot of time in every meeting discussing what should be written down, and OneNote will take care of it all without discussion, which we need because people are stretched for time. So it’s going to be OneNote from here on out.” Or, “We’re going to try out OneNote for the next two meetings and see if it works.”

You could be pretty blunt about the meeting scheduling: “We’ve been waiting a week or more to get meetings scheduled, and we need that to happen faster. It’s something I can do myself very quickly, the same day it comes up, so my plan is to take over scheduling them unless you are up for getting it done the same day it’s requested?”

The other option is to just lay out what needs to change and let him decide if he’s up for it or not: “We need the secretary to do XYZ, which is different in ABC ways from what’s happening now. Do you want to stay in the role knowing the requirements will be changing in that way, or do you want to take a more of a general board member role where you’re not responsible for XYZ anymore?” If he says he wants to remain in the role but you still don’t see the changes you asked for, at that point you’d revert to the steps above.

2. Is it unrealistic to expect a raise while you’re on a PIP?

I recently had my annual review with my boss, and I was marked as “below expectations.” I expected it as I had been put on a performance improvement plan (PIP) due to “communication issues.” Quick backstory on the PIP is that I am the kind of person who if you assign me something, I will get it done, then update you, whereas my boss is more of the “update me as you go along” kind of person. Different communication styles, I get it, and I’m more introverted and task-focused, which caused me to often forget about communication updates to the stakeholders, which can definitely be improved upon. While I felt the PIP was unreasonable as I was still producing results, it was not totally out of line. I fully expect to pass this PIP, and my boss also communicated that during our review.

Back to the review: my boss told me that I would not be getting a raise, as it is company policy that anyone on PIP will not get a raise. Fair enough, again not a good policy, but sure, I get it. However, I argued that in the past year, my roles and responsibilities had increased drastically, including taking on what is traditionally in my industry a complete other person’s job scope. It is a small-ish company, so I understood it as a logical extension of my work. (The PIP was not a result of me being unable to handle the additional responsibilities.) That was in March of last year. Since then, the company has grown in leaps and bounds and hired much more back end staff. I felt that if I was to continue doing both teapot sets of work, I would need to be paid more. His counter was that anyone on a PIP would not be entitled to a raise.

Is it unfair to expect a raise to reflect my new expanded job scope, even though I am on a PIP? I argued with him for about 10 minutes over this, and his counter was still that last statement above. I felt like I was talking in circles.

Yeah, you’re not going to get a raise while you’re on a PIP, at least not more than a cost-of-living increase at most. Raises are recognition that you’re now contributing at a higher level than when your salary was last set, and if you’re performing below expectations for the job (and by definition with a PIP, the issues are serious enough that you could be let go), very few employers are going to increase your salary in the middle of that (again, excluding COLAs).

The problem is that a year ago your company added significantly to your work without compensating you for it. Maybe that was more reasonable than it sounds on the surface — you can have a job composed of two separate areas of work and still have them be one reasonable full-time job at the original salary. Or maybe it’s unreasonable; your company wouldn’t be the first to pile extra responsibilities on someone without paying them at market rate (or what they would have to pay someone for the same job if they hired for it externally). But you’re not likely to be successful in arguing that while you’re on a PIP.

3. Public-facing employees are upset that other employees do work outside our office

I work for a large educational institution. During Covid, we all worked remotely without issue. Even after returning to the office, there was some flexibility; as long as our work was getting done and our supervisors approved, we could work remotely as needed.

Recently, with a change in leadership, an email was sent stating that everyone must be present in person unless they have explicit approval from their boss. This has created a toxic work environment. Most of our clerical staff have always been required to work in person because they are public-facing or their roles demand it. However, many of us have jobs that require us to be in the field, visiting other sites and meeting with stakeholders. The issue is that the clerical staff is now monitoring when people come and go, leading to resentment, tattling, and unnecessary tension. HR has been unhelpful in clarifying that different roles have different expectations, and the clerical staff feels it’s unfair that not everyone has to be in the office all day. To make matters worse, some employees are now misusing their access to our management system to check who has recorded an absence or who they believe is simply not in the office. They fail to recognize that this is an invasion of privacy — people’s absences and their reasons should not be office gossip.

How can we address this growing hostility and get leadership to acknowledge the differences in job responsibilities while also ensuring privacy is respected?

Wait, the clerical staff is upset not that other people at working from home but that other people are out of the office to visit other sites and meet with stakeholders? That is … a weird new twist on this.

That said, there’s not a lot that you as non-management can do about it. You can point out the tensions to your boss (and maybe HR if they’re competent). You can make a point of being more specific than just saying you or someone else will be out of the office and instead say “I’m meeting with a client” or “Jane is doing a site visit” or so forth. You can counter the comments when you hear them (“part of her job is going to clients’ sites”). You can also just ignore it; internally roll your eyes and figure it’s not your problem to handle as long as it’s not directly interfering with your ability to get your job done. The last one is likely your best option; you might get the most relief from realizing you can’t fix it and don’t need to fix it.

But behind that, what you’re describing is a significant culture problem, and one that requires intervention from management to resolve it. If they don’t care to do that for whatever reason, that’s on them.

That said, if there are specific violations of privacy that you can cite (like someone’s medical information being accessed/shared), you should definitely escalate that.

If I’ve misunderstood and the resentment is actually about people who have their managers’ permission to work from home — not just working from non-home locations — the advice above still applies.

Related:
should I get rid of remote work because our in-office staff thinks it’s unfair?

4. My coworkers tune out so much background noise that it worries me

We have a hybrid office. Some people work with headphones on, others don’t, but many lose all awareness of everything else while working. I know that it’s common in offices for us to be completely focused on our work, but surely we should remain aware of where we are?

We’ve had people be surprised at things happening right next to them. We’ve even had them unaware that we’re talking about them while saying their name out loud. The worst example came when I went out of the room to move things upstairs, always a 10-20 minute process each week. A manager then asked me if I could move things upstairs, having not noticed that I had left the room, done the task, and come back as usual. This manager’s desk was right next to the door!

I’m worried that this lack of situational awareness will lead to more trouble than mild surprise. What if there was an emergency? We haven’t had a fire drill for a long time, I don’t know how quickly they’d react. What about verbal warnings; would they hear the security guards warning them to evacuate? What can I do? What should I do?

You don’t need to do anything! It’s very normal for people to adjust to office noise by learning to block it out so they can concentrate; that’s how they’re still able to do work that requires focus. In all but the most extreme cases, their brains will still recognize and respond to fire alarms, shouts to evacuate, and other noises outside the drone of more routine background noise.

5. I got my years of employment wrong in an interview

I just had an interview that I thought went fairly well. However, immediately upon leaving, I realized I said I held a position eight years when it was really six; it was an honest mistake, my bad-at-math brain just visualized “2014-2020” in my head and did the math wrong. But I’m worried that they will think I intentionally lied. Should I include a clarification in my thank-you email?

Sure. It’s unlikely to be a big deal, but on the off chance they did notice it and wondered about it, it would be fine to include a very brief mention in your thank-you note — something like, “Also, right after I left our meeting I realized I said I was at Oatmeal Village for eight years; in fact, it was six, and I didn’t want to leave that uncorrected.”

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{ 414 comments }

{ 414 comments… read them below }

  1. RTO nightmare*

    Wow, the WFH backlash has gotten ridiculous. Not only are we now required to be in the office, but we’re expected to pay attention to everything around us all the time and never leave for anything, work related or not.

    1. Myrin*

      “We” aren’t required and expected to do anything – one person asked a question to a workplace advice website, wondering (unnecessarily, I’d say) about something. I doubt this (whatever “this” may be – OP’s seeming slight anxiety around emergencies?) is at all widespread.

        1. blueberry muffin*

          Sarcasm doesn’t work here.

          OP’s anxiety doesn’t seem slight to me. It seems excessive.

    2. Daria grace*

      That people have a basic sense of things going on around them that are relevant to their work and that they don’t needlessly put themselves in a position where they wouldn’t hear emergency alarms or people telling them something important is not an unreasonable expectation

      1. Rebecca*

        It isn’t an unreasonable expectation, but it does seem like an unreasonable worry. The LW doesn’t have evidence that her colleagues aren’t paying attention to fire alarms or putting themselves in danger, only that they aren’t paying attention to details that she would notice. It feels like needless catastrophizing.

        1. Tea Monk*

          Yea, a lot of times its easy for me to get really focused on something random and stop hearing things around me. It doesn’t have to be work although that sometimes happens. Everyone’s brain is different. Also I need to be warned every time they have a fire drill because I panic so it’s not like I can’t hear that

        2. Emmy Noether*

          Yes, when I am reading, I do not process what people around me are saying. I can sort of tell people are talking, I just don’t absorb the contents at all. I also don’t bother with music while working for example, because I literally will not hear it.
          I’ve had fights with my husband about this because I need him to get my attention before talking to me if I’m doing something else, and he thinks I’m purposely ignoring him. Saying my name, or walking up into my field of vision and standing there will usually snap me out of it (just give me 2-3 seconds to refocus).

          I can still very much hear an alarm or loud noise. Fire alarms are designed to be extremely hard to ignore. I think it’s a completely needless worry.

          2. Ellis Bell*

            Oh my god; same on needing a wake command from my partner – don’t just wander in and start speaking to me!!

          3. Bast*

            Okay, this is fair and gives me a different POV. My husband and I have the same argument, because I am the one who feels like he’s just intentionally ignoring me — I tend to be aware of everything, everywhere, all at once. I don’t know how people do otherwise. My husband will tell me “Yes, I heard you say something, but I wasn’t prepared for you to be talking, so you were halfway through what you were saying before I started to comprehend it because my mind was somewhere else.” This never made sense to me before, because my argument was always that if I was angry and started a conversation with swearing, he’d hear that one. XD

            In this particular context, as this is a colleague and not a manager of these people, it does seem to be a fairly baseless worry. If this were a manager, I might be worried about people not retaining something aka, “Hey Jane, can you run the ABC report before the end of the day?” and getting a vague, “Yeah sure” and then said manager wondering why it hasn’t been done, but as a colleague, it isn’t as big of a concern.

            1. Clorinda*

              My husband also doesn’t listen unless triggered to do so. Before conversation, I always start with Hey Spouse, can I have your eyes and face for a minute. and I don’t begin the conversation until he has said yes and made eye contact.

            2. Not Tom, Just Petty*

              I believe that it is how people are wired. If I am watching TV, reading, focusing on work, I WILL NOT HEAR YOU. But it’s also a skill/survival tool that was honed by growing up in a house with many kids who were born over the span of a generation. 20 year old sister, three year old sister, 14 year old brother…and all the rest, plush their friends. you learn to “take your space.”

              1. Lenora Rose*

                My husband and I are very different on this. If we’re watching a show together, he’s often surprised when I pause it suddenly and head to the kitchen to settle the kids arguing *before* it gets to shouting or crying, or check why the fridge has now done its “door open” beeps THREE times (Once or even twice might end up normal for someone browsing. Three usually means it’s ajar.) Because he didn’t register there was another sound happening.

              2. Reluctant Mezzo*

                I learned how to write books with teenagers in the house, so unless it’s blood or fire I can concentrate through it.

            3. JR17*

              My son does this – he has inattentive ADHD and tends to hyper focus. He’ll even sometimes respond to me, but I can tell that he’s responding on autopilot and isn’t actually processing what I’m saying. To get his attention, I sometimes have to tap him on the shoulder. I definitely have to wait until I have his full attention before I start a conversation – I ask him to make eye contact and focus on what I’m saying and wait until he’s fully engaged, which often takes a few seconds/requests. He isn’t going it on purpose.

            4. MigraineMonth*

              I WFH, and when my partner comes into the room and starts talking to me, I always miss the first sentence while my brain refocuses. Like the “auto-refocus” in cameras; it takes a second to shift subject focus, and by the time I’m actually listening to her, I usually have missed important context.

              On the other hand, she doesn’t hear me at all when she has headphones in, and I regularly startle her by sitting around in our apartment because she’d missed me coming home two hours earlier.

            5. OhGee*

              This is me. I have ADHD and some auditory processing issues. I had to explain this to my partner a half dozen times, at least, before he understood that I was not intentionally ignoring him.

          4. Mallory Janis Ian*

            I can block out general noise around me that is categorized in my mind as “doesn’t pertain to me”, but as soon as something does pertain to me, I hear and respond to it. I imagine this is what the LW’s coworkers are doing, each to their own extent.

            1. Silver Robin*

              Except LW specifically says that even when names are used to address them, coworkers are not hearing things.

              I still agree that LW is hyping up a worry and can let this be, but they did bring up that kind of issue. I think if folks are that zoned in that their name does not snap them out of their focus, then it is fair for a coworker to do a wave in sight line (not immediately in front of their face, but visible) or a shoulder tap to get attention.

              1. Lenora Rose*

                No; LW said when people are talking *about* them, not *to* them, they don’t hear it.

                If Carol and Charlene are talking to one another and not to me, and say something like, “Does this task belong to Suzie or Lenora?” 90% of the time or more, I hear my name and will answer if it’s my task, even though I am not officially in the conversation and being talked to. But on that 10% of occasions where I have a headset on and I’m deep in a specific kind of work, I might not notice until one of them comes to me and says, “Lenora, do you handle X task?” This is the sort of thing where LW is concerned about people not noticing. It’s possible I have more awareness of my surroundings than the people LW is talking about, because that does vary naturally. It’s ALSO possible they are a workplace whose tasks involve more necessary deep focus time.

              2. Observer*

                Except LW specifically says that even when names are used to address them, coworkers are not hearing things.

                No, they say that people don’t “hear” when their name is used and people are talking *about* them, rather than *to* them. That’s a different thing.

                1. Mad Scientist*

                  And some of us actively try to avoid eavesdropping and intentionally won’t react even if we hear our name…

          5. learnedthehardway*

            Agreed, and I have the same experience. If I am reading or occupied with something, I tune out the rest of the world. I would generally notice a fire alarm or if someone calls my name, but I’m not going to register that you walked by, asked if I wanted a cup of tea, or tried to engage me in conversation.

            I am hyper-focused on what I am doing, and yes, that is an ADHD trait, but frankly, since I deal with the rest of the ADHD issues, I will take hyper focus as my superpower and not apologize for it.

          6. Baunilha*

            I have the same problem with my husband: he will come up to me and start talking, then get frustrated that I didn’t listen to any of it. I guess there are no such things as individual experiences, after all.
            And as for OP’s concern about an emergency, a while back we had a neighbor scream for help. It would take me a while to register if it was someone talking to me by my side, but that scream a couple of stories away? I heard it immediately. (Neighbor was fine)

          7. sb51*

            Ditto. Also, I can often respond verbally without forming a memory of it — my mom would ask me to do something while I was reading, I would repeat back to her what she said, and I really and truly would not remember it later. (And it wasn’t just things I didn’t want to do, like chore reminders.)

            Whereas if she wrote it down on a scrap of paper and handed it to me, I’d remember it.

            I also used to have a CD alarm clock, and I would wake up by the very, very soft sound of the CD starting to spin, before it even started to play, because my brain knew that was an “alert” sound, even while deeply asleep.

      2. Radioactive Cyborg Llama*

        It’s an unreasonable expectation from someone who is not in a position to set expectations and doesn’t know whether it would be true or not.

      3. Observer*

        they don’t needlessly put themselves in a position where they wouldn’t hear emergency alarms or people telling them something important is not an unreasonable expectation

        Except that what the LW describes doesn’t actually match what you are saying.

        For instance the LW says that “the worst” incident was one where the manager had not noticed that they had gone out of the room for 10-15 whole minutes! Jumping from “not monitoring every person who passes my desk, even though they are walking through a door” to “won’t notice if a fire alarm goes off” is a wild leap.

    3. KateM*

      We are not expected to leave for anything, work related or not, and we are expected to notice when someone leaves for ten minutes.

  2. Danish*

    My interpretation of #3 was that the in office clerical staff suspect that when the other employees are on site visits they’re ACTUALLY working from home, and so are investigating every absence trying to find proof of that. Toxic situation is right!

    2. Ellie*

      Yes. I wonder if a shared calendar would help? With time blocked off for site visits and client appointments (it doesn’t have to have the clients name or anything identifying, just time blocked off in people’s calendars). It might be that a lot of this is just a fundamental misunderstanding of each other’s roles, or annoyance at not being able to get hold of someone.

      1. MountainGoat*

        Yes I work in a role with a lot of travelling locally during the day (visiting schools as a therapist) and we have a shared calendar that just says in brief where we are for the day e.g. ‘Mary – Hogwarts -> McKinley High -> office’ or ‘John – WFH’ so you can see at a glance without needing to check everyone’s calendars.

      2. Fred*

        Absolutely not. “In office / client facing” is one job. “Could be at home / could be on site” is another. It is not the job of the latter to assuage the feelings of the former.

        1. Cinn*

          Agreed, because they’ll just take it as proof they are in the right and double down on this nonsense.

          (Heck, we had a busybody once who reported us to our boss after being on the email that explained why we were going to be on weird hours that day.)

        2. metadata minion*

          I guess it depends on how much the clerical staff need to know their coworkers’ schedules and/or refer other people to them. To me, a shared calendar seems like a very normal thing, so I can go “I need to check with Susan about this and she isn’t at her desk; let me see whether she’s in today”. But if the two staff groups’ work really doesn’t interact, then it’s less reasonable.

          1. Everything Bagel*

            It sounds like they don’t, they are annoyed that other workers get to work from home.

        3. Pastor Petty Labelle*

          Agreed. The only way to handle it is to tell clerical staff to knock it off. Unless it is actually affecting their work — like they can’t find someone when needed, then other peopel’s schedules are none of their business.

          As for access the management system without authorization to check people’s absences, yeah that’s a firing offense.

          1. Hannah Lee*

            But even in the “can’t find someone when needed” situation, the appropriate response by clerical staff is to approach their manager and say “I’m scheduled to release the TPS report today, and Joan usually reviews it before it goes out, is there someone else I should run it by instead? Or should I just hold it until she’s back in the office”

            And if it happens enough because it’s routine that some staff are working offsite – at client meetings, at job sites, etc) then the *manager* should figure out if some cross training, back up plans, changes to deliverable schedules are need to account for that fact that some roles are expected to be offsite 20% of the time.

            NOT for clerical staff create a Secret File of Shame and Offenses where they track the comings and goings of people they are not in charge of managing, and framing all their co-worker’s actions in the worst, most slacker, most unfair to clerical staff way possible.

            1. bleh*

              This behavior often happens when one group of employees are paid to be present and provide coverage as part of their jobs, while another group are paid to do work that requires not sitting at their desk sometimes. It needs to be nipped by telling clerical staff that they have coverage type jobs and the others don’t, and fair or not, they need to stand down with the nonsense reportage.

              2. Anon for this*

                This is something we’ve had to address with members of our union. We’ve had to say over and over that not all jobs have the same requirements, and some people can WFH because that’s the kind of work they do, while others have to be on-site every day because THAT is the kind of work they do. Some of the issues were valid, but not all of them, and we have been working on distinguishing between the two.

                Basically, there might be a valid issue at the core of what has become a toxic situation that needs to be addressed, but there’s a difference between acknowledging that, and giving them the fuel that proves they were right about it all.

          2. Sharon*

            I’m surprised Alison didn’t recommend that the managers shut this down. If working from home is at manager discretion, managers should tell the clerical staff to stop monitoring everybody’s whereabouts and let the managers handle it.

      4. WillowSunstar*

        If it’s that much of a worry, they can just put the info on a dry erase board where they are and for what times. But they shouldn’t have to justify to clerical staff what their managers already know. Clerical staff (and I say this as someone who has been clerical staff) needs to be told MYOB.

        1. Brick*

          I think that requiring staff to sign in and out on a whiteboard would be “justifying to clerical staff what their managers already know”, but otherwise I agree!

