marketing team refuses to do our projects, second thoughts about a new job, and more

by Alison Green on April 3, 2025

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

1. Our marketing team refuses to do projects for us, then complains if we do them ourselves

I’m one of several who create new educational resources for our target audience. Like most companies, we have a graphic design/marketing department that designs and approves anything that’s going to be seen by the public. Well, they’re supposed to.

Most of my work is in response to current events, so I might make a new guide for our customers who want to learn more about XYZ. I’ll do the research and most of the formatting, and I’m supposed to send it off to the marketing department so they can make it look nice and uniform with our branding before advertising/publishing. Makes sense!

Not once have they ever “had time” to work on my team’s products. We always end up reformatting off of a years old template so we can get things out in time. We then get grumbling complaints from the marketing department that we didn’t do it right. But of course we didn’t! We don’t even have access to Adobe Suite, let alone the training to do actual graphic design!

This is not a timeline issue either; we always send out heads-up and check-ins on these projects weeks or months before we need to deliver them. They don’t respond, say they don’t have time, or send an older version of the product for us to update ourselves.

I have gone as far as escalating this issue to the CEO in the past. The projects I’m working on often come directly from them, and so I report these struggles all the way up the chain. Nothing has ever been done about it no matter how many times they agree with me that it’s “necessary.” I feel crazy and don’t know what communication strategy could possibly make a difference here. Please help!

You need to escalate it again. When whoever you escalate it to agrees that some kind of intervention is “necessary,” you should say, “Can we talk through exactly what the next steps are? In the past there’s been general agreement that it needs to change, but it hasn’t been resolved. I’m concerned that everyone agrees this is a problem, but it doesn’t get fixed and it continues on.”

You could also try saying that since you can’t get what you need from the marketing team, you want to be able to start sending work out to an external designer. Who knows, maybe they’ll let you — in which case, your part of this could be mostly solved. If they say you can’t do that, then you can say, “If that route isn’t possible, then can you intervene with the marketing team so that they will agree to do the work we need? Or is there a third option I’m not thinking of?”

Worst case scenario, continue with doing their work yourself (as you have been) and when marketing grumbles about how it looks, you can say, “I agree, I would have had your team do it but you continually say you’re not available. Given that, what do you suggest we do differently?”

I do want to be clear that none of these may solve the problem if your senior management is unwilling to act, but they’re all reasonable routes to try. (I also am assuming that you’ve sat down with the head of the marketing team directly and talked through the issues you’re having. But if for some reason you haven’t done that, that would be step one.)

2. I’m having second thoughts about the new job I’ve already accepted

I was offered a job in January with a partner organization after a quite long recruitment process (I had started interviewing when it seemed my current role was more at risk; now it is safer). I signed the offer letter, pending contract negotiation, with a start date of May 1. I had been very undecided about taking the job, but I thought the decision would be better taken with the contract in hand and everything on the table. The new role has been sending welcome emails about onboarding, pretty much since January. It’s been an excruciatingly busy time at my current role, and to be honest I was slightly too stressed to think much about it. I have to give my formal notice today, or at least this week. Last week I asked for a delayed start date — mid-May — and they said yes. (They still haven’t sent a contract.)

I know if I pull out of the new job now it will absolutely burn a bridge with a close partner organization, and with people I will have to see/work with regularly. But having made the decision to leave almost by omission (which is absolutely my own fault), I don’t want to leave. I love my colleagues, they have been nothing but supportive, I really like the organization, and my manager is wonderful and kind. Even through all this leaving chaos he has been kind — he’s said that after I give my notice, if at any time I feel I change my mind and want to stay, that’s fine (and welcome), until I actually leave.

I have no clue what to do. I am not sure why I’m finding this so difficult (the new job is more money, a decent promotion, and likely less stressful than my current job), but for the last weeks I’ve been having near-panic attacks thinking about leaving. I feel a lot of shame about the way I’ve handled this, with regards to both sides, and I am not sure what to do — whether it’s better to burn that bridge (and maybe regret not trying something new?), or just try to own the decision and go. My current role won’t be able to be recruited (we’re in a financial crunch, and there’s a hiring freeze), and I’m dreading telling colleagues in other teams that the work we’ve been doing together, that my role supports, will now no longer be happening. (Slightly tortuous analogy, but say we’re a teapot company, and I’m one of three people liaising with the international teapot convention to promote our teapots, with primary responsibility for red teapots. Now our teams working on red teapots will have less support, and the red teapot parts of the international teapot convention will not have our organization’s participation).

You haven’t really said much about why you’re suddenly reconsidering the move! Is it just that you’re feeling sad about leaving a job and people you like (which is very normal, even when leaving is the right move), or are you have doubts about the new job/company/manager? To figure this out, I think you’ve got to really dig into that more in-depth and sort out whether this is fear of change or if something about the new job is giving you pause. If it’s that you accepted the new job solely because you thought you needed a new job, and now you realize that you don’t … well, it’s not too late to undo that.

If it’s really just that you dread telling people you’re leaving … that’s not a reason not to go. But if leaving is no longer in your best interests, that’s a whole different thing. You’ve just got to figure out which it is.

3. Should I escalate my coworker’s misuse of a contact list?

I run a pretty popular newsletter out of our overall company. Mine happens to be tailored to specific topics and has a few different versions — for anonymity, let’s say they’re all about llamas, and each version is about a different aspect of llamas, like grooming, feeding, health, etc. A bunch of people run various newsletters out of the same account of the software we use because at one point, we were all in the same department. This particular coworker has moved to a different department, but still uses that account because her contact lists are still housed there and she still has to send her same newsletter notices out. It’s never been an issue — we all do our own thing with our own lists and leave everything else alone.

I recently discovered that she sent one of her notices to her own list and one of my lists because the topics somewhat overlapped and her lists don’t have many subscribers. Say one of mine focuses on grooming, but only on specific brushes. She was sending out a grooming newsletter notice, and wanted it to get to more people, so she included my contact list as well.

I’m … really uncomfortable with this. It’s technically within the law because the same entity gathered their info (at least I think so), but they didn’t sign up for her notices. They specifically signed up for my newsletter which is pretty niche. I’ve worked hard to both procure and keep my subscribers — I have a very high open rate (more than 70% in 2024!) and a very low unsubscribe rate. I’m very careful to not email that list more than the monthly email that they originally signed up for.

But ultimately, the information she sent does technically apply to them and it’s good information for them to have. It’s just not what they signed up for. She and I both have excellent reputations in our company, and we definitely aren’t adversaries in any way, but we also just never clicked that well so I don’t feel that comfortable talking to her about it myself. My supervisor knows about it and I don’t think he liked it either but he couldn’t really do much since she’s no longer in our department. I could let our department lead know, and I think he’d agree that’s not something we should be doing and would have her department lead talk to her, but I can’t decide if it’s worth escalating. Ultimately, there’s no harm done, and I didn’t get any unsubscribes from her doing it.

