It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…
1. My employer is making us leave fake positive reviews on Glassdoor
My employer has instructed several of us to write fake positive reviews of the company on Glassdoor in an effort to revive their rating and improve recruitment.
We have all marched in lockstep with this, and I have begrudgingly (on the inside) agreed. I’m sure I am not the only one who is hesitant to do this but so far nobody has spoken up against it. Management provided us with a unique template to copy and paste, including a body paragraph and specific ratings, to post on Glassdoor. They stress that this is something that we must complete at home (off-site) and cannot be done in the office on any work computer to prevent tracing.
I’ve told my friends and family about this and I completely understand why they’re disappointed in me. My company shouldn’t be forcing people to lie and while my honest and truthful review would be A LOT different compared to what I’m being forced to write, I want to keep my job for the time being. I can always delete this fake review when I leave the company.
Is something like this a common request these days? Would my employer get in any trouble if Glassdoor somehow found this out?
It’s not super common, but it’s a thing some unethical employers do. It’s remarkably short-sighted — they should want to screen out candidates who object to the aspects of their culture described in honest reviews, not trick them into accepting jobs there under false pretenses. Or, better yet, they could take a look at what those honest reviews say and fix their culture and management, but apparently it’s easier to tackle it this way.
Glassdoor claims that they don’t allow employers to incentivize or coerce employees to write positive reviews. They say they’ll remove reviews if they have evidence that users were coerced into leaving them, and that if the issue persists they may place an alert on the employer’s profile page. So one option is to contact them and ask what kind of evidence they need for that.
2. My boss chewed me out for my husband’s behavior
My husband, Mark, and I work at the same very small company (35-ish total staff) in the same office building. Our company is structured where I work on projects not for a single manager, but my yearly performance evaluation is conducted by the CFO. My husband is a project manager (who I don’t work with unless it’s a dire need) who is also managed by our CFO.
Since spring 2020, Mark, the other project managers, and the CFO all have had a morning status call twice a week. Because it’s an hour before Mark’s normal start time, he has been taking the call at his home computer. Unfortunately, his home computer is currently set up in the living room. While it’s not ideal for me to have to be super quiet getting ready while he gives his status update, it’s for a short amount of time and we’ve not had any issues for the past five years. (He always mutes for the rest of the call unless asked a question.)
The first issue arose this Monday. I had an emergency and made some noises in the background. (Our cat was peeing on some dirty laundry, and I yelped and told him off while I picked him up and took him to his litter box. Genuinely nothing inappropriate for work, but I was able to be heard over the phone.) Mark chose to not drop from the call or mute himself because he was in the middle of his status report. (That’s a separate issue he and I talked out. We found a good solution: he is taking calls downstairs from now on.)
When I got to my desk later that morning, I had an email from the CFO chastising me for the background noise, asking me to refrain from “all background noise” while Mark is on those calls and saying it’s distracting.
Mark and I both find this to be inappropriate. I was not on the call nor on the clock, and this is the first time in five years something like this has happened. Mark equated this to our CFO calling the spouse of a staff member to chastise the spouse.
I was so baffled by the email that I replied explaining Mark chose to not mute and I had had an emergency.
I walked on eggshells for the next call (we’re moving Mark’s home computer downstairs this weekend) and I asked him to say something to our CFO. I wasn’t part of their casual conversation, but Mark tells me it didn’t have the desired outcome. My understanding is our CFO sees nothing wrong for chastising me since I am on staff.
Mark is arranging to have a meeting with our CFO. Should we try to loop the single HR staff member in? If nothing comes of this meeting is there anything else we can do?
Eh. The CFO was wrong to take this up with you rather than with Mark, and you were both right to point that out to him, but unless it becomes an ongoing problem, at this point I don’t think there’s a ton to be gained by continuing to pursue it. It happened once in five years, you have a plan in place for avoiding it being an issue again, and you can probably just let it end there.
It’s not that the CFO’s message to you wasn’t misplaced. It was. He appears to have some weird ideas in this regard. But it’s over, and I’d just let it be over unless anything similar happens again.
3. Can I ask, “How necessary is this feedback?”
I sit a rung or two down from the CEO at a national corporation. I’m here for my very technical knowledge and long-term experience with a part of our business that is different from any other of our peer companies, so I’m pretty specialized and my department is very small. Recently I rolled out an initiative that touches multiple departments and all of our locations across the country. I’m getting a lot of attention from high level folks, so I’m in a pretty great position.
All of a sudden, everyone wants a piece of my initiative. I am always collaborative and do what I can to accommodate the needs of different departments, but the process has become unwieldy and I’m trying to find a balance between getting all the input I need and becoming overwhelmed with data.
Specifically, I’d like to limit people’s input to their areas of expertise. I have one colleague (same level as me, different department) who is notorious for providing his opinion about things that aren’t within his purview. Let’s say he’s HR. He asked me to meet with him to discuss my initiative and I’m wondering if there is any professional way for me to ask, “Is this an HR requirement or just your opinion about my area of expertise?” What do you think?
“I’ve been inundated with feedback, much of it conflicting, so I’m asking people to limit feedback to things that are requirements for their area.”
That said, whether or not it’s smart to say this to any given person depends on the internal politics in your workplace — who the person is, how senior they are, and how much influence they have. In some cases it will be smarter to listen to the feedback and say you’ll add it to the list of things you’re considering (whether or not you ultimately do anything with it). In other cases it will be smart to engage in real discussion about their suggestions (“the issue with doing X is Y”). So judge case by case.
4. Every team email turns into a reply-all fiasco
I have a low-stakes question — my team’s supportiveness is clogging my inbox! Several times a week in the course of doing business, we’ll get updates about something happening in our division: a project gets a nice review in an industry trade publication, or someone lands a new client, or an event we planned goes well. Updates about this sort of day-to-day work are sent out to the full 25-person team … but then the reply-all-apocalypse begins.
My issue: A single update can yield up to a dozen reply-alls of encouragement or congratulations: “Great work!” “Wow, go team!” “This group is really knocking it out of the park!” This is all, objectively, lovely! But multiply that by several updates per day, every week, and you can see the problem. I just came back from a few days away from work, and fully half of my emails were long cheerleading threads of people just chiming in to say “hurrah” and adding nothing else. Alison, one email about a team member’s promotion elicited no fewer than 17 reply-all “congratulations” to the full distro list! What?!
I’m a more seasoned employee here and I’m also a veteran of the original early 2000s reply-all wars, when people were just learning email norms and reply-all explosions were often the hilarious butt of jokes. So I’m admittedly perhaps over-sensitive about this. But I think a word of encouragement or congratulations for just, well, doing your job should typically go directly to the individual not the full group, right? Thank you for your ruling on this matter, which I will consider final and binding.
I can and have issued the ruling you want, but sadly I cannot make anyone follow it. And if this is the culture of your office, you probably can’t either, unless you’re in a position of a lot of influence and willing to spend a lot of effort and capital trying to change it, and even then you might not. Your best bet is to look for technical tools to manage it — if your email program gives you the option, sort messages by conversation or mute whole conversations. It won’t solve it entirely, but it’ll push fewer “go team” messages at you throughout the day.
5. I struggle with talking about conflict in interviews
I am an experienced communicator and former journalist, currently working as a spokesperson for a large company. I have experience talking live on the air and coach others on how to do so.
And yet over and over, as I search for my next job, I find myself lost on how to answer questions, especially “Tell us about a difficult situation you faced and how you handle conflict when working with others.” I always feel like they are looking for a story about a big fight, but I am a professional person and do what all professional people do. Have a bunch of meetings, send lots of emails, until everyone is happy or at least not mad. I have no idea what else to say even though I know I should have some real examples to share.
You’re reading too much into it. They aren’t looking for a story about a big fight! Or at least, they’re not assuming you’ll have one. (If you do, they’ll likely be very interested in hearing about it, but not necessarily in a way that reflects well on you.)
They are literally just looking for an example of a time that you needed to navigate a conflict. It doesn’t need to be dramatic, just anything where your perspective or goals differed from someone you needed to work with, and how you handled it. Obviously you want to try to pick an example that has some substance to it, but you don’t need to land on something full of blood and thunder. It could be as simple as, “I wasn’t getting work I needed from a colleague to move forward with my own piece of the project and so I did XYZ” or “I needed to work closely with a colleague on X and I thought the outcomes should be Y and she felt strongly they should be Z, and so I did ABC and EDF was the result.”
The same applies to other “tell me about a time when…” questions, too. They’re not looking for big, dramatic answers, just a sense of how you’ve navigated a thing that is likely to come up in this job too; they’re asking you to paint them a picture of how you work.
Related:
how to answer behavioral interview questions when you don’t have good examples
#5, I think you’re defining conflict to narrowly ie people having a dramatic fight. You potentially could use an example from an actual fight if you had one, but it would be more helpful to mentally define conflict as something like “a situation where two or more parties involved had different and conflicting needs/wants”. You’ve probably got lots of more mundane situations like that where people weren’t seeing eye to eye or couldn’t all get all all of what they were after but no-one got observably angry
Heck, even if you DID have a big fight at work, the part that’s actually more relevant to them, is what you did after that.
My go-to conflict example is the time a service provider’s technical person blew up at me in a public meeting (for telling him Option A wasn’t viable because it was actually illegal in our jurisdiction). I waited until he finished calling me many inappropriate words, told everyone we were going to take a break there today to calm down, and then ran to my own supervisor absolutely hopping mad to raise a complaint.
But this technical person also had a very unique skillset, and could not be replaced easily. Nor could I move from the project because I was the only one with my skillset. So my example isn’t how I handled the meeting, its how I maintained a cordial, working relationship with the guy who called me a [Blanked for Alison’s benefit] and got my project delivered all the same.
Most people don’t have the dramatic war story I do. But everyone has a story about a time you disagreed with someone, or even a decision, and had to make it work anyway.
Yup, that one tripped me up earlier in my career because I thought it meant screaming fights or totally unreasonable scenarios like ‘coworker A wanted me to cancel my leave because she wanted to take a family holiday’ where there’s no middle ground.
Nowadays I just think back to a recent meeting where people were disagreeing on a timeframe or the time I tried to convince senior management that bringing in a new system to replace one that’s currently working would be a waste of money.
Agree with this. Conflict is not the same as a fight. There are so many situations that arise at work where there’s a conflict, but where it doesn’t rise to the level of a fight. It could be something like:
*two higher-ups have different goals for a project and the team needs to decide who trumps whom
*your boss thinks you made an error, but your information is more current
*you and a teammate have different preferences on which candidate to hire
*as happened to me, my senior colleague wanted to have primary input in everything, even projects where I had primary responsibility. I needed to establish ownership and figure out how to nicely tell her to BACK OFF.
None of these conversations need to be fights, but there’s certainly something to resolve.
And to be honest, the fact that #5 does NOT have an example of a knock-down, drag-out fight is probably pretty good evidence of their conflict resolution skills. In fact, it seems they are so good at it that normal workplace conflict doesn’t seem to register to them as “conflict.”
So that’s a good thing! Now the trick is articulating that in an interview.
I feel like I’ve missed out on some whopper of work stories because I’ve never worked someplace where there were knock-down, drag-out fight.
Honestly, I’ve never had that come up in my personal life.
I have worked in a place with a knock-down, drag-out fight, but it was between middle school students, so while we put a stop to it (obviously), I’m not sure if it counts as a toxic workplace. There is always the option that most secondary schools are at least a little bit toxic.
Middle school could be super toxic, so congrats on surviving that honestly.
I’d say that is one big difference between blue collar assembly line work/construction/machine shops/etc. and the white collar world.
Fist fight between co-workers at a construction sight or auto assembly plant (out in the parking lot) aren’t common – but they aren’t that unusual either.
Ha, I was laughing with a friend about that the other day; we noted that there is all kinds of fighting. I have lived a very white-collar life, and I said that fist fights don’t generally happen in my life, but I WILL hurt your feelings and not look back.
Right? My work life fight skills are things like being able to keep someone from getting the plumb assignment they’ve been campaigning for, not throwing hands.
Yes! I can control the office thermostat. I can make good friends with the sweet potato fry lady in the cafeteria. I can neatly avoid the grunt work. I can make a funny comment to diffuse the tension at just the right time. These are all office survival skills. But I’m not going to actually punch anybody.
In my work, I come across stories of knock down drag out fights that occur in other businesses and it makes me realize my work places have been more normal and mundane than I previously thought.
I’d say as practical advice to think of the most annoying colleague they’ve ever had and then think about what happened to make them gain that status and how LW5 dealt with it.