          1. Lenora Rose*

            I’ve worked in places with a basic slider on the wall for all staff saying “In / out / on site” (or workplace appropriate version thereof), generally placed where clerical staff can see but visitors/clients can’t. It’s often seriously useful to both clerical staff and coworkers. But if it’s not already the habit of a workplace to use such a sign, soothing inappropriately demanding clerical staff is the worst reason to implement one…

      5. I'm just here for the cats!!*

        A shared calendar is overkill. It is not affecting the clerical staff that these people are away from the office. It’s probably the same as it always was before covid, but now they think that everyone who is not in office is working from home or taking advantage. These people need to be shut down. They have to realize that they have a different type of job than the others, with different requirements.

        I worked with someone like this. We had limited staff in our office. We worked at the front desk so we had to be in the office. We work in health care so there were 2 or 3 clinicians that would take turns each day. My coworker was always complaining about how it wasn’t fair. But we weren’t able to complete the majority of our job from home.

        1. Annie*

          Unless!!!! the clerical staff have an absolute need to know where people are so they can contact them, I absolutely agree with you, Cats!

          It’s NOTB–none of their beeswax! They should be worried about their own job and let the managers worry about whether the other employees are in the office when they are supposed to be or visiting a client, or working from home. Busybodies is right. They should be focusing on their own job, not anyone else’s.

      6. L*

        Hmmm. In a way this setup reminds me of my office, though without the toxicity.

        We have clerical staff who are salaried non-exempt, whose jobs are almost always in the office, and we have non-clerical, many (but not all) of whom frequently have to work off-site. I’ve worked in both roles.

        Technically, we’re all supposed to work from the office unless we have a reason to be working off-site, but even before covid, it was pretty common for non-clerical staff to announce that they needed to work from home on a given day for various reasons, and this was let slide. Clerical staff didn’t have this option – they were all on desktop computers and only had desk phones. And yeah, it sucked that we had to take a vacation day if we needed to stay home with a sick kid or let the plumber in when our co-workers didn’t have to do that, though they did give clerical staff extra “floater” days off to make up for this difference somewhat.

        After the pandemic, when the support staff had been moved to laptops, I, as the union steward for the clerical staff, was advocating that clerical staff should be afforded a certain number of work-from-home days. I don’t actually know how that turned out, because I stepped down to move to a non-clerical role in another bargaining unit, but I do know several clerical staff are working from home on extended medical accommodations, so it’s obviously possible.

        I’ve never seen any of the clerical staff be petty about it the way OP’s coworkers are, and the one person I could see leaning into that has since retired. However, management has been mych stricter about requiring department clerical staff to keep tabs on their department members’ whereabouts for safety reasons, as well as requiring all of us to be much clearer about whether we are taking a sick day vs working from home vs wirking off-site, so if someone weren’t aware this was coming from the top, they might assume it was the clerical staff being petty.

        1. Elizabeth West*

          they did give clerical staff extra “floater” days off to make up for this difference somewhat

          That’s actually kind of awesome. I would have LOVED having this when I was on the front desk.

        2. Who Plays Backgammon?*

          Good point. Back in the day, I had more than one job that involved keeping tabs, via a whiteboard or an online roster, of who was in and who was out. There were times when management asked me if Jane had come in that day (when she was supposed to be there but couldn’t be found and hadn’t called in). I wasn’t tattling, I was following my manager’s instructions and people who outranked me but weren’t managers didn’t like it. I got caught in the middle more than once. But people find it so easy to pile on the office staff.

          I wondered if in this case, the office staff had been asked to keep an eye on attendance.

          My current job has a master calendar for everyone’s days in the ofc, outside events, trainings, and WFH, including the manager’s.

    3. Clisby*

      That’s what I thought – it makes a lot more sense than the clerical staff thinking nobody should ever be offsite even when they’re doing something that requires it.

    4. Ama*

      I have unfortunately encountered coworkers in recent years who basically thought anyone who wasn’t doing the exact same work they did wasn’t working hard enough. I had a coworker once who was getting frustrated that my team of two couldn’t help her with a (non urgent) project for a couple weeks because we had a huge time sensitive, data analysis project to do. She didn’t do data analysis work and clearly didn’t understand why it took us so long and we had blocked off all our time to do it.

      When we finished the project and my report (who was friendlier with this coworker than I was) showed her the scope of what we’d done she actually emailed me and apologized that she hadn’t realized how much work we were doing and she now got why we needed to block off our time.

    5. iglwif*

      That’s how it sounded to me, too. They’re not just mad about actual WFH, they’re mad about the possibility that someone might be WFH!

      And for the record, I am extremely pro-flexibility, I very much believe people should be able to WFH if they want to and their type of work allows it. I believe RTO for the sake of RTO is deeply silly. Those folks have a right to be frustrated and annoyed, but wow are they ever taking it out on the wrong group of people!!!

    6. Momma Bear*

      This is something I’d bring up to my boss – it’s misuse of an office system and creating a very toxic work situation. Someone needs to remind them to 1. use resources appropriately (or lock them out) and 2. that job roles are not all the same and people need to legitimately be out in the field and it’s not everyone else’s job to monitor that. This feels like a top down problem, since the office staff feel so aggrieved that they are digging around in ways they shouldn’t.

    7. I Have RBF*

      Very Toxic.

      If there is outside sales, for example, at some companies they are almost never in the office. If you try to say they are slacking, you would be wrong. They are only slacking if they hang around the office all day.

      The fact that these people don’t recognize that people have different jobs and different needs is bananas. I realize it is rooted in jealousy for them seeming to have kept a perk that was senselessly taken from the clerical staff, but said staff is angry at the wrong people. They shouldn’t be angry at the folks whose jobs take them out of the office regularly, they should be angry at upper management that decided arbitrarily that they had to see butts in seats when the other was working fine.

      Want to kill morale at a company? Demand RTO for jobs that spend all day on a keyboard and in Zoom meetings.

      1. Georgia Carolyn Mason*

        For sure. I’m sometimes asked by people in my org but outside my team (fundraising) why my teammates are “never here,” how they get to “work from home all the time,” etc.

        If my teammates aren’t here, they’re meeting with donors. My job is 99% writing proposals, and my meetings are usually on Zoom. This is good, as I don’t have the personality for in-person major gifts work. It’s ironic that I’m the one who’s always here, because my job lends itself super easily to WFH, but we can’t WFH unless you have an ADA reason. I’d personally prefer a hybrid schedule, but oh well.

        The people here haven’t started any creepy/potentially illegal tracking of other folks’ locations, thankfully, but they can’t seem to remember my teammates aren’t WFH if they’re not in the office — no matter how many times I tell them! I think some folks just have so much WFH envy that even when they’ve been told WFH isn’t happening, they don’t believe it.

    8. Wilbur*

      I was wondering if staff was finishing off a day of site visits by working from home. Example-You have 6 hours of site visits on Tuesday so rather than driving 30 minutes back to the office to finish your day you finish your 2 hours at home.

  3. Chickadee*

    LW4 I use headphones and tend to hyperfocus on my work, so don’t always notice right away when people are talking to me, but would 100% notice a fire alarm going off and react promptly. (Fire alarm = evacuate is nearly muscle memory at this point from all the school drills.)

    Your coworkers aren’t responding to the things you mentioned (people talking nearby, you leaving the room) because those are safe, routine events that fade in to background and aren’t memorable even if they notice them. Emergencies tend to be loud and attention grabbing, which will break through most hyperfocus bubbles. If all else fails, a simple tap on the shoulder will get someone’s attention if they aren’t responding to verbal cues.

    1. Ellie*

      Myself and a group of about 4 or 5 people at work did once miss a drill, because we were discussing a technical problem in detail around a whiteboard. Someone eventually found us, and asked why we didn’t evacuate. Our excuse was that there was no siren, and their answer was that ‘there wouldn’t always be a siren’. Um, ok, but if you’re walking around telling people to evacuate, you’re going to need to be loud enough to get people’s attention.

      I’m still not sure what they expected us to do, exactly. Be less focussed? We literally didn’t notice that we were the only ones left in the office.

        1. Myrin*

          In fact, I don’t know what a fire drill without a siren is! Like, what does that mean? Someone running around yelling “FIRE!” (which is what it sounds like from Ellie’s description)?

          1. Your former password resetter*

            And if that’s the case, then an evacuation plan should involve checking every room to make sure everyone heard the evacuation orders.

              1. Georgia Carolyn Mason*

                Systems should have both sound and lights, so anyone with a vision or hearing disability can get the message. But a good safety plan should involve someone checking; this would ensure that anyone with both visual and hearing issues would know about the evacuation, and would pick up those “it’s just a drill” folks who don’t want to go outside. (In a place where we have both subfreezing and above 105F temps, I get it, but it is dangerous to just skip it.)

        2. Whoopsie*

          My office unintentionally had a drill with no sirens, lights, or PA announcement. It wasn’t supposed to be that way, but evidently half of our floor and parts of others hadn’t been wired correctly. Building management had fun getting that fixed, and my company revised our evacuation procedures to include designated people to check for people.

          1. Snow Globe*

            And that’s one of the reasons to have fire drills – to make sure everything works properly.

          2. MigraineMonth*

            I spent time in a college dormitory where the fire alarm sounded like a dying cow and people regularly slept through it. It was years before they finally replaced it with an alarm that woke people up.

        3. Jay (no, the other one)*

          We used to have bomb threat evacuation drills that started when someone came around and said “bomb threat.” It was a medical facility and we didn’t want to panic patients and families.

          1. Hannah Lee*

            What, they didn’t use the old school trick of announcing over the PA “There’s a raccoon in the building, please evacuate”?

            2. LabRat*

              In junior high we went through a period of so many bomb threats that we all started recognizing the “would Dr. Stapleton (the superintendent) please come to the office” code announcement and would start getting ready to be sent outside.

        4. MsSolo (UK)*

          We’ve had a wiring issue in our corner of our building, so our temporary process is someone with an old school bell ringing it and yelling at people to evacuate (we haven’t experienced it, but we have a fire alarm test every friday, so currently they’re just popping up on fridays to show people the bell!)

        5. Peon*

          We do tornado drills (and a few memorable tornado alerts) with no internal sirens, and you often can’t hear the external one! The logic we were given is that the only internal alert they had was a fire alarm and they didn’t want to confuse people and cause them to evacuate the building into bad weather. So they send an email.

          On the other hand, we HAVE designated people on each floor who check offices and bathrooms to spread the word.

          1. Elizabeth West*

            That’s what they did at TechExjob, sent emails. In fact, we had a tornado drill once while my boss was visiting the office (she lived in another state and worked in that office). She said she was actually glad to know what to do and where to go, in case a tornado happened the next time she came.

      2. Eldritch Office Worker*

        My CEO routinely misses fire alarms with sirens – she’s not HOH or unable to notice them I think it’s a trained disinterest. But that’s why offices are supposed to have fire captains to round people up!

      4. Pearl*

        I work in a public building that does require a rare evacuation without an alarm. I’ve actually done one once, we had an issue in the basement that was producing potentially toxic fumes. We had to send employees to every floor and get each person’s individual attention to tell them to evacuate. (Even if our alarm goes off we are supposed to do this, but in this case there was no alarm.) You definitely have to get people’s actual attention.

        1. Peon*

          I generally flick the lights off and on, possibly while yelling tornado (I’m in MI, so it’s not frequent, but enough that we do at least one tornado drill each season)

      5. lanfy*

        If there isn’t always going to be a siren, then the employer absolutely needs to have a person who is responsible for checking that everyone has evacuated.

        They should have that anyway, actually.

        At the previous place I worked, part of my role as Fire Marshal was to ‘walk the floor’ and make sure all the rooms were empty before I evacuated myself. It’s basic safety.

      6. Turquoisecow*

        There was once an earthquake – a very uncommon event – and when it was over it was decided that we should evacuate the building. Since we were not in an earthquake prone area we did not have drills or plans for this and some people immediately left the building and some of us just shrugged and went back to work. There was an announcement on a loudspeaker but the speaker nearest my (and my nearest coworker’s) desk was apparently malfunctioning because we did not hear the announcement. A manager in the next row over came by and was like “why are you still here?” and told us to get out, so I assume others were doing the same and making sure people left.

        In the event of a fire there has always been a loud blaring alarm that is impossible to ignore. In every school, dorm, office, etc, I have never known anyone who was so hyper focused on work they did not hear the very very loud fire alarms, so I’d be surprised if OP’s coworkers were oblivious to it, unless they have hearing problems. Even then, I imagine that someone who did hear it would tap them on the shoulder and explain they were evacuating. Unless someone is in a room or office by themselves away from everyone else, people will usually not allow others to be left behind during an evacuation for fire.

      7. Lenora Rose*

        Literally the ONLY reason to have a fire drill or other evacuation order without a siren is if the siren is broken, and then you make every effort to imitate the results of a siren. If you want people to evacuate, you don’t quibble that it’s not a fire so you shouldn’t pull the fire alarm, you yank the thing. If for ANY reason this is impractical (eg, it’s some sort of evacuation where they WANT you to take the time to grab your private effects and shut down your computer) then you use the PA if you have one, and you definitely check every room you can as well as having checklists of the staff and visitors on hand.

        1. M*

          To be fair, there’s good reason to do an occasional systems check that tests resilience to points of failure. If a rat eats through the wiring, you don’t want to discover that your fire marshals don’t know what to do without an audible alarm, or that they’ve been routinely missing entire rooms and it hasn’t been spotted because the alarm is causing people to evacuate anyway.

          Obviously, in this case, the response was entirely wrong – it should have been “huh, we need to rerun our fire marshal training for at least this floor”, not “but why didn’t you evacuate anyway?”. But that doesn’t mean there’s not good reasons to do a silent drill sometimes.

      8. Observer*

        <Our excuse was that there was no siren, and their answer was that ‘there wouldn’t always be a siren'

        That’s insane! And utterly irresponsible.

        Firstly, the idea that there wouldn’t be a siren is nuts. But secondly, if there is actually a reason to think that the siren might not work, there needs to actually be a fallback plan that does not depend on “people never doing deep focus work”.

    2. Falling Diphthong*

      4 is a straightforward embodiment of the principle that no one is thinking about you nearly as much as you worry. They aren’t even noticing that you went upstairs.

      We can conclude that the coworkers are not field agents in a TV spy network, where situational awareness to the next plot twist would be important. But that’s like a good 90% of the commentariat here.

      1. Lenora Rose*

        Only 90% of the commentariat are not part of a TV spy network? This place is even more interesting than I thought…

          1. Lenora Rose*

            To understand this, you need to know that my mother-in-law is a slight woman who is very much in the anxious-to-please mold; she will almost never say a word out of place or raise her voice, she is kind to everyone from every background, she feeds everyone who comes in her door. She is deeply religious and from a strongly pacifist and anti-war faith.

            My sister in law had brought her (then-boyfriend now husband) home with her a few times when the topic came around to CSIS. (Canadian service often likened to the CIA). He made the comment that he had a hard time seeing why the service exists, since he felt we weren’t much of a target. he ended this with a joking, “I mean, I don’t know of any Russian spies…”

            My mother in law looks him in the eye and says, deadpan, “Well, you know us.”

            it genuinely took him a while to be sure she was *joking*.

      2. Hell in a Handbasket*

        I thought that example, described as the “worst” one, was totally bizarre. If I’m focusing on my work, I’m not at all paying attention to who’s walking by when! And I don’t think I’m at all unusual in that. I think maybe OP’s brain works differently than many people’s?

        1. Observer*

          I think you have a really good point. Because it seems to be really a really odd expectation that the boss no only noticed that they had left the office, but for how long and *knew what they did* while out of the office.

          Honestly, I hope it’s just that the LW’s brain is differently wired. Because I really would not want to work for a boss who notices everyone who walks in and out and keeps track of how long they were out of the room. Because unless there is something specific going on, that’s just way too close to monitoring everyone’s bathroom breaks and occasional personal calls. Which, not great at all!

    3. WillowSunstar*

      I’ve had headphones on at work while a fire drill happened and was able to hear it. Granted, I never had my headphones at the level where I couldn’t hear someone directly talking to me.

    4. English Rose*

      If someone tapped me on the shoulder while I was hyperfocused I’d levitate three feet from my chair!
      But this is absolutely right, no need to be anxious about coworkers who can block distractions.

      1. Eldritch Office Worker*

        I do that if someone walks into my office and talks to me if I’m moderately focused, and I sit facing my door lol

        But hey if I’m scared you have my attention!

      2. Chickadee*

        I should have clarified, tapping on the shoulder is for emergencies! I just hover near my coworkers or do a slight wave while I wait for them to notice me. (Or vice versa.)

    5. Eldritch Office Worker*

      I wouldn’t necessarily notice a fire alarm (and find people are slow to respond to them in my office regardless of what they’re doing so there might be more going on there) but if something were happening actively around me I think it would break the “norm” of background noise enough to get my attention.

      1. Snow Globe*

        In my office, we all know if it is just a drill (there is a loud speaker with the message “this is a drill, not an actual emergency”) which is why people are slow to react. It’s not that they don’t hear it, it’s just not considered urgent.

        1. Eldritch Office Worker*

          That’s not the case here but I expect there’s a history of false alarms or something similar that I’m unaware of

      2. Frankie Mermaids*

        My first office never did fire drills but DID have false alarms on an almost weekly basis for about a year. We had all learned to tune them out so throughly that when they did a surprise fire drill the day our OSHA rep was visiting no one moved a muscle. Then we got scolded for not leaving the building.

    6. Workerbee*

      Better to try to stand in their line of sight or wave a hand in front of their eyes than tap on the shoulder. The resultant reflex might be less, ah, reactive.

      1. Chickadee*

        Yes, tapping on the shoulder is for emergencies, I should have clarified in the initial post.

    7. Susie and Elaine Problem*

      The fire alarm in my office is painfully loud. And the emergency lights flicker. There is no missing it even with super noise cancelling headphones.

    8. Recently Promoted Cog*

      I shared a small office with as many as 5 other people for several years. I did fine, but we actually lost staff over how hard it could be to work in that environment. I have always had the capacity to hyperfocus (thank you undiagnosed ADHD) and was able to work in that office. But man, when I got moved to a better office that I shared with one person who was on the road 90% of the time working at our remote sites? I understood other people’s complaints.
      OP: You’re lucky you’ve got workers that are adaptable enough to be able to work under those conditions. Expecting them to be super responsive to your slightest word on zero notice is an expectation that is at odds with being productive.

    9. iglwif*

      I honestly don’t know how anyone can work in an office where they can’t tune out the safe, routine, unmemorable events. If your brain does not allow you to learn to do that, or if the office is so chaotic that no one can do it, then you need to work elsewhere and/or something in the office needs to change.

      People need to be able to focus. And like you say, the reason that fire/emergency alarms are announced via sirens, bells, loud-hailers, flashing red lights, etc., is that these are big, loud, anomalous phenomena designed to get attention from people who are focusing on something else!

  4. MBK*

    People who tune out background noise tend to tune out the normal background noise they’re accustomed to and that they consider the regular hum of the office. A fire alarm or someone yelling for help (or in warning) will definitely get noticed.

    1. The Prettiest Curse*

      In some office buildings, the lighting will change in a noticeable way when the fire alarm goes off (this is the case in mine) – I think most people will notice that or the alarm.

      1. Nightengale*

        ours flash, which is an accessibility need for people who are D/deaf, hearing impaired or hard of hearing

        The flashing completely disorients my neurodivergent brain , making it harder for me to safely walk and navigate. It’s a conflicting access need.

        1. Muscadine*

          Same – the flashing lights disorient me, and the wake-the-dead siren causes me physical pain and panic attacks. Someone has to lead me out of the building, and then I can’t go back to work that day.

      2. Knitting Cat Lady*

        Yeah, the fire alarm in my office is very high pitched and loud enough to wake the dead. With added flashing lights for those who can’t hear. Those are like very slow, very bright strobe flashes.

        1. DisneyChannelThis*

          The building across from ours has the strobe alert fire alarms, they’ve had 3 in the past year and everyone on my side the building immediately notices that building has an alarm , they’re very effective even across the street!

        2. MigraineMonth*

          My college house once made the security blotter when a neighbor called in a noise complaint for the late-night raucous party we were having on a weeknight: strobe lights, techno music, and a bunch of people milling around on the lawn.

          The entry ended with “Security responded and turned off the fire alarm.”

      3. just tired*

        That’s actually a great idea, it’s very inclusive of those who can’t hear well or are deaf.