I guess I need a vibe check. Am I overreacting and should just let it go as no harm done, or should I bring it up because really, it’s a misuse of information that we should not be doing?

You’re not overreacting, and you should escalate it. It’s not about getting your coworker in trouble for using your list; she may not even have done anything wrong. Rather, it’s about needing protocols for how lists should be used and when one list can “borrow” another’s subscribers. It’s in your company’s interests to have policies that make it clear what can/can’t be done in that regard, so people aren’t left to decide on their own — and this incident highlighted that currently there’s not enough direction about that. Raise it as a concern and suggest clarifying rules for when/if/how this can be done.

4. Coworker’s microphone doesn’t work well

This is really a small stakes question. My coworker has a microphone that always takes 2-5 minutes to “warm up.” That means when she speaks, her voice is not really audible to anyone on the call for several minutes. The issue always resolves itself with time— it doesn’t seem like any sort of manual intervention or troubleshooting is necessary. This has been going on for a year. It just seems like an inefficient way to start calls consistently. She is in a role where she often leads meetings or is expected to chime in on calls.

I’m not her boss or lead, I’m just a coworker. In the hierarchy, I would say we’re at the same level in different departments. Due to a departure, her manager is currently a really high-up VP who 1) I really don’t think wants to be involved in mic management and 2) likely doesn’t meet with my coworker enough to notice the issue.

Would it be rude of me to suggest she get a new headset/ microphone/ etc. ? My company is cheap, so it may end up being an out-of-pocket expense (I paid for my own headset/ mic because the ones IT sent me to use were used and unclean in a concerning way), but I feel like decent mics don’t have to be wildly expensive these days. I splurged a bit on mine because I also use it for personal use.

It wouldn’t be out line. Just be matter-of-fact: “I think your mic may need to be replaced. I’ve noticed we consistently cannot hear you for the first 2-5 minutes of every call. It seems to eventually warm up and fix itself, but we can’t hear what you’re saying at the start of calls so I suspect it needs to be replaced.”

You don’t need to get into whether she needs to buy her own or not. Just alert her to the issue and let her take it from there.

5. Injury while off the clock but on a work trip

I was recently on a work trip for a conference in a tourist destination. I had some time to kill between the end of the conference and my flight home, so I went to do some sightseeing. I narrowly missed being hit by a car while crossing the street — it was a close call but thankfully no harm done! It got me thinking though, would I have been eligible for workers’ comp had I been injured? Yes, I was there for a work trip but was doing personal stuff for fun that I didn’t log that time on my timesheet.

I’m not an expert in this area but from what I can tell, there’s not a clear-cut answer. Some sources that say that it depends on whether you were acting within the scope of your employment, and others say simply by being on the trip you were acting in furtherance of a work-related activity. So I suspect it will depend on the specific facts of the case.

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{ 389 comments }

{ 389 comments… read them below or add one }

    1. Outside cogitator*

      It’s possible she doesn’t know or doesn’t realize how bad it is. You don’t get to hear yourself on calls

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        1. AngryOctopus*

          At the very least someone on a call should be saying “Hey Tangeriana, we can’t actually hear you!”. She may not even know!

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      2. Isabelle*

        This is exactly what happened to me with old Jabra headphones. It was one specific model and after a certain length of time the mic would just stop working. I only found out when someone kept prompting me to answer a question I had already answered that no-one could hear me anymore.

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    2. Caramel & Cheddar*

      It’s so odd to me that every meeting hasn’t started with a chorus of “Jane, we can’t hear you!” comments every time she speaks. Is everyone just pretending they can hear her? I don’t know how this problem lasted more than a week, let alone an entire year.

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      2. LW 4*

        I didn’t make it clear enough in the letter, but every meeting does have a chorus of “oh, we can’t hear you!” “I think something’s wrong with your mic!” And then she’ll reply in the chat function for the call saying “sorry everyone, my mic is warming up.” And if she’s leading the meeting, there’s awkward silence.

        So I think everyone’s assumption is that she is aware it’s causing issues. A few folks have said, “Oh, that’s a weird problem to have! Most mics don’t need to warm up these days.” But I don’t think anyone has said directly that she should replace her microphone yet. That’s at least in part because once her mic is working, everybody is just eager to jump into the call agenda since we’ve been delayed. Once the call is done, it’s easy to forget that it happened until it happens again.

        But I’ll mention it next time it happens!

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        1. I Hate Elon*

          I have to ask … does she use a microphone with a vacuum tube pre-amp, which would be extremely unusual? Because modern electronics (and by “modern” I mean, “made in the last 40 years”) generally don’t require any kind of warm-up, except for some very very specialized cases.

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          1. LazyBoot*

            I’m wondering if it might just be a case of the microphone volume being set too low, and the “warming up” is really some form of automatic gain control in whatever meeting software they use. Those tend to only do somewhat slow ramp-ups to avoid sudden spikes in volume, and will normally reset with every call.

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            1. Grits McGee*

              Yes, as I was reading the question I was thinking that it sounded like a software/sound calibration issue rather than a hardware issue. In my experience if it’s a hardware issue, it will be an issue throughout the meeting. If it’s a software issue, it will resolve after a couple minutes. Rather than buying new equipment, it might be more helpful for her to work with IT to figure out if there’s a way to pre-calibrate the sound for the specific meeting software you use.

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              1. Dasein9 (he/him)*

                And Teams has been bad about “warming up” itself these days. It takes several seconds after we get into a call before we can hear each other.

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              1. SnowyRose*

                I had a similar issue with Teams. in my case, the Bluetooth receiver needs to be plugged directly into the computer, not a docking station or usb hub. A new headset won’t necessarily fix the issue unless the receiver is the right USB type.

                Might not be the case here, but worth checking out!

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            5. Slow Gin Lizz*

              Wow, that’s weird and sounds quite annoying. Another thought would be that maybe this coworker could sign into meetings five minutes early and start talking to the air so that by the time the meeting is supposed to start her mic is warmed up. But of course that would only work if she isn’t in back-to-back meetings. Although if she is, wouldn’t that mean her mic is already warmed up from the previous mtg? Does it have to warm up in every mtg of the day or just once a day?

              Regardless, I’m baffled as to why she’s let this go on for over a year. Any colleague I’ve had with mic issues always wants to solve them asap.

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              1. Antilles*

                I’m also baffled, especially since it seems to be happening on every call.
                If this happened like, once a month or something, I could see ignoring it as a rare technical glitch because software is sometimes buggy. But how do you have this happen for the first 2-5 minutes of every phone call and not think to call IT?
                Heck, how has nobody on the call ever said suggested that she should call IT and get it straightened out because it keeps happening?

