HR changed our performance reviews, do I have to announce my pregnancy at work, and more

by Alison Green on March 19, 2025

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

1. Should I say something about past allegations against a colleague?

I started a new position about six months ago, working with partner organizations across the state on community projects. On a recent call, I was surprised to see someone I’ll call Brad.

I knew Brad from my time teaching in a different city, where he was an activist in the reproductive health rights space. A few years ago, Brad had to leave that work and relocate after being accused of grooming minors. Two friends who work in that space told me about it at the time.

Now, Brad is working in a different community-focused role, and while it’s unrelated to reproductive health, they are still in a position of influence. My role is to provide technical assistance to help make a project feasible for the community Brad works with. Brad is actively facilitating conversations with our partners. It feels surreal to be in meetings with someone who had to leave their previous job due to allegations of being a sexual predator. However, everything I know is secondhand. I don’t know if Brad’s new role involves minors.

Do I have an obligation to say something to my boss? Should I bring this up, even if I don’t have firsthand knowledge? Or is this one of those situations where I just have to compartmentalize and move on?

I don’t think you have an obligation to say something to your boss since (a) Brad isn’t working for your organization and (b) you heard about the allegations secondhand. But I don’t think think you’d be wrong to have a quiet word with your boss about it either — framed as, “I only have secondhand knowledge of this and no idea if his current job involves minors, but given that minors were involved previously, I felt uncomfortable keeping it to myself. Is this something you think we need to do anything with?”

2. HR unilaterally changed our performance reviews

During our most recent performance review period, managers were told that they had to score 75% of employees as 3s on the overall 1 through 5 rating scale (5 being the best), with the remainder split between 1/2/4/5s. Apparently, despite this, there were too many high scores given so HR went in and — seemingly randomly since they most certainly don’t have insight into people’s day-to-day performance — knocked people down to 3s. They also asked managers to change their comments on the reviews of people who had this happen to reflect the new scores. I was among this lucky demoted group, and since confirming that neither my manager or grandboss had any input on this change, I’ve felt increasingly frustrated by this situation since it has the potential to affect future promotions as well as this year’s salary increase and bonus.

Ranting about it to a friend who works in a different industry I found that his company had done the same thing! Is this a new trend? Can you think of any way to push back against this? One further complication is that it’s unclear if HR realizes that everyone knows what they did (a lot of managers were not happy with the changes).

This is not a new trend, but it’s a ridiculous practice. There have always been companies that insist on a certain distribution of performance evaluation ratings, which has always caused problems for managers and teams whose performance didn’t line up with the required distribution of scores. But the idea of HR randomly changing ratings and then demanding managers rewrite their comments to justify those ratings is an extra level of ridiculous; typically they’d just tell managers that they need to change their ratings and leave it to them to decide how to do that.

I do wonder whether it’s true that HR chose the new ratings randomly or whether it was based on anything (including conversations with managers). Managers wouldn’t necessarily disclose the latter to you, and might even prefer to let HR take the blame.

As for pushing back — if you’ve had glowing feedback all year (especially if it’s documented, but even if it’s not) and/or if you’ve met/exceeded the goals that were laid out for you, you could certainly highlight that and ask how your rating squares with your performance and the feedback you’ve received from your manager. They might not care, but it’s a reasonable avenue to pursue.

3. Do I have to announce my pregnancy at work?

Would it be extremely weird if I just didn’t widely announce my pregnancy at work? My boss and grandboss know, and a few other individuals I chose to tell, but I just really don’t want to make a big email announcement. I have a lot of anxiety about this pregnancy and it feels like a jinx (even though logically I know it’s not). But people will be able to tell I’m pregnant soon. Will it be weird if I go around with an obviously pregnant belly without ever having said anything? Am I inviting gossip and/or nosy questions? Do I just need to get over myself and send the darn email?

In some office cultures it might be a little weird. That doesn’t mean you have to announce if you don’t want to, though, and it sounds like the people who need to know already do.

For what it’s worth, in the offices where it would be unusual, I do think you could be inviting more speculation and gossip by not sharing it with the people you work with the mostly closely. Again, you don’t have to if you don’t want to, obviously it’s no one’s business, etc. etc., but realistically on closer-knit teams, people may notice and wonder if they missed an announcement. In fact, an advantage of sending a brief announcement is that if you want to, you could explicitly say, “I’m nervous about the pregnancy and would prefer not to be asked about it at work, thanks for understanding.”

Related:
my employee didn’t tell anyone she was pregnant until she was about to give birth

4. Was this training’s explanation of discrimination correct?

I had to take a training on workplace discrimination and harassment that was mandatory for all employees at my company. As part of the training, we were asked a series of hypothetical questions and had to answer whether they constituted discrimination or harassment. One example involved a graphic design company that had a project to design a logo for a football team, and gave the project to a male employee over a female one because “men know more about football then women.” The explanation given was that it was discrimination because whether someone knows about football is not relevant to their job performance.

It seems to me that if you’re designing a logo for a football team, your knowledge of football is indeed relevant to your ability to do so. The issue here is that they assumed the male employee must know more about football than the female employee solely because of his gender. Therefore, it does indeed constitute discrimination but the provided explanation is wrong. Whose explanation is correct?

Yours. It’s illegal discrimination to assign a project based on gender (“men know more about football than women do”) but not to assign a project based on a specific person’s knowledge or interest (“Lucas knows the most about football”).

Whoever presented this training (a) doesn’t have a good grasp of the material and (b) probably got sidetracked by the gendered nature of the sport and hopefully would recognize that “I’m assigning X to Lucas because he knows a ton about frogs” would be fine.

5. Are non-competes still legal?

I had a recruiter reach out to me for a job at a direct competitor. I’m not looking to leave, but I also mentioned that I have a non-compete.

He told me those “aren’t a thing anymore” and it wouldn’t hold up in court anyway. But I’ve been tracking them and saw that the FTC was trying to pass a law in September to stop non-competes nationally but it was being challenged by two different Texas courts and now the law is in limbo.

The recruiter said I was wrong, so I wanted to ask you since I know you have reported on them in the past. Can you give us an update? Again, I’m not looking to leave, but if I was I wouldn’t be comfortable with “it wouldn’t hold up in court.”

Yes, non-competes are still legal at the federal level.

In April 2024, the Federal Trade Commission announced it would ban them for most U.S. workers, saying they stifle wages. But before that could take effect, two federal courts (one in Texas and one in Florida) issued injunctions blocking it, saying the agency lacked the authority to issue the rule. The FTC was originally expected to appeal those rulings, but that’s much less likely to happen under the new administration.

In addition, in 2023 the National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) general counsel issued a memo stating that non-competes violate the National Labor Relations Act in most circumstances. However, that general counsel has been removed by the new administration, and that directive is very likely to be rescinded.

So for the time being, non-competes remain legal federally.

However, four states ban non-competes completely (California, Minnesota, North Dakota, and Oklahoma), and 33 more plus Washington, D.C. restrict them (generally via banning them for hourly wage workers or workers below a salary threshold).

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{ 395 comments }

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  1. Peregrine*

    It doesn’t seem all that odd to me to not send an email to your coworkers announcing your pregnancy. I would have found it strange if that had happened at any of my workplaces (whuch have all been majority women). When people get pregnant they tend to tell bossed and friends and the news circulates from there.

    1. Trombonish*

      Seconding. I was about to comment that maybe it’s because my workplaces have been majority men, but in 13 years in engineering I’ve never seen an emailed pregnancy announcement beyond the “I’ll be back in X weeks” as they head out on leave.

      1. Miette*

        Thirding. And who knows, by not doing it this way, perhaps OP will change expectations at their workplace for co-workers about/around this.

        1. Anonym*

          Fourthing? I’m in finance, and where I am is pretty gender balanced. People typically tell the people they work with most closely during existing meetings (“Business, business, business, oh and I just wanted to share some news…”). No announcement via email until they’re about to go on leave, and even that’s far from universal, as the out of office message will typically specify who to contact, etc.

    2. Sans Serif*

      Yeah, I’ve never seen a general announcement. Many times, I won’t find out someone’s pregnant until they show. Heck, if they worked in a different office, I sometimes didn’t know till they went out on maternity leave. I just figured I wasn’t in the loop.

    3. GammaGirl1908*

      Co-sign. I don’t think I would ever even consider sending an email. Obviously different offices have different cultures, but I would tell a few key people, including the office gossiper. Then I would let it come up naturally in conversation — that is, there would come a point where I would stop **avoiding** it, and just mention it if it makes sense to mention it. Then I would let the word spread from there.

      1. Fanny Price*

        I used this strategy when I “announced” my MS diagnosis. It helps to ask the gossip to be sure to let people know that you are not up for extended discussions about it. There’s so excited to have been picked to spread the news that they seemed to listen better, too.

    4. Artemesia*

      Me too — when I was showing i.e. about 5 months, I let my boss and close co-workers know but no ‘announcement’ — Those directly affected heard it from me and everyone else noticed by and by.

    5. Usually Just Reads*

      Joining the crowd here. Had 3 coworkers on my team go on maternity leave in the last year without any sort of team-wide announcement until we made it to the announcement of the leave itself. This might be culture-specific.

    6. Buzzybeeworld*

      Agreed. I would find it so strange to have a coworker send a broad announcement of their pregnancy, as if work email were social media. Tell the people who need to know or who you’re close to, and everyone else will figure it out in due time.

    7. the dr is in*

      It’s something that depends on the office. Early in my career I worked somewhere where it wouldn’t have been odd, but the last two places I worked were smaller and close knit and it would have had people talking if I hadn’t said something.

    8. AnotherSarah*

      Agree. I’ve never seen anyone announce a pregnancy at my work (sometimes a shower gets announced, but by that time, basically everyone knows/has guessed). I didn’t announce either of mine by any sort of mass-email, but I did let my boss know quite early, and others with whom I need to work closely and would need to know about my leave pretty far in advance. Other people I work with, I told on what I felt like was an as-needed or as-wanted basis–probably about 2/3 of my colleagues knew, and the rest figured it out when I was on leave! I would find it really odd to get a pregnancy announcement, actually. (I also didn’t send a birth announcement around except to real friends at work, though.)

      1. Old Bag*

        This is how ours works too. There isn’t an announcement email from Jane saying “guess what; I’m pregnant!” but there will eventually be a “cake and ice cream in the kitchen for Jane’s baby shower tomorrow! Please bring your favorite ice cream to share, and see Fergus if you’d like to contribute to the gift card!” and people would participate as they felt comfortable, and nobody is pressured to participate or not. Other than that it’s when they go on leave. Note: that doesn’t mean it’s never mentioned outside of that! I just meant as far as company wide announcements go. People Jean shares an office with or who sit close to her or that she eats lunch with or whatever would likely be included in casual gab about it. It just comes up in the course of natural conversation.

        1. AnotherSarah*

          Yes, exactly! I don’t think it’s weird to say, “oh hey, you might notice I’m pregnant! Due in August!” because of course people will eventually wonder.

      2. Annie*

        Yes, that’s what I’ve seen in my work. No announcement, but definitely when someone decides on a work baby shower, then people are invited to participate/show up, eat cake and give presents if they’d like.

    9. Happy*

      Yeah, I’ve worked in places than spanned from – Collecting money for the baby shower we’ll all celebrate in the conference room – to – Surprise! X won’t be in for a while because they are on parental leave…

      In all of them a group email announcement would have been out of place.

      This is so, so workplace dependent.

    10. KateM*

      Yep. My teammmate’s (remote, in different countries) “pregnancy announcement” was during a team call “so, as some of you know, this is my last working day before my maternity leave, thanks for all your work on this project”.

    11. KateM*

      Ah yeah, and a teacher’s pregnancy announcement was “due to X being away for a lengthy excused absense [that’s the wording this school uses for absolutely anything – sickness, courses, etc], the lessons plans have been changed since Y date, this is the new one”.

    12. allathian*

      It really depends on the workplace, and also obviously on the legal requirements. I’m in Finland, and we’re legally required to disclose a pregnancy to the employer (manager/HR) at 26 weeks, if we don’t, the employer can refuse to pay the full salary for the first 12 weeks of leave (after that, parental allowance is paid by social services). Because our maternity leaves are generally longer than in the US (9-12 months is typical for the birthing parent, after that parents can share the leave, and a couple months at least are reserved for the non-birthing parent, if there is one, regardless of gender) and temps are generally hired for the duration of the long leave at least, this requirement seems reasonable to me. I have no idea what happens in the rare cases when a person doesn’t know they’re pregnant until they go to the ER with contractions, though.

      I told my manager at about 11 weeks because she found me asleep at my desk, my first trimester exhaustion was brutal. I told the rest of the team around week 26. I’d lost a substantial amount of weight before I got pregnant, so I just switched to the bigger pants again when I started to show. I managed without maternity pants until week 32, and by then, the news had spread after we posted a job ad for the temp who covered my maternity leave.

      I work for an organization with 1,800 employees in 30+ offices around the country, so we don’t typically announce pregnancies to the whole organization.

      The small organizations I’ve worked for earlier in my career have been small enough for everyone to be told in person at the office.

      1. KateM*

        As far as I can tell, OP has told their employer, they are asking about company-wide email. There’s a difference between the employer knowing and all coworkers knowing, isn’t it? I imagine that telling about your pregnancy to employer is probably even in Finland usually done in other ways that sending a company-wide email and hoping that the person who has to take action based on it will notice and realize they have to take that action.

        1. allathian*

          Oh yes, absolutely. Sorry if I wasn’t clear. As I said, I told my manager in person when she found me asleep at my desk (at the time, I and the vast majority of my coworkers had our own offices, although I was a junior employee a couple tiers above entry level).

          I informed HR with the form we used for the purpose.

          I told my teammates at a meeting.

          No emails were sent at any time about my pregnancy, unless you count the coffee and cake sendoff I got on my last workday before I went on maternity leave. Most people found out when we posted a job ad for my temporary replacement.

      2. bamcheeks*

        I have no idea what happens in the rare cases when a person doesn’t know they’re pregnant until they go to the ER with contractions, though

        There’s no law in the UK saying you have to tell your employer you are pregnant, but telling them you are pregnant before 26 weeks (and fulfilling other criteria) means you have a right to maternity pay. If you gave your employer less notice, either by choice or because you didn’t know yourself, you’d still get maternity leave and most non-evil employers wouldn’t try to get your maternity pay sorted out as quickly as possible! But if they couldn’t process it fast enough or didn’t have the budget to cover it, they wouldn’t be in trouble.

        That said, I think this is a different situation because LW has told their manager so their employer knows: it’s just about whether they have to do a broader Announcement. I just told people individually as and when it came up, as have most people I’ve known. I am kind of amazed at the idea of anyone caring so much about a co-worker’s pregnancy that they’d notice if they heard it in person / on the grapevine rather than through an widespread email announcement!

    13. Elsa*

      Yup, I’ve been in the workforce for 20 years, in two countries, and I don’t think I’ve ever received an “I’m pregnant!” mass email from a coworker. I certainly never considered sending one myself for my pregnancies. I just told the boss, then told my close work friends, then figured that once I started showing more word would spread on its own.

    14. Michigander*

      Agreed! I was pregnant for the first time during the first lockdown, when we all worked from home and no one saw me in person, and I still didn’t send an email around. I told my boss, then a month or two later told the people in my office in one of our weekly calls. Anyone else I just mentioned it if something relevant came up or if they needed to know about my maternity leave. It was similar for my second pregnancy, even though at that point we were in the office a couple times a week.

      Refusing to mention it to anyone would be odd, but sending an email to announce it to the whole office feels odd too. Just tell people when it comes up naturally in conversation or your stomach becomes impossible to ignore.

    15. MK*

      I agree, but I think, in general, if you want to draw the least attention to an announcement in thw workplace, your best bet is to follow the most common practice; I think that’s the reasoning behind Alison’s response. If such announcements are usual in OP’s company, hers will be just another one.

    16. Nodramalama*

      I just signed a card for someone going on maternity leave today. It would be quite weird if someone was pregnant and it wasn’t referred to eventually.

    17. Melonhead*

      Same. I can’t imagine sending an email about a pregnancy to the company at large. Nor have I ever worked anywhere where this was the practice.

      1. tritan*

        I don’t think anyone is proposing an email to the entire company! Just to your team/people you work with the most who are going to see you obviously pregnant at some point. This is how we do it in my office and it would definitely be seen as surprising if someone didn’t share it with their team although we would try to respect their privacy.

        1. tritan*

          Although in my office it’s most likely to be shared at a meeting or one on one but I have seen emails to the immediate team too.

        2. Snow Globe*

          I think it would be weird to not to share news with your immediate team, but in all the places I’ve worked, that would be verbally – even when working remotely, it’s typically shared while talking on the phone about other things. I’ve never seen anyone send out an email announcing a pregnancy, even to the immediate team.

          1. amoeba*

            Yeah, we haven’t had any pregnancies in my direct team but I imagine they’d just tell people during lunch break and from there, the whisper network would do its job for those who weren’t present! There have been pregnancies of people in other departments that I know and occasionally work together with, and with them, yeah, I normally found out when they started to show. Didn’t think twice about it.

            Some people do send birth announcements, but pretty sure that’s not universal either, just in case you feel like it.

          2. Ask a Manager* Post author

            Since my answer doesn’t seem to be clear at all based on the comments and this one crystallized for me why that is:

            My read of the letter is that the LW doesn’t want to share the news with her immediate team, period. I’m not suggesting an email announcement would be the typical way of doing it, or her only option! I’m suggesting that an email that shares the news while explaining she’s stressed and prefers not to talk about it at work is a way to avoid having the conversations she’d rather not have.

            1. Ask a Manager* Post author

              … and I just went back and re-read the question to see if I had missed something, and indeed the LW specifically asks if she needs to make “a big email announcement.” Agggh. I answered it as if she was just asking if she needed to tell people she was pregnant, period.

    18. KatCardigans*

      Yeah, I’ve never seen a formal pregnancy announcement sent out at work, and I’d be surprised to see one! Birth announcements, yes.

      I’m 8 months pregnant and there are still people at my work who are just now realizing that I’m pregnant because we don’t interact much and they’ve only seen me behind my desk. Nobody’s upset (although I think sometimes they feel like they’ve been unobservant). The people I interact with frequently and/or who needed to know in order to set things up for my maternity leave knew much earlier, of course. Overall, I wasn’t keeping it a secret past the first trimester, but it also wasn’t a conversation I started very often.

      1. bamcheeks*

        We had a surprise in January 2021 when one of the wider team said casually in a meeting, “Of course, when I’m on maternity leave next month…” and about three quarters of us went, “You’re what?!” It would come up in casual conversation or been visible if we’d been in the office in person, but since we’d all been working from home for ten months only the few people she’d told directly had any idea!

        1. Arrietty*

          Someone I see pretty regularly in a non-work context had a few weeks old newborn before I realised anything.

    19. Clearance Issues*

      I see more of just “boss/grandboss/hr” and then direct team members that parental leave will affect, and then a full announcement once the baby is officially born.

    20. Eldritch Office Worker*

      That’s been my experience as well but a) the majority of companies I’ve worked for have been relatively small and b) this is so, so culture dependent

    21. misquoted*

      I agree with this. I recently found out about two pregnancies at work only because one of them was mentioned in passing and the other person had the baby and went on maternity leave (she works in a different location so I never saw her). I didn’t find it strange — they don’t report to me or anything.