    2. CityMouse*

      I am surprised what I can tune out. I used to live near the Space Coast and discovered that unless I was actively anticipating it, I didn’t hear the Space Shuttle landing. It was a loud noise that shook the whole house for a second but my brain would just ignore it.

      1. AngryOctopus*

        I worked in a medical area with several large hospitals for 4 years, and stopped really noticing ambulance sirens and helicopter noises, since they were so common in the area!

      2. Annika Hansen*

        I grew up in house that was on the flight path for many planes using the airport 7 miles away. I was so used it and rarely noticed it. When we had extended family over, they were always startled by it.

        1. allathian*

          Same. I used to live in an apartment where planes flying overhead would rattle the windows. I quickly learned to sleep through that.

          My parents still live there, but 30 years ago they had new windows with aluminum frames installed that don’t rattle.

      3. Turquoisecow*

        We lived under the flight path for a nearby airport and sometimes the planes would be very close. There was also a freight train a block away. Sometimes I would see people in local fb groups complaining about the noise (train whistles at night or whatever) but I never really noticed, especially if we had the windows closed. It’s just background noise.

      4. iglwif*

        Yes, I live on a busy street (3 storeys up, but still!) and under a flight path to a major international airport, and I only realize how much noise I routinely tune out when I am somewhere much, much quieter … or when someone who lives somewhere quieter is in my apartment noticing the noise.

      5. Glad I’m Not Still in the Rat-Race*

        OT: Lived in SoCal in the mid-90s when shuttles were still landing at Edwards AFB. A double house shake with thump meant the shuttle (nose and tail made separate sonic booms); a single shake-thump meant a very small earthquake.

  5. Cmdrshprd*

    OP2 I usually feel like it is disingenuous when people say I am doing two jobs, teapot designer and teapot builder. Unless you are putting in 80 hrs a week, 40 as designer and 40 as builder you are not. If you are still working 40 hrs you are doing 2 half time roles into one position, 20 and 20 or some combo.

    Some people might be working more say 50 or 60, but that is still not doing two jobs, it is 1.25 to 1.5 but not two.

    But also communication and getting on with your boss is a key part of doing your job well and deserving of a merit raise.

    Like if I went into my bosses office every time I dropped off a project and cursed out my boss I would not be a good employee, even if the tasks were done to perfection.

    1. Mid*

      Most people don’t actually work 40 hours at work. They’re clocked in and present for 40 hours, but not every single moment is actually filled with work. So, no, someone doesn’t need to be working 80 hours to be doing two jobs.

      And cursing out your boss is very different than having different communication styles.

      1. Ellie*

        Some managers do make it difficult to communicate effectively. It could be a clash of styles, or just an awkward personality.

        However, in OP’s situation, I’d be concentrating on either finding another job, passing my PIP, or both. A raise seems like the least of the issues.

      2. MK*

        While it’s true that n a lot of jobs people aren’t working every single moment of the 40 hours, they are actually paid for that, so it’s not really reasonable to claim you are working two jobs because you are actually expected to work a full 40 hours.

        1. Greyhound*

          It’s actually not possible to work every single moment of the 40 hours – even the fullest working day usually involves trips to the bathroom or to get a drink of water, a bit of incidental chit chat and so on – pedantic I know but still. More seriously when people say they are doing 2 jobs they may mean they are doing work that is normally done by 2 people, with different sets of responsibilities and so on. That can mean you are trying to pack an awful lot into your 40 hours, and quite probably having to work extra time, or that you don’t have the time to do both roles well. Doing a role well involves having time to think and reflect, not just run around madly. Stressful situations both.

          1. Turquoisecow*

            Usually if someone is doing the work of two people they are not doing it as effectively as two people would because they *aren’t* working 80 hours a week (or even close to that).

    2. LW2*

      Greetings commander,

      I can see why you would think that. Think of it as, I am a teapot designer and builder already (2 separate but directly aligned job scopes) and adding teapot shopkeeper to my list of responsibilities. Sure, I won’t be working 80 hours a week, but that’s because I can design or build teapots while as a shopkeeper.

      The shopkeeper is also taking responsibility that the company doesn’t lose anything on the shop floor, keeping the place clean, but is usually not occupied 100% of the time. However, the responsibilities are still distinctly different roles which you would hire a separate person for. I have had to complete professional certifications for this new role in my own time. I am not asking to be compensated for an entirely different role like another person, I was asking to be compensated for my time, like 1.25 or 1.5.

      I normally pull 9-10 hour days on weekdays, not including networking events and functions at night, or weekend projects that need to be done in person. Also, if the above timings are insufficient, I finish up admin stuff in the office on weekends or at night.

      I fully acknowledge that I can improve on my communication with my boss, and thankfully am not at the stage where I feel like cursing out my boss every time I meet him. And yes, I know I am not deserving of a merit raise if I fail to meet expectations, but this was no raise at all, not even a COLA.

      1. Melvin*

        It’s clear that your performance deserves a raise. The fact that the PIP is so unreasonable, nitpicky, and subjective, as well as being set at the time it was, makes it highly likely the PIP is just pretense to deny the raise.

        The best thing to do is to look for another job, one that is not so toxic. I know you care very much about the good you do in this job, but much like government jobs in the U.S., it is being controlled by someone who doesn’t.

        1. Skippy.*

          > The fact that the PIP is so unreasonable, nitpicky, and subjective, as well as being set at the time it was, makes it highly likely the PIP is just pretense to deny the raise.

          That seems like a more sweeping assumption than the letter indicates. OP says that the PIP “was not totally out of line,” and the company could just deny the raise without the hassle and paperwork of a PIP.

          PIP or not, I wouldn’t assume that anyone getting a “below expectations” rating would be getting a raise.

          1. Nuka COLA*

            Pretty much every employer who’s ever employed me (I’m in the tech industry) has termed all raises as “merit,” even when they were effectively just COLAs (and even when they were below COLA level).

      2. xylocopa*

        Oof. Are you paid hourly or–I assume–is this all being rolled into the same salary for your initial job? Does your boss know how much time you’re putting in, or is that not being communicated clearly?

        Because this sounds pretty rotten. If the company has been hiring more staff, but not doing anything about the situation where you are working that many hours, something ain’t right.

        1. LW2*

          I’m on salary. My boss has acknowledged that I’m working longer hours than most. He’s received emails from me and I’ve remained reachable via calls by him well past midnight.

          The company has been hiring more staff for tech and software, even though we are not a tech or software company. The manpower is just not reaching the departments that need the help now, despite feedback and clear exhaustion by staff. Medical leave usage has shot way up in the past year

          1. xylocopa*

            oh yeah no if your boss knows you’re reachable past midnight and is also still expecting a 9-5 type day, this is a workplace that won’t change

            get out

              1. xylocopa*

                Well– I think “be less available” is a good lesson to learn from this. Plenty of people are rightly encouraging OP to think about why and how things reached this point. And yeah, some of the communication issues are worth thinking about for a future job.

                But from the context given here and in other comments, this really seems like a messed-up job that is not going to change, is making OP miserable, and is not so crucial to OP that they need to stick with it.

                Up to OP whether “get out” should mean “find another job before you leave,” but I think they should leave.

          2. Boof*

            Honestly, I can’t fully tell what is going on here in that something seems wildly off and sometimes folks can be unreliable narrators (no offense I hope, you seem fine, even if the question initially seemed strange). But. 1) does your PIP have an end date? 2) you really are doing the work of more than one person / over 40 hrs a week, have better metrics than others, and your boss (the founder/CEO) really put you on a PIP solely for, what, not reading their mind / “communicating” in a way they didn’t quite like (micromanager?) while getting everything done well?
            Something is wildly wrong here and unless the above is incorrect, your boss sucks and isn’t going to change. Get out and/or make sure your PIP has a clear end date and you start protecting your time/yourself – like I guess just communicate to your boss what tasks you will drop to stay within a reasonable salary / scope. Might you get fired? Suppose so; but you also say you don’t really need this job either so yeah, why keep setting yourself on fire to keep the boss warm?

            1. LW2*

              I know, the whole situation is so wildly bizarre that it’s hard to believe, especially when I don’t want to put a whole page of information about what is happening. I’ve talked about it with fellow departments heads and they are equally perplexed with the PIP but have no other advice than “follow what the boss wants” and “what the boss wants, is what he gets” and platitudes of “he [the boss] is just this way”.

              1) my PIP ends next week. Just after increments are locked into the system. (make of that what you will)
              2) my boss is definitely the picture perfect definition of a micromanager. I have hit higher KPIs than my direct co-worker, while still giving advice on his projects and the reverse is not true. I also talk to tech for streamlining processes, legal for contracting, and marketing for new strategies and content creation, which my direct co-worker does not. And looking for government funding and keeping abreast with government regulation for my industry.

              I’m burning the candle at both ends and I think I’m just tapped out.

              1. Texan in Exile*

                I guess I am confused about why you’re burning the candle at both ends. Why are you killing yourself for this job? It’s not your responsibility to make up for their failure to staff properly.

                This seems like a situation where you tell your boss he needs to help you prioritize your work because you have only 8 hours a day to get it done. That is, you’re doing the suffering in this situation instead of the company. Can you put the pain where it belongs?

              2. Boof*

                Hm. maybe there is advice in AAM on how to please a micromanager without going insane; at least your PIP is ending soon but from what you say here you should start “quiet quitting” (also known as “work your wage”) and/or looking elsewhere. +/- let the boss know all about what you are going to do and why. “hi! I’m going to handle X Y and Z but not do anything with A B C any longer given the scope of my job and hours!” If you’ve done as much as you say the boss would be insane if they fired you; and if they are so petty as to cut their nose off to spite their face then you’re better off gone anyway (collect that unemployment and job search!)

                1. Hlao-roo*

                  Here are some past posts on dealing with a micro-managing boss:

                  “boss is a non-communicative micromanager” from March 31, 2010

                  “dealing with a micromanager” from September 16, 2010

                  “how to deal with a micromanaging boss” from August 24, 2012

                  “help — I work for a micromanager!” from March 13, 2019

                  I think that these should only be short-term solutions while you continue your job hunt based on your other comments, LW2. I’ll put links in a follow-up comment.

              3. I Have RBF*

                I think you need to find another job. You are doing the work of two jobs, working 25% more hours while on salary, your boss is a micromanager and has essentially put you on a PIP for not reading his mind. You are nearly burned out and you need to go somewhere less toxic.

              4. Bitte Meddler*

                LW2 – If a friend who’d had an extra role dumped in their lap where they are expected to work more than 40 hours each week, including past midnight, told me that they’d been put on a PIP for not communicating exactly as their manager wanted — versus it just being a 1:1 conversation — I’d tell them that their boss is trying to manage them out.

            1. Irish Teacher.*

              Yeah, that was my thought reading the letter and the responses from the LW just confirmed it. Not getting a raise while on a PIP is a perfectly reasonable policy, but the rest of it – putting somebody on a PIP and marking them below expectations while also increasing their responsibilities? Expecting an employee to be contactable until after midnight? Ending the PIP just after increments are locked into the system? The whole thing sounds like a mess.

          4. Bess*

            Are you expected to do these kinds of hours or are you choosing to do them to shore yourself up while you are otherwise on a PIP? I ask because I’ve seen employees take on work and overwork even when explicitly told not to.

            If they’re giving you additional work while on a PIP, that’s a bit weird, but maybe they’re trying to find somewhere you do better where you could transfer instead of staying where you are? That’s often easier than letting someone go if the PIP issues are related to a specific area but you do better in another.

            You don’t have to explain further about your PIP, but without more detail on what you’re being critiqued on, that’s going to make it hard to give a balanced take on this.

          5. Venus*

            I think my fundamental question is whether they had spoken to you about the communications problems before putting you on the PIP, or was it a surprise? If they had told you several times what needed to be fixed and that it was a big problem then I can understand not wanting to give a raise (although cost of living is going up so much that a COLA would be reasonable to request if you’re doing a lot more other work). If the PIP was a surprise then I’d be really unhappy if I were you, and I’d add my voice to those saying that you should leave because it doesn’t sound like a place that cares enough about strong performers.

            1. Mgguy*

              I spent a year on something equivalent to a PIP(the timeline is just how it works at my workplace-basically I’m a tenured academic, and it was a 1 year extension to my probationary period).

              I was also initially called out for “communication issues” but I was-quite literally-blindsided by it. As in I had a pile of glowing evaluations, etc, and this was put on me 3 months before the decision would have been made on tenure. Along the way, prior to the PIP, I’d had feedback on how I could improve(not related to the issues cited in the PIP) but had improved everything that had specifically been noted(all relatively minor things) as well as things I’d noted myself that needed improvement in my annual reflection.

              I say I was “blindsided”, but I actually have it in writing from my then-dean(so not speculation) that she was pissed off that I’d talked to HR about taking FMLA leave for the upcoming birth of my child BEFORE talking to her. Those were the “communication” issues. Apparently I hadn’t done it soon enough by her standards, too, despite giving 3x the notice our union contract requires and it being too early for HR to even let me file paperwork.

              The real kicker in all of it was that I actually HAD talked to the dean, and she’d heavily implied that my being able to take the leave was contingent on having a plan in place for coverage of my classes. I finally went to HR on the union’s advice because they said “The only way to actually hire a sub is to get HR involved and formally notify them that you’ll be out.”

              The whole thing was a mess, and I actually was convinced I wouldn’t survive the PIP. Feedback was irregular(I was supposed to have “monthly” meetings with the dean…I had 3 over the course of a year) and inconsistent. Basically I’d never get acknowledgement that an issue was fixed, but instead she would go digging to find something else I was doing wrong. I’m not sure I would have, despite working my rear off(and teaching a near double load all along the way) had the union not gone to bat for me and basically said “We have an open and shut lawsuit waiting as we have documented evidence that this is FMLA retaliation.”

              Fortunately, that dean is now higher up in the food chain, which means that I really don’t have to deal with her day-to-day, and my current dean is amazing.

      3. Smithy*

        I’m in a nonprofit – so our annual salary increases are never all that amazing as is – however, I will say that every nonprofit I’ve worked at – COLA and merit are combined. I’d say that’s more so because saying that someone got a 1% merit increase (after accounting for COLA) is likely worse optics than saying someone got a 4% pay increase. And that’s when the percentage increase is even that high. Places that give like 2.5% pay increases, not really sure how else they’d frame it.

        If you’re at a nonprofit, I’d say this is fairly common across the sector and while a bummer, not an area where you’re likely to have much traction in pushing back. All to say, may be worth asking around your network quietly on the sector or even just your workplace. Because if increases are just combined and never perceived distinctly as COLA and merit, then this won’t resonate with them.

        Not saying it’s right! Just giving that context.

      4. Mango Tango*

        Hi LW2! I want to encourage you to reconsider that “the additional responsibilities are not related to the PIP”.

        It sounds to me like the additional responsibilities are burning you out. Because you are a human and not a robot, the less important things and/or the things you’re naturally less good at (like continually updating your boss) are getting dropped because your workday is overstuffed.

        As someone who has also faced this professional feedback from a micromanager and finally got a raise this year, this is what I did:
        I considered over-communication to my boss now my highest work priority. Yes, over deliverables. Yes, over responding to clients. I started doing daily granular “this is everything I have done today, everything I did yesterday, and my upcoming plan for things to do” updates. I had to cut back the amount of actual deliverable work I did by about 30% in order to create mental room to do these updates and stay immediately available over chat. And my performance review scores went from a 3/5 to a 5/5 in almost all areas and I was one of 20% of our company who received a raise.

        I don’t know if this will help you, but I wanted to post it in case in did!

        2. Just Thinkin' Here*

          Agree – the additional responsibilities mean you don’t have extra time to communicate every update you have. If you weren’t on a PIP, I would say dial back to 40 hours and make the manager hurt for it. Once he doesn’t get the extra hours from you, it will force them to hire someone to help.

          Finish the PIP, wait 2 weeks, then go back to 40 hours. It’s what you are currently being paid to work. If they want more, they pay more.

          And yes, in the long run, need a better workplace.

      5. Cmdrshprd*

        “, the responsibilities are still distinctly different roles which you would hire a separate person for.”

        I don’t know that is actually the case. I think you might be applying big business/company positions to small(er) business/company positions.

        At a big box store you might have a dedicated cashier, stockroom, floor salesperson are separate positions. But at a smaller to medium store, those positions are often all one and the same.

        If the company and additional responsibilities actually require to work .25 or .5 hours more than it is reasonable to ask for a commensurate raise.

        But alternatively you can ask/tell your boss company I can’t keep working 9/10 hour days, I need to cut back to a reasonable 40 hrs a week what should I drop.

    3. Radioactive Cyborg Llama*

      I think that is an overly literal take on someone saying they’re doing two jobs, and particularly here where the LW did not say that but said her scope of responsibilities has expanded drastically to include the responsibilities of two different roles. And she’s not cursing out her manager, she just wasn’t communicating in the way that the manager wanted.

      And I agree with Alison that it’s problematic to ask for a raise while on a PIP but I don’t think the question was crazy here–the company apparently has no complaint about her actual work product and gave her additional responsibilities.

    4. Fluffy Fish*

      There are many many things in life that don’t meet a technical literal definition and yet people everywhere use it colloquially and its understood. Doesn’t make it disingenuous because no one things its a literal statement.

      I do two jobs (teapot designer and teapot painter) as in my work should be divided into 2 jobs. Because I do two jobs, I am unable to do either one fully or with the attention it deserves. No one has ever thought that means I spend 80 hours a week doing these jobs. They correctly understand it to mean we need another body to take over the painting so I can focus on designing.

    5. Shrimp Emplaced*

      One thing I keep in mind is that a “having two jobs” scenario isn’t only down to hours worked. It’s also recognizing that there’s often a significant level of activation energy required to shift into the other set of responsibilities, which can be draining in the way that actually having two separate jobs would be. Esp. if the two sets of duties don’t complement each other or when the toggling back and forth doesn’t help the person feel refreshed (in the way that volunteering using completely different skills in your off-time might refresh you for your paid work).

      1. Sloanicota*

        I think it’s also that you’re saving the company a lot of money if they used to have two separate role for llama penning and llama grooming, and now you’re doing both because they never backfilled the penning role. That’s probably double your salary in savings you’re providing for them. They can’t give a 5-10% raise?

        1. Sar*

          This exactly. And likely the company apologists would argue that if they wouldn’t backfill, the work can’t be that valued. But I bet they’re happy SOMEONE’s doing SOMETHING and they’d be pretty pissed if OP tried to stop.

      2. Sar*

        Hi, it me, I wear the multiple hats. The juggling itself (the lack of focus, the needing to drop one thing to cram in this other emergency) takes energy and executive function (which takes energy).

  6. Dido*

    LW2, I don’t think arguing with your boss for 10 minutes that you deserve a merit raise while you’re on a PIP for underperformance is going to ingratiate yourself with him. You seem pretty blasé about the PIP, but you should act like you’re on thin ice and adjust your attitude if you want to keep your job…

    1. LW2*

      Hello there,
      I think “arguing” may have been a wrong word choice, but I appreciate the comment. No heated words, just me trying to get him to see my point, and him trying to tell me that there were no raises on a PIP.

      I also pointed out that I fully expect to pass this PIP and my boss had also communicated that. If he had not brought up the fact that I was meeting the PIP expectations and that he expected me to pass it, I would not have brought up the raise.

      I am actually at a place in time where I don’t care if I keep my job or not, it has been a rather toxic environment and I am already looking to quit, with or without another offer. But I appreciate the sentiment and the concern behind your comment.

      1. Not Australian*

        “I don’t care if I keep my job or not… ”

        I suspect this is blatantly obvious to your boss, too.

        1. LW2*

          Heh, I’m actually smiling at this comment. Not because it may not be true, my boss may very well be aware of this.

          But so many people in my life have been telling me that I shouldn’t be sacrificing my life to my work, and I’m starting to be aware of how much this job sucks out of me. I’m stressed, sleep deprived, having been recently diagnosed as being clinically depressed and having nightmares about the job that cause me to wake up at 4am feeling like I cannot breathe.

          Meanwhile, my colleagues recognise the workload I’m carrying and are all telling me to stay, and even my CFO has pointed out how expensive it would be to replace me. I love my job, and the impact it has on the wider public, but at this point, I just don’t care.