Yes, if someone were to ask me that question then I would talk about some of the more difficult people I’ve worked with and how I found ways to make our relationship manageable.
I think the line ‘how you handle conflict when working with others’ feels like there’s an assumption that there is a lot of conflict, or there’s conflict with regular coworkers, whereas I automatically read it as ‘how do you handle conflict when working with jerks’ or ‘how do you handle conflict when your otherwise great boss has a bad idea’.
This, exactly. The story I use for this question is about a former coworker who I was almost always low-key annoyed with. It wasn’t that either of us was bad at the job, we just had very different priorities. She was more on the artistic and creative end of the spectrum and I was on the more logistical/operational end of the spectrum, so she was always proposing what I thought of as pie in the sky ideas that weren’t feasible for our organization, and I was always raining on her parade by pointing out the logistical hurdles to her ideas. We just always seemed to be at odds. I ended up deciding that if she had an idea she was really passionate about and the logistical hurdles were relatively small and low stakes, I would keep my mouth shut and just let her try it. Sometimes she discovered those logistical hurdles part way through and asked for my help, sometimes she didn’t and I quietly went behind her and cleaned up what I could. But reducing my overall nitpicking of her ideas made her more receptive when I did point out something that would have larger ramifications.
It seems to have gone over well with interviewers up to this point.
This seems like a great example. It reflects well on you that you recognize it’s an issue of being different, not that the other person is a jerk.
This is pretty much exactly what Alison said?
OP5 is a professional spokesperson, surely at some point they had to respond to a question from a journalist regarding something the company wasn’t ready to talk about yet or couldn’t talk about. So how did OP handle that conflict? How did they prepare knowing questions they could not answer were going to come up?
If anything, I figure that talking about something super dramatic might hurt you more than it helps. It risks giving the impression that you get involved in drama. I think you’re better off talking about something more mundane. Like did you ever disagree with your editor about how to approach or frame a story? How did you resolve it?
This! My go-to for this answer is about a time my then-manager (who I loved working with!) and I disagreed about a new plan to solving an issue. My realization in that disagreement was that I didn’t need her to agree with me, but that I (being a details person to her big picture person) wanted to make sure I had the opportunity to talk through potential issues with her plan and how we could get ahead of them. We both still had a great relationship, and this wasn’t any sort of brawl (verbal or physical), just two opposing viewpoints that we were able to mesh together.
I totally agree. If you were the less influential side in a conflict, as an interviewer I would want to see you handle it professionally, and either acknowledge that higher ups made a decision against your recommendation for solid reasons, or even if you totally disagree, that you were still a reliable team member working to reach the overall goals.
If you were the person with the power, I would want you to talk about how you empowered your team to provide you with all the relevant info, how you made a difficult decision in the best manner available, how you got naysayers on board, that sort of thing.
This question is to recognize if someone brings unnecessary drama to a place of work. Show them that’s not you!
I recently had an interview where I was asked about conflict. I gave a few examples of issues and how they were solved, but the interviewer wasn’t satisfied. Seemed like they wanted an example of something major. They actually said they were concerned that I wouldn’t be a good fit because I would come up against some big personalities in their industry and may not be able to handle it not having faced much conflict before.
That seems like a good example of how you are interviewing the company as much as they’re interviewing you! From that response, it’s clear that the workplace is filled with DRAMA constantly, and not everyone is well-suited for that kind of environment. Personally, I would take that interviewer’s comment as a sign I would be miserable in that job!
I would consider that a bullet dodged. In my experience, “big personality” in a workplace context has usually meant “always believes they’re right and will fight and insult you if you don’t agree,” and if the interviewer is telling you flat out that some of your coworkers would be that way and you’d be expected to handle it on your own, that would be a no thank you from me.
Looks like you dodged a bullet or two here. Not every position is for everyone. Some people thrive on drama, and if there isn’t enough for their liking they’ll intentionally create more.
In my experience, a “big personality” always, without exception, means a jerky asshole I’d actively prefer not to work with.
I don’t thrive on drama, it makes me anxious. And the one office I’ve worked in with a drama king and queen in residence I started looking for a new job before I’d been fully onboarded because I realized that this environment would make me sick. I got a new job before my probation was up and quit, no harm no foul. That job is, for obvious reasons, not on my resume.
Luckily I have a lot of very mundane conflicts to talk about in situations like this and never need to bring up the two conflicts I’ve had that might actually count against me in an interview. Both times the issue was resolved by the other person quitting. In one case we’ve made up later in our careers, we have a professional relationship and can consult each other occasionally. The other person retired and can’t affect my career anymore.
#4 I found an elegant solution. When you send a group email, send it as a BCC.
if they hit “reply-all” it won’t go to everyone, just you.
LW 1: “My employer is making us leave fake positive reviews on Glassdoor”
“They stress that this is something that we must complete at home (off-site) and cannot be done in the office on any work computer to prevent tracing.”
LW1: It might behoove you to ask the boss how to invoice the time spent on these reviews. Unless you are in a work-from-home situation part of the time and able to be on the clock for this, your boss is, quite literally, having you do unpaid labor for the company. I strongly suggest you look into this and share what you find out about it with your coworkers, an employment lawyer, and potentially HR, because this is time out of your day to sit at the computer and paste this nonsense in to artificially improve your company’s reputation online.
#4 – I’m assuming that the initial announcement/congratulation emails emanate from the same person/office. If that’s true, can’t you just go to that person, explain that (while supportive and kind) all the replies are creating inbox overload, and ask that they send those types of emails as Disable Reply All? It’s a simple function in Outlook, and I assume other email programs have a similar command. Then if folks want to congratulate Tim or Becky, they can (and will hvae to) email them directly.
Also for #4, we use Outlook/365/Copilot/whatever-its-called-now, and we have email reaction emojis. So people can still express enthusiasm without actually ‘replying’ to the email. The cute little emojis just build up in the subject line, or you have a little popup tab where you can see reactions. maybe you could redirect people to do something like this?
I’d suggest doing the whole thing (initial announcements and reactions) in a dedicated “Achievements” Teams (or equivalent) group chat. That would keep it contained in one place and is a more appropriate format for one-word or smiley reactions. It can also be muted permanently, instead of muting each new email thread.
One could even sell it by saying that this way, the announcements won’t get buried under incoming current business emails (and vice versa…).
I like this suggestion!
In general, I think this problem calls for a technological solution rather than a social one (though it’s the other way around for many problems where technological solutions are proposed).
Because even if you tell people not to do the reply-alls; and even if most of them agree in principle; it just takes on person to reply-all again with a compliment and many others will worry that if they don’t also reply, it will look like they don’t agree.
Here to agree that shifting this to a Teams chat is the way. Then you can mute notifications and go in once a day to add your own responses.
That was my first thought!
The reaction emojis in Outlook are great, but they aren’t going to satisfy Bob who really, really needs the team to know he also thinks they did a great job, but a teams chat will and will be far less annoying.
Yes, this was my thought, too. Teams/Slack/Gchat space something like that. Channel for the team, they can post their bits of good news, people can reply or add emojis or whatever and it doesn’t clutter up the inbox.
Same! Came here to say this. We have dedicated Teams channel for a for things like shout outs and announcements and people reply there. It saves a ton of inbox space and management, everyone who wants can post a comment or react with an emoji, and my favorite feature: you can MUTE the channel so you don’t get a notice every time someone responds.
This is what I came here to say. Our org uses Teams and we have a dedicated Team Wins chat thread for exactly this reason. Then if you’re getting too many notifications you can mute the single chat and come back to it when you have time.
You can also just put the mailing list (or manual addresses if that’s the org style…) in the BCC (a recipient is needed but yhe sender can put their own email there).
I will add to this that putting the person being congratulated as the “To” or the “CC” in addition to the sender’s email will allow folks to still press that cursed red button and reply but it will only go to the sender and person being congratulated.
We ended up needing to also list “BCC: {distro group getting this email}” as the first line of the email to stop lots of replies of “I got this email but it doesn’t have my name on it. Why did I get it?” or folks forwarding it to the entire distro group thinking only they received it.
Yep, this is my thought, but very glad to learn about Disable Reply All!
It tends to read to me as either performative or sloppy to reply all on something like that, but perhaps I’m being a curmudgeon. I send my congratulations directly to the person – no audience, just a personal, sincere sentiment.
Removed.
I would end up in a company of 1-5 people instead of the 75 we have if that were true. I agree with your sentiment, but sadly the reality of tech ability/memory among the otherwise very intelligent and competent corporate people and professional degree holders we work with can be shocking.
I don’t think it’s a tech literacy issue, it’s just an office culture issue. None of these people seem to be confused about what reply-all does. They’re choosing it because they like to include the whole group when they chime in with congratulations. We might not think that’s worth the email clutter, but apparently most of this team feels that it is.
Yeah, I think that people who like to reply all to congratulations emails want others to see that they are also offering their congratulations. Maybe they want to be seen as a team player (“I, too, think Jane is great!”), maybe they don’t want to be seen as ignoring the good news (“If no one sees that I, too, think Jane is great, they will think I’m a terrible person”), or maybe they are being performative (“Everyone needs to see me tell Jane that I think she’s great”), but in any case, it is pretty tiresome for the rest of us.
OP, it’s kind of a pain, but for your own sanity I’d recommend you mute responses to any of these all-staff congratulations emails as soon as you get them. In Outlook, you can even set a specific rule, like “All emails from Fergus to ‘all-staff’ that have the word ‘promotion’ in them should be marked read, moved to the ‘all-staff’ folder and muted,” but be careful with this because you wouldn’t want it to mute things you really need to see. Or you can just check that folder daily to make sure you’re not missing anything important.
The day I discovered I could mute emails and text messages was a VERY happy day in my life.
I think you could even sort down into:
a) People who like the reply alls and thinks it embodies the good aspects of the team’s work, little extra shots of endorphins through the day.
b) People who view them as neutral-to-pleasant background. It’s just what happens after an announcement, like mushrooms after it rains.
c) People who find them annoying but they acknowledge–whether bitterly or with a laissez faire shrug–that to be marked as a team player at performance review time you need to participate in the threads.
d) People who find them annoying and want to find a way to stop them.
e) Llamas.
It can be easy to figure that if you are in group (d) everyone in your office must be, but they might be distributed all over. So your approach should shift based on where everyone else is on enjoying this.
Reply-all:
Rogue Slime Mold, thank you for including “Llamas” in your list, but since I’m actually an alpaca (or possibly vicuña, long story), I am feeling excluded and this makes me very saaad!
(Cue other responses, from all the new world camelids, followed by the old world camelids, followed by a scattering of mountain goats.)
They could try that, but honestly the only surefire way is to manage it within your own inbox. When this week’s email comes in, create a rule based on the subject line to mark everything as read and shift it to another folder.
Agree; you are *not* going to be able to convince people to stop sending these messages as reply all (and its clearly not just one person who is doing it). The people who hit “reply all” to this kind of message are doing it intentionally. They likely want to be seen as very supportive of their teammates.
This – I find this sort of thing to be totally performative on the part of the reply all people. I always reply privately to these sorts of things because I don’t feel the need to be “seen” when doing my congratulatory bit.
Or they manage their email differently and like the congratulations party in their inbox for everyone.
(Especially true when the reply-allers are ICs who are only seeing these for their handful of local teammates (vs a wide swath of the org) and their inboxes are less of a zoo.)
FYI, this is a great option if everyone involved is using Outlook. If you’re replying to a professional listserv or something like that where some people might be using other clients like Gmail, it will send a new email every time with BOB REACTED THUMBS-UP and it is *incredibly annoying*.
Given your log-in name, you and I might well be on some of the same listservs where this happens! Nothing like clearing out an email backlog with multiple messages of “so and so reacted …”
Yeah, but setting your email to mute/delete/refile those as unimportant seems like it would be easy and have a low false-negative rate.
Everywhere I’ve worked deals with this by limiting the senders on our dist-lists, so the admin and managers can send an official email to any group yet no one can reply to the same group. It’s effective, and unlike BCC everyone can see the recipients.
I have a similar complaint that some people will reply-all to simple requests for info. “Please let me know what work you’re doing on X” will get five responses of “I’m not doing anything” whereas I respond directly to our manager. Thankfully these requests have mostly shifted to Teams so in that case it makes sense for everyone to reply and it doesn’t bother me.
This is why God invented BCC. All company updates like that go out BCC, there is no option to reply all.
Also, maybe you could suggest that these emails go out to a BCC list rather than a C or directly to the whole office.