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                1. Venus*

                  It’s possible that she’s contacted IT quite a few times yet they haven’t been able to resolve it.

                2. LW 4*

                  She may have been talking to IT this whole time– our IT department is, quite frankly, bad. They are wildly understaffed and inequipped to do their jobs well. I don’t know what she has or has not done since I’m not her manager. I haven’t felt like it’s my place to monitor what she is or isn’t doing about the issue, I just know the issue isn’t fixed and it’s been frustrating.

                3. MigraineMonth*

                  If the company doesn’t even “splurge” on new microphones for employees, the IT department may be very underfunded.

        2. Aggretsuko*

          I do online theater and my friends seriously were all “REPLACE YOUR MIC” to me at one point. I gave in and did it. Wasn’t too hard!

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          1. Calamity Janine*

            and as online theater goes, you need a lot better mic than you do for meetings! if a mic for meetings starts distorting when someone spikes the audio due to theatrical screaming and-or singing and-or other variations of human voice for effect, well, nobody’s going to really notice. the bigger problem is someone shouting during the meeting. if their voice goes a bit wonky when this happens, it’s not a big deal. meanwhile a performance with people coming to see it? yeah, that requires more polish. it’s similar to how you don’t want to record an album of folk punk music on your smartphone, because it will probably sound – as i believe the technical sound engineering term goes – like “complete butt”. however you don’t need a nice microphone with pop filter and full dynamic range to call up your great-aunt Gertrude and have a chat.

            now that i have said that, i wonder if that could be another answer. can the employee join these online meetings from her phone? because phones don’t give you the highest quality but they do give you enough to… talk on the phone lmao, as is their purpose. it’s not the best workaround but it’s perhaps another option to consider if it really is a matter of having to play the ball where it lies and there’s no possible way that either the employee or the company can shell out something like fifteen bucks for a pair of earbuds with built-in microphone that’s Good Enough. you can’t reasonably slum it with the skullcandy built-in mic for theater, but you can probably get along just fine for a business meeting.

            (mind you, most of my experience with hearing mediocre mics comes not from the business world but from the online gaming world. a video game with only voice chat is a fantastic way to hear the effects of a conga like of mediocre microphones set to make any sound tech weep, but most of them still work just fine for call outs. and the ones that don’t? it’s more often not the microphone but PEBCAK errors – the problem exists between chair and keyboard. or between chair and controller. and the problem doesn’t want to turn off their TV blaring news, radio blaring music, or fifteen giant fans that make you wonder if the problem lives on a hovercraft as said problem yells at their children.)

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          2. Elizabeth West*

            Off topic, but I’m intrigued by online theater. Would you be willing to share more in the weekend thread?

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        3. CommanderBanana*

          I have zero patience at this point for people who have consistent technical issues with their equipment, their wifi, whatever. I work in a remote-first org and I am so fed up with coworkers who seem to always have mysterious tech problems or oopsy doopsy, their wifi is always problematic.

          If you’re so incapable of getting your tech to work or your internet is so unreliable, you shouldn’t be working remote.

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        4. punkin*

          That was happening to a lot of people in my organization. Turned out that it was a software issue. She should contact IT.

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        5. Crencestre*

          LW, are you absolutely certain that your colleague can afford to replace her microphone right now? Because few things are so infuriating as a well-off individual who does. not. recognize. that many, many people are living paycheck to paycheck and that those biweekly paychecks are NOT in the 6-figure or even 5-figure range! We’re seeing way too many examples of that in the plutocracy that’s currently ensconced in Washington, DC – we don’t need one more example of that on our jobs.

          If there’s any question AT ALL about your colleague’s ability to replace her mic at this point, why not work around it? “Since your microphone needs a few minutes to warm up, let’s start with someone else and you jump in a few minutes later. We all want to hear what you have to say and we all know that tech can be wonky at times.” Simple, efficient and NOT something that will put your colleague on the spot over something that she can’t control.

          Final note: Even well-paid people can have expenses that their coworkers don’t know about but that takes up a huge chunk of their income. They may be helping to support disabled family members, or may have medical conditions that they don’t broadcast at the office but that are very expensive to treat and control. So don’t assume that even a good paycheck guarantees that a colleague has money to spare!

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          1. LW 4*

            That is part of why I (and likely others) held off on suggesting it. That’s why I mentioned it potentially becoming a personal expense because my company is so cheap. I do know that this coworker is paid more than I am and recently bought a hobby ranch (in addition to her primary residence) with her husband, so I suspect dropping the cash would not be an issue, but you’re right– I don’t know her true financial situation. That is why I brought up in would likely become a personal expense and asked if it would be rude to suggest she get a new mic knowing our IT department would likely not replace it or send her something silly. I fully believe my company should pay for proper equipment, but I do not have the power to make that happen for even myself.

            And on working around it and having other folks start the meetings to allow her mic to warm up– she is often leading the meetings, it is her job to lead the meetings. Having me step in and pivot the beginning of the meeting to somebody else isn’t my role and could deviate from what she intends to be happening.

            But from other comments, it’s likely this is a moot point because it’s more likely a setting issue than a hardware issue.

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          2. Kaiko*

            But this is a business expense. Unless this is a cohort of contractors, she should be able to buy the equipment she needs on the company dime.

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    3. Llama Llama*

      Maybe it’s one of those things where of course she could spend her own money to buy herself a microphone but isn’t because the company should?

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        1. ZSD*

          That was my thought as well. If she knows it takes a few minutes for her mic to warm up, why doesn’t she just log in to the calls five minutes early?

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        2. Lenora Rose*

          I suspect if it’s the software issue listed above, it can’t really be “started” until the call is on, and it calibrates. And starting the call 5 minutes early with enough discussion for the sound to do its thing is likely not feasible.

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      2. Analyst*

        This. I’m not spending a penny in that case, I do NOT spend my personal funds on business expenses. If it’s causing a problem, I just…let it and report it.

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    4. TGIF*

      I straight up tell people I can’t hear them well if they sound bad. I don’t have the best hearing as it is and I’m not going to spend time, giving myself a headache, trying to decipher what people are saying on a bad mike. Personally I use a web cam I bought, not expensive, and from tests I’ve run myself it sounds great. I also use a good bluetooth speaker.

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      1. Hard of hearing*

        As someone who is hard of hearing, I never know if it is the meeting or me. Please do others with hearing trouble a favor and tell your colleague she needs to resolve this. You would be surprised how many people have hearing loss and don’t let people know. If you want to be able to hear you, have good equipment. And if you don’t care enough to ensure others can hear you, why are you talking? Seriously.

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    5. Productivity Pigeon*

      I’d honestly be pretty annoyed that NONE of my coworkers mentioned this got an entire year!

      It’s such a simple thing to fix but if no one says anything.

      Reply ↓
  2. Artemesia*

    I had the same problem as #1. The in house publication people were just impossible to work with and often could not get our material done and it was very time sensitive. I finally got permission to take it to outside vendors and got it done.