          2. Falling Diphthong*

            I would advise focusing on getting out. From a purely practical perspective, as this drags on this is going to leak into your visible feelings about this job (so hard to get off the PIP), and into your attitude at interviews for other jobs. Where you want to be able to sell “I am a low drama person who has learned a lot from the many hats I wear at Amalgamated Ruminants, but would appreciate this new job’s opportunity to focus on crocheting alpacas.”

          3. DJ Abbott*

            It sounds like you’re really overloaded, working all the time. I’ve noticed in my own jobs when I get too overwhelmed and overloaded, I no longer care about anything except getting through the next few minutes doing what’s front of me. Luckily that’s only once in a while and I don’t work overtime.
            When you say you’re ready to quit, is that just how l you feel in the moments you’re overwhelmed? Or could you actually quit and be Ok in terms of finance and health insurance?
            If you could quit and still be OK, financially and medically, why not make an exit plan now?
            If you need to find another job first, then look for one that does not require such long hours. Your friends and family are right, it’s not worth it. Even if your job is helping people, you have to take care of yourself too.

            1. LW2*

              Even if I quit, I am lucky enough that I am financially stable and have health insurance independent of my job.

              I should be making better exit plans, of course.

              Thanks for your concern, I will take that into consideration.

              1. Syzygy*

                Just wanted to add my opinion – please take care of yourself. You sounds as though you’re burned out, and if you can afford to leave and take time off before starting another job, perhaps you should, before your health is further affected.

              2. MigraineMonth*

                Can you take a couple of days off (or more)? Right away?

                It sounds like you’re deep in the weeds right now, and I think even a bit of distance would really help you make the best decisions for *you*.

          4. Hiring Mgr*

            If possible, given all that I would forget about the PIP and the raise and find something else asap

            1. Pastor Petty Labelle*

              This. OP you already think the place is toxic, you are on a PIP and you tried for 10 minutes to get your boss to see your point when the decision was already made.

              Save your energy for your job search.

              P.S. Arguing for 10 minutes for a raise when you are on a PIP shows its more than a clash of communication styles. Raises are for over performance. PIP means under performance. You aren’t getting a raise while underperforming.

              1. Trawna*

                You aren’t getting a raise when your boss doesn’t like you.

                Good managers (strong; mature) adapt themselves their reports to give them the best working experience possible.

                Bad managers (insecure; immature) find fault and nitpick staff (especially high performers) to bring them down so that the poor manager feels in control.

                You should not have asked “how high” when put on a PIP while performing well! You should have started planning your exit strategy. Do that now — work on getting out.

                I wish you all the best finding a new job in a mature firm.

          5. CityMouse*

            I suspect you already know this: I think it’s time for you to start job hunting. There’s a degree to which being okay with losing your job is psychologically healthy but you read to me like someone who’s burned out and totally over how your job has been treating you. I don’t think your situation at your job is going to improve.

          6. Keymaster of Gozer (she/her)*

            You sound like you’re at the point I was in 2016. Serious depression and sleep problems, really vivid nightmares, all that.

            I’m here in 2025 to tell you that if your mental state would be improved by leaving the job then do it. You can find another job, you cannot find another brain (unless your name is Igor and you’re from a Terry Pratchett book).

            I loved my job, loved doing what I did and I still miss the people there. My boss at the time though was a colossal git who put me on a PIP for ‘excessive medical leave’.

            The job I’m in now I actually took a pay cut to do but it’s a place where I can flourish.

          7. Sloanicota*

            There’s definitely a Thing where companies will pile on more and more until you break, and then punish you for not maintaining the standards of the role. I hope you find a job that works better for you OP :(

          8. AngryOwl*

            LW2, good for you. Too many of us stay in terrible, toxic places and allow them to drain us. I’m not sure why your letter touched such a nerve with some commenters, but you’re handling it very gracefully. I hope you find a way out soon!

          9. Observer*

            my colleagues recognise the workload I’m carrying and are all telling me to stay, and even my CFO has pointed out how expensive it would be to replace me

            OK, it sounds like it’s time for you to start job hunting on the one hand. But also to have a chat with your CFO or someone in HR about moving to a different position. It’s clear that you are valuable, and if anyone these has any sense they will realize that keeping you with a manager that is willing to take and take and take without giving an inch is going to lead to them losing you. And even if it’s going to be costly to replace in you in your current position, you should be valuable enough that they’ll still come out ahead by keeping you in a different, better for you, position where y0u will build value.

            The thing is, your boss is not unreasonable for wanting a different way of communicating. And I would even say that on balance, he is more “right” than you are about this. But given everything else, he’s being an idiot. And that’s assuming he’s not being a power-tripping, stupid, jerk, which is possible.

            So, see about getting moved. And try to find a new job. Because it’s usually easier to find a new job while you are still in a job than when you are out of a job.

        2. Tenebrae*

          Eh, no idea about LW’s situation but bosses can be amazingly oblivious. At my last job, I was openly dissatisfied and in burnout and somewhat obviously taking time off in the middle of the day for interviews. My boss was genuinely shocked when I resigned.

      2. Storm in a teacup*

        Hi LW2
        I think you feel the communication is a style mismatch when I read it as a fundamental part of your role you are not doing. You may feel it is unnecessary and unwarranted. Your boss has communicated it is not and put you on a PIP to get this issue sorted. I would assume prior to the PIP this was addressed with you and not enough changed in your approach and your attitude.
        I get the job is toxic and you feel you need to leave but honestly, I also think you need to do some self-reflection as it’ll also help you in your next role.

        1. LW2*

          Hi,

          Perhaps you are right, I need to reflect more on this. Thanks for your insightful comment.

          1. Myrin*

            I just wanted to say thanks for interacting in the comments, OP #2, and very graciously at that, especially in the face of criticism.

            1. Keymaster of Gozer (she/her)*

              Absolutely seconded. LW2 is a sterling example of how to take advice even if you don’t agree with it!

              1. Zona the Great*

                I really feel like I witnessed a real version of one of those “crucial conversations” from the book. “Thanks for saying so but this is simply not a priority for me right now”. Love it.

              2. Melvin*

                With all the information that is now out, it’s safe to say this isn’t how to take advice.

                LW2 was thoroughly taken advantage of, and would have benefited from not being so accepting of advice to blame themselves. This constant acceptance of self blame has led to a lack of pushback against their untenable work conditions, and not seeing until their letter was published how bad the conditions are and how necessary it is to leave.

                LW2, I hope these discussions have given you the confidence to not accept unfair treatment and blame.

          2. Storm in a teacup*

            Hi LW2
            I’ve just read some of your responses and the picture you paint in the comments is quite different to the letter.
            It sounds like you’re in a really bind of a situation and honestly if you come of the PIP soon maybe leaving to have a reset and then look for a new role is the best way forward.
            It also sounds like you have a lot of capital built up in your company with other colleagues. Is there a senior manager who could support or a different internal role you could move to?

        2. Great Frogs of Literature*

          What you say is probably true, but I suspect that the environment itself is contributing to making the communication issues worse. (Not to give you a pass on that, LW2 — the boss wanting more updates might or might not be a style mismatch, but if multiple stakeholders for your outcomes are unhappy and feel like you’re leaving them in the dark, that’s a sign that you’re not doing a good job at something that is a fundamental piece of your role, at least in the context of this company.)

          I would say that communication is something I’m good at, and when I’ve overworked and overloaded, it’s still difficult to do well. LW is working 10 hour days! Of course they aren’t spending 30-60 minutes multiple times a week crafting update emails to stakeholders! They’re doing enough work that anything non-essential is getting jettisoned, and since the communication doesn’t come naturally, it’s very understandable that they’re not successful in carving out time to do something difficult (that, at a guess, feels like kind of an unnecessary extra).

          LW2, providing enough information that the people who rely on your work aren’t frustrated with you is not an unnecessary extra, it is a real piece of your job. But I think it will be a LOT easier for you to make time to value and prioritize it when you’re doing a reasonable amount of work, so I’m team Find A New Job.

          1. Hannah Lee*

            I suspect the lack of communication about in-process status may be a LW work style, thing, but also a symptom of being overloaded, responsible for more than any one person can possibly do.

            I know in a situation like that, I can get hyperfocused on just Doing. The. Stuff, knocking things off my to do list and fighting fires as they come up. Having to stop what I’m doing, step back and prepare a cogent update to my boss and stakeholders falls somewhere between “tough to find time to do/lower priority than fighting fires” and “are you kidding me? can’t you see I’m spinning 20 high priority plates? I don’t have time for any status update ish”

          2. Observer*

            LW2, providing enough information that the people who rely on your work aren’t frustrated with you is not an unnecessary extra, it is a real piece of your job. But I think it will be a LOT easier for you to make time to value and prioritize it when you’re doing a reasonable amount of work, so I’m team Find A New Job.

            I think that this is an *excellent* encapsulation of the situation. And it bears repeating, multiple times.

        3. AtoZ*

          This was my exact read of it, too. On projects, communication updates are critical, especially if something comes up that might change the manager’s mind on which direction the project needs to go. I would definitely evaluate this, as it will likely be a roadblock in most jobs that are project based.

          I appreciate LW2’s responses and wish you all the best!

      3. Thomas*

        My 2 pence: Don’t expect to pass it, and don’t trust your boss. PIPs are so often a pretext for firing you when the decision has already been made, and a PIP on somewhat flimsy grounds especially so. Step up your search for a new job.

      4. fhqwhgads*

        “Meeting the PIP expectations” = doing the bare minimum to not be fired.
        If you’d come to him with the reasoning, look my workload doubled, I’m covering stuff that used to be a whole second person, of course my performance suffered, you may have had a point and gotten somewhere. I’m guessing he’d still have said “no raises on a PIP” though, but who knows. But it sounds like the PIP issues were not related to overall workload or anything to do with the change in responsibilities. If so, then you don’t really have the “took on more” reasoning. But either way, that would be less of a reason to get a raise and more a reason to cut you slack about underperforming.

    2. KateM*

      Not for underperformance but for communication issues. Depending on boss, arguing with boss may look like another communication issue.

      1. LW2*

        Thanks for pointing that out. Yes, my PIP was on communication issues, not underperformance. I exceeded performance in all quantitative KPIs, which is partly why I feel so bitter.

        1. Retired Vulcan Raises 1 Grey Eyebrow*

          Communication with coorkers is part of performance requirements at most jobs and communication with your manager almost always is and the amount/method defined by her.

        2. DJ Abbott*

          I feel you on that. When I had been at my job a little over a year, we got a new manager. I tried to help by giving her context and useful information for the processes that she was asking me about.
          She began criticizing and nitpicking at me on the daily, and then gave me a bad review, saying I was uncooperative. I don’t fully understand it, but apparently her questions were actually hints that she wanted me to do things differently, and she didn’t say what she meant.
          She has also said my communication with her is too rough, when I was only telling her about a problem or answering a question like I normally would. Again, I don’t understand it and probably never will, but she seems to want her delicate feelings considered at all times, and for me to somehow discern what those feelings are without being told. I’ve made an effort to accommodate her as well as I can, and that helped.
          I thought she was trying to get rid of me, but I didn’t really want to look for another job after four years of pandemic changes, and this is a good job. I ended up going to our new grandboss, who luckily is supportive and kind, and he supervised the next round of reviews. After 1.5 years, she finally acknowledged, in writing, that I have some value.

          1. DJ Abbott*

            PS- I am thankful for the government protections because she couldn’t fire me just because she didn’t/doesn’t like me.

        3. Fluffy Fish*

          Reading your letter and some of your comments I think you need to to some reflection here. You absolutely were put on a PIP because you were underperforming.

          A job isn’t simply producing work products. Communicating well is a performance requirement of a job. Not communicating is failing to perform one of your job functions that bleeds into every other job function.

          Your treating job performance solely as made all the widgets, is seriously missing the mark. Job performance is about the entire job – the soft skills are as, if not more, important than the widget making.

          1. LW2*

            Hi, Fluffy Fish, on your premise, yes I agree with you. Not communicating is failing to perform. I agree.

            Except. I have a bi-weekly 1 to 1 check in with my boss. And a weekly update meeting with my entire department and my boss. I have a daily standup with sister departments which we work closely with. It’s not that I’m not communicating, I’m not communicating enough for my boss. His idea of communication is replying his messages in 5 mins, emails in 15. If he calls, come immediately to his desk.

            I will also acknowledge that it is my boss’s expectation of level of communication which determines how much I need to communicate, and that I am failing to reach.
            Since many of the commenters have expressed similar concerns, I will reflect and work on myself before blaming anyone else.

            1. Jennifer Strange*

              But you stated in your letter that your style is to update him after things are completed, rather than giving him and the stakeholders periodic updates during the process (which is not an unreasonable request), so at least part of it is on you to communicate more. Your boss may be unrealistic in other ways (such as replying to a message in 5 minutes) but that doesn’t mean he’s unrealistic about everything. I get the sense you’re approaching this with the idea that one of your is right and one of you is wrong, but life doesn’t always work that way; it’s possible for your boss to be a blowhard and for you to have communication issues at the same time.

              1. Ellis Bell*

                There’s also the competing, unrelated job roles that have been dumped on OP because they can’t keep staff. It is very, very hard to communicate minute changes in real time when you’re overloaded and working around the clock. OP simply needs to get out.

            2. AngryOctopus*

              LW, it’s fair to have different inherent communication styles. But unfortunately your boss is your boss, and is the one measuring your performance, and if the boss wants that response time, you have to adapt. Hopefully your next job will have a boss with a style more in-line with yours, but since right now you do not, you have to make the extra effort to get in line with their expectations. But best of luck on your job search, I hope you find something that has you working one job for a better salary and with a better boss!

            3. CityMouse*

              Look if your boss has unreasonable communication expectations to the point he put you on a PIP over them, this situation simply isn’t going to change.

            4. Fluffy Fish*

              Hi so of course you are the only one that knows the situation but what stands out here is you are focusing on the quantity of communication when most times its the quality of communication. I can have 5 different meetings and talk in all of them but still not be communicating adequately.

              If it’s truly a quantity based like you described then yeah that’s probably silly and isolated to this manager. But if its at all an issue of what or how you’re communicating than its worth looking at because that can follow you from job to job.

              Wishing you all the best at things getting better with this employer or finding a better fit elsewhere!

            5. Sparkles McFadden*

              This happened with one particular boss: We used to have lots of standing meetings and the boss would forget everything I said. I used to keep a running log of the state of each project so I could send updates to my boss on a schedule or on the spot. He’d forget to read it any of it. I set up two whiteboards: One for project status and one for daily and weekly goals. My staff loved it and my boss would stand right in front of it and ask me why he didn’t know where we were with my projects.

              You know what the problem was? My boss had three managers and he gave me all of the work that didn’t interest him. The other two managers had projects that my boss was excited about, so everything they did was on the boss’ radar, and everything I did was not something he cared about. It was all him and not me. That didn’t change the situation but it helped me change my mindset. Could something like this be what’s happening with you?

            6. Storm in a teacup*

              Ok that is an unreasonable expectation from your boss (unless your surgeons and it’s during actual surgery or a medical emergency)

          2. AngryOwl*

            I find it so odd when commenters are convinced they understand the situation better then the LW from one short letter (outside of truly awful behavior), to the point of aggressive comments like this. It’s fascinating.

            1. Amy*

              I think when people are arguing for a raise while on a PIP, it gives an impression that they may not be considering all the angles on aspects other too.

              1. xylocopa*

                From what LW2 says in the comments above, I think this is one of those cases where a smallish and slightly odd question turns out to just be scratching the surface of a really toxic job situation.

                1. Observer*

                  I think you are right. And I think that that’s what is throwing people off. Especially when many people are clearly responding based on the original letter, with little of the original context.

            2. Jennifer Strange*

              I’m not seeing what’s aggressive (or even incorrect) about Fluffy Fish’s comment? It’s true that being able to communicate is an important part of the job, and by the LW’s on admission in their letter they weren’t giving updates to the degree that their boss wanted. This doesn’t mean that the LW is 100% wrong and their boss is 100% right, but they might have a blind spot that it would be beneficial for them to look at for this and any future jobs.

              1. Bess*

                Yes, expecting a raise while on a PIP and minimizing the content of the PIP suggest a big blind spot. Not to say his workplace is well-functioning or that PIPs can’t be arbitrary or personally motivated, but I would assume someone asking for a raise while on a PIP has a judgment problem and maybe isn’t understanding the performance problems at their core.

              2. bamcheeks*

                I’ve got to say, I’ve done more or less a 180 degrees on this letter based on the greater context in LW2 comments. I also read it initially as, “yeah, you are failing to communicate, that’s on you, expecting a salary increase under those circumstances seems pretty out of touch” to “OK, you sound super burned-out by a legitimately stressful work situation and an unsupportive manager, I am not sure you’re thinking very clearly about any of this, but I think the lack of a raise is probably the least of it”.

                If you’re someone who is reading the comments and seeing all the other dysfunction and stress that LW is describing, then I can see why, “this is on you, get over yourself” comes across as pretty harsh, but I can also see how reasonable it sounds if you’ve only read the main letter and maybe one or two comments.

                1. LaminarFlow*

                  I 10000% agree with you, and the sentiment of this comment is a great takeaway to think about when interpreting/responding to letters.

                  I can absolutely see how LW is frustrated by taking on a larger scope, and exceeding metrics, all to result in not getting a raise.

                  I can also see how a manager would see consistent low communication as a performance problem. I have coached several employees into proactively providing communication to stakeholders, and some have been successful with it, and some haven’t. However, I work in Big Tech, and there are usually official processes for putting someone on/taking them off a PIP at each company, which protects all parties from applying/removing a PIP inappropriately. I don’t think anyone I have had to put on a PIP has been blindsided by it the way LW was.

                  I have also been argued with about the amount of a stock grant (the way Tech grants raises) not being what an employee had in mind for their comp increase. This is what may have sunk the ship, so to speak, for the LW, especially if manager has nagged them about communication for the last year.

                  But, the reason I like this comment so much is that it doesn’t rush to “OMG you are at a toxic workplace, and you need to hire an employment attorney ASAP, and take them down!” or “LW, you are the slackiest slacker McSlackerson in the history of the working world, and you need to change ASAP!” This comment takes the fact that workplaces and interpersonal relationships are complex, and there are many factors that contribute to these situations. Hopefully, there is something here to be learned and applied to the future for all parties involved.

                4. Storm in a teacup*

                  I’m feeling the same!
                  Think my initial comment was a bit harsh as the letter was very factual and some key pieces of information on the situation are only just emerging

            3. CityMouse*

              It’s possible LW isn’t a reliable narrator, but either way the relationship here has broken down enough and LW is frustrated enough I don’t think this workplace is going to work out. I do think if LW sees similar issues developing elsewhere or similar issues in the past then a reassessment is in order. But right now I’d focus on moving on.

            4. Fluffy Fish*

              Hi so my comment wasn’t intended as aggressive – can you explain more why you think it was? If it’s my assessment that failing in soft skills is absolutely a failure in performance, then I stand by that. It might feel hard for some people to hear but soft skills are just as much part of job performance as hard skills. Disregarding that only hurts people.

              I’m in no way stating that I know the situation better than OP. Based on OP’s letter they have a bit of a blind spot regarding the PIP. Based on further comments in the comment section, they may be viewing the PIP very differently than their employer is re: job performance.

              That doesn’t mean they are wrong, it just means that they probably need to take a step back and try to put some fresh eyes on the situation. Maybe their assessment is spot on and they confirm that – great. Maybe they realize that it might be different than what they were thinking.

              Comment sections are meant for discussion and advice to the OP. Making up wild speculation about situations or motivations isn’t helpful. Pointing out – hey you might have a blind spot based on some things you’ve stated is neither aggressive nor acting like you know more that the OP.

              To your statement I personally find it odd when comments suggest OP take another look at something and people interpret it the way you did. To each their own.

        4. Boof*

          So you are overworked and your boss knows it and exceeding outputs but still on a PIP for not updating the boss as much as they’d like? And started off underpaid because of all the work added? Yeah get out – and who cares who thinks you’re essential unless you have major shares in this company it will never give you back what you put into it.