For the reply all brigade: it’s going to depend on your company culture and individual actions, but encourage people to put the distribution list under BCC and email it to themselves or the subject (if that’s not the sender) as the primary recipient. This will ensure everyone gets the message and that only the sender and/or subject will see the responses. Lifesaver (or at least sanity saver).
LW5, if you have a situation where you’ve had to, “have a bunch of meetings, send lots of emails, until everyone is happy or at least not mad” – that’s your conflict. Talk about what you did. Even if you had a story about a big fight, I wouldn’t tell it. Tell a story about calmly finding a resolution.
Yes, they’re looking for ‘have a bunch of meetings, send lots of emails’ to show that you’re able to stop things escalating to a big fight.
Exactly!
Yes – I also think that these are cases where sometimes the best examples are ones that barely register but can be best communicated.
In a front facing communications role very often you’re taking the work of technical experts and distilling that to general audience language? So an example such as “Chief Expert’s talking points were highly technical and long – this is how I helped them agree to shorter and more accessible language.”
In reality, that situation may have just been a few emails or a thirty-minute meeting – but detailing your process of trying to come up with sound clips for the news or a headline/tweet while maintaining a positive working relationship is the important part for an interview. I think what’s also helpful is having the understanding that some staff take a more argumentative or defensive approach with those inevitable challenges, and you both have approaches to manage that but also won’t be surprised.
LW4- I have just discovered the outlook “cleanup inbox” tool that gets rid of the duplicate emails from an email chain so you just get one email with the replies as a thread (unless there is an attachment). It doesn’t quite solve your problem but it cuts out a heap of emails for me and makes it more manageable
Regarding #4, I disagree– I think with 25 people, it is fine to have congrats emails and replies sent to everyone. In a company of 1000 people, no, but in a team like this where you would know everyone personally, it is reasonable. And sometimes people want to at least CC the person’s manager or other relevant people on the kudos.
You don’t have to read them thoroughly– you can use inbox filters to group all the replies and never look at them. But you shouldn’t complain about receiving the happy emails, I think that’ll make you come across as a grinch.
And it seems that at least they are not replying-all to those congrats emails, only to the original, so that’s a bit better than classical email wars.
Several times a day really does sound like a LOT though.
At first it was “several times a week”, but then it turned into “multiply that by several updates per day, every week”. So I am not sure how many of those updates do they get.
The issue isn’t sending the congratulatory emails to everyone—it’s all the recipients doing reply/all.
But even at 25 people that means 50-100 emails per day that could have been an emoji. That’s a ton of email cruft to have to manage every day.
If OP can manage them through inbox settings, that helps a lot. But otherwise it’s reasonable to try and find a solution to this deluge of well-intended time wasting.
25 people times several times every day is wait…carry the 3…hundreds! Way too many when people need to be careful not to miss important things in the avalanche.
The tech solutions here sound like the best way to go.
But, why? Why do people send the congratulatory responses to everyone in the group, instead of just congratulating the person who won the award (or whatever)? It seems performative, like they just want to make sure the bosses see that they are supportive of their teammates. But in the process, they are clogging up the inboxes of many more teammates. I don’t get it. (Yes, I work in a organization where lots of people do this, and it annoys me every time.)
At this point, I assume a good chunk of the volume is people who have picked up the office norm of being seen to congratulate the person via reply all.
Nah, it’s just easy to hit “reply”. Most people are not thinking that hard about being performative, clogging inboxes, etc
I’d agree if it were only happening for big stuff like promotions or major events so that this was happening at most a couple of times a month. But it’s happening for the kind of positive updates that can amount to several times a day, and that’s just… a lot.
I just set a block filter to every one of those I get. If a colleague wants to complain I missed one of their emails, I’m happy to tell them why: “I had to block because you repeatedly sent me emails meant for someone else”.
The reaction buttons in Outlook are really helpful here I think, you can essentially add your ‘like’ or ‘celebration’ without clogging up the inbox more than necessary.
LW4, if you have the political power to bend someone’s ear about this – and want to spend it – this sounds like an organizational problem absolutely crying out for a solution like “here is our Slack server”. these thank yous and other small reactions would be perfect there, whereas they’re gunking up the place by email.
#2 why is he not wearing headphones with a built in microphone for this meeting?!
Exactly my thought. (Noise-cancelling) headsets exist for a reason!
Maybe he doesn’t want to ? I never use headphones I have a speaker and a microphone on my web cam. Works great.
Glad that it works great, but in this particular instance, it didn’t “work great” for OP. A solution would be for him to wear a headset for this particular meeting.
In this particular instance…for the first time in five years. And they already figured out the solution.
I never needed headphones when I lived alone. Now that I live with multiple people and pets, being on speaker and unmuted is much riskier. It’s all about the likelihood of interruption.
Same; I only use them because the microphone on my (work-provided) headset works better than the mic on the laptop.
If you’re in an area where other people might make noise that can be heard on a call and you know your boss will get mad if he hears said noise, headphones with a built in microphone is an easy way to mitigate that problem.
Yes! I don’t want to dunk on this LW because what’s done is done… but this was SO preventable. The CTO is overreacting; LW and their husband underreacted for 5 years to an incredibly common problem with multiple incredibly simple, well-known fixes.
Yeah I bought a headset during Covid and use it constantly. It did require a splitter so the mic would work, but even with that I think it was under $30. Very easy fix—and the company is pretty likely to pay for it.
Yeah my $30 dollar Logitech headset has pretty good ambient noise suppression when it comes to a very loud 6 year old. Surprisingly so because I will sometime apologize for when she’s heard unmuted yelling down the hall for mom, only to find out they did not hear her at all.
Making this switch also has the benefit of showing Mark that you understand the interruption was annoying and are taking real steps to address it, which is probably the best thing you can do (even though I agree with you that the email was not the way to go, that’s not the hill I would want to die on at this point). To me the best response from your husband is, “I realize it’s a problem and we’re moving my work station and adding this tech fix so it won’t happen again.” Presumably he doesn’t want the boss to decide calling in from home isn’t a good solution anymore and he needs to come in early to take these calls from the office. Although TBH that might be better for *you* OP.
Yeah, I sometimes teach online classes in the same room that my kids are watching TV or talking to each other. My students always say they don’t hear a thing. Regular $30 headset.
Most of these fixes cost money, it’s reasonable not to want to use personal funds for a work fix.
Meh, it’s not unreasonable to spend a small amount of money on headphones to be able to work from home effectively. We’re talking a $30 headset, not a professional sound isolation booth. Heck, most people own headphones already – it’s not a hardship to connect your personal headphones to your computer. The alternative is Mark goes to work an hour early to make this meeting in person, I’d prefer to either buy a headset or use my own headphones to avoid this.
Moving the computer to another room is free, and is what LW and their husband are doing now.
And they are doing it only now – for five years their solution was for OP to tiptoe around their living room twice a week which is 40% of work mornings.
One hour twice a week is not “40% of work mornings”. And we are only assuming the meeting lasts a full hour because it happens an hour before the husband’s usual start time.
Personally, I think it’s unreasonable for ANY employer to allow WFH and then freak out at a once-in-a-blue-moon incident that demonstrates there are other people living in the home. This is not “my five roommates who all work from home.”
Not to be pedantic, but if the LW works five days a week, 2/5 “before work” mornings is in fact 40% of work mornings.
But, to be extremely pedantic, the relevant meeting only happens two days a week, and OP and husband work in the office the rest of the time, based on her comment that they work in the same building. Mark is only doing this WFH meeting for less than an hour twice a week.
And even if it was a meeting once every three months – a senior manager is, more likely than not, not going to apologize on this.
So the only relevant question is: is this OPs hill to die on?
Because bringing up this issue again and again it’s not going to reflect well on her or her husband.
(It wouldn’t be mine.)
Yeah, we’re not dying on this hill.
Mark was the one who wanted to have a meeting with our CFO but I’ve asked him to just drop it.
People use personal funds for work fixes all the time, like car expenses for commuting, professional wardrobe or uniforms, or BYOD. DH could go into the office and hour early to take this call, but he chooses to do so from home.He needs to create a fix for the problem caused by his home environment.
“People use personal funds for work fixes all the time”
Absolutely true.
Absolutely shouldn’t be true, and exploitative.
This is that the paycheck is for.
Your paycheque is absolutely not for subsiding your employer.
(Specifics of this situation aside. If headphones are a work need, your wages should not be paying for it.)
Buying a headset so you can work from home is not subsidizing your employer. If LW’s husband doesn’t want to pay it then he is free to take calls from the office.
ehh, I bought a headset for zoom court. I now use it for other non work related zoom meetings. I bought it during the pandemic and am still using it. So the cost, $30 over 5 years is $6 a year or or about $1.64 a day. Plus I have use it of it when not working without worrying about using business equipment for personal use.
I think you mean 1.64 CENTS a day (less than two pennies a day), not $1.64 a day. But yes! The cost will quickly balance out.
That’s $0.0164 a day.
Depending on the office, there may be a way to expense headphones or even headphones in a supply closet the OP could use.
However, I would also frame that whenever these issues of using personal funds for work fixes are raised – then it puts the employer in a place to say what they will pay for. In this case, their employer has an office. And the employer can easily put forth the OP’s husband should just come into the office earlier for those calls if there’s not another solution.
There will always be employers that push what they expect employees to cover – but I do think it’s helpful to be mindful of when it’s helpful and when it risks being hurtful.
Most of these fixes cost money, it’s reasonable not to want to use personal funds for a work fix.
The thing is that Mark could ask his boss for the company to give him the headphones. Like if it comes up again, Mark could say something like “This is not common problem and we’ve moved my workstation to make it even less likely to happen again. But if you want us to be completely sure that it won’t happen again, could you have IT provide me with a set of headphones with a noise cancelling mike? They really work very well.”
But there is no actual problem that needs to be fixed – just the CEO being precious.
I think that’s why the letter is rubbing me the wrong way. Instead of simply saying: “Yeah, understood, I’m talking measures, won’t happen again, but please address these issues in the future with me”, it’s additional meetings with the CFO and further explanations and possibly involving HR.
Also, on a side note, I can imagine that the audio quality for the CFO, with the existing setup, hasn’t always been as perfect as LW assumes and CFO just might have refrained from mentioning it until now that it was suddenly too much and overreacted.
Yeah – so I live close-ish to a fire station. Occasionally, sirens will be loud, but for the most part I live alone and have never used headphones and never had anyone from work comment.
Then one day I had a job interview, and the interviewer clearly notice and was put off. In my case, I won’t likely use headphones for work unless it’s mentioned – but if there’s ever a super important external meeting (or another interview) I’ll definitely use them.
I do the same thing. I don’t like the physical feeling of wearing the headphones, but I’ll put them on if the dog starts barking. He could be barking 2 feet away from me, and the other people in the call can’t hear him. But the difference is that mine were supplied by my employer (I was hired during the pandemic), so I didn’t have to buy my own.
Yes – I think the LW needs to think about what they’re looking for out of these further meetings. We all agree the CEO was being a bit precious and annoying, but it happened one time. He’s not going to come around and agree that he was being annoying.
Consider your fix and move on.
Yeah, there’s two problems here. One is that the CTO should have handled it with Mark alone, not involving the LW. The other, which is what the CTO should have focused on, is that Mark isn’t using an appropriate WFH setup.
Right. My (disabled) twins often are squealing back and forth with each other. It is sooooo loud. I apologize but my coworkers aren’t hearing anything.
I have teammates in India who do have these headphones and it’s obvious.
I somewhat disagree with the OP for this one – to me, since the situation is work from home, and since both members of the couple are employees, it’s almost the same as if someone in the next office over was causing a disturbance while someone else was presenting in the office boardroom.
That said, I completely agree that the CEO’s response was an over-reaction. If someone had an emergency in their office (eg. burned themselves) and yelped, it should be recognized that this is an aberration. Not to mention that it’s an overreaction to chastise someone when it is very obviously a one-off situation that has occurred exactly once in 5 years.
In this work-from-home situation, it would also have made sense to request that the meeting participant have a directional microphone that reduces background noise – ie. address the issue with the person ON THE CALL, not their spouse. (Directional microphones aren’t perfect – someone yelling in the background can be heard – but they do help a LOT. I’ve had one since the kids were small and I was working from home.)
I don’t think one yelp is causing a disturbance. The boss needs to be realistic. If people work from home you can’t expect the rest of the house to stop existing just because a work call is happening. Also, ensuring quiet is on the person on the call, not anyone else.
boss was wrong to raise it with wife just because she happens to be one of his reports. He needed to raise it with husband – hey we really do need to not hear background noise during these calls so we make sure everyone hears what is being said. Simple, easy.