    22. RIP Pillowfort*

      Yeah I don’t think an email is necessary. I just told management and my immediate coworkers because they would be affected by my maternity leave. I’ve never seen an email pregnancy announcement at work.

      Everyone else just found out if they happened to meet with me in person while I was showing.

    23. learnedthehardway*

      I don’t see any reason at all to announce to the company at large by email that one is pregnant.

      Just mention it to the team you’re on in a staff meeting. Or have your manager mention it, if you don’t want to bring it up. Regardless of company size, that’s plenty of notice to anyone.

      Just because other people have done something one way in the past doesn’t mean the OP has to do it that way now.

      OP – congratulations and best wishes for a safe & healthy pregnancy and baby.

    24. Jackalope*

      I would in fact suggest that if the OP doesn’t want to talk about it with anyone. Tell one or two work friends and ask them to discreetly spread the word and also let everyone know that the OP doesn’t want to discuss it with anyone. That way people will know, and the OP is less likely to have to discuss it with people.

    25. Peon*

      We wouldn’t send an email where I work either; I essentially “announced” mine by stealing a coworker’s pickle while at lunch with our work group and she called me out on being a cliche (and yes, we were friends and I knew she didn’t want her pickle and she knew I didn’t care if people found out) – I hadn’t meant to break the news that way but it ended up being a funny story

    26. Turquoisecow*

      I never got a mass email but if there were team meetings sometimes the person would mention it there rather than going to individuals. I was pregnant during Covid and both myself and a coworker told the group during one of our team meetings which at the time we were having weekly. Prior to Covid it was just kind of passed around, like I would see the person or someone would mention “oh Jane is going to be training on that because Mary will be on maternity leave,” and that’s how I found out Mary was expecting. Or someone was arranging a baby shower or something (even if no gifts were involved we might have snacks on their last day) that I’d get invited to. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten an announcement email.

      I guess it might be more of a thing in a distributed or remote team, but even then it feels like something you’d mention in a chat or during a meeting rather than in a mass email. Husband’s team is distributed and there have been several babies (including ours), I should ask him how they announced it.

    27. Awesome Sauce*

      Agreed. Even here in Canada, where we get up to 50 weeks of parental leave (which can be shared between the parents), it has been very rare in my experience for someone to broadly announce that they’re expecting more than a few weeks before they actually go on leave. They tell their boss and a few co-workers, they make plans to hand off their work, and the news kind of spreads from there. The big announcement is more focused on letting people know they’ll be away for an extended period of time than any kind of “yay, a baby!”

    28. Deborah*

      In case it’s helpful to have another piece of anecdata: I didn’t want to make a big announcement way ahead of time for similar reasons. I’m mostly remote and didn’t show really obviously until 3rd trimester. I told my boss (whom I like and trust) 3 months in, 2 more people who would be involved in logistics around my leave at 6 months, and sent an email to my small department and a couple of other people I work closely with when I was about 6 weeks out (which turned out to be about 3 weeks, since kiddo arrived a little early) with a note that it wasn’t a secret. The bulk of the email was about plans I’d made for having things covered during leave. Sending all best wishes your way!

    29. Retsuko*

      I didn’t even bother to tell anyone outside of my team when I was pregnant. Right before my mat leave, I was wrapping up something for my CEO and made mention that my maternity leave was coming up so he wouldn’t need to be bothered by me for 15 months, and (god bless his heart) he said “What? Where are you going?? HOW CAN WE KEEP YOU DON’T LEAVE US I’LL GET YOU A RAISE”

      And I couldn’t see my feet at that point. He was fully gobsmacked that I was so pregnant. LOL

    30. FuzzFrogs*

      I decided to announce mine via e-mail, but I had some specific circumstances that led to my decision. Namely, that my small department is never all in at once; we work with the public, who had already guessed and started loudly asking about it; and I knew my leave would mean others covering my work while I was out, in a myriad of small and large ways. Basically, everyone was going to need to know pretty soon anyway, and I didn’t want to have to track down ~20 people on different schedules and have a talk about my personal life, which would’ve been exruciatingly awkward.

      I sent a two sentence e-mail with a small joke relevant to my industry, and my due date. Got the job done.

    31. Irish Teacher.*

      Yeah, I’ve never had a colleague send around an e-mail announcing their pregnancy. They tell people individually and people tend to pass the news on.

    32. Sparkles McFadden*

      Yes, I would find an email announcement weird. The only announcements were the “I’m going on leave until [date] so call these people for these things” variety.

      I still have fond memories of one of my male coworkers asking this question: “Did Velma tell us she’s pregnant or can I keep pretending I don’t notice?”

    33. a perfectly normal-sized space bird*

      Agreeing with most everyone else. If the colleague was someone I was close to, I assume they’d tell me when they felt was appropriate if our relationship warranted it. If it was a direct report, team member, or boss, I assume they’d tell me if when it was relevant so we’d have notice of when we need to make work adjustments. For everyone else, an announcement would be weird. But I also never understood the office gossip machine when it came to pregnancy.

    34. I'm the cracker eater*

      Yes, a much more appropriate way of handling it. If necessary, boss can announced in staff meeting “we need to prepare for Mary to be out on maternity leave this fall ” Or maybe if subject would really prefer it not be discussed, just quietly make plans for how the work should be covered. Senting out a self-announcement and including people who don’t really care about your or your family seems. . . boastful? Self-absorbed? Well, inappropriate, anyway. “And admit it: in most workplaces, especially large ones, not everyone will care much about everyone, eve. if they don’t witmsh them I’ll. Tell only those who need to know + those who want to know.

    35. Pomodoro Sauce*

      When I was pregnant with my child, I worked in an e-mail announcement type office. I didn’t do it — partly because I wanted to be private about it, and then later because of some health complications. I told my boss early, for appointment reasons, and then eventually told a few other trusted coworkers — but I didn’t refer to it for most people until I was 6+ months in. People were still confirming I was definitely pregnant when I was about to go out on leave. It was honestly a little awkward! But almost everyone was able to extend empathy and figure out circumstances where they’d act in a similar manner.

      I did feel that I had to lean a little harder into “absolutely delighted by my baby” after the fact to sort of close the concern loop, but that was a lot easier for me.

    36. The Rural Juror*

      The only time I ever find out about pregnancies in our office is a) I work directly with that person, b) their department is hosting an informal shower/get together and invite a few other folks involved in their projects, or c) there’s a birth announcement later. I don’t remember anyone making big announcements ahead of time. I think it’s totally fine to share only with those close to the LW (or not! You do you!)

  2. Not your typical admin*

    For lw 1: I wouldn’t say anything. You have no actual knowledge of what happened, what the specific allegations were, or what an investigation found. Everything you know is secondhand.

    1. New Jack Karyn*

      Eh, I think LW could say something about it. As long as she’s very clear that it’s second hand information, and she doesn’t necessarily know the outcome of any investigations. It sounds like Brad is public-facing, and if things blow up, it could affect LW’s organization.

    2. Ellis Bell*

      If there’s even a remote chance of minors being involved, the default is better safe than sorry. In fields where safeguarding checks of vulnerable people happen, it would be seen as much worse to be overly cautious, secretive, or to sit on relevant information. This is something that is part of the day to day expectation in these fields, for example if a colleague does something untoward, or against policy while working with minors, without you knowing the whole picture, you let someone else figure out what to do with the pieces of info, but you don’t withhold any. This includes second hand information, you just include the source of information. People in these fields understand this default sets off a lot of false alarms, and that you might not know everything, and that you’re simply being overly cautious. The alternative is not to safeguard.

      1. Greyhound*

        You need to be very very careful about making unsupported allegations about sexual misconduct. People’s lives get ruined like that.

        1. Your Local Password Resetter*

          People’s lives also get ruined because they get targeted by sexual predators and everyone dismisses the clear warning signs or actively tries to bury the evidence in the name of keeping the peace.

          Obviously LW should be clear about where this information came from and how reliable it is, but when you get publicly forced out after these kinds of accusations there’s a pretty good chance you’re guilty.

          1. Scrimp*

            Not necessarily. It could be whoever was in charge also just wanted to be “overly cautious” and didn’t want to get involved, or that they were let go for entirely different reasons, that just so happened to coencide with these rumours.

            “They were let go therefore they are guilty” is a terrible assumption to make.

            It is good to be cautious and find out more information, but *we* absolutely do not have enough info to be the jury on this case.

            1. duinath*

              Sure, which is why it would be irresponsible for us, as bystanders who don’t know the situation, to tell anyone to keep mum.

              People closer to the situation, if informed, can look into it and decide if it’s a concern. We cannot.

            2. W*

              And “grooming” is often a very subjective judgenent to make anyway. Unless something explicit was said, or there was inappropriate touching, we can’t know that there were evil intentions. Someone could be horribly mis-judged, and what ashamed for that to follow them from job to job! It isn’t just an easy answer.

          2. MK*

            That’s not actually true. It’s very difficult to convict a predator, but a person leaving their job because of allegations isn’t conclusive of anything. In many cases, it can be a case of an over-cautious employer or even the person themselves choosing to leave for their own safety.

          4. Alice*

            “There’s a pretty good chance you are guilty”? Are you kidding? Go read the memoir _That Librarian_ and learn about the trend of false accusations of child abuse against librarians and teachers by people who claim that age-appropriate sex ed and acknowledging the existence of gay and trans people = child abuse.

        2. bamcheeks*

          “making allegations” means you are saying that you know X abused someone. That’s significantly different from passing on knowledge and being clear and honest about the limitations of what you know and whether or not it’s relevant, and allowing people with oversight and experience of safeguarding to investigate further.

          At the moment, considerably more lives get ruined by failures of safeguarding and people protecting abusers. The balance of probability is still way, way more on the side that you will help people by passing on information (as long as you’re fully transparent about your sources) than that you will harm someone.

          That said, it’s very possible that Brad isn’t in a role which involves access to people perceived as vulnerable or that his employing organisation has already done adequate background checks and concluded that the allegations were unsubstantiated. So once you’ve passed it on to someone who has the power and oversight to decide whether there needs to be any action, I think you pretty much have to let it go.

          1. huh*

            Fine, they wouldn’t be “making allegations” then, they’d be spreading a rumor. Maybe LW’s friends from the previous organization didn’t like Brad, so they’re more than happy to believe that he would groom minors.

            1. Pastor Petty Labelle*

              which is why she should talk to her boss and be clear about the information. Then the boss can handle it.

              You are making the assumption its not true. Which is as much an assumption based on the facts that it is true.

              1. Real paisan*

                You are making the assumption its not true. Which is as much an assumption based on the facts that it is true.

                I think few people assume accusations are untrue per ser. I think that, in the absence of overwhelming evidence one way or the other, most people simply default to the presumption of innocence, which has been drummed into their heads by civics classes and movies like 12 Angry Men throughout their lives. Unless you happen to know and trust the person making the accusation, this is almost certainly the most morally defensible position any of us can take if told that someone has done something that we haven’t actually witnessed.

                1. HB*

                  Well, most people didn’t pay attention in civics class then because “presumption of innocence” is a legal standard regarding burden of proof and is completely irrelevant when it comes to the likelihood of someone being guilty or innocent.

                  The defendant is presumed innocent meaning the prosecution has to *prove* they are guilty. This is an important distinction since in some courts the presumption is the defendant is guilty and they have to prove they are innocent.

                  If a jury convicts someone, the judge can actually set aside the jury verdict if they determine that the prosecution actually *didn’t* prove their case as a matter of law.

                2. Real paisan*

                  I understand that. I simply think that the presumption of innocence isn’t just some pesky obstacle the prosecution has to get around to get a conviction but a morally sound principle in its own right. As I’ve said elsewhere, I would trust my own eyes if I saw someone commit a crime and I would trust those close to me to truthfully relay what they’d seen; beyond that, I’m going to give others the same benefit of the doubt as I’d hope to receive if I were ever accused on wrongdoing.

                3. Old Bag*

                  But what if you were the one who had been prayed upon?

                  I would really hope that people believed me, even if they didn’t see it with their own two eyes, and I would really hope that if somebody told them my story, even if they didn’t see it directly that they would at least contemplate that this could be true and keep it in the back of their mind when interacting with somebody. I can’t imagine how hurtful it would be to have somebody share my story of being preyed upon only to hear a reply of “well I wasn’t there and I didn’t see it with my own two eyes and there’s no concrete proof of it so therefore sharing this story is malicious gossip!”

                4. bamcheeks*

                  in the absence of overwhelming evidence one way or the other, most people simply default to the presumption of innocence

                  this — simply isn’t true? Whether people default to presumption of innocence or presumption of guilt is overwhelmingly determined by things like in-group out-group prejudice and the type of crime. People will overwhelmingly default to presumption of guilt for certain types of alleged crime and certain alleged perpetrators, and vice versa for other types of crime and perpetrator. There is no default presumption of innocence outside of the strict judicial one.

                5. Real paisan*

                  Please, please, please read all the replies to a comment before responding. I have repeatedly said that I would believe someone I personally know and trust if he or she told me something like this. I only withold judgment when it comes to strangers, whom, in the absence of overwhelming evidence, I have no reason to believe or disbelieve.

                6. Real paisan*

                  Bamcheeks, I suppose I was speaking normatively. I default to the presumption of innocence so that I won’t be (mis)guided by prejudice or other factors (e.g., the seriousness of the alleged crime) and I would at least like to think that others do too.

                7. Lenora Rose*

                  But too many people take “innocent until proven guilty” as an excuse to wave off even *making an investigation* (often phrased as “give the benefit of the doubt”, which is why that specific phrasing makes me cringe now in these situations). Thing is, a proper investigation, as well as how evidence is found proving it, is also how a person’s name is fully cleared if they are innocent.

                  I’ve both seen cases come up with credible complaints, some highly disturbing, and have seen people who were targeted by false accusations.

                  I haven’t seen a case that was steered wrong by taking the accusation seriously enough to investigate further, as long as it was done discreetly as far as naming the accuser or witnesses called, and with full public transparency as to the outcome.

                  Note, assuming the person is guilty without further investigation is also wrong – but you literally can’t investigate in the first place without someone informing you there might be something to investigate. This is why you DO tell people in a position to find out, even if you have to make it clear your knowledge is limited and could be incorrect.

                8. Real paisan*

                  Fair enough. I suppose I’m just not convinced that there’s actually anything to investigate in this case. LW heards rumors about someone. If they were worth investigating, can we not assume that they were in fact investigated by the police or by his previous employer if the rumors were credible, especially when the rumors originated in his previous workplace?

            2. bamcheeks*

              Right. And then the employing organisation can look at Brad’s role, do a risk assessment and decide whether any further action needs to be taken.

              If this was “rumour that Brad had stolen money”, I’d agree with not passing it on. But one of the reasons why it’s super important to pass on knowledge of suspected sexual abuse is because we have a longstanding culture of denying, downplaying and enabling sexual abuse. Fix that first.

              1. Lenora Rose*

                I dunno, I’d want “a rumour Brad had stolen money” also to be investigated. I just want both investigations to be done with discretion and a willingness to hear the truth, whether it turns out to be guilt or innocence.

                1. bamcheeks*

                  I would feel more confident that a rumour that Brad stole money had been investigated by the previous employer and that the consequences would have been recorded and either passed on to law enforcement or the new employer if necessary. So I wouldn’t feel obliged to pass on rumours, cos I’d assume that a company would take allegations of theft seriously. I just don’t really assume that with something like allegations of sexual misconduct or abuse: it’s incredibly common in my experience for companies to decide it’s too much hassle or too difficult to determine the truth, or for it to be referred to the police but for someone to decide there’s not enough evidence to prosecute, but the organisation to come to some sort of fudgy no-blame-nothing-written-down agreement to part ways. I think it’s important to pass stuff like this on because the official channels and processes repeatedly fail victims and vulnerable people.

                  I appreciate the irony of saying that I don’t think official processes are very effective and also that LW should pass on the information they have and then leave it up to official processes, but I think that’s the best option out of a set of bad choices.

            3. MK*

              “spreading a rumor” would be gossiping about it with anyone and everyone. Mentioning a rumor about a serious matter to somone who can take steps to verify it isn’t gossiping, it’s being responsible.

              Are you seriously claiming someone should disregard anything they hear that doesn’t come with receipts?

        3. hbc*

          Very few people’s lives get ruined over *supported* *reporting* of sexual misconduct. Brad is gainfully employed despite having at least a couple of ex-coworkers spreading the news that he was fired for behaving in an inappropriate way. If OP lays out the context, the worst Brad’s going to have is an uncomfortable conversation, and that would likely only if he chose a job where he’d still have access to minors.

          1. HB*

            Also… pretend for a second that the rumors *are* false and being maliciously spread by former coworkers. LW currently knows the rumors and doesn’t know if they’re true or not. If she keeps it to herself, she’s basically another person with a worse opinion of Brad due to these rumors. If she speaks up, giving full context as to what she knows/how she knows it, and it goes up the chain… it’s then possible to find out the rumors *are* false and Brad’s reputation will be cleared.

            If Brad’s completely innocent isn’t that better?

                1. Real paisan*

                  If the argument is that LW should, in effect, spread a rumor to her boss so the latter can squash the very rumor that LW had herself spread then that’s… an interesting argument…

                2. New Jack Karyn*

                  Real paisan: If LW told everyone she works with about what she heard, that would be spreading rumors. Telling her boss, and being transparent about her sources and lack of verification, is not that.

                3. Real paisan*

                  Sure, but I was addressing the substance of the argument, which seems to be that LW should raise a doubt about Brad’s character so that that doubt, which LW herself raised, can be put to rest. If she doesn’t raise thd issue with her boss then there won’t be an issue to resolve in the first place.

                4. Lenora Rose*

                  Real Paisan: If you never raise the issue, the issue can never be proven *false*. Telling someone in a position to much more easily investigate and put it to rest once and for all is vastly better than letting the doubt fester on and on.

                5. Real paisan*

                  Hi Lenora Rose. I responded to you about this very point in a separate thread. (I’m just letting you know here so we can avoid having two parallel conversations!)

                6. HB*

                  Real paisan,

                  No, that’s not the argument. I wrote a long post about hearsay below which is related but I’ll try to summarize here:

                  Basically a rumor by itself is not proof, *and should not be treated as such*. But it’s also not nothing because it does mean one of two things: 1) The rumor is true or 2) The rumor is *not* true

                  Now, for most rumors – even salacious ones – the proper response is to just ignore it because there is no risk of harm if the rumor *is* true, and by spreading it you actually are doing harm.

                  But if there is a risk of harm is the rumor *is* true, then what I’m pointing out is that there is *also* harm being perpetuated if it isn’t true. Now, I think your position is that by responding to the rumor you are de facto assuming it’s true and that’s where I think our disconnect is coming from. Instead, my view is that the *risk* of the rumor being true necessitates further action, but the potential harm/risk of it *not* being true dictates what that action looks like. Basically, you recognize that it’s hearsay and treat it as such. You don’t go into your Boss’ office and say “Hey, did you know Brad was let go from his former job for grooming minors?” and not even necessarily “Hey, I was told by former coworkers that Brad was let go from his last job for grooming minors.” But more “I have an issue I think we need to discuss. This is what I was told and this is what I know/don’t know about the situation. These are the risks *from all angles* as I see them. What do you think we should do, if anything.”