  7. Greyhound*

    I’m a person who just could not focus without headphones – not only that but I had to have the music quite loud to drown out not just the background office noises but the background brain noise as well (I’ve since been diagnosed with mild ADHD so that might account for the noisy brain). Somehow it created a quiet peaceful spot in the middle where I could focus and get things done. I never missed a fire alarm or any markedly unusual office activity, but I would have gone slowly insane without them.

    1. Thin Mints didn't make me thin*

      and if that’s a level of focus your work requires, I’m not clear on why you should have to go to an office for it! I wear headphones in my home office, and I live alone, but that’s because my neighbors do not need to share my taste in ’70s progressive rock.

      1. just tired*

        I can’t deal with headphones all day anymore, working in a call center caused me to have such headphone fatigue I can’t stand the things now unless I HAVE to wear them. I use a speaker and if my neighbors upstairs that have a kid that insists on jumping on the floor all the time don’t like it too bad. I’ve been having fun playing Lady Gaga’s Mayhem ever since it came out too.

  8. Waving not Drowning*

    OP4 – I’m one of those people who get into the zone and block out more routine noise. I used to get in trouble for it at school, in that we’d be doing silent reading, and I wouldn’t hear the teacher tell us it was over, and to do other work. It was very handy when I worked in the head office of an auto mechanic business with a very noisy workshop below me, I just tuned it out. Ditto with working on deadlines in a busy office, I switch off to the normal background noise – however, one time we had a new person in the office who turned up music quite loud because she found it was too quiet and we were working too hard, and that was impossible to tune out however hard I tried! Luckily she didn’t try that again!

    I do, however, hear the fire/emergency alarm going off, and also more importantly, invitations to get coffee and or cake.

    I did have an issue once with a quiet office, I had a staff member that I was giving urgent medical attention to, but needed assistance, person in the office next to me was wearing noise cancelling headphones and couldn’t hear me yelling (couldn’t leave the person needing first aid, and also didn’t want to panic them by yelling TOO much). Person did hear me after I yelled their name a couple of times. My backup plan was grabbing a coffee mug from a desk within arms reach and throwing it at their door. Luckily for the coffee mug, it wasn’t needed. I think in most cases, people block out noise, but do hear emergencies.

    1. Azure Jane Lunatic*

      As a kid with undiagnosed ADHD-PI, I would disappear into books for hours. My wake words were my name, and “ice cream” in two languages.

      1. Nightengale*

        There is research showing most people have brain wave changes when hearing their own name. (the one I know best compared non-speaking autistic people to fluent autistic people and neurotypical people – the non-speaking people did not show the brain wave change, suggesting that auditory processing may explain why they don’t speak!)

        No idea on the ice cream though, I don’t think that has been studied

      2. Waving not Drowning*

        I suspect I may have a variation of ADHD, but haven’t been tested. Husband – yeah, I’m pretty sure he’s ADHD.

        Two out of my four children are formally diagnosed as ADHD (one at age 7, another at age 24), both I would say are PI and I could say with 99% certainly, my now 17 year old has either ADHD-PI, or ASD (or both as their twin does), plus 19 year old is making murmurings they think they could be ADHD. Reports for the late diagnosed, and the two as yet undiagnosed would always have some variation on easily distracted. I have discovered girls tend to mask it a lot better than boys, up until teenager years.

    2. Jay (no, the other one)*

      I went to high school in the 70s in a brand-new building that was designed for open classrooms, so for the first year or two there were no walls in the humanities area. The initial curriculum was integrated and that didn’t last, so we went back to typical lecture/discussion classes in this open space. They then built dividers which provided visual separation; you could still hear everything from the classrooms on either side. As a result, I have no trouble concentrating despite significant background noise and for a bonus I can track more than one conversation at a time.

      The layout did lead to some unexpected and amusing episodes. I took AP American History and we were taking a test while the non-AP history class next door was watching a narrated filmstrip (kids, ask your parents) on the same era. The narration gave us the answers to at least three of the questions on the test.

      2. Casual Fribsday*

        I am horrified but not entirely surprised to find out this was A Thing, and not just the one school I experienced it at. (Decades later, but still very apparent in the building layout/lack of soundproofing.) I did once witness an amusing conversation between a teacher and a bunch of architecture nerds who were so excited to be seeing an example of this particular architect and the teacher was (very politely) saying, basically, “Thanks, we hate it.”

        1. Nightengale*

          I keep a copy of The Lorax in my office for my young patients. Sometimes I try to explain that I first met The Lorax in a filmstrip. Not the new movie, not the old movie, a filmstrip. Forget the kids – none of their parents seem to have grown up in filmstrip era either.

      4. allathian*

        I went to a small village school when I was in grades 2-5. One room, one teacher simultaneously teaching three classes becaue by chance there happened to be kids in only every other grade when I was there. I learned to mostly tune out the other lessons and focus on my own work. We did non-academic subjects like art, crafts, music and PE together.

        I don’t have ADHD but I can lose myself in a book to the point that I’m unaware of everything else.

  9. gyrfalcon17*

    LW1, why would you have to eliminate the Secretary position, once you (if you) get the current volunteer to step down from it?

    You said you wouldn’t have anyone to replace him with, but that seems more like a reason to recruit another volunteer for the position, rather than to eliminate it entirely.

    For the long-term health of the board, it seems to me to be reasonable to keep the work spread out so as not to overload any one person more than necessary — even if you or others can cover the Secretary responsibilities piece-meal in the short-term.

    1. Spooz*

      I don’t really understand why they can’t replace him in that specific role with another person who is already a board member. It doesn’t sound like it would be too difficult for anyone who didn’t stall in 1983 to manage. Sure, finding volunteers is hard – but REORGANISING volunteers is not. And if meetings are so annoying for everyone, I am sure someone would JUMP at the chance to solve the problem. Frame it as organisational best practice to rotate roles.

    2. EllenD*

      I was also a bit confused about LW stating they didn’t need a Secretary, as my experience is that it’s more than organising meetings and minute taking. I’m the Secretary of voluntary organisation, and my role covers ensuring we’re complying with our Constitution, notifying the Charities Commission, and our HQ of changes and information, organise the AGM, nominations for posts [while anyone who nominates is usually elected, we still need to go through process], maintain the archive of past minutes, etc, as well as ensuring there’s an agenda for our regular meetings and circulating ahead of meeting. Luckily, we have a minute secretary, but I still double check their draft to ensure all motions are properly recorded, etc. The Secretary should be supporting the Chair, who can then focus on the strategic direction of organisation and how to deliver. LW1 needs to talk to their current Secretary about what’s needed to do the role and whether there is something else he can contribute and someone else take on the Secretary role.

      1. CTT*

        In addition to this, I would not be surprised if the org’s bylaws/operating agreement required that there be a secretary.

        1. JR17*

          I believe secretary is one of the roles required by the IRS (or maybe it’s my state that requires it). The secretary is often the designated signatory for official forms.

      2. Pastor Petty Labelle*

        Secretary is one of the most vital roles of an organization. The minutes are the official record of activities of the board. You must have them. So you can’t eliminate the position.

        That said, because it is so vital, you have to have someone who can do the job. If someone is incapable, technology wise or other, then they cannot be secretary. It’s really that simple.

        Unfortunately it might be time to have a serious talk with this volunteer about what the role entails and other ways he could contribute.

      3. Engineery*

        IME the smallest possible 501(c) needs a Board of 3 Directors who also serve as Officers – President, Treasurer, and Secretary. This separates the tasks of operations, financial management, and operational record keeping, so that the person with decision-making authority cannot (easily) falsify records of those decisions or redirect funds inappropriately.

        My read is the parent organization is a legitimate charity, and OP runs an affiliated group that distributes funds under the direct supervision of the parent organization. (“The board receives money each year to buy supplies for community service events …. [and] rules or guidance on … how we spend the money.”) OP’s group is thus free to operate in whatever methods satisfy the parent organization.

    3. MsM*

      Also, it feels like recruiting some younger, more tech savvy members couldn’t hurt from a general sustainability perspective.

      1. MigraineMonth*

        I don’t think this is necessary. It sounds like there’s one member who isn’t good with technology and who happens to be older, not that the board in general lacks technology skills. Nor would there be any issues with the current secretary’s age if he were good at technology and didn’t have trouble taking notes due to hearing loss.

    4. Recently Promoted Cog*

      I just want to say: I’ve filled out the forms for nonprofit filings in several states, and they required our organization to have a named “Secretary” who is in charge of maintaining organizational records.

      A nonprofit “Secretary” does NOT have to ACT as “a secretary” and actually TAKE the minutes and schedule the meetings. the term “Secretary” has diverged in meaning (you see this in the fact that we have “Cabinet Secretaries” which are definitely not admin support positions). You could reassign the tasks while keeping the position and making the person responsible for reviewing the minutes and filing them, keeping forms up to date, etc.

      In the OP’s case, I’d consider recording the meetings with AI transcription on, and seeing if the secretary can get the key action items and decision points from that. Barring that, maybe you can run the recording/transcription through an AI notetaker to get a summary, and make him responsible for filing the results?

      I think the folks saying “Just tell him you’re using OneNote” are missing the fact that SOMEONE has to write stuff down in OneNote. The problem is that he can’t or won’t use OneNote.

      1. Funko Pops Day*

        I agree with your last point. OneNote is not a transcription service, and also minutes should NOT be a transcript of the meeting or they become impossible to navigate. Honestly, if you have an agenda, the minutes should be pretty easy to generate– what action/decision was taken for each listed item (were people assigned to a committee? did you vote on something? assign someone to get quotes from vendors to paint a mural on the llama stables and bring them back for the board to decide on?), were there any additional topics that came up under new business not on the agenda and what actions were taken for those?

    5. Artemesia*

      I don’t get the pussyfooting around here. He doesn’t have the skills to do this job. Let him know that we need someone in this job with ‘advanced’ technical skills and so you are replacing him as secretary and asking him to return to regular board duties. If you have another job he could do that would be best, but if not don’t give him deadlines to learn skills he doesn’t have or otherwise drag it out. we need someone who can manage the technology for quick scheduling and note taking so we are moving you from this role to this role.

      1. Dido*

        exactly… it’s not like you’re taking away his livelihood (although he would still need to be fired if this was a paid job, but it would make sense to give it more consideration). he clearly doesn’t want the position if he’s refusing to evolve as necessary, just cut him loose so he can find a hobby that more closely aligns with his skills

  10. Mark*

    #3. My team have a shared location where we share our in office presence with each other. I have trained all the staff to use OOO (out of office) for anything that is not WFH or client visits. This way the team can access who is in or out and be aware of client visits without invading the privacy of the team. I have a mixture of staff who need to be in the lab to do their work and others who are more flexible. So far no resentment around this and no invasion of privacy.

  11. gyrfalcon17*

    LW3, in addition to what Alison said, the fact that some people are abusing their access to your management system to lookup and then broadcast people’s in/out office status, is shocking to me.

    Well, not shocking to me that people would do that, but working with data and positions of trust, number one on the list of no-no’s is misusing one’s access in those ways. (No wait, I guess that’s number two — number one would be tampering with the data.)

    I’m not sure of your position within the organization or your standing to raise this access abuse issue, but I hope that it can be brought to the attention of someone with authority to stamp on it, hard.

    1. Metal Gru*

      I had the same thought. Abusing access is one of the few things that go straight to a disciplinary process rather than an informal chat.

    2. Somehow I Manage*

      This stood out to me even more than the grumbling about people being out of the office and actually doing their jobs. That, of course, is a problem itself. But I think the fact that there are people accessing the management system without the authority (or need) to do so is where this has moved from “hey stop monitoring and grumbling” to “stop or you’re going to be fired.”

      If there is information in that system that is remotely private in nature, you have an even stronger case.

      If you know for a fact that people have accessed this system – and hopefully there’s a way to track who has accessed the system and when – and you have any evidence of how people are broadcasting that information, it would be worth taking that to your boss.

      1. Keymaster of Gozer (she/her)*

        If you know for a fact that people have accessed this system – and hopefully there’s a way to track who has accessed the system and when – and you have any evidence of how people are broadcasting that information, it would be worth taking that to your boss./i>

        And if you have an IT department and they are relatively friendly we generally take a dim view of people misusing access to spy on others. It’s absolutely NOT on and yes I’ve removed privilages from people’s accounts because of behaviour like that.

  12. Meaningful hats*

    OP #4- I’m hard of hearing and have to wear hearing aids. I also work in a shared cube in a small office filled with a lot of chatty co-workers. Sometimes the only way to concentrate on my work is to turn off my hearing aids. As a result, there are times when I can’t hear people addressing me unless they’re literally standing beside my chair and talking at a high volume. My co-workers are all aware of the situation and know that if they need my immediate attention they should send me a Teams message. Don’t worry, I can still hear a fire alarm or shouting without my hearing aids and would know if there was a true emergency!

    1. LW2*

      Fair points, all of them. I appreciate your intent behind your comment. I am trying to get a grip. I agree I was furious during that time, but perhaps argument was too strong a word. It wasn’t even a heated exchange with raised voices.

      My boss promised to raise my pay during this review cycle to reflect my additional responsibilities, and was captured on email. But yeah, I would be surprised if I was still at this job in a few months as well.

      1. Crick*

        I’m wondering how coincidental it is that your PIP overlapped the review period, especially if you’ve been undercommunicating for a while and your boss truly believes you’re likely to pass it — if he’d done it a few weeks earlier or later that raise would at least be on the table.

        1. Ellis Bell*

          My cynical self was wondering the same thing: “Oh this PIP is just a technicality to make sure we’re on the same page; you’re doing great with the extra job role we gave you! No need to job hunt!” becomes “What a raise? Oh no no no. You are an underperforming loser on a PIP remember?” TLDR – job hunt like crazy.

      2. AngryOctopus*

        Honestly LW, communication aside, if they didn’t give you the bump when you got the responsibility, that’s BS for you. They’re saving money by not paying you more and getting more work out of you. Definitely time to move on, because you’re not appreciated for the work you’re doing.

      1. Mid*

        You should probably read their other comments that explain it further, including the one above you as a reply. They were given a lot of additional responsibilities and promised a raise during the review cycle and then just happen to be put on a pip for a fairly minor issue right before the review cycle. LW2 is rightly upset about how they’re being treated here.

  14. Banana Pyjamas*

    It sounds like LW1 doesn’t want to remove the Secretary. Allison’s advice to take over scheduling yourself is good. I think you can compromise on Word vs. OneNote. There’s no reason he can’t do the minutes in word and copy/paste to OneNote.

    Have you thought about the meeting structure? The chair of the meetings needs to sit directly next to the secretary, on their good side, and speak at full volume. A good chair will move the meeting quickly, and call out everything that needs to be noted.

    For example they will ask for a motion, then when they get the motion they will say John Public moves to X. Same thing for seconds. They will state who voted yea and nay. If something must be in the minutes they will say “Let the record reflect that x.”

    If you already do that, and he can’t fulfill the role, then it’s not discrimination to let him go.

  15. bamcheeks*

    LW2, to summarise your letter and your comments:

    – you took on a whole new set of duties which required new training and certifications nearly a year ago, out of cycle with the reviews and raises
    – you are regularly working significant extra hours
    – most of your deliverables are good or exceeds expectations
    – your boss put you on a PIP because they wanted more communication from you about the work you are doing, and you didn’t see this as a big deal
    – work stress is affecting your sleep, personal life and relationships
    – you were relying heavily on a raise to make all this feel worthwhile, and it feels like a kick in the teeth that it’s not happening.

    Frankly I would be pissed off too. I can see a version of this where your boss is an arse who is on at you to update all the time when you’re drowning under a huge amount of work, and another version where you’re just off doing your thing and it’s good work but also the way that you are working is not aligned with the direction the department or company wants to go in. I don’t know which it is, and to be honest given all that you’ve said, I would say it doesn’t matter. It sounds like what you can provide and what this organisation wants are not aligned in some fairly significant ways, and IMO that’s a good time to start looking for another job.

    I would consider asking your boss whether there’s a possibility to review your compensation out of cycle in six months or something, given the extra work you’ve taken on in the last year. But I wouldn’t necessarily plan on still being around for that conversation.

    1. Retired Vulcan Raises 1 Grey Eyebrow*

      I’d be talking to your boss if you can drop some tasks to reduce hours to a more sensible 40, rather than asking for a raise during a PIP.
      He is placing more importance on communication than you are and you need to carve out some time for this and to get your life back.
      Also, getting some time back could reduce your stress level and feelings of grievance / antagonism which your manager is likely noticing and not liking.

      1. LW2*

        I have, at the start of the PIP. He said that he would, gave me a list of things I could drop, then completely forgot about it. He blamed me for not setting deadlines for co-workers on certain projects, and when I reminded him that it was no longer my responsibility, he said “I don’t care that its no longer your job, you need to be on top of it”. That line really struck me hard.

        And due to the other responsibility I took on, since it requires training and certification, I am the only one in the company certified to work on it. So I can’t drop that as well.

        1. bamcheeks*

          It sounds like there is TONS of stuff going on, and here’s a question to think about: would it all be worth it if you had got a raise?

          1. LW2*

            Hi bamcheeks,

            Sorry I didn’t respond to your larger comment. Yes, a lot of things have been going on. Would it be worth it? Probably not.

            I feel responsible for my original job scope, because this department is my baby. I was hired to start this department. It is now responsible for 15-20% of my company’s revenue in under 3 years. I hate that I’m “not performing up to expectations” because I feel like I am trying to hold on to the pieces as much as I can.

            I genuinely want this company, this department to succeed because I believe in the company vision. I love my colleagues, the people I work with, and I see the impact happening before my eyes. I could go work in a bank or another industry and earn more, but I stayed because I believe I can make an impact here.

            I am stressed because I care about the job. Not the income. But I believe that my work should be remunerated properly when the company posts record profits.

            I hate feeling this attached to my job, and I hate being bitter. I hate how responsible I feel, even when my loved ones tell me no job is worth this much of my time. I hate that I still show up for work everyday, and come back on weekends to clear more work. I hate that I have to bring my work laptop on holidays, or that I get multiple calls when I’m overseas, but I still do because I want to do a good job. It’s a cognitive dissonance I can’t work out. And that stresses me out even more.

            1. bamcheeks*

              Oh LW2, this is a real Iranian yoghurt problem. The lack of a pay rise is not the main problem here, it’s just the one you feel like could be fixed.

              It is impossible to think clearly about these things when you are burnt out. It’s like, one of the top number one symptom of burn-out– everything feels completely circular, and you can’t think about problem A because of the way it impacts problem B and then problem C gets in on top of you which makes problem A WORSE and but you can’t do anything about problem C because that’ll make problem B is worse around and around and around. It generally takes a clear week or two of not thinking about work at all, as a minimum, to get to the point where you can think clearly about one of the problems. Sometimes it can take many weeks or even months.

              (My textbook for managing burn out was my best friends skip-level manager, who called her after she’d been off with stress for six weeks and said, “Are you ready to come back to work?” She said, “Well, I suppose I had better.” He said, “Nope, not good enough, take another six weeks. But you can call me in three weeks if you actually want to come back.” After a full twelve weeks off, and reassurances that her role had been completely restructured she found to her surprise that she did actually want to come back: she was actively looking forward to managing some of the challenges. Obviously that is not always possible, but that’s what good management of burnout looks like.)

              If you can, create as much space for yourself as possible. Ideally at least two weeks with no interruptions; consider 4-6 if there’s any way of doing that. If you can take that as PTO, do it as soon as possible. If there are any other mechanisms at your company for taking longer term leave, like FMLA or unpaid leave or a sabbatical of any kind, consider them. Ignore all the other problems for now and fix the most urgent one: you need a break to re-set your brain.

              The thing is, the longer this goes on, the harder it is to come back from. If you can stop now, you might be back and able to think clearly and make solid decisions both for yourself and your role in six weeks. A worse case scenario is that you keep going until you literally can’t any more, and it takes six months to recover. A worse-worse case scenario is that you don’t recover, and you can’t work at this level again.