Yes, the boss was not wrong in considering this, and addressing it, as a matter of an employee who interfered with/disturbed a meeting. Since she works there, too, the spousal status is irrelevant.
In an organization, employees have different roles but they should all be ultimately working toward/supporting the same goal. When an employee (even an off-the-clock one) acts in a way contrary to that goal, it isn’t unreasonable to address it.
That was my question, too.
Like obviously the CTO was WAY overreacting to one (1) very minor incident that happened on one (1) instance of a call LW2’s spouse routinely has to take before his workday starts. It’s absurd.
But also, I do my Teams and Zoom calls with the same US$80 earbuds I use to listen to books and music and podcasts on my phone, and am frequently astonished by how much the other people on the call don’t hear — sirens from the fire station down the road, my dog barking at imaginary foes, a family member talking to me because they don’t realize I’m on a call. These things are like magic!
If he’s required to attend this meeting, then the meeting doesn’t occur *before* his workday starts; the meeting occurs *at the start* of his workday.
OP says the meeting is an hour before Mark’s start time. That sounds to me like it’s outside his work hours — because I’m guessing they’re not giving him equivalent time off at the end of the day.
(Source: I used to work for a large company with people in a wide range of different time zones, and was frequently scheduled into meetings at times like 07:00 and 18:00 my time. They never came with time off in lieu.)
Your guess is as good as mine.
I will say he is using earbuds but I think he finds over ear headphones to be uncomfortable.
I have my own sensory icks so Mark not wearing over ear headphones wasn’t a hill I was willing to die on within my marriage.
Yeah no that’s a very reasonable stance! The person complaining really is being unreasonable here — it was ONE INCIDENT.
Also people can just be odd about this stuff. My partner’s colleagues commented with astonishment about hearing cicadas on a Teams meeting (our windows were open, old house with no a/c). They ignored construction, sirens etc, but apparently Nature was weird. You just never know with people …
Cicadas are weird! It’s a strange, electrical-sounding buzz. As I child, I thought that the sound came from the power lines near our house.
Construction and sirens sound like construction and sirens. Cicadas–especially over a call–sound like something I might wonder if I should be worrying about.
For me, it wasn’t until I got myself headphones with a dongle that I was able to use anything other than my computer’s built in microphone. And I was very surprised when that fixed the issue! For some reason, Teams just hates bluetooth. I had thought it didn’t like headphones in general. It would refuse to play audio if I selected “headset” as the output, and would also refuse to give me the option to use the microphone if I selected “headphones” for the output. I’m not in that many meetings and had a workaround, so I didn’t bother asking IT when I couldn’t fix it on my own
#1. It would be great to pit some code words in there so people know it’s fake, or arrange the start of sentences to start F, A, K, E or something like that but you can feign all innocence if you are every pulled up. Sorry you are working for a crappy company.
I can’t tell if by “unique template” they mean that they all got different templates, but if all of their templates are similar enough, my first thought was for everyone to make as few changes as possible. If there are a bunch of reviews that all use the exact same verbiage, anyone with even a slightly skeptical eye should be able to notice the pattern and know that the reviews are fake in some way.
#3: Why not hear this person out – and leave it there?
And only if they ask about implementing changes to the program, you could answer: “I appreciate your input. But I get a lot of feedback, sometimes conflicting, and need to focus on the opinion of subject matter experts/process owners. If you think a chance is necessary, please contact Clothilda Ringlebloom for topic 123/5 and discuss this with her. She will get back to me.”
In a healthy company, the concept of process ownership is understood
Because I think #3 is giving an example of the huge number of similar requests they’re getting. Barry from HR is telling them about HR and communications, but Harry from communications is telling them about communications and payroll, then Garry from payroll…etc.
If OP is getting attention from “high level folks” for the first time, I would really think twice to go into conversations with a boundary that they only want to have selected feedback. It really might be easier to be polite, listen to it, redirect the request (and forget about) it.
It depends how much time they have and what their goals are. There are times when it’s worth listening to a longer spiel, either because you might pick up a bit of useful information or context you didn’t know to ask for, or because it helps build the relationship. There are times when you need to be targeted and specific and directive to get the right information in the time available. I don’t think this is a one-size-fits-all thing!
I don’t think it’s one-size-fits-all, either.
I think the LW is a bit too lean in their approach, though. It sounds like they only want information they need instantly which might be true if this is an emergency or a triage situation or time is of the essence for whatever reason.
If this is a longer term project, then I would advise the LW to be a bit more flexible about what they hear from other people.
I agree with this thread, I think if you can find the time at all, it’s good to take as many meetings as you can and listen to everyone’s thoughts. Maybe you can even write a little report for your project that summarizes the input of every department. That will also spare you from having to do anything you don’t want to. OP’s situation reminds me of the quote “success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan.” I have often found the same. Everyone wants to jump on the Big Thing and have their part of it. Just accept the human frailty and move on, I guess.
I am pretty sure what the LW is struggling with is *peers* (or otherwise not “high level folks”) wanting to stamp their name on her work now high level folks are involved.
Not said high level folks wanting to talk (too much) about the projects.
I’m on a new project and we are collecting similar feedback. We are also a small team. Easy things we did to control the info flood:
– ubiquitous PowerPoint brief outlining the project. So we don’t have to repeat ourselves to every caller and the message is consistent.
– online survey. Gave everyone a link and a end date for response. The last field is a free text comment box so people can blab to their heart’s content (within the character limitation, lol). Keeps the data collection consistent.
– scheduled meetings with important stakeholders. Scripted agenda, half hour max (we did go to an hour with one person who gave us absolute technical gold in terms of focused info). Not everyone gets the meetings; most are referred to the survey.
OP3, your time is just as important as the folks reaching out to you. We phrase participation as: “We know you stakeholders are very busy with your own work; we’ve designed the survey/this process to be as efficient as possible, to capture the info and let you get back to your day.” Good luck on your project!
Oh my gosh I love this. Thank you so much!
Yes! My colleague says ‘let them shout into a google survey’.
4. Signal to noise ratio in emails is an interesting thing to look at from the perspective of the IT department. On one hand we really don’t like dross cluttering up our precious servers and removing reply all cascades is a legit nightmare.
On the other hand if a place has that generic chit chat going round it’s generally a good sign that the firm isn’t cold, unfriendly, rigid and full of people too afraid to say anything.
Basically I use email folders and drop those kind of ‘noise’ emails into one.
#1 Go for malicious compliance: you all take the trample they gave you, hardly modify it and all post your reviews within a very short time frame. Then you can flag it, as this seems a very suspicious coincidence. :D
I don’t even think this is malicious compliance, just compliance.
You were ordered to use a template to make a review – stick to the template and it will become obvious to readers and glassdoor what is going on here when multiple extremely similar reviews appear.
I laughed at “unique template.” What the hell is that?!
I think everyone has a different template: “management provided us with a unique template.”
Yeah. I wonder though if they coordinate to post them at the exact same time (or nearly) if that’d also set off some kind of red flag… The main problem is, could LW’s access to Glassdoor be compromised as well?
I think tipping off Glassdoor is honestly the best solution.
“I think tipping off Glassdoor is honestly the best solution.”
Best solution to what, though? Getting more co-workers, to spread the workload and prevent burnout? Help the people who sign your paychecks build a more productive business.
If your employer is your enemy, you should quit. If you can’t quit, you probably shouldn’t treat your employer as your enemy, even if that’s what they are.
I’m gonna go out on a limb and say a workplace that is pushing people to leave fake reviews is not going to become more productive with the current leadership, regardless of how many new people they hire. Plus, the ability to spread the workload to prevent burnout only works once enough people are trained and only if the business is managed well (which doesn’t involve asking employees to do unethical things).
Giving people an unrealistic view of what they are applying for is likely to do more harm than good anyway.
Sure, but maliciously undermining the people who sign your paycheck isn’t the solution either.
It’s not “malicious.” *They* are pressuring their employees to maliciously undermine the good faith nature of this review site. That is dishonest behavior. Retaliation is completely reasonable.
Off the clock, as well.
How do you build a more productive business by lying and posting fake reviews? Do you think that works?
The best solution to the unethical act that the employer is asking her to do, one that undermines the integrity of a platform that is at least meant to empower employees and give good employers a leg up. I realize that Glassdoor isn’t quite as pure as all that, but at least they’re a move in the right direction. What LW is being forced to do is a violation of their terms of service.
I agree that LW would be best off leaving, but in this economy, that’s not always possible. Quietly letting Glassdoor know that this company is planning on posting fraudulent reviews seems like a good way to keep her integrity intact without any real risk of blowback, since the company wouldn’t really be able to know what happened.
If LW wants to tip off Glassdoor, they probably don’t need to go through all this – they can just reach out via Glassdoor’s contact page and say, hey, my employer is asking us all to do this, is there anything you can do about it on your end? That would be more solid than any timing coincidences.
Yes, exactly.
So, I was thinking that OP could just make the review sound very planted. We all know what planted reviews look like. In my area, we have poorly performing eye doctor offices constantly posting fake google reviews about themselves. OP could just go look at some fake reviews and then post it on glassdoor. Then mostly everyone will know they are planted. Especially if everyone does this and you all post at the same time.
I second this.
From what LW1 said, it sounds like management gave her a script of what to post, so if she doesn’t post that exact script, I think they will notice. I am sure they are not giving everyone the exact same script, but they probably do know which employee has which script post.
OP, I would say wait a week or two after you post this and then let Glassdoor know, so that way your boss knows you did what they wanted. Obviously, you can also contact them in advance and ask them how to alert them, as Jeane suggested. If you know what the other scripts are, you can let them know that as well to make it easier for them.
For what it’s worth, I don’t know what your boss thinks they will accomplish. Anyone they hire will find out those reviews aren’t true, and Glassdoor will find out eventually one way or the other.
Undermining your employer’s business seems like a self-harming solution.
The sad thing is, this could easily have been framed in an positive, ethical way:
“As you know, we’re struggling with recruitment, and it’s affecting our business. If you believe in the what we do, and think this is (or could be) a great place to work, please consider making your opinion known on Glassdoor. Let us know if you’d like a template to help you get started.”
Something like that, which is more opt-in
Not wanting to comply with forced speech and trying to keep a dishonest forced review from being seen as real can hardly be said to be “undermining your employer’s business.”
Obviously this will depend on how desperately you need the job, but under most circumstances I think undermining your employer when they’re doing something unethical falls somewhere between a generally good thing and morally obligatory. And I doubt getting a few GlassDoor reviews taken down is going to hurt the business at all anyway.
People should have a problem if they are asked to lie and create false reviews, especially given the FTC has spoken against it. Online endorsements and testimonials can’t be purposely misleading, and any relationship or connection between a company and reviewer must be disclosed. If the FTC catches wind of companies doing that, they can impose fines.
Even if you don’t go out of your way to post within a short time frame or flag it, a good critical reader looking at a glassdoor page covered in reviews from the same template will probably notice that something’s up. Unless people are going way out of their way to customize the template, the reviews will probably all sound the same, which is a big red flag.
“[U]nique template” – every employee’s scripted review is different. The employer thought of this.
LW5, replace the word “conflict” with something that feels less charged. What did you do when you and another colleague had different ideas about the best way to handle something? I think by “conflict” you are assuming it’s about how to handle high emotions and drama, and something where you are both completely professional and compassionate to each other but have legitimately different priorities is equally valid. They wanted to route the ship through the Alpha quadrant because it has the lowest taxes and best safety record: you completely understood why they prioritised that, but you knew that there was a crew in desperate need of new dilithium crystals and that would take too long. After speaking to them, you recognised that this was a legitimate difference of priorities ans spoke to your boss to make sure the faster route could be authorised.
Showing that you understand another person’s priorities can be legitimately different from yours, scheduling direct meetings to come to a resolution, escalating where necessary, referring back to departmental, organisation or professional strategies and guidelines— these are all the best possible ways to resolve differences if opinion and they are what a interviewer usually wants to hear!
Seconding this! I felt just like the OP a few years ago and struggled with this so much. To me, discussing things when you disagree and coming to a mutually agreed solution/compromise was not conflict at all because it was just so low key and not remarkable. But…that’s actually a sign of handling conflict well!
My other advice is to think of a couple examples ahead of time so you’re not on the spot. I picked one in which a colleague changed my mind about something through discussion.
Agreed.