                  Does that require a level of care/rationality/etc not always exhibited by all people? Sure. I just think your default is unduly restrictive – but I can understand how you got there.

                7. Real paisan*

                  Thank you for your response, HB. I’m still not sure whether I would raise it if I were in LW’s shoes but I certainly understand where you’re coming from now. I’m sorry if I misunderstood or miscommunicated your previous comment.

                8. HB*

                  No need to apologize! I think most of our disconnect was stemming from our differing assumptions and it’s not really feasible or practical to try to list those out in every comment. Therefore the only way to clarify them is to, well, disagree. This is particularly true in situations where I don’t even *know* what my unstated assumptions are, and I can only figure them out when someone looks at the same scenario and comes to a different conclusion. On the whole I’ve never been one of those people to say “Oh I love debating” (because I absolutely do not), but I *do* very much enjoy situations like this where I can parse out my understanding/beliefs/etc in real time.

              2. BatManDan*

                Empirically untrue. I have a friend in prison because the local cops were mad when the actual perpetrator offed himself when caught, and they framed my buddy for the crime. (He was a target for this town’s police force because he was a vocal critic of their crappy policing.) He may end up spending 20 years in jail, and will forever be known as a sex offender when he literally didn’t do anything criminal.

              3. HB*

                I understand why you gave this as a response, but I want to point out that I said *possible* not guaranteed and that was on purpose. Years ago I met an Assistant US Attorney who was really upset because someone he had convicted while a state prosecutor was actually innocent. He said he had truly believed in the system and innocent people couldn’t be convicted. I’m pretty sure I refrained from calling him a complete idiot, but I did say that I figured it was easier to convict an innocent person than a guilty person because the guilty person *knows* what they did and can defend around it.

                But those situations (which are exemplified by the quote) exist because of bad actors. You should always assume that’s a possibility, and act accordingly – like never talking to a cop without an attorney present. Ever.

                1. spaceelf*

                  At least he had the decency to be upset about it. Prosecutors get a bad rap in general, but because the framework in which they must work is flawed, so to are the outcomes they facilitate.

                2. HB*

                  True. It was an odd thing feeling both better about him as a person given his empathetic response, but also worse because that was a stupidly dangerous assumption to have. If I recall correctly the issue was that a witness lied on the stand, and later recanted. It’s not really his fault if people give false testimony, but he should know that it’s a distinct possibility. It’s one thing to believe the system *should* work and conduct yourself accordingly, but it’s another to believe in it so strongly you basically think it’s magic. The more impervious you think your system is, the more likely you are to miss signs, not set up safeguards, or take basic steps to prevent the worst case scenario.

            2. Colette*

              I don’t think that would work out, though. All the OP’s manager can do is talk with someone at Brad’s organizaiton, and all that person can do is contact Brad’s former employer (and possibly google his name). Unless Brad was convicted of something, that’s not likely to come up with a conclusive answer.

        4. Ellis Bell*

          You’ve misunderstood entirely. You don’t make unsupported allegations about anything when making safeguarding reports.

        5. librarian*

          Anyone who works with minors know that you’re meant to report ANY suspicion you have, no matter how small. The protection of minors from predators is more important than “ruining” a grown adult’s life.

          1. Ellis Bell*

            Yeah, it’s not surprising because few people are trained in this stuff. Such confidence though!

      2. Crencestre*

        Thanks to certain far-right alarmists, “grooming children” has begun to mean anything from actually trying to molest them to simply having children’s books that acknowledge the existence of gay people or that tell the stark truth about slavery and racism in the classroom, school, or public library. In short, the term is becoming so vague that it’s becoming impossible to know exactly is meant by “grooming minors”.

        OP, did you learn anything more specific about the allegations against this person? Without knowing that, it’s very difficult to know whether or not to alert your manager about him. OF COURSE your job should know if he was trying to molest children – that should go without saying! But if he was accused of “grooming minors” because his choice of books didn’t please Moms for Liberty…well, not so much.

        1. anon4eva!*

          Brad could dress in drag casually and read at libraries and in certain southern states that could be “grooming” children.
          AAM and some commentators have a bad take on this- it’s easy to look up someone’s criminal history if you know their name and our society loves to allow media to publish stories when someone is arrested or convicted esp for these sort of crimes – but this is just secondhand gossip, where “grooming” can easily be coded as targeted against LGBTQIA+.
          If you can’t find criminal records or media stories, all your doing is spreading hot gossip, period.

        2. Andrew*

          I said about the same below. “Grooming” is basically the anti-LGBTQ equivalent of the antisemitic Blood Libel, and let’s not forget we’re also talking about a very politically charged industry. If Brad is any flavor of queer, there’s a fair chance of the “grooming” allegation boiling down to “is openly LGBTQ and has come within a 1-mile radius of a minor.”

          1. Old Bag*

            LW said the context was that Brad was involved in the reproductive rights activism scene.

            That does not sound like people who are going to be concerned about his drag performances. I could be wrong, but where I am from that is code for pro choice, birth control, Planned Parenthood, etc. If *those* groups are accusing you of grooming minors? I want to know about it.

            1. Betsey Bobbins*

              I could easily see someone being accused of grooming minors in the reproductive rights scene. What if he discussed reproductive options with a minor of pro-life parents? What if he was a target for the pro-life activism scene in his area, the far right loves using ‘grooming minors’ allegations as many other commenters have pointed out. You’re assuming the call is coming from withing the building, that’s not necessarily the case.

            2. Andrew*

              What Betsy said, and do we know that the allegations came from within? All I see is that coworkers were aware of the complaints, not that they originated them. A bad-faith, agenda-driven community complaint still seems plausible.

          2. LL*

            Except that grooming still has it’s original meaning and we can’t assume this is just homophobia without knowing anything else. And I’d hope that the OP has the context to know whether it’s likely that this is homophobia.

            1. Andrew*

              We also can’t assume that it isn’t, though, given the circumstances. Besides the “basically Blood Libel” angle, a couple others have pointed out that this is a situation where anything even tangentially involving a minor stands a fair chance of being twisted into allegations of grooming or molestation, no matter how innocent the intentions, if someone has an axe to grind. (And it’s reproductive health, an issue it would be hard to argue in good faith isn’t chock-full of proverbial hatchets and whetstones!)

        3. HB*

          This is another aspect of something I said up above. I think the problem with rumors is when they *stay* just rumors, and when people don’t properly contextualize them as rumors. LW clearly isn’t an alarmist since they stopped to ask advice on whether to say something… so if LW shares the rumors with the proper context, and if the chain above her is *also* alarmist free… then there’s a chance to actually find out what happened/why. If Brad actually is completely innocent (the rumors were false and spread unknowingly due to misunderstanding/by vengeful coworkers/whatever… or the “grooming” wasn’t actual grooming but discrimination against Brad) I think both Brad *and* the LW would want the truth to come out.

          I mean I know that path requires a lot of good faith from all parties which isn’t always possible, but I would love for the standard to become “Responsibly investigate/verify/clear the air” rather than “stick your head in the sand” vs “go to Defcon 1”.

        4. Beth*

          Thank you for bringing this up! In much of the country, simply being trans, or gay, or even suspected of being trans or gay is enough to bring on accusations of being a sexual predator. This kind of whisper attack had lost some traction for a while, but it’s now fully supported by the administration and will be metastasizing.

          1. New Jack Karyn*

            The accusations came within an organization supporting reproductive rights. As Old Bag says above, they are unlikely to jump to “queer = predator”.

            1. Elle*

              I hate to be this guy, but I would not assume this; in my experience, reproductive rights groups can include TERFs who believe that trans women are predator men “invading women’s spaces.” I have met many lesbians who would feel comfortable labeling “person told a minor experiencing gender dysphoria that they are not bad or wrong” as “grooming.”

    3. JSPA*

      I think I would bring it up as a “me” thing, which is also what I’d do if I’d heard that someone had been abusive in a relationship with a friend.

      “Boss, I know that everyone needs a job, and that letting secondhand information color my interactions with someone is a problem on my end. However, I spent our conversation with [partner org] being interrupted by intrusive worries. Is there any way to tactfully ascertain whether Brad’s role at Org involves directing or otherwise being in authority over minors?”

      After that, Alison’s language applies.

      1. about that*

        “JSPA, is there any way for me to tactfully tell you that your intrusive thoughts are your problem, that spreading rumors when you know you shouldn’t makes me doubt your judgement and suitability for employment here, and that you need to keep your head down and focus on your own job?”

        1. JSPA*

          Luckily i’ve never had a boss or been in a role where I would be spoken to like that, but of course the letter writer is the best judge of their own boss, stature, reputation and track record.

      2. Tiger Snake*

        No; that sort of language tells the boss that you’re liable to get caught up in rumours, neglect your own job and responsibilities, and possibly act biased against people without real evidence. It doesn’t raise any sort of alarm against Brad, but it raises several concerns about your judgement and your ability.

    4. JSPA*

      Adding, in case anyone is going through the same mental gymnastics:

      My first thought (luckily quickly negated) was that discussing reproductive rights can involve a lot of topics that could easily be misconstrued as inappropriate, between a slightly older man, and younger clients.

      My immediate second thought was that literally no-one is better at separating “essential owner-operator information about your reproductive parts” from “getting familiar” than people in the reproductive health sphere. And that “please adjust your terminology and demeanor in this way” conversations happen earlier and with more clarity than anywhere else.

      However, if the LW and others “in the know” can wrap their head around dealing with him, communicating with outside organizational partners seems like it could be a “low to no contact with minors role.” And if so, the situation is likely safer to society / kids (as well as Brad himself) than the “no questions asked, we’re desperate” type of service jobs or grey economy gigs he might otherwise cycle through.

    5. Hyaline*

      My concern would be that this is clearly not secret info—someone else other than LW could bring it up or make accusations that drag the whole org and anyone tertiary to it down—it’s fair to give the boss a heads up that this situation occurred, emphasizing how it’s unproven and second hand info. It’s better for everyone if it’s raised calmly and rationally instead of blowing up.

      Also, I know the commentariat is generally less than favorable about googling people, but I wonder if some follow up could be gleaned with a little research if the boss is so inclined.

      1. me*

        +1

        It gives people a chance to get ahead of the issue so it doesn’t turn up later at a worse time or place

    6. learnedthehardway*

      I think OP#1 should reach out to her past contacts and ask them to reach out to Brad’s current employer IF it is appropriate to do so.

      OP#1 only has second-hand information, and it’s very vague at that. An employer can’t do much with it – it could be real or it could be malicious gossip – they don’t know.

    7. HB*

      In case it’s useful for anyone…

      Most people are familiar with the term hearsay and know it’s inadmissible in court. But to fully understand *why* it’s inadmissible you need to know what hearsay actually is. Hearsay is a statement made outside of court that is offered to prove the *truth* of the matter asserted.

      If I see the defendant murder someone and testify to that in court, it’s not hearsay. I’m testifying to what I witnessed.

      If I see the defendant murder someone, tell my best friend, and *she* testifies, *that* is hearsay. And it can’t be offered as proof because the jury could decide the person testifying is the most trustworthy/reliable person in the world but that doesn’t mean that the *statement* is true. But that’s *all* the hearsay rule does: it prevents you from using the statement as *proof*. It doesn’t mean that you have to assume the statement *isn’t* true and in fact you can use statements in all manner of other ways that *aren’t* hearsay.

      LW’s secondhand information is a *perfect* example of potential hearsay and it’s a big part of why people are struggling with it because they know consciously or subconsciously that it isn’t proof and cannot be offered as such. But that doesn’t mean you have to disregard it – you just have to understand what it is and what it isn’t.

      Going back to my first example… my friend can’t testify that she heard me say I saw the defendant murder someone *as proof that the defendant murdered someone*. And the reason is simple: if I saw it, I should be the one testifying. But what if the prosecution had me slated to testify, and then I died. Can my friend testify then? Maybe. The prosecution would have to argue it falls under one of the hearsay exceptions, and its still problematic. I mean, what if I’m a notorious liar? But what if I was murdered and a few days before I had told my friend I was terrified to testify. *That* is also hearsay, because my friend is testifying to my state of mind, but I can’t be there to say “Hey I was scared of being murdered by the person I saw murder someone else and now here I am… murdered” so not having some sort of exception goes against the interest of justice. But even if the friend is allowed to testify saying that I said I saw the defendant murder someone… *that is not proof that the defendant murdered someone*. But the statement combined with other items entered into evidence *might* be proof.

      1. Anonym*

        So you don’t want to come to firm conclusions (e.g. convict or fire someone) based on hearsay, but it is potentially appropriate to look into something further based on it. Is that fair to say? Makes perfect sense. OP has a “maybe”. So it’s worth checking into, but not acceptable to make any conclusions based on it.

        1. HB*

          Yes precisely! Now, there’s a lot of potential nuance depending on the situation. You don’t necessarily treat the hearsay as completely neutral or a Schrodinger’s cat situation… The hearsay itself and all relevant factors will absolutely influence what you do and how you do it because it will change the scope.

          For example pretend for a moment that the person who had told LW about Brad been someone the LW knew disliked Brad personally – that might decrease the urgency in one sense because the LW may feel that it’s more likely the person made it up… but *increase* the urgency in another sense because the LW may feel like this person spread this viciously and maliciously meaning that it may come out at some point and they need to get ahead of it.

          Now pretend for a moment that the person who had told LW about Brad had been Brad’s boss. That increases the urgency since it’s from someone directly connected to the situation, and it may be proof that he was fired for being accused of grooming children, but NOT proof that he was grooming children.

          In either scenario, the overall goal may not be to determine the “truth” of what happened, but something else. If Brad’s job has nothing to do with minors, Boss and LW may decide it’s none of their business and to let it go. But I think the main thing is to make sure your actions are based on conclusions, and your conclusions are based on evidence and as few assumptions as possible (some assumptions are inevitable).

        1. HB*

          No we’re not, but understanding why the rules of evidence are what they are can still be useful – including in explaining why a rule of evidence in a court of law doesn’t apply outside a court of law.

    8. Aggretsuko*

      I sort of of had this come up: In my hobby life, someone I know grumbled about “Dick Pick Rick” participating at another organization. I checked the Internet and sure nuff, the fellow had earned his name and is no longer a teacher. Doesn’t sound like he was legally prosecuted, just lost his job. However, as far as I can tell/heard, dude is employed in a non-teenager-seeing position and was involved in adult-only activities and coming on to adult women and not misbehaving. Do you tell at that point if he seems to have shaped up AND isn’t around teen girls? Also, I’m not involved in their organization at all, why would they listen to me? A friend of mine liked the guy (that was a fun conversation) and she wasn’t totally shocked to hear it, but asked if I could stay quiet since he seemed to have shaped up. Okay, fine, given what I said above.
      Anyway: someone at that organization found out about it later, made a stink, and DPR got canned from the organization and their org now has a disclaimer saying they will check databases to see if anyone is in them.

      We also had a Teen Girl Guy at one of the organizations I do my hobby at. Same situation, but it had been a lot of years and as far as anyone knew, dude had shaped up, had an age-appropriate girlfriend, different job, etc. I was reassured that nobody was worried about that guy any more. And then, well, the board found out about “a pattern of behavior” and canned him.

      My therapist said after that that these guys can’t really get better or reform, at least not without a ton of resources that nobody has. Sigh.

      1. JSPA*

        As “listed” people have way more oversight than the rest of us, those who are not obsessive and committed in their offending are highly motivated to get their attitude and behaviors adjusted.

        As a result, the numbers are better then 50/50…and far better after extended periods without re-offense, or with advancing age.

        Eventually, the individual risk drops to “no greater chance than for someone pulled randomly from the general population.”

        Which, mind you, isn’t zero! General skeevyness, specific forms of skeevyness, loss of inhibition with degenerative diseases and people who’ve always flown under the radar, all exist.

        But too many people generalize from the fixated guys (who are obvious and prolific offenders) to the general SO population, which turns out to also include people who are neither as troubled nor as troubling.

    9. Lacey*

      This attitude is how predators molest children for decades and then people wonder how no one ever spoke up.

    10. LaminarFlow*

      I am on the fence with this one. At this point, the LW is repeating second-hand gossip. However, if it is true, I would escalate this information on a need-to-know basis only, like manager/HR.

      Since this information hasn’t been proven, and it has the potential to ruin this man’s career and life, think I would dig in to the situation more – search county data bases/sex offender registries/etc. I might try to get in touch with the original person who told me this information to ask a few clarifying, but non-leading questions. If dots are connected, and this man did have inappropriate contact with a minor, I would absolutely raise it (with evidence) on a need-to-know basis.

    11. JD DJ*

      There’s also the very real fact that “grooming” is an allegation right-wingers are throwing at everyone, and I can easily see a man in a reproductive rights aligned org being labeled a “groomer” because he honestly talked about reproductive health with a minor, or is just openly LGBTQ.

  3. Joeb*

    What kind of wondering and speculation would be happening with someone being pregnant? That just sounds bizarre. I’ve got several coworkers who were pregnant that we didn’t know until they got bigger, and there was nothing weird about it.

    1. nnn*

      I read it as the wondering and speculation happens when the pregnant co-worker starts getting bigger in a way that visually suggests pregnancy (rather than simple weight gain) but hasn’t announced a pregnancy.

    2. Nodramalama*

      In my experience the speculation is a bit more when coworkers think someone might be pregnant but it hasn’t been announced.

      And the conversations are usually more like,… Is she? I’m not sure, I haven’t heard anything. I don’t want to mention it in case she’s not. Etc etc

      1. londonedit*

        Yeah, the thing is that there’s going to be a point where the OP will start to look visibly pregnant, and then if there hasn’t been an announcement of some sort, people are going to start thinking ‘Is OP pregnant? I haven’t heard anything…maybe not, then…I don’t want to say anything…she definitely looks pregnant, though…’ and that sort of thing.

        It might be different in the UK because people do need to disclose a pregnancy to their employer because of maternity leave and health & safety etc (also because you’re allowed time off for appointments related to the pregnancy and so on). I don’t think I’ve ever seen a ‘company-wide announcement’, though – usually what happens is that the person will initially tell their boss, and begin to sort out any HR-related stuff to do with their pregnancy, and then they’ll tell their closer colleagues in person. Anyone they don’t work with on a regular basis will probably find out in a more organic way – probably when they see the pregnant person around the office and say ‘Oh, wow! I didn’t know you were pregnant!’ That’s a very normal thing for people to say, so I don’t think the OP can necessarily avoid it. Which is why some sort of email might be a good idea, because then the OP can – as Alison says – let people know that they’d rather not make the pregnancy a big deal at work.

        1. Dr. Rebecca*

          “‘Oh, wow! I didn’t know you were pregnant!’ That’s a very normal thing for people to say”

          …it *is* but I wish it wasn’t. I’m a 44 year old woman with weight gain due to illness that mimics a pregnancy in appearance (swollen abdomen, rounder face, no weight gained in arms or legs) and would absolutely HASTEN to correct anyone who made that unfortunate assumption. We should all remember to not make assumptions, and to definitely not comment on other people’s bodies unless they ask us to–and even then, do so sparingly and with delicacy.