              Honestly, take this seriously. Everything you’ve written here is saying that this job is currently destroying your perspective, your health and your performance is not far behind. If you can, try and make your boss see that taking your health seriously and either significantly reducing your workload or letting you take 2-3 weeks off is the only way to ensure you can stay and function long term. If you can’t get your boss to see that, please prioritise your health. The consequences of not doing so can be be pretty fucking awful, both for you and for the people you are serving.

              best wishes!

            2. Great Frogs of Literature*

              Having read this comment thread, I am even more Team Find A New Job. This one is making you stressed and miserable, and you’ve asked your boss for help, and he has not only not followed through on doing so, he’s giving you completely outrageous expectations. “I don’t care that its no longer your job, you need to be on top of it” WTAF?!?!

              I do things that are no longer my job, because there is no one else to do them and I think they’re important, and every time they come up, my boss thanks me for making sure they don’t slip through the cracks. And on the occasions that things that used to be my job but aren’t anymore do slip through the cracks, he’s the first person telling me that yeah, that thing is important, but also it’s not my job and the company has not seen fit to assign the work to anyone else.

            3. TechWorker*

              You can’t care more about your job than upper management does. What I mean by that is if they’re not staffing the department appropriately but relying on the income that isn’t your fault or your problem.

              You’ve said you’re looking to move, but is the person above your boss aware that all of this is going on? (And you’re overworked & overstretched?). If you think they might have a different view it could be worth a conversation.

              (Not quite the same, but I was at the point of quitting a job from a company I liked because I had way too much work, not enough support & my managers response was ‘oh don’t worry, try to be less stressed, also we can’t promote you because you’re stressed. I spoke to someone above him, got 2 more people on my team the week after and a change of manager not that long after.. now very happy here 4/5 years & 3 promotions on :p)

              1. LW2*

                My boss is C-suite. The only person above him is technically the CEO. Both are founders of the company, and are college frat buds. I don’t think my boss is going anywhere.

                When I came in, I was asked how many manpower I need for my department. After 3 months, I gave an answer. We still have less than 50% of that number I gave initially.

                1. Hannah Lee*

                  Oh, LW, if that’s the case, I think leaving this job should be your priority.

                  Find something else if you can, but since you said you could get by without it, think about whether that’s something that makes sense – you’re burnt out, boss is not supportive, you’ve got more responsibility at work than any one person can handle, they are not paying you for that. Having seen people in those situations, it doesn’t get better the longer you say, and can have serious, and sometimes long term, impacts on your health and well-being. Your boss and his college frat bud boss are pulling the old “boil the frog” treatment on you, for whatever reason, making things incrementally worse and worse as you try to deal with whatever they throw at you. But you know how that ends? The frog winds up fully boiled, and dead.

                  You’re already seeing negative impacts outside of work with the sleep issues and stress.

                  Please, prioritize your own life and well-being (and your quality of life with anyone you care about, who depends on you being a balanced, unstressed person in your personal life), and get out sooner rather than later. You can’t fix this, your boss is unwilling to even try. It doesn’t matter if you have been the perfect employee, are the only person who could do what you’re doing, if you are the only xyz in that company. They obviously don’t care.

                  So the smartest thing to do is stop trying to fix it and just get out. Do it as gracefully as possible, but without any more sacrifice on your part. Even if you have to (as my mother use to say) scrimp and survive eating spaghetti or peanut butter every day, it will be worth it in the long term for your own peace of mind, quality of life and future.

                2. Storm in a teacup*

                  It sounds like the CEO values what you provide (certainly the profits). Is it possible for you to go directly to the CEO to discuss changing your reporting line to them? Especially with the extra responsibilities etc….
                  Also worth considering working to rule or leaving but returning to them as a consultant to help them out until they get someone permanent in?

            4. I Have RBF*

              You can’t care more about the company than they do. They are using you and abusing you. They doubled your responsibilities in the last year, then conveniently put you on a PIP when it was time for raises. That dog don’t hunt.

              You need to leave. You are burned out and it’s messing up your health. I’ve had this happen before, and the health issues never fully go away.

              Run. It won’t get better.

    3. Hyaline*

      Just chiming in to say, LW2, that after reading the letter and your replies here, the raise feels like a misdirected focal point for a lot of concerns that cannot and will not be solved with a raise! I think you’re stuck in the unenviable position of really reflecting if this job is a good fit for you, and whether, gently, you are a good fit for this job and have been doing good work. If it’s not, you also have to dig into whether it’s just a mutually poor alignment, or that your boss happens to be a real jerk, or that maybe you’re partially at fault here and if so, if the issues are now too deep to fix. Like–if you really are doing solid work that no one could complain about, and the company is doing well, and the boss put you on a PIP for a seemingly trivial issue–that’s a crappy boss and/or a toxic and crummy company. But if it’s possible that maaaaybe your work isn’t as fantastic as you think, or your additional duties are not really that remarkable, or you’re struggling in ways that aren’t apparent to you immediately, then maaaaybe the PIP is about more than a minor communication issue and it’s time to really grapple with that. Why does it matter? Because I think either way you are going to end up thinking about a new job at some point, whether it’s over this issue or not, whether it’s now or in a few years, whether it’s on your terms or not, and having a good and honest assessment of what happened will help you land somewhere better and maintain a better working rapport in that new spot. This is all really hard, and I’m sorry you’re dealing with it–but I really think you want to drop the focus on the raise and pull out the lens to a wider picture.

  16. Stained Glass Cannon*

    LW3, my team is facing the exact same issue right now, with additional complications. My team needs to leave the office to attend events and meet stakeholders, so they keep irregular hours. We have the flexibility to come early and leave early if we need, and some of them do that in order to avoid traffic conditions. I will also admit – I have encouraged them to schedule their meetings in such a way that they are justified in not returning to the office later and WFH for the rest of the day, because the desk component of their work requires intense focus time and the office is horrendously noisy and distracting.

    However, the admin staff have been escalating complaints to my boss that my team and an adjacent team aren’t in the office. And one of my team members reported to me that admin staff are messaging them daily asking if they’re in the office!

    I’ve realized that the admin staff have been given some kind of KPI for ensuring that butts are in seats at least part of the day, which is not their fault and rests entirely on the person who decided that butts in seats were necessary to justify the cost of RTO. But at the same time, I absolutely will fault them for not correctly tracking who actually comes and goes. E.g. if my team turns up at 8 a.m. and leaves at 10 a.m. for meetings to return at 2 p.m., and the admin staff comes in at 10:30 a.m. and goes for lunch just before 2 p.m. and therefore completely misses seeing them…

    My solution so far is documenting to my boss and the admin staff, repeatedly over email and the internal messaging platform, that (1) my team is in fact in the office every day (2) they come and go at irregular times (3) whenever there is a request to WFH I do in fact notify both my boss and the admin staff, and if the admin staff missed that email it is not my or my team’s fault. If you have this ability to push back, you should; if you don’t, see if your boss is willing to give that shove on your behalf so that you and your team, at least, don’t end up scapegoated.

    1. Phony Genius*

      I’m actually seeing something similar to this. Our current organization head wants to see a certain percentage of workers at their desks. The current WFH policy limits the percentage of people who can WFH at once. Rumor is that it may change soon to measure the percentage of people in the office, which would then count people in the field and people working from home as the same thing.

      Thing is, a long time ago, I worked briefly under a boss here who abused field work. Whenever we went to the field, we had the opportunity to get lunch at places that had interesting cuisine. Much better than the scant choices near the office. So I sometimes got dragged to the field for an almost nothing assignment, just so the staff could try some restaurant. I was just starting out, so I had zero capital to push back. I moved to a different group after a couple of months. So I can understand if some employees don’t trust that the field work is legit.

      All this said, in many organizations, using access to management records in this way is an automatic termination. A good system will log who looked at what, and those employees will have to explain themselves and show that it was truly part of their official duties.

  17. Hornswoggler*

    I have been on various boards of charities over the years and all of them had limitations on how long you could remain on the board. Initially usually three years. When that was up, you could be re-elected/reappointed for a further three years. When *that* was up, you graciously stepped down unless there was a very specific reason (e.g. being in the middle of a huge project), when you could get an extension for 1 year.

    You always think you can’t find someone to replace volunteers and it does take work. If you have a transparent process like this, you can put out communications such as “Robert will be reaching the end of his term as Secretary at the end of this year and we are looking for someone to fill his shoes” and so on.

    1. EllenD*

      Absolutely. It is hard work finding new people and almost needs to be started up to twelve months ahead.

    2. Hyaline*

      And if this hasn’t been the case, a good goal as chair might be to institute a culture of limited tenure in officer roles. It avoids stagnation and ironically getting people more involved (without overburdening them) can help increase investment and morale. She can start by replacing John :)

    3. Sloanicota*

      Ideally there’s a role for Robert, it’s just not Secretary. Is there a role that isn’t time-sensitive and doesn’t use more technology than he’s comfortable with? It can be helpful to ask Robert to transition to the buildings & grounds committee rather than just fire him as secretary. And a loyal person who shows up often is valuable to the tiny non-staffed all-volunteer groups I’m in – at bare minimum we often need a warm body to ensure we reach a quorum.

  18. Rebekah*

    I have several small children right now and my brain is set to heavily filter noise (arguably too much, sometimes I don’t register a kid talking right to me). However I can still hear certain noises from clear across the house. Front door opening? Brain registers from the far end of the basement. Chair being dragged across the kitchen floor? Could hear from the neighbours.

    In short, those brain filters actually work better than you’d expect for noises that signal “danger” or are unexpected.

    1. Keep it down!*

      I have several small children right now and my brain is set to heavily filter noise (arguably too much, sometimes I don’t register a kid talking right to me).

      This is precisely why I know I’m going to have a bad time when parents and their children sit near me at a coffee place, a restaurant, or on an airplane. The amount of noise children can make without their parents so much as looking up from their phones is totally astonishing to me, though I can of course see why parents choose to tune so much of it out.

      1. Texas Teacher*

        In my experience, trying to lessen the noises children make doesn’t lessen it. The parent just adds their repeated shushing and nagging to the mix.
        Very frustrating when my kids were younger. I tried to focus on the most egregious things. One flight, my toddler’s feet were long enough to kick the seat in front of him, so I spent the three hours pretty much holding his legs. Good times.

      2. Jackalope*

        It’s probably not the parents choosing to tune it out so much as it’s them being very used to it. At some point in time it just kind of…. happens.

        1. Falling Diphthong*

          It’s like city and country folk swapping places, and both complaining about the constant noise in the new location. We learn to edit out the stuff that isn’t unusual. (For example, close each eye and note where your nose is. Open both, and your brain edits that nose right out.)

          1. Jennifer Strange*

            Reminds me of My Cousin Vinny where he can’t sleep next to train tracks or with the sound of animals in the woods, but sleeps like a baby in a jail where there’s a riot going on around him.

    3. Observer*

      In short, those brain filters actually work better than you’d expect for noises that signal “danger” or are unexpected.

      Yup. Crying baby? Absolute radar even from a fairly deep sleep. Crashing thunder? Nope.

  19. Nodramalama*

    LW4 for what it’s worth, I don’t usually wear headphones at work, and am pretty easily distracted but sometimes I’ll still be focussed and someone will scare me when they approach me. It happens. It’s not a big deal. It’s very unlikely they won’t hear a fire alarm

  20. Rebecca*

    When I worked in person, I worked with small children for several years. The brain is actually very good at processing noise in the background. I listened to children yelling and screaming in the playground and didn’t pay attention to most of it, but when a scream came that was the result of an actual injury you can bet my feet were running before I was even aware that the scream was different. When I was in a classroom, I’d notice the sound of the classroom door opening immediately, but blocked out the chatter of 25 children so I could have a conversation with one of them. Now I work from home, and I regularly forget my husband actually lives in the same apartment as me, he startles me at least once a day walking into the office (that we share!) while I’m focused on my work, but if the high pitched oven timer goes off, I hear it immediately.

    If we were actively paying attention to every bit of auditory input, we’d go insane. It’s why fire alarms and sirens have unusual and unpleasant sounds and why we use a different tone of voice to convey urgency – our brain recognizes which sounds not to leave in the background.

    1. Elizabeth West*

      This was me living in tornado country. I keep a fan running at night — I can’t sleep if outside noise isn’t masked, or if it’s too quiet. But I would always be like 0_0 the second a siren started to wail even if I could barely hear it.

    1. Patrick Star*

      On the contrary, employers seem to come off remarkably well despite negotiating with and treating their employees with contempt!

      1. A*

        In this specific letter, can you point to an example of the boss treating the LW with contempt?

          1. A*

            Sorry, my mistake! I thought we were discussing the second letter. I’ll be clearer in the future.

    2. LW2*

      Fair enough, I was furious during the review. And I agree that I could have handled that better.

      1. Andromeda Carr*

        FWIW, this example of how your boss treats you made me think the boss may not be so reasonable after all: “He blamed me for not setting deadlines for co-workers on certain projects, and when I reminded him that it was no longer my responsibility, he said “I don’t care that its no longer your job, you need to be on top of it”. That line really struck me hard.”

        1. Parenthesis Guy*

          Maybe. I can’t set deadlines for my co-workers, but my boss wouldn’t be impressed if I just let a project fail without telling him because my co-workers didn’t do things. He would want me to inform him that things are behind schedule. Once my boss understood the situation, it would be on his shoulders to fix not mine. But that doesn’t mean I could just ignore what was happening.

          1. Morgan*

            I mean, if it’s not LW’s job or responsibility, then they’re not responsible for it, i.e. they can’t be expected to give a response. If the boss told LW that they should drop certain tasks, but still wanted LW to track those tasks and report their status, that’s something that should have been communicated very clearly up front because it’s certainly not the obvious conclusion to reach. If I tell my boss “I have more on my plate than I can manage, I need to cut one of A, B, or C” and they tell me “okay, Alphonse will pick up B instead”, I’m going to reasonably assume that Alphonse is going to be the one telling my boss how B is going and my boss is going to be telling Alphonse what the deadline is for B.

            “You are still responsible for B, but you can delegate it to Alphonse, but you’re the one who has to chase it up with him and follow up with me about its status” is a valid arrangement, but not at all what it sounds like LW was told (or at least, what they understood).

  22. EllenD*

    Absolutely. It is hard work finding new people and almost needs to be started up to twelve months ahead.

  23. Falling Diphthong*

    #3, this is a good example of how a basic humans-in-groups problem is how to tell whether other people are shirking, if we’re no longer in a little band of hunter gatherers. (One of the early cities solved this with tons of little statues with freakishly huge eyes that watch everyone, and in general it’s associated in history with the appearance of some sort of all-seeing god akin to the Elf on the Shelf.)

    There’s a fundamental breakdown of trust in your office. I think less “How can you be working if I can’t see you?” and more “If I have to suffer this indignity, I’d better be able to see that every other worker is suffering in the exact same way, so it’s fair.”

    1. iglwif*

      I think less “How can you be working if I can’t see you?” and more “If I have to suffer this indignity, I’d better be able to see that every other worker is suffering in the exact same way, so it’s fair.”

      Oooooooh I think you are onto something here.

      Like the same dynamic as “well I had to pay off my student loans in full at extortionate interest, so why should Kids These Days get a better deal?” and “generations of medical residents have suffered through 24-hour shifts, that’s just how it is, we can’t possibly change it”.

      1. AnonORama*

        My entire former company returned to office in May 2020 because the retail arm (considered essential) complained about the office team working from home. They understood the jobs were different, they just didn’t like being ordered to go into work when others didn’t have to. Upper management figured the retail team would quit or unionize, so they ordered the office team to come in. The fact that it massively increased covid risk to have twice as many people there was not a concern, and I’m still surprised we only had minor outbreaks.

  24. Morning Reader*

    Weighing in for people with hearing loss:

    Fire alarms and other emergency signals (sirens, whistles) are loud and different enough that most people with hearing loss will respond to them. They penetrate the focus. Fire and smoke alarms in commercial buildings should also have bright flashing lights, so even the profoundly deaf can notice them. (The ADA became law 35 years ago, I recall there were some grace periods or modifications only required when doing a renovation, but still, 35 years. Your workplace should have these now.)

    For the hard of hearing secretary, there are a few apps that will do, essentially, captioning for meetings. They will also record. Zoom has this capability as well so you could zoom your meetings even if everyone is present. Your best bet is of course replacing this tech averse board member, but in the meantime, having a transcript of your meetings could be a timesaver. Rather than stop to make sure he heard and is writing down minutes, tell him to refer to the transcript. (This can open up other problems, such as making sure the transcript is deleted later, getting agreement from everyone to be recorded, etc.) But, hearing loss should not be an impediment for minute taking. It might be an impediment for board participation at all, though; if he’s not using hearing aids or other adaptive technology, why is he even at the meeting? If he’s missing half of what is discussed, he’s not an effective board member. I will suggest that you suggest some adaptations like this. (I’m not familiar with Onenote, does it do this already?)

    1. Transcripts*

      Most of the automatic note takers are wildly inaccurate, especially if there are acronyns/jargon/technical terms involved. So if you’re relying on them, be aware they’re often very different from the actual content of the meeting.

    2. CompetingNeeds*

      And here we have competing disability needs because I’m legally blind and cannot function if I get hit by a bright flashing light. Seriously, I will literally be both screaming in pain and completely unable to move for many minutes afterward. It will take me 2-3 days to go back to my normal level of function. I have filed complaints about some of the alarm lights because they prevent me from evacuating and make it unsafe for me to be in the space and force me to take several sick days (which would be okay for a legitimate evacuation assuming I could actually evacuate but is not okay for a drill).

  25. Anon person*

    LW1 – give this poor older lonely man another position, even if it’s not really needed. Say that you must start using new technology to schedule meetings and take notes, so someone else will be taking over secretary responsibilities. Instead, you really think his redirection to the org would make him an awesome fit for social chair (or something) His job is to come early to meetings, greet everyone, or whatever else makes sense in your org. He can communicate any feedback that people have about the meetings to you (or something). Even if he doesn’t hear well or he forgets, it won’t really matter. Give him an easy task but one he can be proud to do. Getting old SUCKS and it would be a kindness that wouldn’t hurt anyone. A volunteer gig is different from a place of employment

    1. Lauren*

      At my org (where I am an employee) we sometimes create Emeritus board positions for certain volunteers who we want to keep close/recognize their past contributions etc. Maybe you could invite John to become the first secretary emeritus whereby he still can come to all the meetings but is relived of the day-to-day responsibilities.

      1. Enai*

        I like this idea. It lets the board get on with things while still recognizing Johns contributions.

      2. MsM*

        I’m guessing OP doesn’t have enough people for this, but advisory boards are also a really great place to stick board members who have aged out or don’t have the time to devote to a full commitment but bring something valuable to the organization (even if it’s just name recognition).

      4. Lab Boss*

        If John has been secretary for so long, that Emeritus position might not just be a gesture of kindness and recognition, either. He may be struggling with technology and his hearing but I’d wager he’s got some serious institutional knowledge from his lengthy tenure, and that’s knowledge it’s great to have on tap when it’s time to ask “does anyone remember how we did X when we last did this a decade ago?”

        1. WestsideStory*

          Yes my current org has Emeriti (see below). Institutional knowledge is valuable, and rotating out of a functional role into a more consultive role allows that knowledge to be there when the board needs it.

  26. Hiring Mgr*

    On #3, does the clerical staff not understand the job of the field workers, or is it that they think the field workers are taking advantage and actually working from home?

    I guess it doesn’t matter but the whole thing is weird

    1. Lacey*

      It really is strange. Long before WFH was common I had some coworkers whose jobs took them away from their desks 50-75% of the time.

      There wouldn’t have been a point in trying to guess if they were really working all that time.
      And as someone with no authority over them it wouldn’t have been my place to worry about it.

    2. Delta Delta*

      Clerical staff: It’s not faaaaaaair Lucinda gets to slack off and not be here and I’m stuck here all daaaaaaay.

      Boss: Lucinda’s job is doing swamp research. She has to go to the swamp to do the research.

      Clerical staff: But she’s not here so she’s not working. It’s not faaaaaaaair that I have to be here. she isn’t actually doing anythiiiiiiiiing.

      Boss: We don’t have a swamp in the building. She has to go to the swamp to research swamp stuff.

      Clerical staff: it’s not faaaaaaaaair.