Honestly, if I ask this question and get a story about a time that they got in a fistfight with the navigator on the bridge in the middle of a battle with the Borg… that would make me VERY LEERY of hiring them. It’s possible that the story could be told in such a way that I would find their de-escalation techniques impressive, but unless the story hits exactly the right notes, what I would take away from that answer is “This is someone who allows interpersonal conflicts to fester so badly / makes their colleagues so incredibly frustrated that people punch them in the workplace.”
I don’t want that kind of drama on my team! I am in fact asking this question (in part) to see if you can calmly and reasonably talk about someone you may still be annoyed with. “We had a frustrating situation with Accounting because they wanted us to submit our expenses daily and it didn’t make sense for us to submit them more than weekly, and we solved it by having a bunch of meetings with the higher-ups present, where I did XYZ to find a mutually-agreeable solution” is exactly what I’m looking for here.
Really, conflict should be less charged in the workplace to begin with. We use it for things like scheduling all the time, it doesn’t have to hold a whole other layer of drama when people are involved. Sometimes people/ideas/understandings/dispositions aren’t aligned, and we figure it out.
Agreeing – when I ask candidates this type of question, I actually have taken to phrasing it differently. Too many people assume (esp. in junior roles) that it’s an inter-personal conflict or fight that I want to know about. It’s really NOT.
What I want to know is how the candidate deals with situations where there are stakeholders with competing priorities, no obvious correct answer, and where there are real business consequences on the line. I want to know how the person manages the relationships, how they deal with challenges and curve balls, how they prioritize the correct things, and at what point they determine they should bring in management support.
The correct answers to all of these issues very much depend on the level of the role – more senior roles will require more complex and developed skills in each of these areas.
This always reminds me of the time I asked a question during a round of interviews if candidates had any experience delivering bad news to external parties.
In this case, the role did regularly require being the face of delivering that kind of news – but things like “the project is being delayed”. So definitely requiring an ability to diplomatically and transparently being the face of news that something isn’t going well. For getting that kind of information, I’d say it worked so-so, but then one person responded about at time they worked for the Red Cross and had to provide military families with news about family members being injured, missing, etc. And it definitely highlighted to me how some people could easily view “bad news” and why they might be getting stuck on that question and not providing answers more aligned with the skill set I was trying to assess.
Yes – I have to say – I work somewhere where words such as conflict or criticism are more highly charged than other places I’ve worked. Like we don’t give critique of work, but rather provide feedback.
If the OP personally or their primary employers have had that tendency to see terms such as conflict as being entirely negative – then it may just be helpful to sit with those terms and find ways to make that transition from feedback to critique, or coming to agreement with resolving conflict. I genuinely have seen pluses and minuses from both varieties of workplaces – so neither is in red flag territory for me. But when the way your brain immediately defines a word is different from others, it can be harder to think of how best to respond. And finding that translation may be helpful.
Can someone (an American?) explain what chewing out is? My mind goes straight to eating out which is obviously very NSFW. Where did this expression come from?
In British English, I think (verbal) bollocking comes closest. I don’t know the etymology of “chewing out” but it never has sexual overtones. Maybe closer to biting someone’s head off?
“Bollocking” is exactly right!
Australian – it came from military, as a polite version of chewing someone’s [butt] out. It means to be scolded or reprimanded – usually loudly and with lots of yelling because, well, military origin
(and for why you’d chew someone’s butt off – the way I heard it, it’s because “clearly that’s where your head is”, no idea if that part’s true to its origin)
Oh, I always thought it came from “chewing someone’s head off” meaning to attack them (verbally). But it has the connotation you are scolding them for a specific reason, typically something within their purview, just being particularly strong in doing so.
There are a few different theories I’ve seen, generally attributing it to military slang but with different origin stories. I think it’s one of those cases where if a website gives exactly one clear origin without citing any sources, they are just the latest in a chain of “repeating something I heard once” that may or may not be true.
“Chewing out” means thoroughly scolding or reprimanding someone. “The CEO really chewed out Bob for complaining that Mary had ordered extra guacamole.”
It took my brain a few seconds to process what Burnzie meant by “eating out” – at least in American English, this can also mean “Going out to eat at a restaurant, as opposed to preparing a meal at home”!
I am familiar with the meaning Burnzie referenced as well, though. Which meaning is intended is usually clear from context, and which one you encounter more often is probably tied to how often you happen to encounter each topic.
Neither meaning of “eating out” has anything to do with “chewing out”, as other posters have already addressed.
I am an American too.
I did not know “chewing out” is a NSFW term.
I have no this term for decades. It means what the others have said in the thread.
Is this a regional thing?
“Chewing out” is safe for work. So is “eating out” in the context mentioned by MCT (“We’re eating out [at a restaurant]” and similar).
“Eating out” also has a different, NSFW meaning but like MCT said, whether “eating out” is referring to food at a restaurant (SFW) or people (NSFW) is usually clear from context.
#1 sounds like the employer demanding that the employee does work off the clock. Unless they are salaried.
Also there is the issue that Glassdoor might ban the accounts that post the fake reviews. Which will make it difficult for these employees to post honest reviews in the future.
If I had to do this, I’d be posting the fake review from a throwaway account via a VPN. Preferably one that makes me look like I’m in a country where the employer doesn’t operate, just to make it suspicious. Then demand pay for the work the employer has instructed me to do.
#4 Can these non-urgent good news stories and congratulations move to a different channel? This is the type of things that go well in a Teams channel, and then people are free to turn off notifications and just browse through those announcements and replies when it suits them instead of clogging up the inboxes
My work culture at the job I just started has this habit too – I’m just trying to accept it. The whole time someone’s talking on a zoom call, if they share anything remotely positive or even funny, the comments are full of positive encouragement, cheerleading, emojis etc – and email the same. They’re from California which is a factor I guess. I haven’t encountered this before and I don’t always love it, but I’m trying to adapt haha.
Agreed, a teams or slack channel for good news is the fix here. The wins still get announced, there’s a place for people to reply or post a congratulatory react emoji, and people can mute it if they need deep focus time.
For LW1, one or more employees could faithfully post their assigned positive reviews as ordered …
… and additionally use another different non-work IP address (friend’s house? mobile data?) to leave an *honest* review explaining the situation and advising readers to take recent positive reviews with a generous pinch of salt.
Yes, I’ve seen these in the past when browsing Glassdoor. An employee will post saying their employer forced them to post positive fake reviews.
Maybe I’m weird or an outlier, but I’ve never gotten bothered by reply- all email fiascos. You can just delete the messages and it’s usually over pretty quickly. Even the examples LW uses don’t seem such a big deal. I know the letter is somewhat tongue in cheek, so I think LW doesn’t really mind either
I’m wondering how your company would know if you just didn’t complete the review? Aren’t they anonymous/screen names?
Same. My former job also heavily pressured us to leave reviews (they didn’t explicitly say “positive” but it was implied). I ignored them until I left and then wrote my own. They can’t actually make you do it.
If they each got a unique template to use from the employer, they will be able to figure out who didn’t complete the assignment.
I think the key is that each person has been provided with a unique template/script. So they’re checking that specific reviews have popped up, which they know correspond to specific employees.
Which will obviously flag to Glassdoor that all of these reviews that came in around the same time and follow the same script are not genuine reviews.
Hmm, I wonder if the employees who were asked to do this could coordinate to all post their reviews at the exact same time? Maybe that would flag to Glassdoor that something sketchy is afoot?
Man those people need more actual work to do if they have time for thus!
The idea that OP’s employer went to the effort to draft a different template for every single employee is wild to me. That’s so much work, for so little return! I know it says it in the letter, but I keep thinking it has to be more generalized than that.
I can nearly guarantee you they used ChatGPT.
The company provided unique templates. Presumably they can see which reviews have been posted that match the provided template and track it that way.
AFAIK, there’s also nothing stopping any one of these employees from privately adding a “real” review noting that these reviews are all faked and giving the real scoop on employment there, although I understand OP doesn’t really want to get deeper into the drama. If you’re still in touch with any ex-employees, they could be a good candidate. When my bosses were way too obsessed with Glassdoors, I put deliberately obfuscating details in my review so it could not be connected to any person. I also left a review while I still worked there, but in the style of someone who had recently left (and there were no actual recently departed employees who could be blamed for my words).
That’s what I want to know. They’re so determined it not be traced back to them, what’s stopping you from just pointing to a random one and going, “Yep, that’s totally mine”?
Wondering the same thing. What if you just don’t do it?
I don’t fully understand the specifics of #3, but I’d just caution LW that with things like this, once they become bigger and more known the original scope might change, and higher ups might have their own thoughts on it.
So the overall advice is don’t get too attached to it being “yours”, depending on the specifics of your role, company, etc.. of course
3: sometimes you don’t listen to people because you need to hear the communication. You listen to people because they need to say it.
The LW would be well served to develop a filter for information they need. They would also be well served to have some longer term thinking about this. In the short term, they are probably going to hear a lot of things from people they don’t immediately need. In the longer term, they are fostering connections with people across the company and that will probably pay dividends. If the LW switches their mindset from “I am going to this meeting to get X piece of information” to “I am going to this meeting for team building” that might help.
If the LW is truly uniquely skilled then they have some insulation on getting along well with other people. But nobody is immune to this. Especially as you move up the ranks.
Listening to people at your level but in a different department is an investment in your own future even if they don’t say something you immediately need.
In addition to contacting Glassdoor, write a review setting out what you’ve told us here.
Whenever there is mention of reply all, I have to post the glory that is “Free bananas in the kitchen”.
https://www.metafilter.com/78177/PLEASE-UNSUBSCRIBE-ME-FROM-THIS-LIST#2408665
#2 – I agree the CFO’s email to you was misplaced, and that you should drop it. However, it would be wise for both you and Mark to prepare a response in case the CFO brings it up—especially you, since he conducts your performance evaluation, he apparently currently considers Mark’s background noise to be your work-related responsibility, and it sounds like he does not oversee much of your actual day to day work.
In preparing a response, here are things I would suggest it focus on:
1. You have both been cognizant and careful to minimize background noise for these calls. One brief incident (which was an emergency) in over 500 calls demonstrates that.
2. You and Mark have implemented changes (I agree with the person above who suggested Mark use a headset!) to further reduce the likelihood of a repeat incident.
3. Despite all the care you have taken, here’s a reminder that *you* were not at work at the time. You are off the clock during these calls, so the CFO was indeed contacting you in your capacity as a spouse, not as the CFO’s direct report, and also not as Mark’s colleague/officemate.
4. For Mark: he understands the CFO’s concerns about background noise during his status updates, and to eliminate the possibility of background noise due to being at home, would like to suggest either rescheduling the meeting to a time when all of the meeting attendees can take the call from the office, or that the company provide noise-cancelling headphones to use at home.
5. For Mark: Don’t focus on his choice to mute or unmute, but if the CFO brings it up to him, he can that unplanned background boise can occur in the office too and ask how the CFO would like him to handle it (regardless of location) in the future.
You didn’t specify in your letter what Mark said when he brought it up to the CFO, but the two of you should make sure you’re on the same page going forward.
I personally wouldn’t lean on “emergency” for a cat pee situation, although I know it’s upsetting to OP. Unexpected or something is probably a better term for it.
Maybe “small emergency”? It was something that elicited appropriate shock and really did need to be addressed right away – cat pee deposited outside the litter box is bad news bears. To me, it feels like a home emergency comparable to a lot of offices’ work emergencies.
I think it’s fine. No need to explain that the emergency was pee specifically.
No need but it sure would be immediately understood by anyone who’d ever had a pet. And hopefully sympathized with.
“Startled” is also a good option, if you feel “emergency” comes on too strong. That implies “provoking an involuntary reaction,” too.
Our CFO would blow off “unexpected”
but he will/did take “emergency” seriously.
Well, yes, because I’m guessing he thought someone was injured or something. I too accept a different standard in “emergencies” vs everyday inconveniences … but if I found out it wasn’t an emergency at all, just an inconvenient housecleaning situation, I wouldn’t be very happy.
Well, you can remain happy. A cat peeing in the laundry pile means the cat has either a urinary tract infection or bladder/kidney stones. It actually is an emergency, the animal likely will need surgery. So… be happy that something sufficiently awful has happened?
Weird response on your part.
I don’t mean to undermine you but luckily for us our cat has been checked out by the vet & has a clean bill of health.
He has a behavior problem we are working to resolve.
Okay, lay out for me how our CFO would find out what the emergency was without myself or Mark spilling the beans?