    Reply ↓
    1. journeyboots*

      I had the same issue too. I managed to get a hold of a few current templates that they had been gate keeping, and got my manager to approve additional software. We enjoyed having control over the process. As our materials were not highly complex, it was actually way faster than working with their team or an external firm.

      Reply ↓
    2. Tiger Snake*

      The thought that my brain went to is “Is LW asking for work her area will not fund?”

      For better or worse, my organisation is set up so that certain areas – like IT – are only given BAU budget for KTLO. If you want anything to be upgraded, or a new version, etc; your business line is expected to fund IT’s work. They deliberately do not give IT a budget to “do stuff” for everyone else as part of their BAU bucket.

      I wonder if there’s requirements for engagement that LW isn’t following, or doesn’t know are needed because she’s coming to a midway team that doesn’t know how to ask for what they need if its not through normal process.

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      1. Higher-ed Jessica*

        BAU = business as usual
        KTLO = keep the lights on

        I think what TigerSnake means is that maybe the marketing team’s regular budget only covers their basic costs of existence, and any projects they do have to be funded by the unit they’re for.

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        2. Lauren*

          But then what is the marketing departments point, then? What are they marketing if not the products the company produces?

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          1. Hlao-roo*

            In the set-up described by Tiger Snake and Higher-ed Jessica, the marketing department is there to market the products that the company produces but marketing dept services need to be “bought” by other internal departments.

            For example, the team that makes Widget 1 wants a brochure they can share with customers about the specs for Widget 1. They go to the marketing department with all the Widget 1 specs and explain what they want in the brochure. The marketing department says it will take 10 hours of work to create the brochure with the proper company branding, and the going rate for marketing dept work is $100/hour. The head of the Widget 1 team transfers $1000 from the Widget 1 team bucket to the marketing department budget to pay for the work, and marketing creates the brochure. The money is being transferred around inside the company, but it matters to department heads/team leads which budget funds the work in this scenario.

            Tiger Snake is suggesting that (potentially) the marketing department at LW’s company knows the head of LW’s team/department won’t “pay” the marketing dept for marketing work, so the marketing dept doesn’t work on those requests.

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            1. Lenora Rose*

              Which is not even slightly what Marketing is saying, though; there’s no mention of money here, just refusal to work, followed by complaining if someone else does the work.

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            2. Wilbur*

              This is similar to how one of my previous roles worked and it was the absolute worst. Projects would always start with a reasonable scope and slowly get whittled down to a point where they wouldn’t cover everything the client needed. When problems came up, we couldn’t provide concrete answers because we couldn’t do the necessary prep work. When they took our group over and eliminated that portion it was a huge improvement. Other groups still use this method, and it’s completely infuriating. We’ve spent huge amounts of money with those teams to use their assets (enough to purchase and maintain those assets), but management won’t let us buy those assets because “the company already owns those assets”. Prime example of accountants and management completely wrecking R&D.

              OP should get permission to outsource, management won’t fix anything until they get hit with a bill. My teams marketing department is like this-we’re a very profitable but not one of the big markets so we get no support. Every time they tell you they can’t support you, forward it to management and ask if you can outsource. I’m not sure how they get their budget, but at my org they get a % of your overall budget. See if your boss can get that cut since they can’t support you.

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            3. Beth*

              If this was the setup at LW1’s company, I’d expect LW1 to know it. There’s a huge difference between “The marketing team always tells us they don’t have time for our projects” and “The marketing team says we’ll need to spend $X to do this project, we refused, so they didn’t do it”.

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          2. Baunilha*

            I don’t know about LW’s company, but I’m in the marketing department in mine. We have our own marketing projects (advertising, comms, events, partnerships) that take most of our time.
            If other teams ask us to do something for them, we have to add that to our already long to-do list. Now multiply the requests by all the other departments. We simply can’t do it all, so we do what we can. (So sometimes a project that’s not very important is done first because it’s easier and faster than others)

            That being said, I agree with Alison. If the marketing department can’t do it (or can’t do it within the expected timeframe), they can’t complain either.

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        3. Anon Office Drone*

          I work for a company that has that feature (billing between departments), but I feel like LW should already know that. It would be a big oversight if not.

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      2. Nebula*

        If that’s the case, then someone from the marketing team should have clarified that during one of these many back and forths rather than just saying ‘We don’t have time for that’.

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        1. JSPA*

          Hmmm… maybe the inside protects are like public service announcement level of priority? They can’t bill for them, get paid less to do them, and thus have very limited slots, when there’s down time between the projects that pay???

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        2. Cabbagepants*

          I can’t make sense of the lack of ownership from the marketing team. How can their leadership take 6 months to just review a year’s worth of requests, let alone do any of them?

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          1. huh*

            Not just a year’s worth of requests, but requests that they themselves asked for which included projects marketing already knows about!

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          2. darsynia*

            I got a strong undercurrent of, ‘the marketing team doesn’t like our campaigns and are throwing excuses not to work on them.’ The use of ‘current events’ was the indicator for me. Interestingly, if marketing avoids working on the stuff they ‘don’t agree with’ (if I’m right, and I’m just spitballing here), and LW1’s team works on it themselves with outdated templates, that’s a win in more than one way for marketing. They don’t have to work on something they don’t like AND the campaigns they don’t like end up lacking the polish and unity with the rest of their output.

            It seems too that if they’re just somehow making things work themselves without involving the marketing team, there’s not that much friction or incentive for things to change. It might behoove them to pick a project they’re comfortable with being late or abandoned and push back, saying they can’t finish the work marketing ought to be doing, and placing that ‘figure it out’ in their boss’s lap?

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            1. darsynia*

              Note for clarity: ‘campaign’ here is meant to be seen as ‘a series of advertising posts’ not politically. I caught myself using it farther into the comment and changed the word, but missed the first one I used.

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            2. Venus*

              I get a strong feeling for this too. My expertise includes finding new ways to save money and I was asked by a department to help reduce the cost of a solution because they kept being told that the company couldn’t afford it. I thought about it a bit, then realized that a cheaper solution wouldn’t matter because other departments had the same situation yet no problems getting more money for bigger solutions. It was clear to me, and informative to them, that they would be better off making a business case to get funding (I helped them write it up).

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            3. Kella*

              I also got that vibe for the same reasons. Otherwise, saying you don’t have time to do one of the basic functions of your job seems like just… refusing to do your job?

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          3. Sloanicota*

            It was very foolish of them to ask for the whole year’s requests anyway. That’s not realistic or practicable. It should be probably the quarter, or maaaybe six months at most. So just that detail made me think these people aren’t sending their best.

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          4. Miette*

            As a marketing professional and sometime dept head, I find this APPALLING.