  27. Hyaline*

    LW 1, no, don’t put your elderly secretary on a PIP! Honestly, I’d skip most of the steps Alison suggested and just TALK to the guy, with your decision already made (and a replacement lined up). Tell him that you value his perspective and experience, and want him to continue as a member of the Board (if he has some particularly valuable institutional knowledge, or community connections, or just is an insightful fellow, emphasize that you’d like, or create an unofficial role for him), but that part of your plans as Chair involve getting some new people into leadership (you can share, and it’s true, that letting people stay in the same volunteer positions too long can lead to problems and atrophy in terms of the org being able to adapt and grow). Firmly but kindly tell him that beginning the next meeting, Sarah or Steve or whoever is going to be the new secretary. Give him time to process this change and hope he continues as a Board member, but if he doesn’t…that’s his pride speaking, not you.

    I have no idea why you want to eliminate the position; it sounds like you just want to handle it yourself? DO NOT take that on! You have enough going as chair. I think it would be a mistake to eliminate the position and even if you rotate tasks like taking minutes, it’s helpful to have the responsibility travel with one person, and it’s a fairly low-stakes way to get someone involved in more senior leadership in the org. Depending on your org’s bylaws, you may actually be required to have one.

    1. Max*

      Also, the org bylaws may well not allow somebody to be both secretary and chair, and may well require a secretary to always exist. At least that’s my experience with this sort of thing.

      1. iglwif*

        Yes, the by-laws of the organization whose board I’ve been on for the past several years requires certain specific positions to exist and be filled by different people. The Secretary, a member of the Executive Committee, is one of those. (There are also “member at large” positions that are more flexible in number by the by-laws.)

        That’s in addition to the fact that volunteering to be both Chair/President and Secretary is a bananapants proposal and someone who did that would burn out very fast.

  28. Artsmgr*

    LW1 – As a nonprofit professional and having been a board member on different boards for awhile, I feel for you. It’s a tough spot to be in. Before you eliminate the Secretary position entirely make sure it’s not an officer position required by your bylaws. Then, a few ideas for your longtime board member: move them to “emeritus” or “honorary” status; have them become the historian/archivist; or consider making them an at-large without a title. While it’s less of a concern for the Secretary role, you may want to consider rotating officer positions on a regular basis regardless of this situation as a potential fraud deterrent (like Treasurer) and also to have a clear pipeline for new volunteers who demonstrate interest and aptitude in the future. Good luck!

  29. Atalanta*

    Add me to the ADHD hyperfocus with music club! I frequently listen to music using over the hear headphones (as opposed to Airpods) so people can tell I may be checked out to things happening around me which has led to some unintentional hilarity when paired with my high startle reflex. My team mates surrounding me are all noisy fidgeters and I’ll listen to the same song for hours while concentrating so I figure this evens out in the end, we aren’t all annoying each other with our WFH habits.

  30. Lacey*

    I’m cracking up about LW4 – this is such a funny thing to be concerned about.

    People can’t focus on multiple things at once. The work they’re paid to do is what they need to focus on, not other people doing their own work or conversations where their name may or may not pop up.

    Sure, it can lead to funny occurances, like the time I left the office for three hours to cover an event and 10 minutes after I got back my boss exclaimed in alarm that I had missed the event I was supposed to cover – but no one is really hurt by them.

    1. Lauren*

      Maybe I am totally off base, but LW4- do you wish the work styles of your colleagues were different regardless of safety concerns? As Alison said, how they’re choosing to work is OK, especially as your boss (their boss too?) is also working that way! If you want to ensure your boss knows that you’re on top of getting X done upstairs just shoot them a email or Teams/Slack message saying “I’m headed upstairs to take care of X, be back in 10.” As for your maybe annoyance with other people’s tunnel vision, the more you can shrug it off rather than wish it were different the easier your days will be for you.

    2. Eldritch Office Worker*

      Hahaha that’s so relatable. It boils down to people experience common environments in different ways, which can be a hard thing to wrap your head around but it typically harmless.

  31. HonorBox*

    OP1 – Don’t eliminate the Secretary position. As @Artsmgr points out above, it may be in your bylaws. And even if it isn’t, you still want to have someone who knows it is their job to take minutes of your meeting. I’ve been in meetings where there isn’t a dedicated Secretary or note-taker, and everyone is then going off of their own notes and information, and there’s plenty of opportunity for confusion afterward. Having one set of minutes ensures that everyone is on the same page.

    I think you just need to have a difficult conversation with this volunteer. Clearly there are problems occurring right now. You’re spending an inordinate amount of time ensuring he is hearing things correctly and documenting. He’s not scheduling meetings quickly enough. He’s not using a system that allows for everyone to have direct and immediate access to the meeting notes. While it is not going to be a fun conversation, he’s been around long enough and obviously feels like the organization is important. So telling him that you need to use the technology and speed up the process so you can accomplish more as an organization should ultimately resonate with him. Then give him the choice… he can jump in on using the technology or he can step away from the secretary role. Keep him on the board. Give him opportunity to be involved, even in a minor role. But you’re going to need to find someone who can perform the Secretary role and not create the delays you’ve been facing.

  32. Delta Delta*

    #3 – This seems like a larger problem of dysfunction within the department. No, admin staff shouldn’t be looking up people’s personnel information to find out if they’re “really working.” But is there perhaps a larger problem here around scheduling/access to employees/knowing where people are? It’s completely unreasonable to expect that someone whose job involves site visits or field research doesn’t leave the office to do their jobs. It’s also not reasonable for people to be MIA. I don’t know if the latter is happening, but if it is, that’s also a problem.

    1. higheredadmin*

      Agreed. I used to work in higher education fundraising, and this 100% sounds like the situation. You have one group of exempt fundraising staff who earn significantly higher salaries who also have multiple places that they can be at any one time (office, office in academic unit, meeting a donor, meeting somewhere on campus etc), and then much lower paid administrative staff (often hourly) who were in the office 9-5. There was always a low-level grumble on this (what are the gift officers *actually doing* was a common question I would get as a admin staff manager. My answer was – not your problem!) When wfh hit, the admin staff got a taste of a more flexible schedule, but then got drug back in while the fundraisers continue being all the places they could be. (I’m also in a large city, so a lot of people realized that they had hour-plus commutes.) The post-COVID return to the office has really bust this divide wide open. Because if you can be anywhere, you can also be at home napping on your couch.

  33. MsM*

    LW1, you’ve already gotten a lot of good advice, but I want to flag that it would be really good if part of your tenure as chair involves professionalizing the board and getting the organization…well, on board with that. Of course no one wants to alienate or turn away eager volunteers, but that doesn’t mean you need to give them the exact position they want or work around them not being able to fulfill key aspects of their obligations because it would be really nice for them to feel included.

    Take a good hard look at the bylaws and role descriptions and orientation materials. If you don’t have those, or they’re due for a refresh, maybe that’s a good opening to sit down with John and have the conversation about what the role requires. But that process shouldn’t just stop with John.

  34. Parenthesis Guy*

    LW #2: It is unreasonable to expect a raise when on a PIP and when receiving a score of “below expectations”. What you could do is ask for a raise as befitting your role if you do end up passing the PIP.

    I think the question you need to ask yourself is if you deserve to be on the PIP or whether your company is taking advantage of you. In the comments you’ve mentioned that your quantative KPIs are above average. You’ve mentioned that you’re working a huge amount of hours per week and are bringing in significant money (15-20% of revenue). You’ve mentioned that the team realized that you add a lot of value. It seems bizarre that they’re putting you on a PIP when you’ve done so much simply due to a stylistic issue. Ok, your communication is lacking, but your department is a huge success. I don’t know if that’s PIP-worthy.

    If your assessment of your performance is accurate, and a lot of the success is due to your efforts, then it could be that they simply don’t want to pay you what you’re worth. They may try to keep you onboard at your current level of pay using sticks and carrots (more sticks), but they be trying to find ways to keep some of the benefits for themselves.

  35. Keymaster of Gozer (she/her)*

    OP2: You sound burnt out. I honestly don’t think this job is right for you at all anymore.

    OP4: Being concerned that people are on headphones is a bit weird mate. I’ve taken a look round our office and I’d be challenged to find more than 10 people who weren’t wearing a headphone or two. You can perfectly hear emergency sirens.
    Although, I work in IT and wee’re notorious for being glued to computers because it’s our job.

  36. Asking For a Friend*

    #3 made me think of a situation in my job – we’re mostly remote, and everyone has very flexible working hours even though we’re all in the same time zone. If I don’t get a response from someone for a while, I (the clerical staff) will sometimes check the absence management portal to see if they’re on PTO so I know whether I need to find another solution to my question.

    If we had a system that tracked client meetings vs WFH, I could see myself checking that too, for the same reason—if I see Wakeen is working from home, I’d assume I can call him for something urgent; if he’s in client meetings, I’d know to wait.

    I’m not sure how this would be a violation of privacy (unless the system exposed sensitive details like medical appointments). Gossip is of course a different issue, but I feel transparency matters too.

    1. Eldritch Office Worker*

      This is common where I work too but I think structure and intent has something to do with it. It doesn’t sound like this staff has a logistical need to know why people are out, they’re just taking attendance and keeping score. The same way it might be appropriate for me to know if my coworker is sick and for how long because I need to work around their absence, the same inquiry for someone I don’t work with and don’t need to keep track of could be overreaching, especially if I’m logging it or using it to create discord.

      Context is important.

    2. JB (not in Houston)*

      What you’re talking about doesn’t at all sound like what’s going on with the OP, though.

    3. I Have RBF*

      I work fully remotely. We have a shared calendar where we log our PTO and travel out of office. My boss will get sent for a week to handle a data center issue – he puts it in the calendar and mentions it in our meetings. Our team of 5 people lives in 4 different states.

      People maintain their status – Available, In A Meeting, Away, and Offline – in Zoom.

    4. iglwif*

      I also work for a fully distributed company with flex hours and staff in many different time zones. Everyone’s time zone and working hours are in their Teams profile, people put their OOO time (vacation and otherwise) in their calendars, and anyone can see your free/busy/OOO/working elsewhere calendar data if they need to — say, to schedule a meeting or decide whether it makes more sense to send you a Teams chat (for an immediate reply), send you an email (to be answered when you’re back), or ask someone else.

      We do not have access to other people’s detailed calendar data, except where someone specifically grants that access to someone else, nor do we have access to other people’s details in the payroll + time off request system (which is what “absence management portal” sounds like to me). Random coworkers do not need to know when I’m at the dentist and when I’m at a funeral.

  37. Bee*

    LW4: I use headphones at work to help me tune out the environment a bit (I work in an open floorplan office), and when I get hyperfocused on something, someone coming up behind me to talk to me at my desk will absolutely startle the heck out of me. However, I’ve never missed a fire alarm or tornado warning, and I put up a tiny rear-view mirror on my monitor to help me see if someone is coming up to my desk to talk to me so I don’t yelp in surprise at the sudden appearance of my boss. (It happened once – we were thankfully both able to laugh about it!

  38. Emily (not a bot)*

    LW2: You are being taken advantage of. The PIP may have been specifically to avoid giving you a raise. You have made clear you will put up with far more than most people will, and that’s not putting in a position of negotiating strength. This is not an ok situation.

  39. Dek*

    “Yeah, you’re not going to get a raise while you’re on a PIP, at least not more than a cost-of-living increase at most…. very few employers are going to increase your salary in the middle of that (again, excluding COLAs).”

    In my experience, you don’t even get that. Our COLA depend on having a “successful” rating on your annual review. So if you don’t have that…you make even less than the -2% raise everyone else gets.

  40. K*

    Re #3 my office is dealing with this too except it’s coming from upper management. People who do field work are expected to start their day in the office (so they can visually see we aren’t laying in bed eating bonbons or whatever they think we do when we work from home) and they’ve just started a new protocol where our immediate supervisors have to make random calls to our work partners to make sure we actually were where we said we were.

    1. K*

      We have shared calendars and an electronic in and out board so there’s already a fair bit of transparency IMO

  41. Cat Lady in the Mountains*

    LW2: It may be helpful to approach this from a standpoint of different types of pay adjustments:
    – COLA increases – if your company does these at all, you may be eligible even if you’re on a PIP
    – Equity increases – if your company has a process for pay equity assessments, and determines that you’re underpaid from an internal equity lens, they should fix that regardless of your PIP status. Given how you’ve described your company it sounds like they may not have such policies in place. This is likely to be driven by HR or another central decision-maker for the organization, rather than your manager.
    – Job changes – if your responsibilities have changed enough to merit a new or significantly revised job description, that may result in a new salary, although not always. However, getting this while on a PIP is likely to be a hard sell, since being on a PIP means your continued tenure in the role is in jeopardy.
    – Merit increases – Very unlikely when you’re on a PIP.

    Your best course of action if you’re looking at one of the latter two buckets is likely to pass the PIP, give it at least six months for sustained performance, and advocate for it at that point.

    One other thing to consider – your manager may need to expend some capital to get you a raise or JD change. If your manager is considering letting you go for performance reasons/your communication issues are serious enough to be on a PIP, it’s a REALLY hard sell to convince them to use that capital (and the amount of capital is higher than if you’re knocking it out of the park). That’s not necessarily fair – I’m a big believer in formal compensation policies that have checks and balances against individual managers – but there is a certain amount of manager discretion involved in even the most perfectly-standardized compensation strategy. At the moment it sounds like you have a fairly tense relationship with your manager, which is likely to make it harder to get what you want.

  42. Alton Brown's Evil Twin*

    If someone were wearing headphones, and was highly focused, and didn’t hear the fire alarm going off, then that’s a clear exception to the “no uninvited physical contact” rule.

    (Also, most commercial fire alarm systems now also include bright strobing lights)

  44. DNDL*

    Re: LW2

    I have having flashbacks to the person I put on a PIP. She thought it was for poor communication, and said almost word for word the same thing as LW2. Talking about being task-driven, gets her work done independently, doesn’t need to keep me updated until the task is completed….except, that was only a piece of it. The bigger piece was that she would fundamentally misunderstand the assignment, never seek clarification, give me no indication she had questions, and then turn in shoddy work that couldn’t be accepted, period. Things got so bad that I had to take tasks away from her so that she could learn a job she had held for five years task by task. As she grew proficient in a task, I’d add others back to her plate and she, too, would claim that she had taken on an extraordinary amount of additional work and demand higher compensation. And yes, she would absolutely argue with me for 10 or more minutes, as though ignoring my feedback would get her anywhere.

    I doubt that LW2 is my person based on other details shared, but the strong parallels between LW2 and my situation are staggering. I would encourage LW2 to reread her job description and duties list, and really reflect on if she is doing those tasks and, if so, is she doing them well. It could be that all that extra work is part of their job, but they got it late because of performance issues.

    1. Eldritch Office Worker*

      I also hear some trigger phrases that remind me of employees I’ve had on unsuccessful PIPs in the past (and I don’t use PIPs as a precursor to firing, many of the ones I’ve done have been successful. But these issues tend to stick). That doesn’t mean they’re the same or that LW2 doesn’t have valid points, but communications issues are usually about a lot more than mismatched styles.

    2. Dust Bunny*

      I would add: Maybe the expanded her responsibilities a lot, but maybe those are a natural outgrowth of the original position and just part of learning to do the job.

      I started my current job with no experience in the discipline and, obviously, couldn’t do the whole job right away. I currently do a lot more things but it’s mostly because a) I know more about what I’m doing and can do more without being closely supervised and b) technology has advanced and we do things now that didn’t really exist when I started.

      (We also get raises, though, but I’m not on a PIP.)

    3. Boof*

      This is so interesting. Yeah someone is really out of line in LW2’s situation and it’s hard to tell who, though as LW2 claims their peers seem to think they’re fine, they’ve created 15-20% of the company’s revenue, and all their actual output metrics are great, I’m thinking their boss is the problem unless LW2 has a severely skewed sense of their output/metrics.
      Did anything eventually get through to your employee or did they just permanently think they were underpaid because they slowly relearned their job over (years??)

      1. DNDL*

        It’s just so interesting to me, because the same could be said about my employee. They would claim all day long that everyone loved them, that they had never had a problem with a manager before, that they were responsible for the best customer interactions….but none of it was realistic. They had gone through almost an identical PIP with a previous manager that resulted in a demotion. When they were ultimately fired for accessing sensitive data and breaking confidentiality, their coworkers came out of the woodwork saying things like they could breath easier now that she wasn’t around. They even had numerous customer complaints that I would forward to them, only for them to claim it never happened. My employee situation grew so toxic that I ultimately left for another job, outside of her chain of command, because I was worried about workplace violence. And, like I said, she was fired for accessing sensitive data without a valid business reason after I left. I work for a public org, where it is almost impossible to fire people. In my case, PIPs are always coaching/teaching tools that, at worst, result in demotion to a job lower in the hierarchy, but you get to keep your pay rate.

        The trigger phrases LW2 used that made me immediately suspect were: putting communication issues in quotes, talking about a mismatch in communication styles as the issue (effectively removing blame from oneself and putting it onto the boss), use the term task-focused, talking about forgetting to update stakeholders (which is in direct conflict with previously removing blame from oneself), talking about being hyper-focused on results (implying any communication or style difference don’t matter as long as the results are good), claiming responsibilities had increased drastically (potentially overstating one’s responsibilities, which is incongruous with how a manager would assign tasks when an employee is on a PIP), talking about how certain tasks should automatically be someone else’s work (no acknowledgement of workplace norms, just commentary on how LW thinks things should be), and then of course the arguing with the boss for 10 minutes….it’s one thing to push back, its another thing to argue, its still another thing to argue for 10 minutes, which tells me LW does not take feedback well.

        This could be a complete misread on the situation, of course. But these are the reasons I became skeptical reading LW2.

        1. Boof*

          Wow, and you could not actually just… fire this employee?
          If someone is that divorced from reality there’s no way an internet commenting site would suss it out if all we had was their side of the story; but perhaps for you the advice for your employee to go job searching would still have been helpful XD
          Hopefully the LW2 knows if they have been on PIPs / in complained about multiple other times from other people than just their boss!

      2. DNDL*

        I swear I responded to you, but the comment went missing…so I apologize if you get this twice.

        Some of the trigger phrases LW2 used that made me skeptical include:

        *Putting communication issues in quotes, implying that no further information was given about quality of work. Could be true, but also PIPs are rarely given based on communication alone. Usually there are larger issues with work quality that could have been avoided if communication was better.

        *Saying that they are the kind of person who, when you assign them work, will do the work and then update you. To me, this is indicative of caring only about the final product, and not about the process. There could be very good reasons why manager needs employee to follow a certain process or give updates at certain milestones, but OP would be dismissing that by only caring about the final product.

        *Blaming different communication styles for all issues related to one’s work. This is a way to transfer blame from oneself to one’s boss, and shows a lack of accountability on OP’s part. If only their boss was better, there wouldn’t be any issue…

        *Talking about forgetting to communicate updates, which is in direct contradiction to the shifting blame we see in the previous point about blaming different communication styles.

        *Calling the PIP unreasonable because they were producing results. Again, showing disregard for a lack of office norms surrounding the process itself, which is a part of the job.

        *Talking about roles and responsibilities increasing drastically, despite the claim that much more staff have been hired. Normally, a boss would not assign more work to someone on a PIP. It makes me wonder if these are natural growth area’s for OP’s role, or if they have always been a part of OP’s role, but boss had to slow walk adding them because of other performance concerns that led to PIP.

        *Talking about taking on roles that are traditionally another person’s job, without any discussion about if this office follows tradition. My own industry has changed a lot in the last ten years, including division of labor. This makes me wonder if OP’s office just does things differently than OP wants them to be done.

        *Disregarding the PIP in some areas of work, just because that area is not directly about communication. As I stated previously, many communication PIPs are about how communication impacts job performance across all areas of one’s work. To say that the PIP doesn’t matter with responsibility X because responsibility X isn’t explicitly “communication” seems like LW2 doesn’t fully understand the point of a PIP.

        *Talking about fairness as the reason something should be done, again with no discussion of workplace norms.

        *Arguing for 10 minutes. It is one thing to push back. It is another thing to argue. It is still yet another thing to argue for 10 minutes. Talk about communication problems.