I think preparing a response should it come up makes a lot of sense. I wouldn’t dwell on this more than being prepped, as it is likely to eat at OP/Mark more than needed, but should the CFO bring it up, a well-reasoned response is going to be helpful.
And I’d agree that “emergency” might be overstating the situation, but certainly “unexpected circumstance” would be correct.
I understand this approach may be necessary if the CFO is a wildly unreasonable person (which the initial chastisement may indicate), but I really hope that OP realizes the problem here is the CFO and not the incident itself, and that thinking through it all this thoroughly would be a major overreaction in most offices.
I’ve worked hybrid for the last several years and interruptions happen occasionally. We’ve had a conference room full of people in another office drop off suddenly due to a power outage or have to log off to evacuate for a fire alarm. People forget to mute while they take another call or speak to someone who popped into their office. People in cubes have lively discussion occur down the hall or a facilities person using power tools nearby. And yes, sometimes there’s background noise at home.
Of course if there’s a consistent issue it should be addressed, but a one-time thing? Just part of life.
Your take on interruptions is absolutely correct, but the fact that LW got scolded by the person who does her performance reviews changes it — at least for me — into something that one might want a plan for handling if it comes up again.
I think your response would be great for a reasonable person, but if the CFO is blaming a woman for her husband presenting in a shared living room without headphones, I don’t know that he’s reasonable. It’s good for the LW to know the CFO is a lil sexist, that he is unlikely to self-reflect, and that he might be annoyed that Mark takes these calls from home at all. Other than that, I’d say it’d be better for LW’s response to be non-defensive, breezier and more conciliatory while focusing on it being Mark’s fault – “Oh, that? Mark moved his office downstairs after that call, since he’d actually been set up in our living room! I can’t believe he got through five years with no background noise issues, that was an accident waiting to happen!” or something
Our CFO is quite old fashioned in some ways & isn’t very prone to self reflection.
Though to his credit he does take a reasonable stance on most everything else.
We three are all friends outside of work which messes with the dynamic even more.
All that being said, having a response ready to go just incase this comes up during my review is a good idea.
Oof at the mix of “old fashioned”, friends with boss outside of work, and boss being weird about hearing a yell one (1) time.
Hopefully you being friendly means he felt overly comfortable to effectively just vent at you rather than holding it against you the way this thread is preparing for.
Sounds like you need a new job STAT! Not easy in the current climate, but at least consider looking around.
Being friends with your boss is simply asking for trouble, ask me how I know. It’s never, ever a good idea.
I’m firmly convinced that it’s not possible to maintain both a professional relationship with someone and also be friends with them. I guess you’re lucky in that the CFO hasn’t caused you any trouble before now.
Mark didn’t say what he & CFO talked about.
I assume since they are friends outside of work it was part of a bull session.
Mark was very upset about the CFO emailing me not him & I think he took my walking on eggshells to heart.
I will tell him to drop it for now.
OP#2- What outcome do you want from this? It’s obvious this is making you mad. It would make me absolutely furious so I am not judging.
You’re pushing this when I think it’s pretty obvious the CFO will not apologize or see the error in what he did.
I agree with this. OP, I’m livid on your behalf. You were in your own home on your own time. And it sounds like a team status update not a presentation to outsiders for a billion dollar contract. And if the meeting is so important, have it during normal work hours. But let it go. That boss is unreasonable.
I plan on letting it go for now.
I was going to let it go after I replied to the CFOs email. However, Mark took it very personally when I told him I was walking on eggshells. So Mark took the initiative to casually talk to the CFO. I agree nothing else would come from more formal meeting so I am going to tell Mark so just drop it for now.
I’m taking the advice of letting it go.
Organizing your in-box by thread as opposed to chronologically can help with this kind of “great job!” clutter. It keeps them in a single thread (that you can mute in my in-box) instead of sprinkled through the inbox throughout the day.
If you can get anyone to start a Teams or Slack channel for achievements, that may also help.
The Teams channel was what I was thinking about. A “Kudos” section where we can consolidate all of our amazing compliments.
And then just mute the notifications for that channel.
I’m not in the US, and I don’t really understand the whole (non)exempt thing – but is there any possiblity that LW1 should be paid for the time she spends at home writing the review?
I get that any employer that behaves in the way LW1’s employer does is unlikely to be stupid enough to document that it’s paying its employees for Glassdoor reviews (or indeed to care about complying with every single law re wages). And it’s not a hill I’d personally choose to die on. But questions about that might produce some interesting evidence.
I mean, if HR provided a template and OP is just copy-pasting it, that’s probably five to ten minutes of work, so yes arguably a non-exempt person needs to be paid for those five minutes but I don’t think it would be worth pursuing if it were me.
“Ooh, does this mean we’re allowed to WFH now? Because I need to have a washing machine delivered.”
LW3: When folks are giving feedback on something outside their scope, I’ll often name that for them – like “thanks for sharing that. I’m going to prioritize the input from [directly impacted department] for that aspect of the project because it’s their work area, but I’ll keep this in mind.” That both gets you out of shutting them down, and helps them understand their role in the process. Although for a team like HR where their scope might genuinely cross into other areas, I also think it’s fine to ask “is this directly related to something HR needs, or are you sharing something you observed but doesn’t directly impact HR?”
LW5: When I ask this question in interviews, I want the details of “have the meetings, send the emails.” I want to know what you said to who and why, how they reacted, and how you responded to their reaction and why. It doesn’t need to be a major conflict or anything involving Big Emotions, but I am looking for something that took some back and forth to resolve and align on – i.e. not something that was an easy compromise with a single email. I want to hear your thought process about where you were willing to compromise on your goals/priorities to achieve a better outcome for the organization as a whole, how relationship management factored in, how you assessed the priority of the other person’s needs. I can get all that from something as minor as “colleague missed a deadline and it caused a minor headache for me, but it turned out it was because their dad was sent to the hospital the night before” or as major as “colleague and I disagreed about how to approach something that had the potential to cost the company tens of millions of dollars” – the details of the disagreement matter less than your step-by-step approach, problem-solving and relationship management skills.
While not specifically an answer to your question, OP1, I was struck by you comment that your friends and family are disappointed in you for doing this. I’m sorry you’re getting that kind of reaction from those close to you because I think that’s a really harsh take on their part, and it doesn’t help you at all. It is one thing to join you in your own disappointment that your employer is instructing you to do something shady. But to put that disappointment on you for following instructions is unfair. While it is shady to instruct employees to do that, you’re not scamming the elderly out of their retirement incomes. You’re not taking food out of children’s mouths. You’re not upselling your customers into purchasing supplemental insurance that doesn’t actually benefit them. A friend or family member should be helping you find a solution, not expressing disappointment in you for following these instructions, and I’m sorry that’s happening.
The solution is for these sad folks to flag the reviews as fraudulent.
Yeah, that was a record scratch moment; these are people who OP has confided in and who need to support her. OP doesn’t have any personal motivation or desire to deceive, and you’d have to be pretty privileged to believe she should fall on the sword of her livelihood for a principle – and for what? To help Glassdoor maintain it’s trustworthiness and integrity? That’s their job. Personally I think OP should lean in on this one, and not just for the imperative of keeping their job. If companies want to be this deceptive they should be given as much rope as possible. People deleting or correcting their reviews later on will not look good at all.
This is a really good take.
LW, in terms of things people do to get by under capitalism, this is small potatoes. Is there moral value in taking a principled stand? Sure. But there’s also value in deciding that while you consider this unethical, it’s not something you want to stick your neck out for. Not doing it probably wouldn’t result in losing your job. But if I understand the setup, your employer has the ability to determine if you, personally, have complied, and it is 100% okay to decide that remaining in good standing at work is more important than fighting for your principles.
Especially if you can report this to Glassdoor in a way that isn’t traceable back to you or your uniquely identifiable review.
Yes, thank you for highlighting this. I was coming here to say the same thing. I’m sorry, OP1, that you’ve gotten that response from folks. I had a similar thing happen once in my career where I was asked to do something that I didn’t really love (but wasn’t causing harm to folks, etc like HonorBox mentioned above), but was very important to the company that I do it. When I brought it up to friends and family, a few had the same response about how they would never do that how they couldn’t believe I would actually do it. I remember feeling just terrible and crying about the pain of their disappointment and how these people who were close to me apparently viewed me as having no integrity. In the end, I did it and it was fine. It turns out the world is much more gray than some folks would like to believe. Maybe it’s true that they have the ability to never do anything that they wouldn’t like to and quit a job first. But most of us don’t have that ability, even though we do have firm lines we wouldn’t cross. There are a lot of folks in government who have said they wouldn’t work for an administration they didn’t agree with, but then end up doing it because they still need a job. As long as they aren’t actively working on harmful initiatives, I don’t judge people for not quitting every time a new administration is hired. Your friends and family should be supporting you and helping find ways to flag any problems, not making you feel terrible for something that’s honestly probably inconsequential in the long run.
Is asking questions about workplace conflict in interviews common? I’ve been working for 30+ years and have never been asked about it, nor would I think to ask someone who I was interviewing. I must give off a “he’s chill” vibe..
Yeah, I have gotten variations of it, as have my friends. basically a question for assessing soft skills (how do you manage people’s different priorities and your own without it getting nasty) and also an angle on “how do you do under pressure/stress” since conflicts can spike people’s adrenaline (metaphorically and literally) even if they are technically low stakes.
I remember one job a while back asking a version specific to their workplace of “is it more important to get the weekly pamphlet out as good enough or perfect?” because their office had been really struggling not to fiddle with the damn thing until the last minute. I explained my process for asking for revisions and stuck to it, so my answer for conflict was: consistent, proactive communication and follow through on timelines. Everyone gets their opportunity to opine/add stuff and if it is late, oh well! there is always next week.
I think it depends on the career path, mine involves a lot of soft skills (as Silver Robin notes too) and get a LOT of When X how do you Y in interviews
Pretty much every interview I have ever had has asked about how I deal with either conflict or difficult people. Engineers are high conflict drama queens, and companies are highly invested in finding people with soft skills.
I am just realizing that my current position never asked me about how I deal with interpersonal problems, and the workplace is correspondingly filled with low interpersonal skills people.In fact, I would call this place a dumpster fire of dysfunction and toxic personalities.
I work at an engineering firm and while I wouldn’t go quite this far, many of our employees (many of whom have PhDs, most of whom have at least a masters), need time to adapt to the idea that they’re not the smartest person in the room, no matter how they did in college. In some cases this learning process is very painful for the employee and everyone around them.
In my experience, most engineer types with PhDs have had the idea that they’re always the smartest person in any room knocked out of them during their PhD. They do, though, often enter the working world with a very narrow definition of what smart is, and a disdain for soft skills (and ideas of working norms severely warped by academia), and that can be a real problem.
Oh yeah. Many years ago I worked with a PhD who literally told me that he shouldn’t have to be nice to people, that all that should matter was that he get his work done. He thought “niceness” was just fake and a waste of time. My analogy back was that “niceness” was the oil that kept the work engine from seizing up. People put up with him but I don’t think he had any friends.
Those people are still out there! Closer than you may think…..
I don’t think people like that value friendship much. Or if they do, all of their friends are carbon copies of themselves.
In a group consisting entirely of potential reports (candidate would become our manager) we asked exactly this question! We wanted to hear stuff like “when llama services insisted llama grooming — my department—turn around grooms in 20 minutes, I …”
Yeah! Absolutely want to know how you deal with conflict from either unreasonable demands or uncooperative colleagues!
I’ve encountered it in most office-job interviews, yes, though tbf I don’t interview often.
Sometimes the phrasing is softer, more like “a time when you had to persuade someone”, but it comes down to the same thing.
I tend to break it down like this for myself:
1. Show you have experience of a kind of conflict that’s common in your field.
2. Demonstrate your understanding of the relationships at play, as well as the practical considerations.
3. Demonstrate your understanding of the scope of your role (knowing when to delegate, when to cooperate and when to dictate), as well as what resources you can use.
4. Discuss the outcome and how the successes or failures informed your ongoing practice.
In my field it’s very common for one involved group to want to publish ASAP, and for another group to hold on to confidentiality for as long as possible. Funding typically comes from one group in the short term and the other group in the long term. It’s easy for me to pull examples of this kind of “conflict” without implying unprofessionalism or mal intent on any side.
It’s a very common question for any job that will deal with conflict. Management, customer service, HR, etc.
No it’s just whether not the job has a high level of problem solving and interpersonal management. It’s a standard question for us because it’s a very big part of our job.