            At first I thought OP wasn’t giving them ample lead time, but that’s not the case. I think if it was a budget thing OP would have mentioned being told that. So what actually is this team’s problem? Other than having their heads up their own butts. I mean, they put a needless gate up for folks to jump over (the form) and then when people complied they still couldn’t get their sh*t together? Criminy.

            I’ve worked places where there was corporate marketing teams and business units operated separately, and good luck getting anything designed if you worked in the BU (which I did), because corporate were only interested in national ads, company-wide stuff like the website, etc. So we made do, but I could easily get the budget for a designer from the BU president. Doesn’t sound like that’s the case here. Just plain old fashioned… i don’t even know. Incompetence. Laziness. Bloody mindedness. I hate when I hear stories like this–it makes us all look bad.

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            1. iglwif*

              Former marketing person here, now working in a role that sends requests to marketing, and I am also APPALLED by this.

              My current small org has a small marketing team and they sometimes get very stretched. Soooooo we have implemented marketing priority tiers, ways to triage requests as they come in, self-service options, specific lead times for different types of requests, and quarterly planning sessions so that the maximum amount of work can get done.

              At LW’s org it sounds like the marketing team has somehow implemented ways to get less work done, which is just absolutely bananapants. (To be fair, we don’t know what volume and type of requests they are getting from other sources than LW’s team. But if the issue is “we were told to prioritize X over Y and since all your projects are Y, we can get to them only after all the X are done” … marketing should SAY THAT and LW’s team should be given the tools to do the work better themselves and/or permission to outsource it.)

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      3. Lenora Rose*

        If there were, why would marketing not say so? It’s not like this happened yesterday; this has been an ongoing issue for more than long enough for marketing to explain that, and last I checked, if an internal department has to charge other departments, they’re not shy about saying “Hey, we can do this, but it will cost you $X.”

        (The ONLY time I can see them not mentioning the cost is if the agreement is long since in place, and the budget line is already set. I do a few things like that, where the other department just sends the invoice straight to Accounts Payable, but it’s not like nobody ever had to agree that the money would move out of our account…)

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      4. NYWeasel*

        In house agency person here. I’m 99.9% sure that the agency has only resources to handle A, B, and C, and OP is part of D-Z who’s being told to use the agency without being told that the agency isn’t staffed or funded to cover any of that work. So the agency looks like they are being unreasonable when the reality is they simply can’t do all the rest without the right resources in place.

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      1. Jackalope*

        That was my question. Also, if they’re a marketing department, why aren’t they getting in trouble from management for not marketing? It would be one thing if they occasionally couldn’t do something because they were so overwhelmed, but all of the projects for this one team always?

        As Alison says on the regular, the real issue here is is a management issue. This is something that the people supervising them should have dealt with a long time ago. Management has (or should have) the tools to either make sure they do their job, or (eventually) fire them and hire someone else who will do the whole job and not just the parts they feel like doing.

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      2. Aggretsuko*

        This is sounding like my current office, where some people just Refuse to do stuff like they’re Bartleby and then they are allowed to get away with it. If marketing is just Refusing and being ALLOWED to refuse, I hope they let OP get their help elsewhere.

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    4. juliebulie*

      I am on the other side of this problem (sort of) and I beg OP to escalate it. I wish someone would escalate it with my team. This shouldn’t be such an adversarial relationship. Ultimately we are all on Team Employer.

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    5. Ann O'Nemity*

      I’m experiencing the same issue as #1. Our marketing department requires us to submit project request forms for support, but these are often declined due to their limited capacity. Because of budget constraints, I rarely get approval to use external vendors. As a result, I rely on templates and am trying to learn basic graphic design and website skills to meet our needs. (Side note: it is financially stupid for me to spend my time on this because I’m not good at it and I’m paid too much.)

      The head of marketing acknowledges that demand exceeds their team’s capacity. As a result, they prioritize projects that promote the company as a whole or align with executive priorities. She’s suggested that departments like mine that provide specific programs should consider hiring dedicated marketing resources. However, my senior leader does not support that approach. Like the letter writer, everyone seems to agree there’s a problem, but no one agrees on how to fix it.

      IT is the same way. I wanted to get a license for a new piece of software last year and had the budget to do it, but I couldn’t get IT to support implementation – so we didn’t get the software.

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    6. Beth*

      I’m so curious whether the marketing team is like this with everyone. In LW1’s shoes, I’d be doing some targeted water cooler talk with other departments to see if they have similar problems. Do other teams already hire outside vendors? Does everyone do their own marketing work and just put up with the “you did it wrong” lectures? Does the marketing team have a grudge against LW’s team specifically?

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    7. CubeFarmer*

      We have in-house publication support who mysteriously gets to pick and choose the projects that he works on, yet he is, ostensibly, the person in charge of our publications and any external messaging. My program’s workload expands and morphs as demanded, so I don’t understand why his cannot. When I pushed back on the refusal, I did not receive an answer as to why his workload was allowed to be so static.

      I also had to get permission to hire outside of the organization. This makes NO SENSE.

      I’ve learned in my career, however, that every organization has someone who seemingly can get away with anything.

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  3. Cmdrshprd*

    “should I bring it up because really, it’s a misuse of information that we should not be doing?”

    I agree you should bring it up to let the company decide/set a policy for how list can/can’t be shared.

    But I think calling it a misuse of information is a big stretch. Its one thing if the “list” had been borrowed by another company, but the same company not that big a deal. I think you might be overestimating how many people would even realize it’s a different newsletter/person sending it out since it is still coming from Llamas inc.

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    1. AJ*

      Presumably OP has access to unsubscribe rates and can actually view if the extra email had a measurable effect on their mailing list or not.

      Reply ↓
      1. Myrin*

        She does!
        “Ultimately, there’s no harm done, and I didn’t get any unsubscribes from her doing it.”

        Reply ↓
        1. KateM*

          But OP#3 can’t know how many people considered it a first strike and are now waiting if there are more to come.

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          1. DJ Abbott*

            Yes. I find it annoying how every company I’ve ever had contact with presumes I have time to read their newsletter. Even if I did not work, and had no social life and did nothing else, I would not have time to read all these newsletters! Nor would I want to.
            When OP says they’re careful not to email more than once a month, I want to cheer. That’s how it should be done!
            Last year I started subscribing to a news service that’s pretty good and offers several different short newsletters. I subscribed to one, and they began sending me a bunch of others without being asked. I went to update my preferences, but they did not have options to unsubscribe from all the ones I was getting.
            I emailed them and they responded that maybe they should make their update process more detailed. Meanwhile, I’m just deleting the ones I don’t want, unread. Sigh.
            So OP, this can be a big deal for your subscribers. I would be sure to make that point to management, that it doesn’t take long to become annoying with presumptions about what they want to read.