        In the case of my employee, she would argue with me at such great lengths that meeting with her became untenable. Her sense of fairness slowly warped into a sense of persecution. She began to make threatening comments, which led to me becoming concerned about workplace violence. I took a promotion out of her chain of command. She was on the verge of a second PIP when she was fired for accessing sensitive data without a business reason for doing so (and given the nature of the data, only led to reinforce my fear of workplace violence). I work for a public org, so a PIP is never the prelude to firing, and even on a PIP workers still get COLA, they just don’t get performance-based raises.

        Like I said, two completely different situations. But I’ve heard all of this before in a context that makes me think LW2 could stand to be a bit more introspective and open to feedback.

    4. Banana Pyjamas*

      “ The bigger piece was that she would fundamentally misunderstand the assignment, never seek clarification, give me no indication she had questions, and then turn in shoddy work that couldn’t be accepted, period.”

      I’d like to point out two things

      1) If someone fundamentally misunderstands what you want, they won’t ask for clarification because they think they understand. It’s not reasonable to expect them to ask for clarification when they think they understand…at least the first couple of times. Once it’s obviously a pattern there’s a responsibility on both parties to improve communication.

      2) Shoddy work is a separate issue from fundamental misunderstanding. You can do the wrong thing but do it well.

      1. Melvin*

        Yeah, DNDL shouldn’t automatically blame their employee, and should start being more introspective.

    5. Cat Tree*

      Same for me. I have an employee who somehow finds the longest, most difficult way to do anything. He had something past due and was scrambling to finish it the next day. He said he had just one piece left, which should have taken 20 minutes. Two hours later he finally sent it to me. And then I realized he must have done it the hard way, which he confirmed when I asked him. But we’ve had multiple conversations about him just asking for help or clarification. He just will not do it. He wasted so much time on this and it’s so frustrating.

    6. LW2*

      Hey DNDL,

      I thank you for your analysis, and your further comments below, and I actually see where you are coming from. If you look at it from a severe standpoint, and not knowing the situation, I really see where you are coming from. It sucks, and your comments are harsh, but I can see what kind of viewpoint you have, and it has made me reflect a lot.

      Let me at least try to justify myself.
      Communication issues in quotes, because it was number 1 and 2 of my PIP. Keep stakeholders updated and prevent escalation to management. Literally that’s all my PIP is.

      I wasn’t trying to shift blame to my boss about communication styles, and I acknowledge that as a hyper-independent person, this is one of my flaws. I actually said that during my interview, in that I am independent to run, which since I was hired to create a new department, is essentially what I was doing. Create new systems, processes and hire people. The role indicated a freedom to run outside the office, which would indicate a trust in my independence to get my work done (as long as I produce results).

      I know it sounds like I refuse to bend on my independence, and refusing to increase communication, but without you knowing me as a person, you won’t know how much I’ve bent and sacrificed for this job.

      I recognise your comments about the workplace norms, and how failing to meet my PIP expectations, or indeed disregarding them and calling the whole thing unreasonable, are reasonable. I can say that I definitely found it unreasonable, BUT complied with the PIP. I didn’t fight the PIP, I accepted it and did my best to comply with the directives. But sure, there is room for improvement on this front.

      The other duties and responsibilities and the hiring of additional staff are 2 separate matters. The staff hired were all tech and software. We are not a tech or software firm. Meanwhile, my own department has had a hiring freeze at <50% of my recommended capacity when I came into the job. So hiring people doesn't lessen the workload I was dealt with. The additional responsibility I was given (more than half a year before the PIP), was not related to tech or software. I was given responsibilities loosely connected with my department, like my example in a comment above, I design and build teapots, but now need to do a shopkeep role to sell the said teapots. It is outside of industry norms, much less workplace norms, as it requires its own training and certifications. This additional role has to supervise the operations of other departments, including my own. It's like a trader also performing their own quantitative risk verification, it's just not done in the trading world. It definitely was not in my job description, but I took it on because I saw it as helping the company in the interim. But a year later, a whole new department is licensed by the government due to me holding the certification.

      Life isn't fair. Work isn't fair. Perhaps I shouldn't have used the word fair. Or "argue", because besides repeating my point of view, I did not raise my voice nor did the discussion become heated.

      However, I hear all your comments, and I thank you for your time to type them all out. I will reflect, and be better. At my next job maybe.

      1. Irish Teacher.*

        While I do get the impression overall that your workplace is dysfunctional and you were set up with unreasonable expectations, I just want to point out that repeating your point of view, even politely, for ten minutes in this case could concern a manager. Even just asking for a raise while on a PIP could make a manager feel that you didn’t truly grasp how serious this was, let alone continuing to discuss the issue after they said no.

        I don’t think most of us assumed you raised your voice or became aggressive. Our concerns are just that it sounds like you showed the manager that you continued to think that a raise was possible in this situation.

        This additional role has to supervise the operations of other departments, including my own. It’s like a trader also performing their own quantitative risk verification, it’s just not done in the trading world.
        This sounds bizarre on so many levels, both that it sounds like a conflict of interest and that it is bizarre you would be on a PIP and asked to supervise others and adds to my impression that the raise really isn’t the issue here.

  45. Velawciraptor*

    WRT LW4, the use of the phrase “situational awareness” makes me wonder if we’re seeing the end result of someone raised on in school active shooter drills entering the workplace. It’s not hard to imagine that someone who spent their formative years training on how to avoid being killed in the childhood equivalent to a job would carry that into the workplace. This may not be mere anxiety that the LW needs to “get over,” but a trauma response.

    LW–if this is concern is becoming overwhelming for you, you may want to reach out to your workplace’s EAP, if they have one. Having someone you can talk to about where this concern is coming from might help.

    1. Dust Bunny*

      This seems like a stretch. The preceding generation was raised on tornado (depending on your geographic location) drills, razors and arsenic in Hallowe’en candy, and laughable Cold War duck-and-cover exercises. But it kind of doesn’t matter–it’s a level of anxiety that’s a bit out of proportion to the problem and, yes, something they might want to address with an EAP if they can.

      1. Eldritch Office Worker*

        To add to this, I know active shooter drills have gotten more press coverage in recent years but we’ve been doing them since at least Columbine. People raised with these drills have been in the workplace quite a while.

    2. appo*

      I’ve had school shooting drills since elementary and I graduated high school in 2010 so this is farrrr from the first instance of people growing up with that as the norm.

      I do agree they need to speak to someone though because that’s not a normal thing to be worried about to the point where they write into an advice column.

      1. Banana Pyjamas*

        That surprises me. I’m the same age, but we only started having drills after Virginia Tech. I definitely didn’t grow up with them.

      2. Parakeet*

        I had intruder drills, a sort of predecessor, in elementary school in 1994. Though I know they weren’t common everywhere. But we definitely had fire and tornado drills, as well as bomb threats and carbon monoxide leaks.

        That said, I consider “situational awareness” a totally normal part of my vocabulary despite never hearing it in any of those that I can recall.

    3. Observer*

      the use of the phrase “situational awareness” makes me wonder if we’re seeing the end result of someone raised on in school active shooter drills entering the workplace.

      Maybe – but only in a very individual level, if so. As others noted, situational awareness is not just a matter of active shooter drills on schools, and these types of emergency drill are not new.

      This may not be mere anxiety that the LW needs to “get over,” but a trauma response.

      True. But step one is for the LW to recognize that their reaction to a very normal situation is not really reality based.

  46. Dust Bunny*

    #4: I went to a college that literally had a train track running through campus. Visiting and new students would complain about the trains running through at 3:30 in the morning, but the rest of us . . . didn’t hear them. You got used to it pretty quickly.

  47. Counterpoint*

    About #3: I happen to work in an academic department with a similar structure (although not the vibes, exactly), and I have a few thoughts. Firstly, people at my level were all blanketly forced back in the office regardless of our actual work. My actual work needs to be done on-site maybe two half-days a week; the rest was actually easier to do at home, with limited interruption. Doesn’t matter. Because so much of the work has migrated online, we do need front-facing staff, but a fraction of them that we used to, so people could easily alternate days, and the rest could WFH. Doesn’t matter. Zero flexibility

    My job isn’t forward-facing now, but when it was, it absolutely was a consant problem that I didn’t know who was working and when, or when they’d be back, or who was in the building, but this was not recognized by management. I had the choice between being perceived as a busybody in my workplace or offering terrible customer service. I would smile and be welcoming and explain how to make appointments, and people would walk off, never to be heard of again, sometimes telling me about multiple unanswered voicemails and emails to the people who didn’t have fixed schedules.

    Also, everyone is so upset that time is being scrutinized, when that’s just normal for hourly staff, like our clerical staff, who have to account for all their time and whereabouts. There are a lot of departments that are 100% rigid for clerical staff, and 100% “come and go as you please” for other employees. If staff have no flexibility, of course they’re going to resent people whose time has no particular oversight. That may not be happening in this workplace, but it’s not at all unusual.

    Maybe these people are busybodies. I don’t know. But a lot of these responses really seemed to have a kneejerk hostility that took me aback! A lot of our academic departments would absolutely fall apart without dedicated clerical staff, who get very few perks and little respect.

  48. Definitely not me*

    #2 – LW said, “…it is company policy that anyone on PIP will not get a raise. Fair enough, again not a good policy,…”. Not a good policy? It’s a perfectly normal and logical policy. Imagine if your coworker had performance problems and was on a PIP and you weren’t, but you found out you both received the same merit raise. It wouldn’t seem like a good policy to you in that circumstance, I’ll bet. The tone of this LW’s comments make me think that they are aware of the “why” but may suffer from impaired judgment of the self-centered variety. Alison noted that the real issue, and the question the LW should be asking, is whether their pay is commensurate with the position at all.

      1. Bast*

        In general, I agree that people should continue to receive their COLA even if they don’t receive a merit raise. Frankly, it usually isn’t very much and people shouldn’t take a loss for continuing their employment.

    2. Artemesia*

      This. A pip means you are likely to be terminated. Why would you give someone in that position a raise?

  49. WestsideStory*

    Re: the Board Member – I am also part of a nonprofit that has an all-volunteer Board of Directors. We have a position known as “Director Emeritus” that allows Directors to essentially stay on the board and participate in meetings, but they no longer hold officer positions.
    The OP should take steps to enforce digital means for scheduling and note taking. As President, they can do that. And then suggest (after conferring with other board members) to create an Emeriti category. In our org, the Emeriti are listed on official stationery and website, and we value the input their long organizational history provides when decisions need to be made.
    I would counsel against eliminating Secretary Position all together, as most nonprofits have a Charter or Bylaws that require the positions, or are a corporation and under state incorporation rules are required to have a Secretary position. Check Charter/Bylaws first. And work like heck to get a new volunteer to be Secretary. Our organization has two: one is a recording secretary – all he does is the minutes, and the other is a Corresponding Secretary, who handles the mail and mailings.

    Hope this helps!

    1. WestsideStory*

      I also note that in our org, the President schedules any adhoc meetings using online calendars (live and zoom as needed). The regular board meetings are set up at the beginning of the year (zoom only) for each month and everyone knows when they are. (members may join any board meeting; this is very recommended if you are trying to recruit new board).

  50. Observer*

    #1 – Problematic Board member

    It’s really a good thing that you are not jumping to “this guy is old so he can’t do these things.” And I really appreciate that you want to be fair and ethical even if the law doesn’t specifically require it.

    But, I think that your framing here is not only unhelpful to you, it’s a bit harmful in a more global sense. Framing the expectation of being able to perform that basic legitimate tasks of a position as “akin to discrimination” both downplays the severity of actual discrimination, and feeds into false narratives about what anti-discrimination looks like.

    So, if you cannot get this guy to change, you absolutely do have to take those tasks away from him.

    But before you do that, I would try some things that might help:

    See if there is a better choice for Board meetings notes, etc, than OneNote. (I’m not saying that there is something that is better for you or equally good and more comfortable for him. Just that you want to try to make sure that you’re not going to get anything significantly better if you make a change.)

    Offer him training. Specifically for OneNote or whatever tool you decide on, and on getting meetings set up.

    If possible and appropriate, help him upgrade the equipment he uses to make it easier for him to do whatever it is he needs to do.

    Help him with hearing aids. Those things are absolute game changers! Especially if you are doing Teams / Zoom meetings, and he’s using a cell phone. Because the bluetooth link between the a phone and the hearing aids can be like magic. (I’ve seen this with family members. Just not to be believed otherwise, in the best possible way.)

  51. cathy*

    Hahahahahaha I used to work in the middle of a 60 person cube farm- I can tune out just about anything.

  52. Melon Merengue*

    I understand that the situation in LW4 can become very frustrating. I have a coworker who watches his phone all day with his headphones on. He often doesn’t answer us when we try to talk to him. He completely misses things going on around him (example: multiple people mentioning that A and B will be out of the office all next week. Next week comes around, this guy goes “where are A and B?”) along with work-related updates and meetings he’s supposed to be in. An egregious example, sure, but I think there’s a difference between tuning out nonsense noise so you can work, and being completely disconnected from your surroundings.

  53. Emily Byrd Starr*

    4. Sometimes headphones are necessary for people with ADHD, as we can’t tune out unnecessary noise on our own.

  54. Elizabeth West*

    #4 could be my office. It does worry me a little. We did have a fire alarm last week. The alarm here is a very loud beeping sound and then an announcement, which alerts you that there may be another announcement telling you to leave your floor. Our facility office lead went around telling everyone we had to evacuate. We all started toward the stairs, but then the all clear sounded, so we didn’t have to go outside.

    It made me wonder what would happen if we really did have a big fire. Large tornadoes don’t happen here, but fire in a skyscraper is a real concern. This company is big on safety so I’m sure it’s not a “keep working” culture thing, more of a “I’m really behind and I can’t be arsed to get up unless I smell smoke” thing. You can’t wait until you smell smoke because by then you’re in deep doo-doo!

  55. Sportsball*

    my boss told me that I would not be getting a raise, as it is company policy that anyone on PIP will not get a raise. Fair enough, again not a good policy, but sure, I get it

    Okay I’m confused. How is it NOT a good policy that if you’re on a PIP, you wouldn’t be entitled to a raise??? Am I missing something???

    1. tamarack etc.*

      I guess it depends on the raise. Missing out on a cost-of-living adjustment? That seems unnecessarily petty. Merit increases? Well, that is likely less compatible.

      1. Mad Scientist*

        I think it would have been more understandable if the LW had pushed for a raise on the basis of COLA, but their reasoning was performance / extra responsibilities, which doesn’t make sense when you’re on a PIP.

  56. Lizy*

    #4 just today, I was so engrossed in a spreadsheet that I basically gave my kids permission to snack-galore outside.

    At lunchtime.

    When their dad had just said “let me know when you’re hungry and I’ll get you lunch”.

    While sitting on the couch.

    So yeah, it happens.

  57. kiki*

    Echoing Alison that It is really normal (potentially standard) for folks on pips to not be eligible for raises.

    I think the real questions for LW is whether or not they feel the pip was in good faith and/or if they’re willing to leave over likely not getting a pay increase in the next year

  58. Meg*

    I wouldn’t simply internally roll my eyes as the clerical staff wanting to know where everyone was. If it were me and they said something to me, I would say “That is none of your business,” and very visibly roll my eyes.

    1. Sparrow*

      I don’t think this seems like a good solution. Visible eyerolling is pretty blatantly unprofessional, and responding to unprofessional behavior with your own unprofessional behavior just takes away from any legitimate point you were making.

  59. tamarack etc.*

    Frankly on #1 the solution is sharing board positions. You need a secretary. Are there secretarial tasks he can do? Pair him up, and list the secretary position as occupied by two people.

    We had co-presidents, co-secretaries, co-treasurers in a small but active local org, and it’s reduced stress for everyone.

  60. Sparrow*

    LW#4, please ignore this if this doesn’t resonate with you, I just wanted to say something as someone who has struggled with things very similar to this before:

    It seems to me like this situation is causing you a disproportionate amount of stress—the jump from “my coworkers don’t hear me moving around the office” to “if there was an emergency my coworkers wouldn’t notice that they needed to evacuate” is a pretty large one, and it seems like it’s also been accompanied for you with a sense that this is *your* responsibility to solve in some way. It also seems like you are very, very aware of your surroundings to a degree that’s atypical of most people (e.g. that manager not noticing that you were moving things upstairs sounds perfectly normal to me, but it seems like it was shocking to you).

    Personally, I have long struggled with getting mired in the thought pattern of “if [mild, fairly normal thing] happens that means [big, horrible, catastrophic thing] might happen, and I’m the only one who’s seeing this pattern so I have a moral responsibility to stop it or it will be my fault”. I’ve also dealt with feeling like I need to be on high alert and hyperaware of my surroundings at all times. For me, both of those things ended up being a result of trauma, and I’ve gotten a lot of relief from therapy. Now, I do know that it’s very possible I’m wildly misreading the tone of your letter and that this is just one specific worry you have about one specific situation. And if it is—well, again, please just ignore me! But if this is a thought pattern you do deal with frequently (and particularly if it causes you any kind of distress), I wanted to make sure you know that there are options out there that can help.

  61. Coverage Associate*

    On the elderly board secretary, I lived this as a charity’s vice president. The first time I was on the board, the CEO (president of the board) begged the rest of us to take over for the treasurer. He had been treasurer for more than 30 years as a practical matter, though corporate formalities were followed in terms of term limits and rotating positions. But, the flip side to having someone with a corporate title who doesn’t do the associated duties is someone can do all the work without the associated title.

    Eventually, the treasurer developed his final illness and was unable to do any of the work. I wasn’t on the board during this transition time, but when I rejoined the board, I learned it took many hours by an accountant to sort out the organization’s finances after the treasurer died, and some earmarks were forever lost, though no funds were unaccounted for. (There was $X in the general bank account that was planned for y purpose, but no record of the amount of $X.)

    The only way the organization got through it is of course his family’s finances were just as much of a mess, and the family agreed to pay the accountant to sort out the organization’s finances too. If the organization had investors or shareholders, it would have blown up in court.

    All this was at a time when most board communications were by email, but one board member didn’t have email and got things by post and phone call.

    Anyway, I like most of the advice here. Let him keep the title but rejigger the duties. Make him emeritus. Make him a member at large and make someone else treasurer. My organization had bylaws and privacy issues so that parts of meetings weren’t public, so a “social chair” or someone else without an official role would not fit, but informal organizations can mostly do whatever works. It sounds like OP’s might not even be a formal entity with bylaws, in which case the very worst that could happen is the funding organization ends the relationship, just like with my organization, the worst that could happen was state or federal authorities ending the tax exempt status. But that’s far from a federal prosecution by corporate regulators.

    1. Lenora Rose*

      Let me just say a social group I was in got audited after it was found a prior treasurer with bookkeeping experience was, perhaps, not as good at accounting as his talk suggested. He skipped MANY steps out of the idea they were “inefficiencies” that were actually needed to balance the books. The auditor’s final verdict was “We do not think any money is missing, and we think he was honest in his intentions, but we cannot actually prove either.” They could have shut us down over it, and might have if we had shown any signs at all of not *trying* to comply.

      (The most egregious example I can still recall: he paid someone’s claimed expenses out in cash. By leaving it in her mailbox and walking away. She made sure to send a message to say she got the money and could affirm it was the correct amount based on her own receipt copies, but she also noted in the audit that it would have been easy for her to say she never did.)

      So yes move duties ASAP, even if you know the person’s intentions are trustworthy.

  62. Brevity*

    Re: #3, I dealt with the same utter crap for eleven years in my last job, where staff in jobs whose *publicly available job descriptions* noted they must be in the office, complained, mightily, about me being away from the away from my office, when I frequently gave presentations around campus. My counter to this was as follows:

    If the clerical staff want to be in jobs where they can work from home or out in the field, nothing is stopping them from applying for such jobs.

    1. Waving not Drowning*

      I had similar comments when I worked part time (young children), and I worked half days. People would see me pack up and leave at 1pm, and would pass comment on how nice it is to leave, and they wished they could do that. I’d smile and say that they would only get part time wages though, and the penny would drop that yeah, maybe they didn’t want to do that after all, that there were downsides to that.

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