          1. bamcheeks*

            Yeah, I think there’s been a move away from saying this for the last few years, as more people are aware that there are various conditions or just body shapes that can look like pregnancy but aren’t, and it’s awful for everyone if you make the wrong assumption! In my experience, people have started to lean harder on talking about themselves / third parties planning maternity, parental or adoption leave to make sure the work-essential information gets shared without focussing on people’s medical information. Obviously it’s still sharing personal information, but it keeps the focus on work and doesn’t invite questions about the personal or physical side of pregnancy!

        2. blupuck*

          I’m of the mind that unless I personally have been informed, a woman is not pregnant unless she is in active labor and the baby is crowning.
          I would never comment on a pregnancy (or not). It’s easy to get through a conversation without commenting on personal appearance.

      2. mango chiffon*

        Am I the only one who will see someone days from giving birth and not saying anything at all because it’s none of my business? Personally I only think the discussion matters in the workplace if you have to discuss the workload change with your colleagues ahead of your leave.

        1. a perfectly normal-sized space bird*

          I’m the same way. Some of my office busybodies like to speculate about pregnancies and last time they were in a tizzy, it’s because someone in another department was pregnant and didn’t have a partner. Like, so what? People get pregnant. That’s what they do.

        2. Curious*

          I’ve heard the rule is that, unless someone has told you that they’re pregnant, you don’t say anything to them about their pregnancy unless and until you see the baby’s head actually crowning.

    3. LaminarFlow*

      I had one coworker who decided to not tell anyone that she was pregnant, and she sort of doubled down on it with a general vibe of “someone in the office is pregnant? Whaddya mean?” She just didn’t want to listen to everyone’s pregnancy/labor/nursing/etc. experiences.

      But, it isn’t unheard of for pregnant women to be overlooked for things like big projects and promotions if they announce a pregnancy. So, I understand why not telling people about a pregnancy at work is something that happens.

    4. Anon Attorney*

      I would imagine that the speculation would occur when they do get bigger or have a noticeable baby bump. Also, at some point they would be leaving the office for maternity leave presumably, so it feels odd to me that they’d leave and think no one would know why? That would at least be odd in my office culture.

  4. IT Relationship Manager*

    See, you say that it will be obvious but people are more likely to never mention it or bring it up with you if you don’t acknowledge it.

    I had a coworker I wasn’t working directly with who had a baby last year and it wasn’t u til I got a baby shower invite at 8 months did I actually get confirmation that she was pregnant.

    I understand not wanting to talk about it, but I would acknowledge it with your team and the people nearby but don’t invite conversations about it if you don’t want it. You will have to formally acknowledge your pregnancy at some point when you discuss how your work will be co0vered during your leave, etc. But to be honest, the people you want to avoid talking about it with are the ones who are the most annoying or troublesome about it.

    Anyway, it would feel less weird as your coworker that when you started to show, you do say that indeed you are pregnant! It will avoid awkward whispering around you from others.

    1. JSPA*

      Not to state the obvious, but the other thing that avoids awkward whispering is for people not to whisper (awkwardly or otherwise) about their coworkers, and specifically not discuss their biological processes, until any period of confusion or “needing clarification” is well past.

      Yes, if someone starts in on all-day morning sickness, I’d probably seek some, “you OK?” reassurance, and maybe reassurance that it’s “not communicable.”

      But if you don’t have opinions on people’s somewhat-expanding bellies, “glow,” modified eating patterns or occasional doctor visits, then you don’t need to have whisper conclaves about pregnancy.

  5. Apples and Oranges*

    There have been lots of people at my work who I found out we’re pregnant through word of mouth it when they started showing. I don’t think it’s weird at all but to formally announce it but just mention it when/if it makes sense

    1. 2 Cents*

      Yeah, at my former workplace that had 100 people in just my division, I often didn’t know, if I wasn’t good friends with the person, until someone mentioned it off-hand (“When Susan goes out on her leave…”) or when I was invited to the office baby shower. I never thought that was weird. Instead, I’d congratulate them, wish them all the sleep in the world, and contribute to the group gift :D

      When I was pregnant at my former very small company (less than 50 people), I announced via Facebook, because of course we were all friends on there as well. So everyone knew, or quickly knew, when others congratulated me. I kept the talk to a minimum because I was nervous about the pregnancy and people, more or less, followed my lead.

  6. MSD*

    I worked at a company that rated 1 – 5 and required a bell curve for ratings One of my teams supported a legacy system and HR lowered everyone’s rating from the 3 (successful) that I gave them to a 2 (doesn’t meet). This obviously impacted their bonuses and raises. Years later I can still feel the justified anger from my folks coming at me when I gave them their reviews. Of course I couldn’t say HR gave them the 2 but in reality for them it didn’t matter who gave the 2.

    1. allathian*

      Why of course? I’m grateful that every time I’ve had a poorer rating than I merited, not because my org follows a bell curve (it doesn’t), but because there haven’t been any funds for any merit raises, I’ve been grateful to my managers who’ve frankly said that they’d love to give me a raise and think I deserve it, but that there’s no budget for it. I wasn’t happy, but I would’ve been even less happy if I’d been left with the idea that my manager thought I didn’t deserve a raise.

      First-level managers are too low in the org chart to carry that sort of crap for systemic injustices in the way the company works, IMO.

      1. KateM*

        Yea, why is employee thinking they are doing poor work better than them thinking HR sucks? Of course it matters who was the one to give them that 2!

      2. Your Local Password Resetter*

        Agreed. If HR or a senior manager makes the decision and overrides you, then they bear the responsibility for that decision. Lying that you did it is just sacrificing yourself to shield them from the natural consequences of their decisions. Which is very much not part of your job.

      3. iglwif*

        Yeah in your position I would tell your team as much as I could about how it went down. And I think as one of the “downgraded” staff I would absolutely care whose decision it was! For one thing, I would want to know whether I could trust you, as my manager, to give me an accurate reference for the new job I would quickly start looking for.

        1. David's Skirt-pants*

          This is why I left my prior job. I never got over the rating I was downgraded to in the year I gave the most of my blood, sweat, tears, and time away from my family. Maybe it was HR and not my manager but my trust was gone after that because I knew he didn’t go to bat for me and, more importantly, I didn’t feel motivated to go above and beyond anymore.

          If your team is consistently rated 4s and 5s, congratulate yourself on great hiring. Don’t push them out the door with unnecessary gerrymandering.

          Your competitors will thank you, though.

          1. I Have RBF*

            This.

            If your company hires well, the answer is to let the “curve” go naturally, and let your mean creep up to 3.8 instead of forcing it to 3.0. Otherwise you will chase those great hires out the door.

    2. Jeff Vader*

      Which is a better direct line manager decision: give honest reviews to your reports, explain what they did well, what youd like them to improve on ? Also explain that raises are not part of your control and then let higher management / HR make the bad decision to shaft them

      Or

      carry the can for someone else’s bad decision or nonsense system ?

      1. Jeff Vader*

        It’s not your system of grading people. it’s designed to minimise the amounts of raises given and is a huge demotivational tool if you’re one of those whose rating is lowered so that the scores fit on the curve.

        I don’t want to have a go at you but that system is terrible.

      2. I Have RBF*

        I prefer it if they are honest, and tell you that they can’t give very many 4’s and that a 5 wants a novel written and you just about have to walk on water in the middle of summer.

        If HR insists that the mean and mode are 3.0, tell people that. If the company mandates that raises are only 2%, then tell people that. Transparency into the process goes a long way in keeping people.

        I actually got a 4 this last cycle. It had to be approved by my boss, grandboss and great-grandboss. I got a 3% raise instead of a 2 % raise. How did I do it? I took on another person’s entire job.

        IMO, performance reviews have very little relation to reality when it comes to ratings and raises.

      3. Kyrielle*

        I got a 4/5 one year with no raise…because there was almost no budget for raises and the focus was on some people who were wildly underpaid compared to similar-performing peers. My boss told me just that, HR allowed the scores + no raise, and while I didn’t love getting no raise, I didn’t feel shafted by the review process *or* by people who were out-of-grade with the rest of us getting what money there was. Just…spread raises around as you can but grade performance fairly, for the love of everything!

    3. Fishsticks*

      Why on earth didn’t you just tell them you gave them successful ratings but HR changed them to reflect an internal policy, and reassure them that you believe they were successful and wanted them to receive the raises and bonuses they deserved?

      Why lie by omission on behalf of people who harmed your employees financially?

      1. learnedthehardway*

        Agreed – HR overrode your decision, so HR should bear responsibility for the decision.

        Not only was it unfair that the OP’s team got bad reviews, but it was also unfair to them that there wasn’t transparency about it.

        This could also have long term implications for the OP, themself. I would have a quite justified amount of resentment for someone who gave me a bad performance rating when I deserved a good one, and it would certainly carry over to future interactions with them. eg. I wouldn’t recommend someone I thought was an unfair manager for other positions, if I was asked if I knew someone or if I was asked to comment on their suitability for a role.

        1. Old Bag*

          I know of some organizations where if a manager said that it wasn’t their fault, HR did it — the manager would have been putting their own job at risk.

          1. Lenora Rose*

            There’s likely still a way for the manager to convey the information, just more discreetly, and frankly, if HR doesn’t like being blamed for HR’s decision, and likes seeing a front line manager take the fall for them despite having voiced disagreement with their decision, then that manager should start looking elsewhere for their next step, because that is a serious red flag.

            1. I Have RBF*

              This.

              If HR or upper management makes shitty decisions, they don’t get to abrogate responsibility for those decisions. Front line managers don’t get paid enough to take the fall for upper management’s bad management.

    4. OrangeCup*

      It does matter. Happened to me at my last job. Got my raise and bonus letter to discover a bonus, but zero raise (which was usually a measly 3% COLA anyway). I went to my boss confused and full of rage. He was equally confused and promised he’d given me a raise. He goes to our grandboss who confirmed she’d signed off on the raise. She goes to HR who responds “not everyone can get a raise every year”.

      She didn’t tell us exactly what happened, but from what my boss and I could piece together, HR had taken away raises from a percentage of every department, and we’re not sure if they did it on their own or were directed to do so, without considering the reviews at all, because I got the best review in my department. Luckily our grandboss had enough juice in the company that she was able to get me back 2% of a raise but I never forgave HR or the company or forgot about it.

      1. I Have RBF*

        If HR thinks that “not everyone can get a raise every year”, they are going to have a steady stream of people leaving. Most companies don’t give COLAs. They call them “merit” increases. So to maybe keep even with inflation, you need to get a better than average review, which seldom happens, and then HR pulls raises because “not everyone can get a raise every year”?? IMO, this is a big red flag about out of touch management and HR. It also seems a recipe for employee rage. Then these same idiots wonder why people quit after two years, and whine “NoBoDy WaNtS tO wORk AnYMoRe!!1!!”

    5. Iranian yogurt*

      Adding to the chorus of people perplexed at the idea that you can’t be transparent about who really holds responsibility for their poor rating.

    6. Sloanicota*

      The thing that makes no sense is, if a company wants to lean on the “3 is average, there’s nothing wrong with a 3, most people should be getting 3s” rhetoric, then they … need to not be punishing people for getting 3s! It’s fine to say there’s not a lot of raises this year and that most people won’t be getting one. But it’s weird to say “75% of our employees should be in this range, and we’re going to penalize them for it.”

    7. Space Needlepoint*

      I once worked a job with that bloody 1-5 rating. My boss told me in the review, “I think you do superior work, but I was told that I am required to only give a limited number (I forget if it was one or two) 4 and 5 ratings. If an employee is doing well, per HR, most of the ratings should be 3 (meets expectations).

      I loathe this system.

      1. Sloanicota*

        My boss told me one year “I can only advocate for one employee from the division to get a big raise, and this year it’s going to be (not you)’s year. But knowing that you are doing great work, I can commit to making it your year next year.” Controversial, but it actually worked for me – and she really did go to bat for me the following year and got that raise. My sense was that she only had limited power in the system and was trying to work it as best she could. Obviously I would have felt differently if I’d realized it was just a line and she didn’t mean it.

        1. JustaTech*

          Yeah, may company has this … system. They also instituted a thing where you have to have two 4 ratings in a row in order to get a promotion. Which sort of made sense when we did 2 reviews a year, or when more than 2 people per department were allowed to get a 4. But now HR/very senior leadership can point to that “rule” to justify never ever giving anyone a promotion or raise, regardless of their actual duties or work product.

          It’s very demotivating.

          (Yes I’m mad, yes I’m looking, but ughhhh this job market.)

      2. I Have RBF*

        That is horribly very standard. Blame Jack Welch who implemented it with his rank-and-yank that ruined GE. It absolutely shits the bed WRT morale, but these people pat themselves on the back for having a “fair” and “standard” review process. I guess screwing everyone over every year is “fair” by some measure.

        Every company I have worked for in the last 30 years has had the same system, and the same forced curve fit.

    8. I Have RBF*

      I am very annoyed at companies that force-fit a standard bell curve down on to even small teams. If they hire well, the entire company should be shifted upward (ie their mean is 3.7 vs 3.0). But HR and upper management have this fantasy that even small group can and should be “normalized”, ie everyone’s ratings are depressed until it fits a “normal” distribution. It’s all part of that “rank and yank” bullshit promulgated by Jack Welch when he destroyed GE with it.

    9. Always Tired*

      We had HUGE drama this year because the bossman didn’t think the rating were fair and even, and decided that each role needed to have an average of 5 out of 10. It did not go well. one roll got a +0.2 curve, another got a -3.4 curve MINUS THREE POINT FOUR. OUT OF TEN. They all, understandably, freaked out, forcing management to reveal the “adjustment” and now I am once again, for the third year running, overhauling the entire review system as bossman insists there is a way to quantify what is mostly qualitative work, and directly and fairly compare apples to oranges.

      Adding a curve to reviews encourages the worst kind of competition, where the failures of others is almost as beneficial as your successes. This leads to bogarting information, sabotage, and an overall reduction in quality of work and employee satisfaction.

  7. nnn*

    Tangential to #4, I would love to hear from anyone with actual experience on graphic design whether you actually have to know a significant amount about football to design a football logo. Or would simply seeing other football logos and having a general sense of football aesthetics picked up from living in the world (or perhaps with some intensive research) do the job?

    This seems like the kind of situation where either a competent professional would know how to research as they go, or a competent professional would need a depth of subject matter knowledge I can’t fathom. But I can’t tell which one it is.

    1. RandomNameAllocated*

      I work in a design adjacent role and feel that an objective view from someone who is researching as they go is probably better rather than someone who is very invested in the subject – a sort of can’t see the wood for the trees thing

    2. bamcheeks*

      I was thinking that too. I mean, I am sure that if it was a brand-refresh for a major corporate team, you’d have people involved who were specialists in sports branding because there would be specifics to sports branding that weren’t relevant to say, Unilever, or weren’t as important if it was a mid-league or amateur team. But even then, I’m sure it would be way more about “being an expert in sports branding” rather than “knows about / likes football”.

    3. Angstrom*

      If there were time and resources to do the research, I’d agree that a competent professional should do a better job than an enthusiastic amatuer. If the situation were “Help! We need a concept for the 1:00 meeting today.”, someone with subject knowledge might be useful.

      1. Cmdrshprd*

        “agree that a competent professional should do a better job than an enthusiastic amatuer.”

        But even in the example it’s not professional vs amateur, but rather between two professionals, but one who is assumed to know a lot about football and who does not.

        The assumption is wrong, because John is a man they know more about football is wrong.

        But depending on what you are going for a competent professional if you want an outsiders perspective or a enthusiastic/knowledgeable professional could be the better choice if you want to appeal to the core/diehard fans.

    4. Rogue Slime Mold*

      Yeah, a deep understanding of the sport–of the biomechanics of each move, of the underlying strategy, of the fantasy league rules, of the details of training–seems like it wouldn’t particularly help with graphic design of a simple logo.

      If the team is the Snails the designs will show stylized snails.

    5. Antilles*

      No, you absolutely do not. The reason you know this isn’t the case is because the vast majority of football logos do not include anything specific to football. Seriously, go on Google right now for “NFL team logos” and count how many have any indication that they’re for a football team.
      The answer is one: The Cleveland Browns’ logo is a football helmet. Every other team’s logo is either related team’s nickname (e.g., the Chargers logo is a lightning bolt) or an abbreviation for the city (e.g., a “G” for Green Bay Packers), with nothing actually indicating it’s a football team.

      1. Always Tired*

        The Raiders have entered the chat. And 5 of the NHL teams have hockey sticks in their logos: Sharks, Penguins, Capitals, Coyotes, and Islanders.

        But that’s also not the point, because football helmets and hockey sticks are such rudimentary parts of the game, you don’t have to be a fan to recognize them. I would also suggest someone invested in football would have their team, which is likely as not to not be the team the design is for, which could result in some bias. Better to have an outsider come to research on the team and it’s fan base to optimize the logo.

    6. hbc*

      Basically no experience here, but I bet it’s a tradeoff. People with football exposure are less likely to make mistakes that would be obvious to football fans (say, using white stripes on a supposed NFL ball because of old NFL or current NCAA images), but a football fanatic is less likely to do something innovative because they’re already steeped in that imagery.

      1. Elizabeth West*

        Not sports, but book covers.

        I do my own, but they look like I did my own. If I were to hire someone, I would want them to have experience designing book covers and knowledge of how they affect sales and the appropriate graphics and lettering to use for what genre. So Lucas who has experience with book covers is going to get picked over Celestina who does not.

        Re football, I’d probably go with the knowledge first. However, you could have a two-person team if both people had disparate skills. Say Lucas knows about football, but Celestina is better with logos, or whatever. They could work together. (This is all hypothetical so there are no staffing issues or work overload, lol.)

    7. doreen*

      I don’t think you need to know a lot about the playing of the actual sport, but I suspect you might need to know a fair amount about logos, possibly more than you would pick up from watching one team or sport. For example, I watch one team – I know enough to know that every team in the area uses a different font for the city name/initials but not enough to know which team uses which font (except for the one I follow).

      1. Butterfly Counter*

        I imagine that a client won’t through an agency to the wolves with this, though. “Our standard branding are these specific colors and fonts. Go from there.”

    8. Butterfly Counter*

      This was my thought as well. I’m sure graphic designers make branding for, say, agencies who make industrial chemicals. They don’t need someone who has a degree in chemical engineering to do so. Or even need to be a chemical enthusiast.

      Most clients will say, “We want it to look like an atom in these colors,” and a graphic designer would say, “Why don’t we make the center one look like star since your name is Midnight Industries?”

      Basically, I’m with the trainer that, assuming everyone has similar graphic design experiences, you should assign projects without discrimination based on hobbies or perceived outside knowledge. Everyone should have the basic skills to do a good job if they are a design agency.

    9. amoeba*

      I mean, I guess you can argue that one either way, but in any case, it wouldn’t be illegal discrimination to give it to the person who is most interested in football!

    10. Lacey*

      The graphic design example was a bad one for the instructor to use, because it really doesn’t matter at all.

      I design for football events all the time, I know nothing about football.
      I do a little research, I look at trends within the NFL advertising and I make design.

    11. umami*

      Yes, that was my thinking. What OP is saying is … just not how design works. You don’t need foreknowledge of a subject to be able to design well. The question and answer were just fine as presented.