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      2. Lenora Rose*

        It’s a known phenomenon that people don’t leave a business when the business makes the decision that first alienates them. They hang on for a while, giving the business a chance to turn it around. (I really wish i could track down the article where I was first reading about this in detail). This is the same thing in smaller scale; the LW doesn’t see any harm … yet. but might be right to check into policies *before* the harm does come down the pipe.

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    2. Juniper*

      I assume that most of these letters come from the U.S., where privacy laws aren’t as strict, but if OP is in the EU, then this may very well be a misuse of information depening on how consent was given. GDPR sets very explicit guardrails around purpose limitation — you can’t collect personal data for one purpose and then reuse it for another purpose outside the original scope. The big caveat to this would be if the subscribers gave consent to receiving newsletters from OP’s company, rather than one newsletter only, which is a normal way of handling newsletter subscriptions and may very well be the case here. In this case, the situation can be chalked up to poor internal control. But if they signed up to receive xyz newsletter only, then putting them on the mailing list to receive something else entirely, no matter how relevant OP’s colleague thinks it would be to the recipients, or how unlikely they are to notice a different sender, constitutes misuse. Either way, it’s a good idea to tighten up the procedures around access to and use of contact lists.

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      1. SayMyName*

        Yeah, if they’ve signed up specifically for OPs newsletter, and the list with their personal data is being taken and used for something else, even sending a different related newsletter, that would definitely be a GDPR violation.

        And even if OP isn’t in the EU GDPR would still apply if any of the subscribers are in the EU, as GDPR covers anyone in the EU, it’s not about where the company holding the data is. Now obviously it’s not that likely there would be any huge consequences if they aren’t in the EU and don’t do business there, but it is something to consider, especially if OP wants it to stop.

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      2. OP3*

        All of our different newsletters have different branding and different sign up lists. A person can sign up for any of mine on one page, because it makes sense for it to be set up that way. That person would have to sign up for any other newsletters we send out as a whole in different places. Whether that’s efficient is a conversation for another day… but it’s how it’s set up for now haha.

        Mine are niche, so I market them specifically as “the monthly newsletter about XYZ, tailored to ABC!” Because of the nature of what we do, none of our contact info is purchased, etc. I built my lists from the ground up through organic marketing and word of mouth. (Humble brag: my newsletter is currently up for a national award!)

        We are in the USA, not the EU, and it would be extremely strange if someone from the EU were subscribed though.

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        1. Miette*

          A couple of things:

          First, many US states have privacy regs similar to GDPR–CA, MD, CO, and VA spring to mind (though there may be more) so a reason to comply/add certain controls to your procedures already exists. There is also a federal law (CANSPAM) that says you must provide basic contact info and a means of unsubscribing from all company emails anyway (except in certain circumstances like billing where there’s a standing relationship). If you don’t already comply with that (and the unsubscribe your email service provider has for your one list may not be enough), then someone should look into it. I don’t know how well the fed statute is being policed/enforced these days, but it’s worth it to at least be aware.

          Secondly, most people won’t see your newsletter as any different from your colleague’s–they will see it as a newsletter/email/communication from your company. Sure, the content differs, but who is sending it does not matter to them. Not having a centralized database or way to unsubscribe from certain types of communications while maintaining others may ultimately prove problematic for the company–it’s more about the overall brand experience and company reputation than you may think.

          I think the time for your company to discuss this has arrived for you, unfortunately, OP. Good luck!

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          1. Beth*

            I don’t think it’s a given that people don’t notice. If I signed up for a newsletter on “The latest in llama grooming brush technology” because I specifically cared about llama brushes, I’d notice if I started getting newsletters on “llama shampoo advancements,” “stylish alpaca haircuts,” and “Does your llama spit too much? Try this dietary supplement!” It might not strike me that it’s a newsletter from a different author/entity if it was under the same branding, but I’d notice that the topic isn’t what I signed up for or cared about. If LW says that this other newsletter wasn’t in the scope that their subscriber list signed up for, and that their subscribers care about that kind of thing, I’d trust them on it.

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          2. MigraineMonth*

            Hmm, I’m actually not sure if I’d pick up on the company if the branding were distinct enough. If I signed up for Dove soap coupons and started getting Axe Body Spray coupons definitely I’d be annoyed by the latter, but I wouldn’t necessarily think, “Oh, right, both those are Unilever brands.”

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      3. Jamjari*

        This was my thought as well, and I’m not even in Europe. If I signed up for a llama grooming newsletter and suddenly started getting newsletters from the camel feed emporium, I’d be unhappy with how my data was used – especially since OP says in another comment that these lists have different branding. I would wonder how this company got my info and unsubscribe.

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      4. Ann O'Nemity*

        Eh, even in the U.S. there are laws about this. I remember my last organization got blocklisted by an email service provider for sending unsolicited emails. We had to go through a remediation process to prove that recipients opted in to communications and that the emails were relevant to what users agreed to receive. In the end we had to tighten our segmentation and clarify consent language. Just because someone signed up to receive a newsletter did not mean we could email them about another program.

        (This all sounds rather spammy and devious, I know, but I swear we were just a nonprofit trying to promote free services.)

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        1. MigraineMonth*

          This is a good point. Even if the recipients technically agreed to receive all the company’s emails, it’s really bad for the company if they get flagged as “spam” too frequently.

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    3. KateM*

      how many people would even realize it’s a different newsletter/person sending it out since it is still coming from Llamas inc.

      That’s what I would find as the biggest problem here, actually – newsletter receivers believing that I the person responsible for this newsletter was the one who sent this extra information that they did not sign up for. This would imply that there is more of that to come, and I’m now about to receive several times more email than I wanted. I would be sitting on fence and waiting to see if that’s going to be the case and whether I’d better unsubscribe.

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      1. KateM*

        Sorry, I changed my point of view from newletter writer to newsletter receiver halfway, but I hope it is understandable – let’s say that I as the newsletter writer would be imagining myself into newsletter receiver position. And I think OP#3 has done this and worried about that, or they wouldn’t have checked whether someone had unsubscribed after receiving this not-signed-up-for letter.

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      2. Lexie*

        Since the information is pertinent to what they do they could also think that it was some sort of supplemental material that OP thought would be useful to them and not have any concerns about it.

        Reply ↓
        1. KateM*

          It is still a worrysome situation for OP as they are now responsible for what someone else sent.

          That’s like if someone sent a work email from your name – maybe it was all good, and no harm done, but maybe it was something you don’t really agree with.

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        2. MigraineMonth*

          Even useful newsletters are irritating if they’re coming more often than agreed on. When a newsletter says once a week or once a month, they’d better not spam me in between unless there’s something really critical.

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      3. Anonym*

        Yes. She’s going to irritate recipients and damage the org’s reputation by sending content they didn’t ask for. I work in corporate communications. This is Not Done. She just created reputational risk for the firm to advance metrics on her own personal work – that’s actionable. It may not be illegal, but this would be a “do not repeat on pain of firing” issue on my team. Manager should talk to her, explain why it puts the firm at risk to misuse data, and make clear that it cannot happen again.