I work with mainly engineers and other professionals. We all have different priorities and ideas. A big part of this job is understanding how to navigate the competing interests. Mine are as important as others. So I can’t run around being inflexible to their needs because they need my part for theirs. But I also deal with people that think my work is incredibly annoying and unimportant to the point they’re hostile to us. So I simultaneously have to deal with that too.
It’s pretty standard IME, although I expect this varies based on the characteristics of the jobs you’re interviewing for. (Every job I’ve ever had has involved the potential for interpersonal conflict at some scale — you’d be amazed how angry you can make some people by changing where they put their commas! — although fortunately not all of them have involved actual interpersonal conflict.)
I’ve certainly asked it as a hiring manager, and listened very closely to the responses.
What the question is trying to get at, usually, is both how you handled the conflict at the time (did you escalate or de-escalate? was your de-escalation effective? what did you do to repair the relationship going forward?) and how you talk about the conflict in retrospect (can you resist the urge to be dismissive of the other party? can you speak neutrally about the conflict itself? does it seem like you learned something from the experience?). In my world — academic publishing — the conflicts themselves are usually extremely low-stakes! But people can get very, very exercised about those extremely low-stakes problems, and if you can’t talk them down effectively, you will not be good at your job.
Yes, we always ask it and I have almost always gotten some version of it. Except when the hiring committee is all faculty members.
It’s exceptionally useful. See CatLady in the Mountains comment for why/
We ask this question at every interview. I’m in healthcare in a multidisciplinary setting, so we need collaborate people on the team. There are always some disagreements among colleagues, and the stakes can be high (people’s health/lives), so it’s a pretty important question, I think.
OP #2- he can use headphones with a mic. Most block out background noises really well. They’re cheap and plentiful too. Most workers won’t care if your camera is on first thing in the morning too, but I guess that varies between employers.
But it is strange you were chastised by the CFO- a small joke should’ve been made by your husband when the issue happened to illustrate this isn’t a big deal, especially since they all know who you are. These are literally just early morning status calls (a treat only early birds from a different generation or Type As love).
I’m surprised your husband has to meet an *hour early* before he even starts, twice a week. Should he like, let someone know he doesn’t start until x time, so it can be rescheduled? He’s a PM, so I thought he’d be all over his time and how it’s spent.
Good luck with this!
It is very common at companies that allow flex time in starting/ending hours to expect employees to support meetings that happen during the workday but outside that individual employees hours. Largely this applies to morning meetings happening earlier than some peoples typical start times but not two afternoon meetings that happen after some peoples typical and times. Morning people take a dim view of being asked to move their meetings, and it’s sort of tone deaf to office hierarchies to ask that your group meeting be moved.
Morning meetings can also often be a practicality thing for senior people with busy calendars (e.g., the CFO):
The very first meeting of the day at 7:45 AM is often easiest to guarantee it happens. No risk of previous meetings running over, no unexpected craziness, no client meetings to work around, etc.
Also super common in multinational companies, no matter what the flex time looks like — if there isn’t an overlap in office hours between two time zones at all, someone is going to have to take the call outside their hours. (Granted, at my employer, everyone is very chill about the fact that the person taking the call outside standard hours might have interruptions/weird background noise/terrible sound and video quality going on, and that it should be politely ignored unless it actually stops the meeting from being possible.)
Yes, we have flex starting times & our CFO starts very early in the morning & is a morning person.
So like you said, we are expected to be flexible in regards of morning meetings.
OP2 – I think the CFO is way out of line here. I don’t think there’s benefit in pushing back now, though. Having said that, what @Pocket Mouse said above would be helpful. Be ready in the event the CFO brings it up again. Be able to highlight that it was a one-time situation and there has never been any sort of problem before or since. Show that you and Mark have made some changes to work setup to decrease the potential impact of noise in the future. And highlight that, even though you report to the CFO, in this circumstance, you were not on the clock and you were just a family member in the background.
Background noise happens ALL THE TIME when people are dialing in to virtual meetings. Dogs bark, UPS drivers ring the doorbell, phones ring, someone drops something, someone walks into the room and doesn’t realize a mic is not muted. This happens when people are at home and in an office, and it is really difficult to perfectly control for the potential of background noise. And in this situation, you have been almost forced to be a hostage in your own home during these meetings, tiptoeing around and trying to be as quiet as a mouse. While Mark could do more to control environment (by setting up elsewhere like you’re doing or by wearing headphones) things can still happen even in the most controlled environment.
Overall, I’d say let it go as much as you can. Try to create some distance between this situation with the CFO. But be prepared with a reasonable response if it comes up in the future, because someone who is THIS picky about a very benign one-off situation (it isn’t like you marched through the room F-bombing and crashing cymbals) may bring it up in the future.
I think the CFO will either drop it like we are or it’ll come up in my performance review.
So having a response ready to go isn’t a bad idea.
I think a really strong point in your favour is you and your husband have taken this as seriously as humanly possible, you’ve been quiet for countless calls, and once you both realised a hole in the plan (being surprised by something), you changed the workspace to account for that. Because he’s being ridiculous there’s a huge temptation to explain how and why he’s being ridiculous rather than to point out that everything is already resolved.
LW1, I feel your pain. I left a scathingly bad review on Glassdoor for an insane company I briefly worked at, and last I looked, they had three or four 5 stars reviews that came around after mine. They’ve been doing this for a long time too – every time a negative review comes trough they have an influx of vaguely positive 5 star ones – and I’ve reported some of their older fake reviews to Glassdoor, but the tactic unfortunately works, because their average Glassdoor score is currently 4.4 despite there being quite a few 1 star reviews like mine on their Glassdoor page, so they keep doing it. It’s super obvious that they’re fake and it’s frankly embarrassing. I suspect management submits them rather than coerce employees to do it themselves though.
If I were you I’d follow Alison’s advice of reporting this to Glassdoor and wait. If management eventually asks if you’ve written and submitted your fake review yet, apologize and say you keep forgetting to do it but you’ll definitely get around to it asap! Then rinse and repeat until they stop asking, either because they’re happy with the amount of fake reviews they got or because Glassdoor contacted them about what they’re doing and not-so-politely told them to knock it off.
LW #5: if the only story someone can tell me about conflict during an interview is about a big fight, I will think they aren’t great at handling conflict! Conflict in the workplace shouldn’t really rise to the level of “a big fight.” Tell me about that time when a coworker wouldn’t stay in their lane and was creeping in on your project. How did you discuss that with them to get the desired results WITHOUT a big fight? Tell me about the person who was demanding things of you that you weren’t able to provide. How did you help them feel like you cared about their requests while also setting reasonable expectations?
Not to be Mr contrarian, but are reply all email fiascos really that big of a problem? Yes it can get annoying, but it usually peters out pretty quickly and they’re pretty easy to just delete and move on..
That sounds like a small amount of reply all emails, and a role where there’s time to do that kind of email management. It’s going to vary hugely by company size, type of role, and individual temperament. I work in a large school where there is never enough time to get on top of emails. Even so, some people will still love the cheerleader cameraderie and others will be just dying to get to the bottom of their emails.
I don’t understand why the manager in #1 doesn’t just write the fake reviews themselves. It’s trivially easy to set up a VPN to avoid tracking. Not looping in employees makes it way less likely they’ll be found out.
RE: the reply all congrats messages, we have a “kudos” channel in our organization’s Slack channel where people can share a “congrats to person X for Y” type of comment and most people will react with a relevant emoji or a few might comment. The notifications can easily be turned off and it still has the feeling of cheering on a coworker. Maybe consider moving these “good news” messages to a lower stakes platform where notifications can be managed more easily?
I work for a large team that also likes to reply-all to things when it’s not necessary. I just hit “Ignore” on the top left of the message top ribbon and it solves the problem.
#2 – I think there has been a lot of good feedback on this. I can see how it would rub you the wrong way, but I can also see it from the CFO perspective of it being more similar to talking to an employee who made noise while their colleague was on an important call while they were in the office. That’s probably why they think it’s appropriate to bring it to you directly. If you had stopped by your husband’s office while in the on-site workplace and made noise, I’m sure you wouldn’t think it was inappropriate for the CFO to bring that to you.
That being said, if you fight back on this, you may find that your CFO’s response is to require your husband to go into the office an hour early for the call. Because that would eliminate the issue completely. It is what it is, and sometimes we need to let things go for a better outcome in the future.
Yeah I don’t see any benefit in continuing to talk to the CFO about it.
I agree Alison & the commenters advice has been pretty solid.
It has nothing to do with whether or not someone is “chill” – as a hiring manager, I want to understand how your problem solve and navigate challenges. This question gives you the opportunity to tell me how well you do that.
LW4, boy do I feel your pain. For our all-staff emails, we’ve solved the issue by having anything sent to all staff go through an approval first. It’s not ideal, but it has solved that issue.
For my part, even when I send emails to smaller groups – to the management team, or to one department in particular – I put the email lists in “BCC” but I make sure everyone knows who was included in the email through my greeting (ie. “Hi Management Team,”), because otherwise even those end up in an endless reply-all loop. You can also do “bcc” but “cc” the person/people involved if it’s a kudos kind of situation – that way only you and they will receive a reply-all email.
Doesn’t necessarily help you if it’s someone else starting the email chain, but others may take this up as a best/better practice.
#4, I totally commiserate with you. My team at work loves to reply in Teams group chats at the ends of meetings of 50+ people, so it’s just person after person saying “Thanks!” “Thanks so much!” “Thank you” “Excellent presentation–thanks!” “Great job, thank you!” over and over again. Makes me feel very curmudgeonly but it’s so annoying! (I can and do mute/leave as soon as the meeting is over but they come in rapid fire)
That’s why I love Teams reactions so much. You don’t see them once you’ve left the meeting and they pass by quickly.
RE: #4
I completely agree with you LW, but wanted to make one minor point. Whenever I get included in a group email sharing good news or whatever, of course I want to just be happy and then delete it. But part of me thinks that I’ll be a jerk if I end up being the ONLY ONE who doesn’t respond with “Congratulations” or “Way to go!”
It’s kind of like when you’re at a birthday party, and you don’t want to be the only one who hasn’t directly said “Happy Birthday” to the person you’re celebrating, even though they’ve already heard it at least ten times from other people.
#1 – I have little faith in Glassdoor as an honest feedback system when coercion, fake reviews, and third-party manipulation can so easily distort the truth. It’s increasingly common for companies to game these platforms. My last employer hired an “employer branding” firm to clean up their Glassdoor presence by disputing negative reviews and flooding the site with fake positives. At the same time, employees were pressured to post glowing reviews and report back with proof. Even when several of us reported the coercion, Glassdoor did nothing. Why would they? There’s no real oversight, and Glassdoor profits from the very companies being reviewed.
LW#1, your company may think they’re being clever, but it’s really, really easy to tell on Glassdoor when a company pushed for positive employee reviews. Yes, it may manipulate the ratings summary, but if you actually read the reviews, it is pathetically obvious when a company has forced employees to leave positive reviews.
Yes, it’s painfully obvious. One of my former workplaces has some absolutely awful reviews, which are accurate (it’s why it’s a ‘former’ workplace, I bailed after about 7 months). A bad review is followed by very saccharine ‘everything is fantastic, no notes’ reviews.
What I find weird about LW2 is that this is apparently so rigid a meeting that the CFO even mentioned it but also that the husband didn’t just make a small joke of it. This is a very small company, they’ve been doing this call twice a week for five years and she works with these people.
At my company, we have a daily ‘what are we focusing on today’ meeting and people call in or sit in depending where they are — in the office, in the car on the way somewhere, working from home, waiting for a flight, wherever. And sometimes pets jump in or a doorbell rings or a kid suddenly pops up. If anyone mentions it at all, it’s usually to gush over the dog or cat.
If it got really disruptive or we were so pressed for time that even a slight diversion was too much, the manager would jump in and say, ‘Hey, step away and do what you need to do and we’ll circle back around to you’ but that would be the rarest of rare. Mostly, it would be thought of as regular office banter and employee camaraderie. Which is probably why the LW is so ticked off that this became ‘a thing.’
Our CFO is very old school & ridge about decorum so I can see why Mark didn’t make a joke of it. (But I agree it would’ve been a smart move on his part.)
That is unfortunate. What could be a light moment of shared human experience instead turns into scolding — I can see why it annoys you. I hope it’s just the CFO and/or just that meeting …
I feel like leaders who are gracious, warm and make people feel at ease when life stuff happens are to be sincerely appreciated.
The rest of the time our CFO is pretty reasonable.
We three are also friends outside of work which makes the whole thing even more confusing (not sure if that’s the right word-the dynamic wanes & flows depending on if we are at work or hanging out.)