    12. fhqwhgads*

      The only benefit I can think of to “knowing a lot about football” is perhaps being aware of existing logos and avoiding accidental similarities. But anyone designing the new one could and should just research that anyway. So, I guess already knowing is a minor benefit.
      The example from the training is obvious discrimination in two ways. 1) the assumption that “mean know more about football” and 2) the assumption that knowing about football would be relevant, rather than knowledge of sports branding. Like, I get it’s a placeholder just to play “spot the discrimination” but it’s like the person who wrote it is missing the layers of unconscious bias injected into it.
      What I mean is, obviously, saying “well give it to Lucas because he’s a man and he knows more about football” is clear gender based discrimination. But I think while on the surface “give it to Lucas because he knows more about football” isn’t clear gender discrimination, it still probably is rooted in gender discrimination, because assuming “knowing football” has anything to do with designing a football logo. Like, no one’s really concerned about a logo with an upside-down goalpost or something. So, like if the goal is “check yourself if you’re doing something discriminatory”, it’s worth thinking about both as potentially problematic. If the goal is “which one is very obviously illegal discrimination”, the first one is. If the goal is “look closer for more signs of a pattern”, then both matter.

    13. Hannah Lee*

      Or, if you’re like one of my high school art teachers, you can have experience in graphic design, as well as familiarity with football logos, and simply plagiarize the logo of a prominent college team (Duke Blue Devils) and present it as your own work for the new high school football team logo.

      So in that case, both types of knowledge were useful.

    14. LL*

      Yeah I was thinking the same thing. I highly doubt you need to know a ton about football in order to design a logo, you just need to ask the right questions about what the person wants in the logo and be a good graphic designer. It still doesn’t fall under any kind of protected class, but it seems like it shouldn’t matter.

    15. Grimalkin*

      Semi-related tangential question for #4: Let’s assume that you don’t need to know football to design a football logo (which seems to be the consensus here anyway), but that someone who was into football would likely prefer such a project over a different one (intuitively enough). Would it make sense to give the project to someone who’d enjoy it more, all else being equal? Does it matter that love of football, specifically, is often (but not always) male-associated? Would the answer change if this project were particularly good for the project leader’s career, or conversely, if the project were closer to useless busywork than the average such project?
      (Still assuming that you actually know the preferences of the people involved rather than just assuming that John is more likely to be into football than Jane.)

      1. Plate of Wings*

        A few years ago I got selected for something coveted at work because of my completely non-professional “accomplishments” in a (female-coded, crafty) hobby!

        It didn’t help my career at all, but I work in a senior technical role and never get to fly out to cool events, let alone get to ball out for them. It’s a good (and very fancy) memory.

  8. A*

    I like the way that many European countries do non compete, which is to pay for ‘gardening leave’

    If my knowledge is really that important and you can’t let me start work for a competitor, you can pay me to stay home and do nothing for awhile! That tends to limit it to only really important employees and puts the burden on the employer. It works better in places with long notice periods where you new employer knows you’re not coming for 3 months and the only question is whether you’re still working for that time or your old company pays you to fart around at home instead

    1. Gardening leave*

      Gardening leave is meant to keep somebody out of the workplace during their notice period so that person doesn’t sabotage things and to prevent their further access to data and communication channels and software tools. Or, in case of a firing, the employer might offer a longer than standard notice period with gardening leave if the employee avoids legal actions.
      But gardening leave is not a form of non compete.

      1. allathian*

        That’s true. However, I’m in Finland and here the right to work is strong. If an employer wants to prevent an employee from working for a competitor, they’re legally required to pay the soon-to-be former employee for that time. So the employer has to decide if that employee is important enough to pay typically 3-6 months salary for nothing in return. This is meant to avoid “just because” non-competes and restrict them to people who are strategically important to the business.

        1. Sir Nose d'Voidoffunk*

          God, it’s so refreshing and sad to hear non-Americans use the phrase “right to work” and know the phrase actually makes sense for their definition.

      2. Emmy Noether*

        I think it’s not usually called gardening leave, but in some countries non competes do work somewhat like A says. For example in Germany, you can put a non compete into the contract for up to 2 years, but then the employer has to pay at least 50% salary during that time (and that would be after the up-to-6-months notice period, which will most likely be worked, or sometimes taken as gardening leave). Needless to say, they are rare.

      3. londonedit*

        Gardening leave is also supposed to give enough time for any inside knowledge the person might have to go out of date. If you have six months of gardening leave before you go to a competitor, anything you knew about what the company was doing or planning will most likely be out of date or will already have happened by the time you get to the competitor, so there’s a limit to the amount of info you’re able to take with you.

    2. Retired Vulcan Raises 1 Grey Eyebrow*

      FinalJob in Germany had gardening leave for anyone going to a competitor. HR claimed it was to prevent taking confidential data (easy to do before giving notice!) but it was really pro forma, more imo about hurt feelings and wasn’t about avoiding sabotage, which would be more a concern for someone fired (who’d get zero or minimal severance)
      Notice for salaried employees was at least 4 weeks, up to 3 months for senior managers, so it was a nice paid break between jobs.

      Many EU/EEA countries mandate compensation for the duration of the non-compete period.
      However, some may not require the full salary, so compensation is more of a topup to the salary of the interim work outside their field.
      Also, the non-compete may not be valid if there is an RIF or other non-regular ending of employment

      e.g. In Germany, the non-compete is only valid if compensation is at least 50% of salary, maximum duration of 2 years and the employer must have a clear business interest, not a whim. The job restrictions must be reasonable, not too wide and of course everything must be specified in a written agreement.

    3. Retired Vulcan Raises 1 Grey Eyebrow*

      Non-competes are rare in practice here (DE) at least in most fields, but still imo a grossly inequitable and oppressive imposition that can slow career progression. Hence I feel that this should be compensated with e.g. 150% salary for the duration. If that’s too much, then don’t require a non-compete.

      1. JSPA*

        But surely the non-compete is in the contract, and entered into knowingly?

        There are few career trajectories that can’t benefit occasionally from adding breadth of experience, further education, teaching, learning-focused travel… and a CV / resumé that specifies “lecture tour and in person research in comparative widget- manufacturing in Asia and the Americas, during contract-mandated non-compete” isn’t going to read as, “nobody would hire me, so I doomscrolled.”

    4. learnedthehardway*

      Depending on the location, the recruiter is somewhat correct (and somewhat incorrect).

      Non-competes have to be pretty specific to be enforceable, and have to be justified (at least in Canada).

      For example, a non-compete that prevents you from working in an industry as a whole for five years is likely not likely going to stand up in court. Society has an interest in you being gainfully employed in a field for which you are qualified, and employers can’t prevent that.

      However, a non compete that prevents you from working for specific competitors or companies that provide X and Y services/products which involve intellectual capital (when your employer produces X and Y) for a period of 2 years, within an appropriate geography – that’s very likely to be enforceable.

      If the OP is really interested in this role they’ve been presented, it might be a good idea to tell the recruiter that they’d have to get a legal opinion on the enforceability of the non-compete. They could also have an initial conversation with the hiring company about the role (IF their non compete is disclosed up front) or tell the recruiter to check with the hiring company. The company’s corporate legal counsel can probably determine whether or not the non-compete is enforceable.

    5. Sloanicota*

      Right. This would suddenly prevent “sandwich artists” from having to sign non-competes to work in chains, or even nurses; suddenly the company would realize it’s not worth *their* money.

  9. Shipbuilding Techniques*

    Regarding Q2: My company also redid its rating system recently, adding an extra layer of obfuscatory numbers as well as new definitions of what the ratings mean. What’s amusing to me is that they are now trying to spin it that “today’s 3” is better than previous years’ “meets expectations 3s” and is in fact more like what prior year’s “above expectations 4s” were! And of course everyone is getting 3s because this firm is chockfull of superior people! Even a 2 is not that bad! And we have a few ACTUAL 4 AND 5 LEVEL PEOPLE SOMEWHERE! Buck up, everyone!

    1. Bird names*

      Hm, let me guess, the “today’s 3” somehow still don’t merit raises though?

      At this point I wonder if it wouldn’t make more sense and save time to simply skip ratings like that entirely and just give general feedback while making clear that nobody gets a raise this year. At least it’d be more honest…. and less insulting.

    2. just tired*

      The whole rating system in this is completely ridiculous, what’s the point of having the damn scale go up to five if you are never allowed to put anyone there? Personally I show up to work every single day, I’ve called out sick twice in the last 5 years. I work with other people well, I get all my stuff done quickly and efficiently every single day. I think I am “exceeds” expectations but I am never given that. And we definitely didn’t get merit increases, we barely got a cost of living raise.

      1. Aggretsuko*

        Yeah, I think everywhere that I’ve ever heard of is 3’s only if you’re passable or doing well. This is common practice. I think they’re obligated to “offer” 4’s and 5’s, but they won’t actually do that if they’d have to raise your pay. I would only get a 4 on something if they gave me a 2 on something else, it was very balanced out to make sure you got 3’s as your final result (until they started hating my guts and I got 1’s on everything, anyway).

        It is what it is. I think what’s the point in having performance reviews anyway, but we still have to have ’em.

      2. librarian*

        In my experience managers need to really advocate to give their employees a 4 or 5. They need to have taken detailed notes over the year and take the time to write an extremely in depth, well thought out review in order to convince HR that their employee deserves to be higher than a three. It’s sad, but most manager just… don’t want to do that. They either don’t have the time or don’t see the merit.

      3. Hannah Lee*

        The “HR arbitrarily changed the ratings” thing is bonkers.

        It’s also really crazy when you consider that some departments may have a bunch of high performers (for example, some companies create departments that are incubators for high-potential employees, working on high impact projects, and manage them well) vs other departments that have more mid-level performers, or might even be staffed / scheduled to be a churn department where they just want bodies in to do xyz for however long they last , and staff with a “bad breath is better than no breath” mentality

        So with the forced ranking, bell curve kind of stuff, you could have a one department of 20 high performers with an actual assessment based on performance that’s a 1-5 distribution of 0-0-4-10-6 and another with a distribution of 1-4-14-1-0.

        And then HR/the CEO declares every department has to rank on a curve/% that results every department of 20 having 2-4-11-2-1, and the people who rated 1 and 2 are all in line for being RIF’d or PIP’d, and only the rare 5’s and maybe 4’s getting any raises, with no exceptions.

        And so the company lays off 6 of their highest performing/high potential employees, making a bunch more feel undervalued and likely sparking job hunts, and gives raises to 2 or 3 middling employees in some other department. I worked at one company that did exactly that – a few in their c-suite were enamored with the GE way or other dysfunctional management “rules”. It was ridiculous and resulted in the loss of some really talented, hard working people, some with incredible industry and institutional knowledge.

        (add into that some sexism and other isms that resulted in thinks like VP’s gaming the adjusted ratings so that – actual occurrence – a middling performing man with a stay at home wife and 2 kids gets his rating adjusted to from 2 to 4 “because he needs the money” while a high performing single woman co-worker is adjusted down from 4 to 2 (and no raise) to balance things out on the arbitrary curve. It’s a really bad practice all the way around)

        1. JustaTech*

          Exactly. Microsoft did this for years and it was very unproductive in the long term as far as fostering cooperation within even a single team, and in the company overall.

          It also made for an absolutely miserable road trip one time when I picked up a friend to go to the lake for a holiday weekend just after he’d gotten his mandatory 3, (even though he’d done some serious reach projects that year) and he ranted the entire 4 hour drive. On the one hand I felt bad because he had clearly been done wrong. On the other hand, it’s a lot to ask for me to drive in holiday weekend traffic *and* listen to ranting.

      1. fhqwhgads*

        So have we, but it also only goes to 4 here, not 5. But yeah, I’m used to employees feeling like 3 = meh, because on a 5 star survey, most people use 3 to mean “meh”.

        But I’ve been repeatedly told at every job that 3 (or whatever number = “meets expectations”) is a good thing. It means you’re meeting all of the requirements of your job, doing what you’re supposed to do, and can keep on doing that. And they really do expect most people to be 3s for everything most of the time. There’s no arbitrary X percentage who must be 3, or grading on a curve. That’s crap.
        You’re supposed to be judged against the job requirements and expectations for your specific role. And “meets” is good and indicates you’re doing everything you’re supposed to. “Exceeds” means you’re working at a higher level. So, say, someone with mostly 4s has a very good argument they ought to be promoted.

        If what happened in the letter were truly arbitrary, or affected anyone’s bonuses or potential pay increases, that is absolute garbage. But I’m not necessarily against the idea that HR might be telling managers they’re not using the numbering system correctly, if it does indeed apply the way I’m used to seeing.

  10. Mark*

    #3 Maybe it is a cultural thing but here in my European company I have never seen anyone announce their pregnancy by email. The norm is the first person you tell at work is your manager. After that you can inform whoever you like or don’t like but most people get word eventually. Sometimes at a team meeting you may hear that we are recruiting to fill Jane’s position as she will be going on maternity leave etc.

    1. CityMouse*

      I’m in the US and covered for multiple maternity leaves (and taken my own) and never seen someone send an announcement email before birth. Birth announcements yes pregnancy, no.

      Having been a supervisor when I did send out “Can someone cover this project” emails, we actually very deliberately would NOT mention whose work it was and why due to US privacy laws.

    2. doreen*

      I’m in the US and I’ve never seen an email announcement of a pregnancy either. The one time I saw someone have a problem with co-workers, it wasn’t just that she didn’t announce it , it was that she actively denied being pregnant when people asked when she was going on leave. Which meant she didn’t arrange leave in advance, everyone just got to work one day to find out a baby was born and “Natalie” would be on leave for 2-7 months. ( I have no idea why she did that, she didn’t do it with her first pregnancy) and it was the sudden leave that really caused the problem, not that she didn’t announce the pregnancy to the whole office.

    3. JustaTech*

      I’m in the US and I didn’t send out a formal email. I told my boss (and 2x boss) in person, and then eventually told me coworkers at a social thing.

      I did send out a “I will be on leave, here is all the information I have for this project, if you have questions ask now, otherwise ask Boss”, but that was only for a specific project.

      Maybe if you were a majority remote job it might be an email?

  11. Coffee Snob/Knob*

    Contributing to #2, my boss has this “Calibration Meeting” where he would forcefully downgrade the overall annual review results by at least 1 to 2 grades, based off a 5 point system similar to OP2. It’s not even a bell curve, it’s a deliberate reduction in the overall grade despite the sales team recording record profits for the company. This meant that a rockstar performer (nearly 20% of the entire company sales BY HIMSELF) got a 3 overall, which meant a 2.5% increment (cost of living + merit). He was so shell-shocked coming out of the review.

    1. Dark Knight in White Satin*

      I hope the “rockstar performer” went on to be a rockstar for a competitor.

    3. Lucy P*

      What is the actual point of it, other than to be able to deny merit-based raises and promotions?

      1. Ex manager*

        That would be the actual point of it, yes. Specifically, the company has a very limited budget for ‘merit’ raises, and so has to ‘calibrate’ the ratings to fit that budget. That boss just takes that to an extreme.

          1. I Have RBF*

            Yeah, somehow “calibrating” never hits VPs and C-suite, and they get fat raises every year, even if they are driving the company into the ground. It’s the ICs and line managers that have to get the sucky reviews and shitty “merit” increases that don’t even keep up with inflation. Then they wonder why they can’t keep people more than two years.

      2. Coffee Snob/Knob*

        The issue I have with, is that if this way was imposed across the whole company, I would be more “oh whatever, its the company norm”, but its only applied to the sales team. Marketing, CS, all under the same boss? Not affected.

    4. JustaTech*

      In my first calibration meeting as a manager (this past year) our VP was very frustrated that *anyone* was ranked a 4 and said “oh come on, they’re not all doing such great work”.

      It didn’t help that he refused to define what a 4 was in his mind (just kept referencing the company definitions which are *clearly* not used). So people who had (by our estimation) been knocking it out of the park and saving our collective bacon were rated “3”.

      It was very frustrating and I’m sure everyone will be disappointed (or more) when we finally get our reviews back in a couple of months.

  12. Nodramalama*

    LW3 won’t there eventually have to be some kind of an announcement or messaging about mat leave coverage?

    1. RIP Pillowfort*

      Not necessarily. I just set my Out of Office messages to state I was out on maternity leave until X date and who to contact while I was out.

      I didn’t have to announce it. If someone tried to call me or email me they found out I was out and got an alternative contact.

      1. Dr. Rebecca*

        This, and depending on who/how you were being covered, you could just shorten that to “leave” or “on sabbatical” without specifying what kind.

      2. Nodramalama*

        So your team had no idea you were about to take leave and found out via an out of office?

        1. Dr. Rebecca*

          I mean, that’s assuming several things: that RIP Pillowfort has a team, that anyone on that team needed to know in order to do their job, that whomever covered for RIP Pillowfort wasn’t competent to do so/interact/liaise with the team if there was one…

          People go on leave. It’s a thing that businesses should be prepared to handle without making a fuss about it or needing to mention why/what the leave is for.

          1. Allonge*

            Most people don’t work in a vacuum though, so these are not unreasonable assumptions.

            And no, you don’t need to share anything about your person, you can be just a faceless entity who sends emails sometimes. Lots of people will find it a bit extreme!

  13. Opaline*

    My old job had the amazing loophole that no-one could score above a 3 (meets expectations) because their expectations *were* that you’d go above and beyond, give 120%, do regular overtime, pick up extra duties not in your job description, etc.

    How did you score a 4? No one knew.

    The word was to get a 5 you basically had to do so well you got a spontaneous promotion. But of course, if you got promoted you’d be evaluated against your new role. Which you’re still learning and haven’t been in for a full year, so you can’t be meeting expectations yet…

    1. CityMouse*

      I once had to explain to a trainee that rating someone anything other than a 3 during the training session was basically impossible because they hadn’t produced enough work product to be rated otherwise. Basically my training rating was just signing off that they’d completed it.

    2. Upside down Question Mark*

      “do so well” meaning trade your personal life for work and break all boundaries of physical and mental health completely to get a 4 or 5.

    3. Laura*

      The joke at my old workplace (biomedical research with a heavy focus on cancer) was that Jesus could come down from the heavens and cure all cancers and still couldn’t get a 5.

      1. The Unspeakable Queen Lisa*

        My ED said that to get a 5 you had to be a “water walker” – so same thing. Ironically, this was a company that handled statistics regularly and supposedly knew what kertosis was.

      2. JustaTech*

        The time when I did a random side project that ended up saving our ability to continue manufacturing (versus shutting down completely), I got a “thank you” and a $100 Amazon card.
        And something to put on my resume.

    4. Sloanicota*

      Haha I’m always bemused by human’s weirdness around the 5 point scale. I work in books, and there are a LOT of reviewers who believe a book they loved should be a 3, whereas 4 is for the best book you’ve ever read in your entire life, and there are no 5s. Sad to see companies adapting that mindset if the 3s don’t get a raise though.

      1. Tea Monk*

        Amusingly on the little 5 star surveys they have everywhere we have to give people all 5s so they won’t be fired

        1. Sloanicota*

          Right?? There’s people saying “most good things should be a 3,” people saying “anything other than a 5 is bad” and people saying “I never give a 5 for anything” – all using the same scale and expecting to be understood!!