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      4. Miette*

        I would honestly be surprised the company hadn’t already been marketing to me from that list anyway. Unless OP is in the newsletter content business (and they didn’t say so), there’s nothing to say the data can’t be used for other marketing purposes by the company that she works for UNLESS the form says so specifically. In the US, all you really have to do is provide a means to unsubscribe at will and comply when people do it. The fact that OP’s company doesn’t have a centralized database in use for this is slightly problematic, because what if someone wants to unsubscribe across the board but they’ve subscribed to three newsletters which are managed separately? If they complain, it’s technically a CANSPAM violation. (that said, no one gets dinged for small scale stuff like this, it’s really enforced for large spammers).

        ALL THAT SAID, OP and their company may not want to have to deal with diminishing the brand identity/customer satisfaction/goodwill they’ve built up by being respectful of people’s preferences in this kind of case, and it would be in their interest to adopt procedures and use cases for these things. Sounds like OP (and their colleague) have a really great content engine going and they should treat it as a company asset and ensure they not alienate their audience.

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    4. Goreygal*

      In the UK and EU this would be misuse of information and both OP, the colleague and the employer, could find themselves finded by the country’s Information Commission Office. Data Processing laws say that information like this can only be used for the specific purpose it was collected for, and you cannot presume consent to use it for anything else even if there’s a tangible link.

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    5. Kuddel Daddeldu*

      It depends. In Europe, rules are stricter; a company can use data only as agreed (and consent is always to be considered narrowly) or legally required. In LW’s case it appears the newsletter recipients agreed to a monthly message, not more. Sending more can result in damages awarded; there have been successful court cases.

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    6. Sloanicota*

      Yeah, I will say I had the opposite perspective on this one. I think OP may have gotten in a bit too deep here. It’s not “your” list, it’s the company’s list, and you might need to take a step back because ultimately the company *is* going to want to mine that list to increase engagement elsewhere or generate revenue, unless you’re literally an education nonprofit with the goal of providing one-way education to these people. Signed – someone in fundraising who always got pushback from marketing for “ruining their metrics” by pushing for appeals/solicitation emails … that paid the salaries of the marketing people.

      Reply ↓
      1. OP3*

        Funnily enough… you kind of hit the nail on the head about one-way education! We don’t generate revenue from any of our newsletters — they are purely educational, and our metrics are based off of what got the most attention, really. So each month, I gather all the metrics of clicks and let internal stakeholders know what got the most clicks so they know what our audience is interested in.

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        1. Cmdrshprd*

          I get you wanting and worried about keeping up your metrics, and you should definitely explain that. But at the end of the day the company can decide they would rather increase engagement across the board/company at the expense of the metrics for your specific newsletter.

          Sometimes what’s best for the company might not be best for a specific department/employee and that’s fine.

          Reply ↓
          1. Hroethvitnir*

            I find this a strange take – while as a complete hypothetical this is broadly true, in the specific situation we’re talking about, “the company” encourages individual contributers to engage in clients in a way that gets a positive response, and the person who borrowed the email list was literally doing it for their personal engagement.

            If the org’s goals involve not driving people off, changing the content, and *especially* the frequency of newsletters, is indeed a problem.

            And even if it wasn’t, clear rules around how this works are absolutely required to function smoothly.

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      2. Slow Gin Lizz*

        I agree, but I also agree with AAM’s advice that the company needs to come up with guidelines as to how their lists are used. The colleague should at least have asked if it was ok to send her newsletter to OP’s list first and not just sent without asking.

        Reply ↓
        1. MigraineMonth*

          Yeah, and it’s a good thing that nothing went really wrong here. Raising the question can be a low key, “Hey, this worked out this time, but it made me realize we should probably have guidance around this” instead of “My coworker sabotaged years of work and now half my list has unsubscribed because of her!”

          This is something that should be explored as a company to establish rules about when an occasional additional newsletter–or cross-promotion within the newsletters–benefit the company’s efforts and when it definitely shouldn’t be allowed.

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    7. Parakeet*

      As a privacy pro who works with people for whom some kinds of privacy violations can put them in danger, I think explicit consent is paramount here. People consented to one thing. The data shouldn’t be used for another. In this case it doesn’t sound like it’s likely to put anyone in danger, but the ethic of consent, and following procedures meant to uphold it, is important (even if not widely followed in the US absent state laws to force it).

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    8. iglwif*

      Depending on your local laws, it might be quite a big deal to send people emails they didn’t opt in to receive.

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    9. Bike Walk Bake Books*

      I’m with OP #3 here. I had the same thing happen with a list for my specific unit within a large public agency and was very very unhappy.

      We took that issue to the central communications unit responsible for managing the subscription/sign-up system and they made it clear to the person who did it that you should never use someone else’s list. This doesn’t happen accidentally; you have to go through a set of dropdown menus to choose the list(s) you’re sending to and ours wasn’t one line away from theirs.

      If you think your content is of interest to my readership you can ask us to highlight it, run a story, link to an issue–some other mechanism in which we continue to maintain editorial control over items sent to the list we built.

      People can sign up for other newsletters on very different topics from the same agency from the same central subscription page. For a change from llama grooming, imagine that we’re sending out information on healthy physical activity and someone else wanted to send information on vaccination. Also health, right? But not physical activity, and these people aren’t necessarily signed up for the vaccination news. They had the chance to sign up for it when they signed up for ours.

      Yes, the list belongs to the agency. Its value was created and is sustained by our editorial content. We’ve grown the list organically over time and it’s for a very specific subset of the agency’s work. You know it’s from us because of the title and contents. The email it comes from is the same for all these newsletters and identifies our agency. If you don’t like this unexpected topic and block or unsubscribe, our list and the agency (including every other newsletter list) both lose out.

      I don’t know whether we lost subscribers but that was absolutely not okay and doesn’t represent best practices in email communications.

      Reply ↓
  4. Naomi*

    I want an update to #1, just to find out what is going on with that marketing team! From the info in the letter we can only speculate (are they snubbing OP’s team in particular? genuinely overloaded with work? just slacking off?) but there’s got to be something behind this.

    Reply ↓
    1. Double A*

      Seriously, I’m so curious! Is it just a whole department of Bartlebies who just would rather not? A leader who is just absolutely incapable of prioritizing or planning?

      Reply ↓
      2. journeyboots*

        I’m not the LW, but I easily could have been.

        In my instance, the leader was an incompetent egoist who filled her days with meetings instead of producing material. Before her, I’d never met someone who so clearly believed that “more meetings = better.” Rather than focusing on producing tangible results (like the booklets we requested) her calendar was a wall of meetings. From the meetings I had to suffer through, they seem to be scheduled so she was being able to tell people her calendar is full and she’s too busy to help them.