Re: letter #1:
I think you hit the nail on the head with the word “unethical.” They want to trap workers in terrible jobs, not create a legitimate company where people are happy to do their best work for their employers. Therefore they aren’t thinking about screening out candidates who don’t fit into the culture, they’re trying to hide what they are really like until candidates have quit their previous jobs for them and they’re stuck at the company (until they can move on, of course). This is not a company that cares one bit about culture, they just want their worker bees to do what they’re told until they quit and can be replaced by a new worker bee.
OP, any chance your family and friends are disappointed in you not because you wrote the Glassdoor review but because they’ve heard a lot of other bad stories about your workplace and are actually just disappointed that you still work there at all? I know you said you want to keep this job for now, but maybe start at least putting out feelers for other positions so you can see what your options are.
That may be why the friends and family are expressing that, but they still should be disappointed in the company, not in OP1.
reply all fiascos are one of my top.pet peeves. I have recently been appointed to lead a project that includes 60 people in multiple departments and send certain emails out to the team with their emails in BCC so they can only respond to me. Prevention can be easier then trying to cure it.
Reply All – Put the addressees in the BCC field. Easy and quick solution because then people cannot reply to anyone but the sender.
The problem is the LW isn’t the one sending the email so while they can (and should!) suggest that, they can’t do it for the sender.
I am surprised by the answer for LW2. She wasn’t an employee during the phone call. She was an employee’s spouse. It’s too late now, but had I been the husband, I would have asked the CFO to apologize to her.
While I agree that the CFO was out of line, she is still an employee of the company, even if it’s outside of work hours. And the husband asking the CFO to apologize…likely would not have ended well. Again, not saying the CFO handled this correctly (he didn’t!) but I think the advice still stands.
#1 – I would almost submit an honest review every time they made me submit a fake one (using two different emails, of course).
OP5: After 30+ years of being the interviewee and 5+ years as interviewer, I think most behavioural questions are being used as proxies for something else. I advise people I’m mentoring to try to (quickly!) find the “question behind the question”.
“Tell me about a difficult time and how you handled conflict” is probably, most of the time, a question about responsibility, accountability, professionalism, stakeholder management, and communication more generally. Conflict management would be (if I asked this question) 6th on the list after those five.
When I ask something like this I’m probing to find out if you work collaboratively; if you accept that you may be contributing to these scenarios or whether you insist it’s always everyone else’s fault; how you handled this if you had direct authority over all others involved, or (far more interesting to me) how you handled it if you *didn’t* have authority; did you ask for help, how and when; if and when you let your boss know as a status update; what were the consequences of how you handled it; and (perhaps most important) what did you learn from it and how did your work change as a result.
If you can answer in a way that gives me insight on those points, I don’t care whether there was much actual conflict. It’s possible I could have a question where conflict management matters more to me, but I think I mostly want to know if you’re conflict-avoidant. Hmm. I’d give you bonus points if you had specific de-escalation techniques you consciously wielded, including some assessment of which one was best.
LW#1 – Your family and friends shouldn’t be disappointed in you; they should be upset about the state of your workplace and how precarious employment can be for so many people.
You’re doing what you need to survive in this job, and while it may be at odds with your personal values, that’s something you can reflect on and decide how you want to move forward. Honestly, this is relatively low on the scale of workplace moral dilemmas – you’re not being asked to hurt anyone, steal, or commit fraud. It’s not great but it’s not something you should be raked over the coals about either.
Your support system should be rallying around you and helping you figure things out – not piling on with disappointment.
I’m sorry, that really set me off! Please don’t internalize their weird attitude.
Agree! It’s one thing if you’re all disappointed in a system that makes this kind of BS necessary if you want to keep paying the rent. But being disappointed in you for wanting to keep paying the rent is not cool.
Sure, you can job search if you want. But I’m sure you know the job market/salary/culture of other places way better than these folks who aren’t in your shoes.
LW 1, I’d say go the malicious compliance route. Go on Glassdoor and report all the reviews you know were coerced (Allison includes the link in her response to report). In your report, you can pass on any communication you received from your company asking you to write a review based on a template.
My sister’s old boss made them write positive reviews. A few current (and some former) employees all reported them. And the account now has a flag on it that says, “We have evidence that someone has taken steps to artificially inflate the rating for this employer.” Her old boss has appealed to Glassdoor many times, but they’ve kept the flag there because it’s just so dang obvious the reviews were coerced and written based on a template.
OP #4 – Create a rule where all emails with “congratulations” in the subject line go directly to their own folder. Check every few days to make sure there’s nothing urgent in there.
Our office is very big about birthdays. This was my solution. It’s bliss.
For LW#1, Glassdoor talks a big game about not letting employers incentivize reviews but they do absolutely nothing when evidence is submitted. I worked as an independent contractor for a small but popular gig app and in the earlier days they offered contractors a cash bonus to post a five star review on Glassdoor. This was during a time of conflict between contractors and the company and it was definitely a ploy to disguise the negative reviews about new policies. Hundreds and hundreds of glowing reviews flooded in and despite many people sending in copies of the e-mails and posts about how to get the cash bonus for the review, Glassdoor did nothing. The evidence was clear as day and after their “investigation” nothing happened. It was so frustrating.
#4: If the updates are always from the same email address to the same list, it might be possible to lock down the list so that only the designated person can send to it.
My office is all about the “Reply-all-apocalypse”. Someone will get a good result on some work and the supervisor or colleague sends out a “great job on this” and then the cascade of emails starts. It was annoying to me at first, but then I just decided to lean in, and now I see it as coworkers cheering each other on.
I can just delete all those emails by sorting by subject. But it is a new culture for me, for sure.
#1 – I can see how the natural progression is this:
Employee writes phony good review
Employee quits
Employee writes real review, noting that the company tries to force employees to write phony reviews
#4: Oh how I feel you! I am on a large govt/contractor/military team and the same thing happens, but multiply your 17 or to literally hundreds. And of course the ensuing “PLEASE DO NOT REPLY TO ALL” “REMOVE ME FROM THIS CHAIN” replies to all only exacerbate the issue. 1) Right click on any of the messages in the thread and choose “Ignore” and all incoming emails with that subject line will go to the Deleted folder. 2) I’ve realized that some of the people doing this have their Outlook set to Reply All by default and many of the others want to make sure that they are SEEN congratulating and being a “team cheerleader” by others. Those people you aren’t going to change. Perhaps bring it up in a staff meeting or All Hands and say, “Hey I can’t be the only one annoyed by this: Can we put a very strict moratorium on Reply All unless it is something everyone NEEDS to see or take action on?” Good luck and make good use of that ignore option (Obv I’m assuming you’re using Outlook; if not, ignore everything I said!).
Fake Glassdoor reviews are 1. way more common than Glassdoor would ever admit, and 2. extremely obvious to most readers. I always take both the very positive and very negative reviews with a grain of salt, because those tend to reflect issues other than what it’s really like to work there.
LW 1 about Glassdoor – I had a company do this to me, a VERY toxic company, and I refused. I didn’t make a grand statement or anything, I didn’t even say no officially, I just… never did it. I was eventually fired from that place based on a made up reason (and I refused to sign any paperwork agreeing with that reasoning and easily got unemployment!). And you know what I put in my scathing Glassdoor review once I was gone? Yep! That many of the positive reviews were written by current employees who the company was making write them.
If they keep pestering you write it, and you really don’t want to, just say you wrote one and have no idea why it’s not showing up. Play dumb on it. Just an idea.
It’s good to know that other people’s cats also pee on dirty laundry
#5, sometimes with these “tell me about a time” questions, I like to actually tell about 2 times: something I did not handle well in the past, and then how I learned from it and do it differently now.
So for conflict with coworkers, I might describe a time in my early career when I didn’t know how to navigate it and went to my manager for advice without clarifying that I wanted to handle it myself and was *only* looking for advice. The manager took it as a complaint, and what should have been a low-level discussion that was easy to work out blew up.
Now, I’ve had conversations about “let’s book some time to discuss this and make sure we’re on the same page” a thousand times and am comfortable handling them myself without needing to ask for handholding or intervention from a manager, unless it’s a big enough situation that it impacts work as a whole and they ought to know about it anyway.
#5 – Your a communications professional, so perhaps put on your communications hat that really think about what you want them to know and what they actually need to know.
No one really needs to know about juicy stories of crazy fights in the office. What they *do* need to know, among other things, is that *you* are not likely to be the person that sets those fight off. And that you are sufficiently self aware that when you indicate that it’s clear that actually never set off a screaming match in the office.
As for what you want them to know, I would think it’s pretty simple. You want them to know that you are “a professional person and do what all professional people do. Have a bunch of meetings, send lots of emails, until everyone is happy or at least not mad.” So give them a story or two that shows that.
In my case, it might look like this (real) case: Someone was pushing a project that I thought was unnecessary, unlikely to provide high benefit, and likely to be a distraction. We had a meeting and a decision was made to go with the project. After the meeting, I walked into the office of the person who had been the strongest backer of the project and said “Now that the decision has been made, I’ll do my best to make the project work.” And I did.
That kind of story serves them – it’s what they need to know, and you – it shows reasonable and mature behavior. And if they are competent, it’s also what they know they are looking for. Because smart employers and hiring managers are not looking for juicy stories in their interviews, but do appreciate boring stories in the appropriate context.
#3- You’re being overwhelmed with “suggestions”.
One thing that I have not seen mentioned, although I admit I have not read all of the replies yet, is that this person may have information that’s useful to you.
I’m often that person. But it generally turns out that what I have to say is very useful to the people I’m talking to. I have a lot of institutional knowledge, and a fair amount of knowledge about stuff that people assume that is out of my wheel house. Of course, I never insist that something needs to be done my way. But if someone were working on a project that touches many parts of the organization and they did not want to talk to me if I approached them, it would not be a wise move.
#4 — Can they make the general update emails no-reply and BCC them? Would that solve the problem?
We get those kinds of newsletter-y things all the time. I generally skim and delete them.
#4. I will always remember the time a reply all disaster got me over $2,000 worth of overtime pay in one weekend.
I worked in cybersecurity and my team had an alert on our phones whenever there looked like there was a potential “hack”. One member of my three person team or our supervisor was on call every weekend, and every night the following week.
This particular event happened when I had to do two weeks in a row, because the rest of the team plus the supervisor were on vacation.
Starting on a Thursday afternoon, an automated system malfunctioned and sent out an email about something that only applied to one tiny group to everyone in our global organization. Somehow our security alert ended up in this chain as well. So every time someone replied all asking to be removed from the list my cell phone would alert me that there was a potential attack that needed to be investigated. Then people would start replying all, telling other people to stop replying all, making the problem so much worse. Then people would reply all to those saying that they were just adding to the problem. 100s of alerts every hour. And they were just shouting into the void because the sender was an unmonitored email.
And of course, the text alert didn’t give any details, just saying “potential attack” and I had to log in for further information. I had to examine every single alert. IT wasn’t able to go in and stop this until Sunday around 5pm. I spent Thursday night, and almost the entire weekend, glued to my computer. Even the nights weren’t a reprieve because of the global nature of the organization. Every person besides me authorized to access this data was out of the state or out of the country, so no one was available to help. I think I got an hour or two of sleep those days.
Monday my supervisor was back from her trip. I handed her the weekend log, and after taking in her gob smacked expression of sheer horror, informed her I was taking a sick day, went home and collapsed.
The extra pay was nice at least and when my supervisor passed the log onto her boss he bought me a bottle of tequila.
Did anything change? Like did your manager ensure that only one of you was out on vacation at a time, in case someone else got sick?
No idea. I ended up getting a better job offer and leaving the next month
OP 2: I hope your cat is okay? Peeing in “bad” places can be a sign that they need a visit to the vet.
He has been given a clean bill of health by the vet.
He just avoids any litter box that doesn’t meet his finicky standards.
We do our best to meet his needs but it’s not always easy.
Littermaid?
#4: speak to whoever does your IT, because there is a technical way to reduce this issue:
a) send from a no-reply address
b) send to a list which only you have permission to send to, and/or BCC recipients
Some people may still manually type in your team’s email, no way around that, but it will cut down on the mindless reply-alls.
#1, your friends and family are disappointed in YOU? Must be Real Nice for them, never having to choose an income over The Highest Of Moral High Grounds. Jeez.
However, what this sounds like is your employer forcing you to do work-related stuff off the clock, which is illegal in I think most of the world (I know nothing but I hope).
Alison, do you think this LW would have any recourse along those lines?