          1. Hannah Lee*

            Add into that the review bombers who organize to give whatever company/product/organization/person that is this month’s target 0’s or 1’s and you realize that those rating systems are really not worth much.

            (eg any Star Wars or superhero film that featured women or POC in prominent roles)

        2. Hush42*

          Yep. I took my car to the dealership for some service and the service person that I was working with (who was wonderful) told me that the manufacturer sends out random surveys after service. He asked that if I got one to only give 10s because even getting a 9 on a 10 point scale wasn’t good enough for the manufacturer and would result in a ding to his record… which is absolutely insane to me. He also wasn’t supposed to tell me, and whether or not he did tell me was a question on the survey. I lied on the survey, of course. But last time I checked 90% was normally considered a very good score.

          1. Lady Lessa*

            I’ve seen the same thing with my dealership and have done the same thing. If it is the same firm, they have a plant in G’town KY.

          2. Wilbur*

            For a a while this was the case for internal project surveys at my Fortune 50 company. Anything less than a 9 and it triggered a mandatory meeting with that person and their supervisor. Meanwhile performance reviews were on a scale from 1-5 (1 being the best), with 1 being impossible, 2 being almost impossible, and 3 being anyone that didn’t have glaring performance issues. They also adjusted performance ratings because your rating determined the % raise you would get and there’s only so much money allocated for raises every year. I don’t know why they don’t just adjust the % raise to fit the amount of money they can give you. There are longstanding complaints about recognition.

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

          I worked for a cell phone company and the scale was 1-10. Anything under 9 got used against you. Too many bad survey’s and you got fired.

      2. Scholarly Publisher*

        For ratings of purchases, I still prefer that to the “everything must receive a 5 if it has any merit whatsoever; giving it a 4 is the same as giving it a 0” attitude. Most of my reading and movie and shopping experiences are 3 out of 5, and that’s fine; it means I got what I needed and there were no problems (and that I’ll come back to that store or read another book by the same author or continue to use that brand).

        For people’s jobs — well, that’s why in practice I’ll rate an ordinary transaction as five stars, because I don’t want the employee to be screwed over by a system that only tolerates extraordinary.

        1. Another Kristin*

          Yeah, I think we need to normalize the 3-star review*. I really hate the thing where you leave a 3 star review on Google Maps or whatever and the store manager leaves an apologetic reply about how they’re sorry they didn’t meet your expectations. I didn’t expect my trip to Walmart to be a stellar, 5-star experience! I expected it to be pretty mid, and it was! No one in their right mind would expect anything else!

          “4/5 is the same as 0” is sort of analogous to the mindset among some parents that any grades other than straight As are a failure. Personally, I worry if my kids are clearly struggling or are getting failing/barely passing grades, but a mix of As and Bs and the occasional C is just fine – the kids are learning, some subjects are easier for them than others, but they are grasping the material and meeting expectations. Not everything has to be perfect all the time.

          *with the caveat that you should give your Uber/delivery driver/other service delivery person a 5 star review, because we all know anything less is risking their livelihood

    5. Rusty Shackelford*

      Reminds me of a social media post I saw recently from a doctor. Someone had rated him 4/5 starts and commented “Dr Jones saved my life!” and the poor guy was wondering what he had to do to get a 5/5.

    6. Aggretsuko*

      This sounds like the professor I had who said he’d only give you an A if you had a halo over your head.

    7. Head Sheep Counter*

      I had a boss deploy this logic on me and I looked her dead in the eye and stated that I didn’t think it was a good thing to aspire to be a C student but that if she wanted meets level work that’s what she’d get.

    8. Pomodoro Sauce*

      I worked for a government agency where to get anything above “exceeds expectations” you’d have to do something so truly extraordinary that everyone would know.

      There was a crisis with some of that agency’s facilities that was on international news. About a third of the agency’s staff handed off their project and reported to the facility, where they spent a year+ of hundred hour weeks literally putting things back together in a series of trailers during several extreme weather events. This wasn’t in their job description, they just went because they were asked.

      Around this time my group got a new supervisor, who asked us to fill out our evaluations together, and include the people from our group who had been at the crisis for almost a year. I convinced my group to give them all “exceeds expectations” — we still provided support to them, and they’d absolutely hit that metric: this is clearly the circumstance where “Exceeds Expectations” applies.

      The new supervisor wouldn’t even let us submit it. “Sorry!” she said “They say it’s only in INCREDIBLE circumstances, and I wasn’t here to see whether it qualified! I just can’t! Sorry!”

      She had very high staff turnover as long as she remained in a management position.

  14. Grey Coder*

    LW2: I went through this at ExJob as a team lead, which was the lowest level line manager. I had naively assigned ratings based on the standard meanings of the words (“meets expectations” “exceeds expectations”) and apparently the overall distribution was not to the liking of senior management.

    All the team leads were called into a room to argue it out so that the “correct” number of people would be given the higher ratings. The snag was that the teams were doing very different work and it was just not possible for me to (ethically) argue that my team member was better than someone in another team when I didn’t know what the other team did.

    I pushed back in the meeting — in retrospect I’m kind of surprised I wasn’t reprimanded or even fired, though I think I did limit my prospects there as a result. The senior manager’s favourites got the high rankings, others were pushed down to “meets expectations”, and I had some illusions about fairness shattered. At least they changed things the next year.

  15. Turingtested*

    LW 1, as a hiring manager I would want to know about the allegations of grooming of minors and I would likely have a lot of questions you don’t have the answers to because you don’t have direct knowledge of the incident. I’d be very straightforward and say something like “I don’t mean this as gossip, and I don’t have many details but two people I trust said _____.”

    Given the lack of details and direct knowledge of the allegations of grooming, don’t be surprised if nothing immediately happens. But if your leadership is good they will watch him very carefully.

    1. Real paisan*

      How would you respond if you were falsely accused of having groomed a minor? If the accusations are false, what can Brad possibly say in his defense?

      1. Silver Robin*

        give a factual summary of what happened and provide references from previous job who are willing to back up that story, ideally in management/hr?

        1. huh*

          So, based off of hearsay, Brad gets to work in a new job with a million eyes on him, all belonging to people assuming he’s a pedophile. Great.

          1. hbc*

            I’ve been falsely accused of racial discrimination before. It was really not a big deal. People were interviewed, there was no evidence found of discrimination, and the investigator told me that the former employee (who had resigned) would probably be trying to come back within six months. She was right. As far as I can tell, it never affected my interactions with anyone, and I was able to take a big step up the ladder at my next job.

            Of course, being someone who believes that people should be able to report suspicions probably contributed to me being trusted. If I’d have been going around “AllLivesMatter!!” and “What About Reverse Racism?!?!” before, I probably wouldn’t have gotten much benefit of the doubt.

            1. Hiring Mgr*

              Ok but we’ve seen other instances of false accusations where it was shoot first and ask questions later. Your incident may have worked out alright, but I wouldn’t be so cavalier about false accusations being ho-hum

            1. Elizabeth West*

              Unfortunately, some predators are good at waiting until the eyes are looking somewhere else.

              2. Ellis Bell*

                That would be addressed by policy in even a mediocre organisation. So, anyone who made a habit of working out of sight would be corrected, or fired regardless of what they were doing out of sight. Equally people who aren’t being vigilant are not doing their jobs. This is standard stuff.

        2. Real paisan*

          But who’s to say that anything happened? If I were told that an anonymous accusation had been made against me by someone at work, I wouldn’t even be able to guess what had been said by whom. Assuming the accusations are false—which, as a matter of principle, I will unless and until they are demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt to be true—would Brad’s boss really be satisfied if his responses were “I don’t know” or “I wish I knew”?

          1. Jackalope*

            Why would you assume that they’re false? I can understand choosing not to make an assumption either way until you can investigate, but the assumption that they’re false is going too far the other direction from what you say you’re trying to avoid.

            1. Real paisan*

              I address thise elsewhere but I simply default to the presumption of innocence unless I personally witness wrongdoing or unless I’m told about it by someone in a position to know the truth whom I know and trust. l understand that private individuals are not required to extend the presumption of innocence to others, but I simply believe it to be the most morally defensible stance to take unless there’s overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

              1. metadata minion*

                If Brad is now working anywhere that puts him in a position of authority around minors, the risk in assuming innocence is pretty terrible. I would much rather make one employee uncomfortable — and a decent person would understand why everyone is being so cautious — than risk more children be abused.

              2. Tea Monk*

                It just depends on individual experience- I’m so used to people being like ” he must be proven guilty in a court of law for you to think a guys a creep for slapping a girl’s ass” that I find that whole thing a red flag

                1. Real paisan*

                  I understand, which is why I set this standard aside where I personally witness wrongdoing or where I’m told that someone I know and trust has witnessed it. (If I saw someone I recognize assault someone, I wouldn’t say, “Well, he hasn’t been found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt by a jury of his peers so I’m going to withold judgment”!)

              3. inksmith*

                So, Real paisan, you and I don’t know each other. If I tell you I was a victim of domestic abuse, do you automatically assume I’m lying, because you didn’t see it, and you don’t know me? What if I say my car was broken into, or I was sexually harassed at work, or someone hit my car with theirs?

                Because that’s what you’re actually saying – you assume everyone you don’t know is probably lying about what happened to them, since you assume the person they’re saying did the thing (in this case, not even named) must be innocent. If the person who abused me is presumed innocent because you don’t know me and didn’t see it happen, then I’m by default presumed guilty of lying about it – because how else can my hypothetical abuser be innocent?

                You see why that’s bad, right?

                1. AnonMouse*

                  I mean, I don’t know you, you could be making all of this up to win an argument on the internet. The internet can influence real life, but it isn’t.

                  I could say all the same things as you, but that wouldn’t make them true.

                  I wouldn’t be running around calling you a liar, but I would treat it as “so and such said”.

          2. Thegs*

            “Furry” is one of my hobbies, and yeah, we’re getting the “pedophile” and “groomer” accusations slung at us now. Conservatives are obsessed with tearing down the subculture because it’s so tightly integrated with LGBT+; they’ve fired the first salvo with the FURRIES act in Texas. We’re officially in their sights for getting legally categorized as pedophiles.

            So like, all these posts saying, “any rumor of X being a groomer means they must be treated as one,” sure feels great when 40% of the country is accusing every single LGBT person of being a pedophile for their own political gains. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be looking out for children, but “groomer” has been functionally entirely coopted by the fascists. Every accusation might have been weaponized so they need to be taken with a grain of salt, and that’s such a horrible thing to have to be forced to take in to account when it comes to kids’ safety.

      2. Nomic*

        In the above scenario Brad doesn’t get a chance to defend himself, he is just “watched carefully” (with all the gossip and potential job limitations that entails).

        This is all 3rd-hand knowledge at best, and troublesome on both sides of the equation.

      3. Ellis Bell*

        That isn’t how it works. People working with minors have to follow certain policies, like not contacting minors out of hours, or being alone with them out of approved areas. If Brad followed the policies, great, they will be logged and he can point to the trail that all people who work with children have. If he can’t, he needs training on protocol, and possibly a different job. I work with kids, I can tell you exactly what policies I have followed with each child and most of it will be on camera. I even had a spurious accusation once, which was very easily dealt with, even though I was trainee in a school with shaky policies. Brad isn’t someone who would be unaware of how to do this. It is part of the job.

        1. Elle*

          This is really well put. If Brad is on the up and up, being transparent about the concerns will let him have a chance to vindicate himself and everyone can move on.

  16. Hiring Mgr*

    Does Brad actually work for the same company as LW, or is it a partner organization? I would still mention something, but I wouldn’t necessarily expect your boss to do anything if Brad isn’t even a direct colleague

    1. Real paisan*

      If you wouldn’t expect LW’s boss to do anything then what possible reason could LW have to tell her?

      1. Hyaline*

        So let’s say you work for a school and your school contracts with a company to provide training on harassment. You find out that there were allegations against Jimbo, one of the training personnel, for inappropriate conduct. Do you try to do some more research? Do you continue to contract with that company? Do you ask that Jimbo not be assigned your location? There might be many situations like this where directly managing someone isn’t the only position that has some recourse.

  17. Llama Llama*

    Regarding number 2. I haaaaaaate the way my workplace does it’s distribution. We get in a room for a days and talk about all people at the same career level with our recommendation for rating. It’s insanely cut throat and people will tear apart a review if they don’t believe they deserve their rating.

    In the end HR will make a final decision. Last year anyone with the lowest rating were let go from the company ( we didn’t know that during the reviews). Some people with the second lowest rating were bumped down!

    1. Pastor Petty Labelle*

      Which is the problem. Come layoff time, they don’t remember everyone was graded on a curve. They just see the low rating and out they go.

      OP, add a document to your file stating you protest your downgraded number. that might help you later. Maybe.

    2. I Just Want to Win The Lottery so I Can Quit*

      My company is similar. We don’t have ratings on our reviews, just comments. But raises… 80% of people get the same raise (3.5% this year) and the other 20% get a “compensation adder” that bumps them up a couple percent. It’s 20% of each employee level, regardless of job title, so all the senior engineers, senior finance analysts, senior ___ are in the same bucket.

      And because the math will work out with fractions of people in each supervisor’s group, there are arguments and negotiations to decide who gets how many people to give the adder to.

      Meanwhile, someone who is doing terrible and heading towards a PIP gets the same raise as the person who is knocking it out of the park but there weren’t enough spots in the 20%. I hate it. I have no incentive to do more than the bare minimum in my own job, and I have to give performance reviews to underperforming and highly performing people who get the same raise. I despise review season.

  18. Can’t think of anything clever*

    We had a male employee I’ll call Ted call his supervisor and tell him his wife had had the baby and he wouldn’t be in to work until a date 3 months away. What baby? He literally had told no one his wife was pregnant. The biggest problem was the scramble to cover the schedule. Paperwork can easily be caught up with so that wasn’t a huge issue but it would have been easier to do it while he was still at work. Still, I wouldn’t envision needing to make any big announcements, just tell the scheduler and payroll clerk and it sounds like that’s been done by the LW already!

  19. r..*

    LW2,

    The concept of forcing a certain distribution on performance review ratings. It is at various times called ‘vitality curve’, ‘stack ranking’, ‘rank and yank’, and many others. It has serious problems because

    a) under the assumption that reviews are honest assessments it punishes above-average teams, it rewards below-average teams.
    b) it hence incentivices inefficient and intransparent practices, like hiring of people (there’s even industry terms for it like ‘buffer hires’) you know you will almost certainly rank at below expectations, in order to not have to assign this rank to people than don’t deserve it
    c) it makes ratings between teams of different qualities completely uncomparable
    d) and many others

    The way the company approaches this, however, is banana-pants even by stack ranking standards.

    If you tried to get me to play along with this I’d change the comments. Oh, I definitely would. I’d add that my own assigned rating for their performance is X, that the assigned rating was changed without feedback to Y by HR and is entirely unrelated to actual performance, and that I maintain that X was the appropriate rating.

    HR … wouldn’t like that, but that is their problem, not mine. They asked me to rewrite my comment to reflect their change in rating, and I did what they asked me to do.

    1. Rogue Slime Mold*

      It is such a failure to understand math. A group of 4-40 humans isn’t going to neatly break down into a bell curve for every task. And this isn’t even a randomized group of humans, but humans who were chosen because they are expected to have these skills and excel at these roles.

      It’s saying “As an employer, we are deeply committed to the idea that our entire workforce is mediocre.”

      1. bamcheeks*

        Misunderstanding of maths, but also motivation. I think that’s always the key group f more than six people you’ve probably got:

        – one person who is motivated by the intrinsic challenge of the work
        – one person who is motivated by the extrinsic reward of more cash
        – one person who is motivated by extrinsic reward of recognition or praise
        – one person who is motivated by the fear of losing their job
        – one person who doesn’t give a shit, which does not correlate with being a good or bad performer

        The fact that all those people would like a raise doesn’t necessarily mean that they will perform better if a raise is available to them. On the flipside, it’s easy to demotivate any and all of them by getting the reward and recognition wrong.

        I am not sure there is such a thing as a reward and recognition system that works for everyone, because everyone is so different and a company necessarily has to pick one system. I think the most functional companies are probably the ones that recognise that and give managers maximum flexibility and support to figure out what individual’s key motivations are and work to them.

        1. bamcheeks*

          somehow I deleted half my second sentence, but it was supposed to say:
          I think that’s always the key problem with performance management and reward and recognition systems: in any group of more than six people you’ve probably got:

        2. metadata minion*

          I was under the impression that a raise was intended to reward good work, not incentivize better performance. I would be pissed if I didn’t get a raise because I’m not particularly motivated by money. That doesn’t mean I don’t still *need* the money!

          2. bamcheeks*

            Right, that’s what I mean about how it can go wrong. Even if you aren’t directly motivated by the chance of getting a raise, you can be demotivated by not getting it!

            1. metadata minion*

              I guess what I was trying to say is that in the case of money, unless you’re in a very highly-paid field I don’t think it makes sense to even ask whether your employees are intrinsically motivated by money. Everyone likes being able to pay rent or childcare or medical bills. Just give people raises if they perform to the standard that warrants a raise.

              1. bamcheeks*

                But that’s what I mean: you have to make a decision on what “the standard that warrants a raise” is, and that’s also going to reward some people and not others. “Everyone who is doing their job well gets a 4% raise” can be super demotivating to someone who believes they are going above and beyond but sees someone else who is doing fine-but-not-brilliant get the same raise. I am unconvinced that it’s possible to create a system that isn’t going to have some some perverse incentives or demotivational effect somewhere along the way.

                1. r..*

                  Here’s the thing:

                  Most reasonable people, who are feeling valued in the job, feeling paid adequately, and so on, will not be ‘super demotivated’ by a single instance of them getting the same 4% as someone else does.

                  This only tends to become a problem if there’s significant other dysfunctionalities that piss them off, if they don’t feel valued, if they feel like they should’ve gotten merit/bonus award and haven’t gotten them for *years*, …

    2. Junior Assistant Peon*

      Stack ranking was a big problem at a past employer of mine. They went through a long period of shrinkage through attrition, during which all of the low performers were managed out. We ended up in a situation where there wasn’t anyone left who deserved a low rating, but people would get forced into the low band anyway just to make a nice bell curve.

      1. Aww, coffee, no*

        Yup, my company laid off a significant percentage of people during the worst Covid years, in order to save money, and it was the lowest performers who were let go.
        Managers the year after that were extremely irate at the very idea that they would have anyone left who fell below ‘Meets expectations’.

    3. Eldritch Office Worker*

      I posted my rant below but you’re completely correct. This is one of my lines in the sand as HR. I’ll do some stupid things to please leadership, but we’re not doing stack ranking. The ripple effects on morale, retention, planning, and more are simply not worth the fleeting joy they find in a pretty bell curve.

    4. Parenthesis Guy*

      “HR … wouldn’t like that, but that is their problem, not mine. They asked me to rewrite my comment to reflect their change in rating, and I did what they asked me to do.”

      I strongly suspect they’d make it your problem.

      1. r..*

        They would be quite welcome to try.

        This isn’t the type of conflict I am afraid of. As a matter of fact it is the sort of conflict — a dysfunction that will seriously imperil the long-term ability of the company to retain talent at competitive costs — a good manager, in my eyes, must not be afraid of.

        The thing is that even if one thinks that stack ranking is a good idea, this is an extremely inane way to execute it. By the time they’d try to make it my problem I’d already have talked with boss, and with my grandboss.

        I’d likely also have talked with corporate counsel, because those changes by definition are arbitrary and result in performance ratings that are not objective (they cannot be, because the persons doing the adjustment lack the knowledge to accurately assess the peformance). As a consequence we might end up doing silly things like giving people of different protected characteristics different ratings (and hence pay) for the same work, but without an ‘objective merit’ defense.

        As a manager, that’s the sort of conflict you either win, or you need to take the hint and move on to a place where you can actually do good work. Trying to be a good manager at a place where HR thinks this is a good idea, *and* is backed up by the Powers That Be, is like rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.

    5. Antilles*

      I agree. There’s also the problem that it subtly encourages all sorts of toxic behaviors with your employees because it sets them up as rivals rather than teammates.
      If you know that one person in the department is getting a bad review no matter what, it’s clearly to your benefit to make absolutely sure that there’s at least one person in your group who’s worse than you. Don’t offer help to that struggling colleague, you want him to keep struggling. If you foresee a big roadblock coming on his project, keep your mouth shut and hope he faceplants into the wall. Etc.

      1. I Have RBF*

        There’s also the problem that it subtly encourages all sorts of toxic behaviors with your employees because it sets them up as rivals rather than teammates.

        This.

        Yahoo under Mayer went to goddamn quarterly stack ranking, then canned everyone who wasn’t politically popular enough to keep out of the lower ranks. It was all based on what flashy stuff you had done, and your own peers were your rivals. It was the worst of Jack Welch, all designed to avoid calling it a layoff because of the WARN act. They “managed out”/canned mostly people who were older or other protected classes and had been there a long time. Then to get severance they wanted you to sign pages of lies that said they could claw back any EEOC or class action awards. I didn’t sign it. I hope they lost sleep over that.

    6. Ginger Cat Lady*

      It also encourages mediocre performance. What’s the point of doing a good, thorough job if I’m only ever going to score a mediocre review and never get a raise or promotion?
      HR defends the practice as “reminding employees that there is *always* room for improvement!”
      You’ve heard of acting your wage. Ever since my company instituted this policy, I’ve been acting my review. If I’m going to get a review of “meets minimum expectations” every damn year no matter what I do, then you better believe I’m only going to put in the effort to “meet minimum expectations”
      You want a rock star (like they say in their job ads)? Then stop negging your high performers with mediocre reviews.

      1. Eldritch Office Worker*

        Such a good use of negging. I’ve never heard it in that context but it’s so true.

  20. Eldritch Office Worker*

    The quotas for performance reviews thing drives me nuts, and is widely misinterpreted and therefore badly implemented by overly literal HR teams.

    The way I try to explain it to people is “if our performance system is working as intended, we should see something resembling a bell curve to signify normal statistical distribution”. That bell curve can sit farther right on the graph – and we hope it does! – but we want to make sure that people are being given realistic, actionable feedback. If everyone was scoring at the highest level we would also be reaching all of organizational goals without exception, so we also want to look at that comparison.”

    Data has nuance. It tells a story. If you manipulate the data it doesn’t tell you anything anymore. I use performance reviews scores to influence organization training, recruitment, to justify salary proposals, and for strategic planning. I want to know how people are really doing – are they ready for promotions, do they need extra support, is the whole team underperforming do we need to look into adding people or structures. The only thing these HR departments are doing is creating a pretty graph to present at a board meeting and give no further thought to.

    1. Parrhesia25*

      I have to disagree with you. What you are describing is a largely discredited system for grading students that tells you little-to-nothing about how people are actually doing. You could have a company full of nincompoops but wouldn’t necessarily know it if you were forcing their evaluations to fit into the middle of a bell curve. You could also convince yourself that your company full of rock stars was actually a company of average and below-average employees.

      Nonsense like this is why most performance evaluation systems are seen as wastes of time.

      Why not just have clear, objective performance standards that you measure your employees against and use as the basis for a professional discussion of employee’s strength, weaknesses and growth opportunities?

      1. Eldritch Office Worker*

        I don’t think you read my comment correctly.

        These systems do have clear, objective performance standards – and statistically, most employees perform across a bell curve. Which means the output of a performance system that is accurately rating employees will often “resemble” – note I said resemble – a bell curve. And the data about whether or not those metrics are being met, how the distribution plays out, and whether the organization is meeting their goals, is a key component in strategic planning.

        I am extremely against stacked ranking, and specifically said not to manipulate or force the data in any way.

        Performance processes are useless if you don’t look at the whole. Without the greater context you don’t know if managers are being fair, you don’t know if there are organizational trends that need to be addressed, you don’t know the best way to allocate your resources. This is all important data and the point I made was that the integrity of that requires not forcing any specific distribution.

        However, if the distribution is statistically unlikely at the end, you should look into why. But you shouldn’t change it.

        1. Ex manager*

          The entire POPULATION will be on a bell curve if:
          you have a metric which runs to infinity in both directions.
          No one is excluded.
          There are no factors creating ‘lumps’ (training and experience, for example)
          etc.

          In a given company, the lowest performers are fired. (Hopefully) That truncates the bottom end of the curve. The pay scale for the company fits somewhere in industry and professional norms, so it is unlikely that the very best of the best stick around if they aren’t paid. That means means the given company will have a curve that is decidedly NOT bell shaped. Hopefully, it will be truncated downward – the bottom of the tail will be cut off, but in most places it will be truncated upward as well, because the best will leave for greener pastures and be promoted. Ideally, yes, this means a huge number of ‘3’, very few ‘1’ and ‘5’ (those should be PIP’d or on promotion track respectively – unless they are the rare high-performer who wants to stay in place), and some ‘2’ (needing help) and ‘4’ (merit increase).

          What this shouldn’t mean is an even number of 2 and 4 – a good paying, high ambition company will have far more 4’s than 2’s, while a low paying, low ambition company will have far more 2’s than 4’s. Having ‘5’s who don’t want promotions isn’t shameful either. Forcing a bell curve is saying “we want to be average”. It is stupid.

          1. Eldritch Office Worker*

            The bell curve doesn’t automatically have to start at 1. It can be a bell curve situated from 3-5, which I mention in my original comment. If everyone is at 5 you’re not doing enough to differentiate between or recognize the nuances in the high performers, and 5s don’t need to be the only ones getting full raises or promotions. I wouldn’t use a 1-5 scale anyway but that’s semantic.

    2. Parenthesis Guy*

      It’s tough, because managers can inflate scores if there isn’t a check of some sort on them. I’ve worked at places where the grandboss and great-grandboss might change scores for employees in their overall line of command.

      But then, maybe it’s fair to say that knowing that such-and-such manager gives the average employee a 4 rather than a 3 is an interesting data point. It can help put future potential praise into appropriate context.

      1. Eldritch Office Worker*

        Definitely! That’s why it’s important to investigate overall patterns and distribution – again as a data check, though, not changing the data

  21. OrdinaryJoe*

    Re: #1…. and this is why rumors and gossip and second hand information is so damaging and exhausting to someone falsely accused. It *never* ends.

    I have a friend whose ex-wife continues to spread nasty rumors about him not paying child support and going as far as contacting his job and reporting it to the courts. So … two weeks into a new job, he gets to have an uncomfortable conversation with HR about ex-wife, haul in paperwork, assure them that he’s not a deadbeat dad, etc. all while thinking Great! Wonderful first impression!

    1. Old Bag*

      But why would a situation like that even get to HR?

      In ours it would go like this:

      Ex makes accusations, requests garnishment.
      HR replies “we garnish wages in accordance with state law upon receipt of paperwork requiring us to do so. When we get this paperwork, we will be happy to put that process in place. Thank you for letting us know.” And I’m not actually sure that they would even confirm or deny the employment status of any given individual to anybody other than a legal representative, or someone inquiring about references for a job interview, or something like that.

      They would then hang up the phone and it would never be spoken of again until the paperwork arrived. If the ex continued to harass or call HR making these unreasonable requests, they would loop the employee in — but he would not be expected to explain anything. The government is responsible for sending the garnishment request. The ex needs to deal with that with the government. I’m honestly really not understanding where it would get into a situation that he needed to show them anything?

      But that’s why I think the example you’re giving isn’t really comparable. If someone is not paying a child support, there is legal redress for that. If they are not paying it, it will be enforced. This isn’t something optional. As long as somebody has a job that is on the books and not under the table, their wages will be garnished to pay child support. So if somebody is calling HR screaming about how their ex isn’t paying child support, that would tell me instantly that this person was not reliable because clearly they don’t know the process and there is one in place to get that.

      Meanwhile, I didn’t get the impression that by secondhand the letter. Writer meant that she wasn’t sure if it was true. By secondhand, I thought the letter writer meant that she was not there, but was told by someone who was. And regardless, there is no guaranteed enforcement mechanism for grooming. There can be a lot of different interpretations as to what is actually grooming, and whether or not a given action crosses a line. To me, the fact that Brad was fired shows that these were not necessarily baseless accusations.

      1. Morgan*

        The ex-wife situation also isn’t one of “rumours, gossip, and second-hand information”. It’s someone claiming direct harm to them.

        If I tell you “Bob stole my car and used it to rob a bank – don’t lend him your keys”, you may think I’m lying or deluded, but telling me not to spread gossip would be a nonsensical response.

  22. A*

    1: I think the LW needs to be realistic about what, if anything, their boss can actually do about Brad. I see people saying things like “they can keep an eye on him” but what does that actionably mean? Does it mean his electronic communication is monitored at all times? Does it mean he has an escort at all times? Does it mean he gets annual background checks?

    If the LW was Brad’s co-worker and their boss had direct power over Brad there would be a lot more options. That is not the case here.

    I think if the LW tells their boss what they know about Brad they need to recognize that they are doing this for their own benefit. They are doing this to clear their conscious, to wash their hands. This is a fine enough reason to do something like this and I cast no judgment on it at all. But it will be better if the LW can recognize that.

    Tl;dr: This is about how the LW feels. This is not about what the LW can actually do.

    1. bamcheeks*

      If this is a role and an organisation that has contact with minors or other vulnerable people, they should have a safeguarding policy which tells them how to assess the risk and how to proceed. If it isn’t, there’s nothing that needs to be done. Neither of these things is LW’s responsibility, though.

    2. Sloanicota*

      Well, someone involved in decisionmaking could contact Brad’s last job and potentially get the real facts. I would at least survey what opportunities Brad has to be alone with minors and whether there’s any inherent power systems being established around that. Also, has Brad requested or implemented any changes that make this more so? Perhaps at the time that went unnoticed, but I would want to reflect on it now and change them back. I would also perhaps be sure to be a friendly, trusted resource to any minors in Brad’s orbit and if any of them noted anything “off” I would be a lot quicker to take action on their comments.

      1. A*

        I think there is advice that feels good to write down on the Internet but falls apart in real life.

        Who is “someone involved in decision making” in your reply? The LW’s boss? Brad’s boss? Who are you referring to and how can the LW compel them to reach back to Brad’s former employer?

        How does the LW find out if Brad made changes in their organization policy to make it easier for him access minors? Is that the LW’s job? Their boss? Who is doing this?

        How do you access minors who might come in contact with Brad and forge a relationship with them? Under what reasoning do you form this relationship?

        We all want to protect minors. I understand that righteous feeling. I do not understand how your comment is actionable for the LW.

        1. Morgan*

          The actionable part is very straightforward and simple: LW talks to their boss, their boss communicates upwards/sideways as they see fit. Word gets to someone who is in a position to take meaningful action, or it gets filtered out before that. The fact that LW isn’t personally following through to take those actions doesn’t mean that communicating concerns is an empty exercise in quieting their own conscience.

          You started out listing potential actions in a way that looks designed to make them seem ridiculous/excessive (“Does it mean his electronic communication is monitored at all times? Does it mean he has an escort at all times? Does it mean he gets annual background checks?”), then when given a list of actually reasonable actions you pivot to dismissing them as unattainable for the LW.

          1. A*

            I would agree with this line of thinking more if the Brad was the LW’s co-worker and their boss had authority over Brad.

            That is not the structure in this letter. I don’t think the LW’s boss has the authority or the ability to do anything with the information the LW has. So most of this is a revenge fantasy.

            Which is actually fine! It is fine if the LW reports this just to clear their own conscious and nothing else. I just think it’s better they are honest, they are doing this for themselves. They are doing this so they feel better.

            1. Morgan*

              LW’s boss has the authority and ability to ask questions of their partner organization and the community group Brad is working with, or of people who do have that authority. I don’t know why you’re assuming they don’t. Casting it as a “revenge fantasy” is disingenuous and, frankly, gross.

              There isn’t much LW can or even should do here, but there’s some they can and no reason to try to make them out to be a bad person for wanting to. Despite your denials, that’s exactly how you’re coming across here.

              (Most times when people do the right thing, it’s because their conscience would make them feel bad if they didn’t. Casting that as questionable also comes off as highly disingenuous.)

              1. A*

                I think the LW is a good person for wanting to do something.

                I think a lot of people have a very strong reaction to protecting children from predators. This is a good thing.

                I think the LW’s second hand information about Brad will become third hand to their boss. I don’t think their boss has standing to do anything about third hand information.

                All of these can be true at the same time.

            2. Hyaline*

              The LW’s boss might decide not to work with Brad’s organization any longer, or choose to limit contact with Brad/between Brad and his employees, or request another rep instead of Brad…the boss can do a lot of things that aren’t hire/fire or managing an employee.

  23. HailRobonia*

    Re. annual reviews: in one of my first jobs they had a “scientific” way of rating employees and your annual raise was based on it. You were ranked 1-10 in a variety of categories and your raise was based on that. The problem? There were 20 categories.

    Even if you got 9 out of 10 in all of them – i.e. “virtually perfect” in every category, you ended up with a score of 80 which was “satisfactory” and a mediocre raise. Add in the fact that the “scientific” rating was highly arbitrary and based on your supervisor observing you teach two sessions in a term and it was a total failure.

    1. Sloanicota*

      I also recall from my statistical methods class that there’s very low replicability of even experts “bucketing” data into more than three buckets (never mind amateurs) so the more buckets you create, the less “real” the results generally become.

  24. Takki*

    #3, I didn’t tell anyone i was pregnant with my last until I was about 6 months, and I only confirmed if asked.
    I used all the TV tropes of hiding behind books/desks/big purses and bulky coats/blazers. It’s amazing what a thick cardigan with a sash and an armload of paper will hide. In warmer weather, tying a sweater/shirt around your waist – while not super professional looking – will do a similar thing, but without roasting in overly warm clothes. Several people were surprised to find I was out on maternity leave, having no idea I was pregnant despite a weight gain of about 50lb. I’m sure several more knew, but were kind enough to wait for me to acknowledge it.

    Best Wishes to your growing family!!

  25. Czhorat*

    The diversity training answer was a mess, but there are ways it could have been interesting.

    One clearer way in that “this is irrelevant” could be a real answer is if they said “we’re assigning this to Lucas because he played football in High School”. This *is* irrelevant to the design role and, while not formally discriminatory based on gender, DOES introduce a gender bias in that men are statistically far more likely to have played football in HS than women.

    That might be the kind of answer the trainer was thinking of (rather than the more obvious “knows football does not equate to male”), but they presented it poorly.

    1. umami*

      I don’t actually assign projects to designers based on their background, but on their ability, and potentially their interest in the subject matter. The only reason someone’s background in football would be relevant is if they said they were interested in being assigned the project because of it. Knowing about football is not a prerequisite for designing a logo for a football team.

      1. Allonge*

        Of course not, but all other things being equal, you get to assign a project based on actual (not assumed) affinity for the topic.

  26. Data Nerd*

    #2: If what you described is exactly what happened, that’s pretty awful. But as someone who sits on the other side of this, we do require managers to calibrate performance because one manager will score their entire team as consistently exceeding expectations while another manager will score their whole team as meeting expectations when the performance between the teams doesn’t vary much. So we try to make the scoring (which drives the merit increase) fair across the board. We have had managers tell their employees in the past, “I wanted to give you a higher score but HR said I couldn’t.” But that’s not really what happened in the conversation. Instead we pushed back and asked for examples of how their performance exceeded the expectations and if they can’t provide specific examples we ask them to adjust the rating and comments. So I would take what you’re hearing with a grain of salt. Although we don’t do a forced bell curve so maybe our process differs.

    1. Sloanicota*

      This is actually a logical insight. In that case, of course, you *would* see people whose scores got bumped up by HR, whereas cynically I almost always assume HR bumped down scores because they don’t want to pay more in raises/bonuses. But it’s definitely true that we need more standardized training on what “exceeds expectations” means, because there are plenty of bosses with pie-in-the-sky expectations it would be impossible to ever exceed without performing a literal miracle on the shop floor.

  27. Andrew*

    LW1: One minor (pun unintended) question about Brad: do you know if he’s LGBTQ? Because the first thing I thought of was how “grooming children” is basically the anti-queer equivalent to the Blood Libel. Total speculation here, and I think others have raised more likely possibilities, but in a field as politically charged as reproductive health, that kind of agenda-driven misinformation can’t be dismissed out of hand.

    1. Nomic*

      That came to my mind as well. Not to mention that, while not speculation as to the actual role, being “an activist in the reproductive health rights space…” makes you a target for every Conservative group out there, and “groomer” is one of the first accusations they spew at anyone in that arena.

    2. anon4eva!*

      Yup- in some southern states, men dressing in drag and reading at libraries can be considered grooming children.
      Also, criminal records (esp if you have a name) are readily available online and our media is all too happy to report on this sort of charges- generally, it’s not a secret or spread through thirdhand hot gossip.

      1. Eldritch Office Worker*

        And organizations where it is relevant are usually very good at doing their due diligence, legally, without relying on second hand accounts.

      1. Saw Palmetto*

        I wouldn’t put it past an upset fundie parent to make something up if they find out their child received some kind of service there. I think that the supervisor speaking QUIETLY to the supervisor at the other place is the best idea. If it was obviously fake, then the new org did their due diligence, and I’m not so sure that there’s any need to broadcast it to every other employee, because there should be (as people have pointed out) rigorous child safety rules applicable to everyone. If not…well, pretty self explanatory why it’s important to check then!

    4. Thegs*

      As someone who is LGBT+ that’s exactly where my mind went as well. Accusations of “grooming” without anything specific is the first page in the conservative handbook for attacking people they don’t like right now.

  28. Crencestre*

    OP4: Not a sports fan myself, but I’ve seen plenty of sports team logos and I can’t recall a single one that required anyone either seeing or designing it to be very familiar with the sport itself. Designing a logo doesn’t rely on deep knowledge of the sport; it DOES rely on the ability to design an instant recognizable, visually arresting and memorable image. And that ability knows no gender!

    1. Rusty Shackelford*

      I think you might be surprised. I can’t think of the exact issue right now, but I know I’ve seen logos that were clearly created by people who didn’t understand the subject. Important details drawn backward, etc. Like if I created a logo for a cricket team and, knowing nothing about the sport other than it involves a ball, drew something that looked like a baseball.

      (I agree, of course, that the ability to design an image knows no gender.)

      (Um… does cricket actually involve a ball?)

      1. Angstrom*

        Good research should cover those issues. Poor research would give poor results.

        On a related note, think of all the ads you’ve seen where the models — and the directors — were clearly not knowledgeable about the activity being depicted.

    2. Nomic*

      I’m imagining a ton of hilarious counter-examples, like an image of a person holding a baseball bat backwards, or a basketball player kicking a ball into the hoop, or a hockey player in figure skates.

      ON THE OTHER HAND, I can also think of a few images designed by presumable sports enthusiast (lowest bidder for baseball clothing), with the memorable “A’s s” hat, or the more recent “TeTas” hat (google is your friend, the Oakland A’s hat is particularly a work of lower-case A art”).

      1. Phony Genius*

        Or a real Babe Ruth statue in Baltimore where he’s holding a right hander’s fielding glove. He was left handed.

    3. londonedit*

      I don’t know about other sports, but in football (AKA ‘soccer’) here in the UK, club badges are a big, big deal. Most clubs have a good couple of hundred years of history behind them, and whenever a badge is redesigned there’s always a HUGE reaction to it, some fans will be unhappy, it’ll be talked about for months if not years if not decades. There’s a huge amount tied up in the symbolism of a football club’s badge. So if someone was designing a new logo or badge for a football club here, there would definitely have to be a lot of consideration of all the aspects of the current badge, fans’ opinions, history, etc etc. And you’d have to be extremely careful not to do anything that would even potentially hint at having anything to do with a rival club.

    4. A*

      I think good design is immediately recognizable to people if they are fans or not. Within that design there are more meanings that devout fans understand. I don’t know if this is the correct term but the one that springs to mind is a “deep cut.”

      Devout fans tend to love that their sports team is recognizable and they like the feeling of being “in the know” so to speak. I think to achieve both at the same time you either have to be a fan yourself or research it heavily.

      There is no reason fanbase and research is gender coded, though.

  29. Nina*

    For the pregnancy question, tell your most gossip-y coworker AND tell them that you don’t want to talk about or hear about your pregnancy at work – and let it go from there. Works in a variety of situations.

  30. Old Bag*

    I did the whole no comment pregnancy thing with my *family.* I’d had three miscarriages and a FIL who was adamant we needed to stop trying because we already had two small boys and that was enough and we were just making ourselves sad to keep trying. Note: no one had ever asked his opinion. We told my mother-in-law, but we told her we were not telling father-in-law and why. They were in basically a roommate marriage so she felt no loyalty or sense of obligation to let him know. When it became very obvious that I was pregnant, he just rolled with it and acted like he had known all along, and we had always been discussing it and that he had been told. He knew damn well he had not been told, and he was a smart enough man to know why.

    But this method of dealing requires the other party to have the kind of manners where they would rather eat their own head, then be ghost enough to actually ask a question like “are you pregnant?!” It works splendidly in “Midwest Nice” cultures. Not so much in “bring your whole self to work” cultures. (Every time I hear that phrase I mentally imagine myself sitting next to Toby Ziegler.)

  31. Alice*

    I find it quite awkward if a colleague doesn’t mention their pregnancy at all. It’s hard to tell when the situation switches from “don’t comment about other people’s bodies” to “congratulations!” And, OP, if you don’t want people to talk about it, that’s fine — the announcement that Alison suggests would work very well.

  32. Nomic*

    I am rolling this over and over in my head, trying to figure out if voice to text betrayed you!

    “… then be ghost enough to actually ask a question like “are you pregnant?!” ”

    Did you mean “than be gauche…”?

  33. YoungTen*

    LW3, As a female and a mother, I would find it odd if “Jane ” in the next cubicle over who I’ve worked with for over two years is noticeably showing and is acting like nothing. It would be odd if “Jane” changed her hair from dark to light and did not say anything much less be showing. It’s certainly not my business but I’m also not blind. I would automatically assume that something must be wrong with the secretiveness.

    2. Roland*

      What kind of announcement would you expect from someone who dyed their hair? “Hello, I dyed my hair”?

    3. Joielle*

      I work in a very “midwest nice” culture and I take great joy in dramatically changing my hair from time to time and saying nothing! Once I came in with purple hair and got a lot of double takes, but nobody (except my closest work friend) said a word. It was funny watching everyone do the mental gymnastics of “Omg purple! Wait, what color was it before? Is that new? Should I say something? Is it weird if I do? Is it weird if I don’t?” and then decide to say nothing. Gotta keep things a little bit interesting around here.

      1. inksmith*

        I dyed my hair pink once, and a guy I’d sat opposite for two years said, “Has your hair always been pink?”

        The temptation to look confused and say yes was very strong, but alas, my picture is on both my ID badge and my Teams icon, so I’d soon have been proved wrong.

    4. Elizabeth West*

      You might find it odd because YOU wouldn’t go without saying something. But if it’s not your business, there’s your answer. :)

    5. toolegittoresign*

      But there may be lots of reasons to not want to talk about it. High risk pregnancy, being a surrogate for someone else, etc.

      I had a coworker whose baby tragically did not survive birth. She took leave of course, as had already been planned, and when she was due to return, we were all informed of the devastating news. But do you know what the worst part was? She ended up leaving the job shortly after because she just couldn’t bear being around us all every day knowing we knew of her loss. Not because anyone did anything bad but just even getting asked “how are you holding up?” by well-meaning people was too much. She preferred to go work somewhere that no one knew so she could not think about it at work.

      When you’re going through something difficult, you can really REALLY not want to talk about it and even the most polite questions create a massive emotional burden.

      I have actually been thanked by pregnant coworkers before who have said “You are the only person who doesn’t ask me about the pregnancy and I really appreciate the chance to not to have to talk about it or think about it for a bit.” I still ask them about their weekend, anything fun planned, etc but I make a point to not bring it up because I know it’s exhausting to get the same questions from everyone all the time.

    6. Clisby*

      Visibly showing a pregnancy or a hair color change are the exact opposite of secretiveness.

      Why would you find it odd for someone to decline to talk about their bodies?

  34. CubeFarmer*

    A colleague of mine had her second child early last year. I don’t work with her directly, so if there was an announcement I never received it–which was fine. Her maternity-leave schedule didn’t affect my work, and we aren’t close enough as colleagues to warrant a social, “Hey, guess what!?” type of announcement.

  35. I Do Watch A Lot of TV*

    #3 made me laugh remembering two TV shows that chose to simply ignore the pregnancy of an *actress* who was pregnant when it would make no sense for the *character* to be pregnant.

    On the second Bob Newhart show the girl who played the maid just carried a laundry basket in every scene for the whole pregnancy and honestly I don’t think it was ever obvious. And this was before the Internet told everybody everything!

    On the first Fraser Crane show *their* maid just complained for months about how fat she was getting, while the other characters just kept telling her she looked fine (while rolling their eyes at her as she ate pastries and candy and “couldn’t figure out” why she was getting fat). Finally she “went off to fat camp” to lose the weight, and on the next show one of the characters (Niles, as I remember) talked to her on the phone and then told the family “She’s having a great time, and already lost seven pounds six ounces!” … which was just about the cutest baby announcement ever!

    2. Aggretsuko*

      How I Met Your Mother just had large purses and then suddenly Allyson Hannigan just huffed off for awhile.

    3. I went to school with only 1 Jennifer*

      I remember clocking that a character on the Roseanne show was standing oddly behind furniture, a couple of episodes before they announced the character’s pregnancy. I felt so clever. :-)

      I also remember a great police procedural show from the 1970’s (McMillan and Wife) where the actress was pregnant, and they did ALL the pregnancy jokes with intense food cravings, and then when the actress gave birth they just … didn’t have a baby on the show. Never mentioned it again. I even think they did that twice. (And I just looked it up to make sure I spelled it right and omg, I did NOT remember that the male lead was played by Rock Hudson!)

    4. allathian*

      When Roxann Dawson was pregnant on Voyager, there’s half a season where they only show her from the chest up. Later when B’Elanna was pregnant on the show, they used a fake baby bump.

      On DS9 when Nana Visitor was pregnant they used similar tricks until they wrote the Keiko’s baby transplant plot, but she also wore a fake baby bump in at least the Bajoran birth episode.

  36. Cacofonix*

    Honestly, as a manager, why bother doing performance reviews if HR is going to unilaterally change them AND require that you change your comments to reflect their score? I get performance ties to pay rises and more but HR completely loses the plot and this practice gives them a 2 for me. They implemented a process (yay) then they failed.

  37. Alton Brown's Evil Twin*

    Somebody needs to give HR a remedial statistics class.

    You can either rate on a “doesn’t meet”, “sometimes meets” “meets” “sometimes exceeds” “always exceeds” scale, or you can rate on a normalized curve. You can’t do both of those at the same time.

    What’s more, unless you’ve got a really big sample size, you’re not going to get a normalized curve. Is every manager scoring 50+ employees directly, without any intermediate evaluators?

    Not to mention that if you want to combine scores from different managers, teams, business units, etc then the new curve probably won’t be normalized.

    This is using an “objective” scale as an excuse for blind staff reductions. It’s lazy and it’s dishonest.

    1. Alton Brown's Evil Twin*

      Oh yeah – it also assumes that the entire hiring practice is pointless – because the only way to get a group of employees that fit a normal curve is to do no real evaluation of their past work before you bring them on board. As long as you’re a CPA or a certified welder or whatever, we’ll hire you without doing any thinking about it.

  38. lizzay*

    When my coworker was pregnant, she not only didn’t make an announcement, she was exceedingly… private about it. Even when she was about to pop, she actively denied being pregnant if anyone asked or directly mentioned it. But only to internal folk! External client calls, when they got wind of it, would congratulate her on calls. It was exceedingly weird. To this day I don’t know if it was thoughts of jinxing things or superstition (some cultures don’t have baby showers before the birth!) or just having a relatively extreme desire to keep work/life separate (she did eventually tell us about the kid after the birth – and even sent a picture!). But you know what? She told us several months ahead of time that she was taking some ‘personal leave’ for however long, so we knew & could plan ahead. Which really, is the important thing at work. So you do you. Know that it might make things awkward at some point and/or people will talk about it. I don’t think you need to send an email around. If & when you do get to that point, I would just mention it to a couple of people & word will make it around.

  39. Boof*

    Uhg, I don’t understand/reject the idea of demanding performance reviews be on some kind of curve, but also essentially punishing people for not being at the top of the curve. I’m sure someone out there thinks it makes employees hyper competitive and that somehow is better for the company overall, but if you bother to think about it for more than a moment maybe having your employees all fighting eachother is actually not good and it will mean they just focus on gaming the system to get the top rating rather than on actual helpful metrics that they should be rated on, and those that are uninterested in fighting their peers or being downgraded for doing a decent job but not beating the curve will probably leave as soon as they can.
    Reviews should be tied to how well one is doing the job, and it only makes sense to compare to peers if there’s someone standing out in a good or bad way to either correct it or perhaps extra reward it but have to be careful with bonuses based on performance they can be a double edged sword if it’s like, easy for one person to grab all the credit for a shared effort.

  40. appo*

    While I don’t think you need to do an email blast about the pregnancy, you also don’t want to go too far in the other direction and Streisand Effect it. Most of the time I’ve learned someone is pregnant at work, they announce themselves in direct conversation or someone who’s heard it from the pregnant person shares the news (of course with implicit approval)

  41. SunriseRuby*

    “I’m nervous about the pregnancy …” seems like information I DON’T want to share because of how my co-workers might view me until I left for maternity leave. I wouldn’t want them to treat me like I was too fragile to handle the work I was hired to do.

    I think a better request – inspired by advice that Alison has given to others – would be: “Going forward, I’d like to stay fully focused on work in the office, so I’d prefer not to be asked about my pregnancy, thanks for understanding.”

  42. Betsey Bobbins*

    I could easily see someone being accused of grooming minors in the reproductive rights scene. What if he discussed reproductive options with a minor of pro-life parents? What if he was a target for the pro-life activism scene in his area, the far right loves using ‘grooming minors’ allegations as many other commenters have pointed out. You’re assuming the call is coming from withing the building, that’s not necessarily the case.

  43. poor performance reviews*

    This is what companies do. Managers admit it outright. They have to give poor reviews so as to justify never giving a raise. This is the new normal. It is so incredibly demoralizing.

  44. Just wondering*

    I’d like us to get away from the idea that pregnancies should be “announced.” Births are the event that should be announced. Pregnancies, at least at work, should be “disclosed.”

  45. Off-label*

    Thus far companies are still getting away with enforcing non-competes in MN and neither me nor my coworkers have had any luck contacting the Attorney General’s office even before January. Now that my company is in very bad odor with the public maybe they’ll finally respond to us but most of us are looking at leaving our industry entirely because we’re prohibited from working anywhere else due to shenanigans in vague job descriptions and extensive external contracts with other companies. They also prohibit and fire managers who give referrals for grad school applications so that’s been fun for us to navigate

  46. Mark This Confidential And Leave It Laying Around*

    LW2, this has happened to me, and it was based on job title. I was told by my manager who insisted on knowing why his ratings were changed. He refused to chnge what he wrote so I had a glowing review marked “Meets Expectations.” It’s done to hold down raises.

  47. Contracts Killer*

    #2 Ugh. I used to work in state government where ratings had to be distributed as a bell curve. But also, we were to work with lower performing employees to ensure they started to perform better. Underperformers were to be put on PIPs – firing if no improvement and keeping if there was improvement.

    During a training by the state personnel department, I asked how those two conflicting concepts could both work. We are supposed to rate on a bell curve which means at least 50% will be performing below average. But we aren’t supposed to keep below average employees so if we are doing our jobs correctly, everyone should be ABOVE the 50% side of the bell curve.

    The answer – *crickets* and a blank stare, then moving on with the presentation.

  48. Oniya*

    I’d actually say that ‘knowledge of football’ isn’t really necessary for designing a football team’s logo. Look at the Steelers’ logo, for example. Or the Browns’, or Ravens’. You’d need the specs for the design (color, size, approximate shape and complexity), but none of these logos have a specific thing in them to say ‘football’, compared to baseball or basketball.

    *Some* logos incorporate elements of the game (old Patriots logo had the Minuteman in the three-point crouch), but those are by far the minority.

  49. Another Academic Librarian too*

    Just want to note “accused of grooming minors” can be code for “hey I didn’t like that book you shared with middle graders that had same sex parents in it.”
    My spidey senses went up with “reproductive health”

    As for mandated reporting- As a mandated reporter I must witness an incident or have a minor share with me. That is not the situation according the letter writer.

    1. CG*

      RE mandated reporting: that’s not the case in California, or anywhere that I know of. As a mandated reporter I am required to report whenever I have *any* suspicion of child abuse, for any reason. It definitely does not need to be only an incident I witness or have a minor share with me. That would be way too high of a bar for reporting!

      Also, to clarify: reporting only means that there is reason to suspect abuse. It does not mean that I believe child abuse to have necessarily taken place. As a mandated reporter it is not my job to investigate, hypothesize, legitimize the claim, or do anything other than pass the information I have along to the appropriate authorities. Too many people have a fundamental misunderstanding of this process, and it causes so many problems (within an already flawed system!).

      1. Another Academic Librarian too*

        I can only tell you what are the rules in NYC. My suspicion of abuse is limited to my own knowledge, not rumor. Did a child come to my library with suspicious bruises? I report. Is a child sleeping through my class period repeatedly? I report. Does a child cower or exhibit excessively frightened behavior? I report. As you say, I am not the investigator. I don’t care if the child comes from a “good family” If I observe and am suspect there is abuse. I report.

  50. Another Academic Librarian too*

    What a coincidence, I just finished the “self-evaluation” part of my performance appraisal.
    HR changed things up this year adding a few ratings- it used to be
    Extraordinary- no one got that. Basically “changed the course of the institution”

    Exceeds expectations- many people got that as most of us are committed rockstars and love our work.

    Meets expectations- people who did an okay job

    Fails to meet- expect to be on a PIP

    We had a performance evaluation training and there was the new ratings system with HR claiming that as supervisors we need to understand that meets expectations isn’t a C.
    And the way they did that was that the definition of exceeds was the former definition for extraordinary and added three levels of “better than okay”, “just okay”, “okay but could do better.” were added.

    Wouldn’t be a big deal except that our very mediocre merit increase (if there is one) is directly tied to the ratings. And because the increase -in the range of 2.5% for exceeds and the difference is .05% between levels is negligible ) AND some of us do want acknowledgment of our hard work even if it a bulls%@t rating.

    So the new one is, Extraordinary, Exceeds expectations

    Fulfills all expectations
    Individuals at this performance level have regularly met all expectations and may have demonstrated instances of exceptional performance.

    Fulfills most expectations
    Individuals at this performance level have regularly met most expectations and may have demonstrated instances of exceptional performance, but need to strengthen one or two areas of performance, as specified in the review.

    Fulfills some expectations
    Individuals at this performance level have been inconsistent in meeting overall expectations. They may have demonstrated instances of exceptional performance in some select areas but their performance has been lacking in several key areas of responsibility, as specified in the review. Supervisors will work with individuals to set expectations for improvement and to develop goals commensurate with professional experience.

    Fails to meet position expectations
    Individuals at this performance level clearly and consistently fail to meet all or most position expectations and fail to heed evaluative judgments or recommendations for improvement. Supervisors have worked with individuals to set expectations for improvement.

  51. Laura*

    So my non-compete clause when I worked as an hourly worker for an animal shelter was definitely illegal. Good to know, good to know.

    I balked at it when I was signing entry paperwork, but figured I wouldn’t really bump up against it since it was an employment-gap-filling job and I had no plans to go to another shelter in the area.

  52. WhatConstitutesProof*

    How is someone going to determine the validity of a third hand accusation lacking details? People absolutely do make false accusations, or have strange definitions of grooming. I know two high school teachers who taught sex ed classes and another who taught anatomy and physiology. All three live in fairly liberal locations. All three got complaints about grooming based on teaching to the standard curriculum.

    I have a relative that used to threaten to call CPS and file child abuse claims whenever she didn’t get her way as a preteen. She was convincing, but the accusations were false (she was very proud of this).

    I have been treated by therapists who tried to convince me I’d been abused as a child but must simply be repressing all memories because they believed everyone was – this was a real school of thought in the late 80s through the mid90s.

    There is real grooming. There is real child abuse. There are real other nasty things. But not every accusation is true and you cannot go around spreading second hand vague information that cannot be reasonably investigated.

    So, unless there’s a legitimate way to ascertain facts and adjudicate what is and is not true please avoid spreading anything around.

  53. Elan Morin Tedronai*

    #2: Most parts of the civil service in my country bell-curve performance grades – the logic of course being there’s a limited budget for payroll and that it’s missing the point if everyone ends up with an A… It’s completely absurd of course, but that’s life. Sadly.

  54. MCMonkeybean*

    My company does employee reviews on a curve as well. Was told once I would be getting another 3 even though it was my best year ever because a lot of other people also had their best years ever.

    I worked briefly for a different company and learned they also do reviews on a curve–felt both better and worse to know that’s common.

    Now, I am back at the first company and the information is kind of freeing. I know that no matter what I do, I’m going to get a 3… so I just don’t really worry about it at all. I do good work and sometimes I go above when I want to but I keep firm boundaries and I don’t worry about how it will impact me come review time.

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