        To circumvent her, I got a hold of a few of the templates that had been gate-kept (without her knowledge/approval) and the necessary software to produce our materials and did them myself.

        That woman went onto much larger roles…in the email from her boss announcing her promotion, she listed some “career highlights.”Amongst them, one particular project which was ACTUALLY MY WORK! I can only assume that most/all of the other bullet points were pilfered.

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    2. Myrin*

      Yeah, I have a million possible reasons for their behaviour in my head and I desperately need to learn what’s actually going on there!

      Reply ↓
    3. FD*

      I am also very curious. I also would love to know whether it’s just the LWs department specifically or whether everybody has this experience with marketing.

      Reply ↓
      2. Spar*

        I hate to say it, but I and many of my acquaintances in different organizations who had similar experiences with useless marketing departments. I don’t know what it is about the field, but I hear too many stories to believe it’s random

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    4. Nebula*

      Yes, I would also like an update. This kind of gatekeeping but then not doing stuff is weirdly common with marketing departments though, I have no idea why. I’ve also been in a similar situation to the LW in the past, though not quite as egregious. But yes, the whole ‘you have to go through us, but also we don’t have time for your request, but how dare you do something yourself’ rigmarole is familiar to me. I don’t know what they expect people to do in those situations – just… not do the project? Not do the work? It’s bizarre.

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      1. JTP*

        It’s not “gatekeeping.” I’m not sure from OP’s letter, but it’s possible there are several areas of the business that marketing serves. If one high-revenue-producing area of the business sends a lot of work their way, they’re naturally not going to priortize work from a lower-revenue-producing area of the business.

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        1. ecnaseener*

          Sure, but how do you justify them proceeding to complain when LW’s department muddles through without them? If you don’t have the bandwidth to work on a low-priority project, then you say so and accept the reality that said project might go on without you.

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        2. Pierrot*

          Then they need to be transparent about that and promptly inform LW’s team that they won’t be able to do a project instead of sitting on the request.

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        3. metadata minion*

          Sure, but if the LW’s department needs marketing materials and the marketing department doesn’t have the bandwidth to provide them, they need to address that! Preferably by bringing it up to upper management and getting more staff, but at least by telling the LW what the problem is and what they want that department to do about it.

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        4. Observer*

          If one high-revenue-producing area of the business sends a lot of work their way, they’re naturally not going to priortize work from a lower-revenue-producing area of the business.

          But then they would not be complaining that the LW’s department was doing it on their own.

          And also, that’s not what the marketing department is saying. In fact they are saying a whole bunch of things – including a couple that are self contradictory, and at least one that is not true (ie they can’t handle the project because they are still looking at prior submissions, even though the project HAS been submitted!) – but at no point have they mentioned that they need to prioritize income producing projects.

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        6. Nebula*

          By gatekeeping, I was referring to the whole “no we won’t give you the templates or train any of your staff on this, we will just complain about what you produce” thing that the LW seems to be experiencing and that I experienced. In regards to this not prioritising work from a lower revenue part of the business – fine, but if it is agreed that the work needs to be done, then a solution needs to be offered, whether that is outsourcing or someone being trained to do the work. What I was pointing out is that it seems to be common for marketing departments to say “we don’t have time for that” but not offer any solution, and even block potential solutions, because the setup is that, in theory, they should be doing all this in-house work. Also “not prioritising” is one thing “literally never doing anything even with a six month lead time” is another.

          Reply ↓
      2. supply closet badger*

        Since you ask, as someone in a department with a similar function to marketing, in that content/projects from across the whole org trickle down to us and we are responsible for maintaining the quality and consistency of everything that reaches the public … yes, sometimes we would prefer that you just not do the project! :)

        We are constantly slammed with a huge volume of work coming from other teams that means we cannot possibly fulfil our own job responsibilities properly with the time and resources we have. Getting people to prioritise and say what is actually time-sensitive or significant and what is a nice-to-have can be like pulling teeth. And the people in the rest of the org can’t do what we do themselves.

        So the choices feel like a) compromise the company’s product and reputation by doing our jobs badly, or b) annoy the other teams by telling them they need to wait to get their stuff out. Which would you choose?

        Now in our case, we’ve been arguing to leadership for some time that we either need to cut back the number of projects or increase the size of our team. What’s interesting is that, in the letter, they got their extra people, so it seems odd that that hasn’t helped. But perhaps the new people’s skills are not interchangeable with those of the existing team members — an increase in the range of tasks they can do, rather than in the number of people who can do any one task.

        It would be a huge relief to me personally if the rest of the org could stop saying yes to every project idea and/or become more comfortable with prioritisation and letting projects drop or be discontinued.

        Also, I’m not saying that the marketing team in the letter is handling this well — they should be communicating better and also advocating to leadership with solutions instead of just becoming a brick wall! But perhaps they have already tried that so many times, don’t believe anything will change and so are just trying to protect themselves in a dysfunctional way.

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        1. supply closet badger*

          I should add, or maybe the LW is totally in the right and the marketing dept in the letter is just being obstructionist for no good reason! That’s quite possible. But I felt a stab of possible recognition at Nebula’s question, so just wanted to provide my perspective from that general side.

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          1. MigraineMonth*

            Yeah, Nebula’s question made me immediately think of my own job working in the IT department. Yes, we’re to0 slammed to make your requested modifications to the custom software right now. I know it’s important to you, but we have a list of projects that are higher-priority to the organization longer than my arm. No, we DO NOT want you to inject* some code that will make the software do what you want, which we will be stuck trying to maintain, fix and update for the rest of time.

            *I’m happy for non-IT people to write their own reports, scripts and extensions, but for the love of data integrity don’t mess with the core code.

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          2. Nebula*

            OK I get that you would prefer we not do x project I situations like this, but if this is my work and my team is being told this is the project we’re doing and we have to produce certain materials for that, then it’s not up to the marketing department to determine that no actually, this shouldn’t go ahead. You see my issue?

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        2. Cabbagepants*

          Thanks for this perspective!

          Speaking from a non-marketing perspective, my desire would be for management to acknowledge the roadblock and come up with a way to get people served without 1:1 input from marketing. I don’t know your work but a lot of stories in the comments are mentioning templates!

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          1. Anonym*

            Definitely templates, and allowing people access to the applications needed to use them! I’ve been on both sides of this problem (much less severe), and the answer is to give people the tools they need to do the job effectively.

            If people have the templates and tools, marketing can shift to a review/revise/approve model for at least some projects instead of creating them all themselves but refusing half the work.

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        3. Jackalope*

          Part of the weirdness here is that they’re always rejecting the work from this one team, even in the instance mentioned above where they were given advance notice for the rest of the year on what projects were needed, and couldn’t even be bothered to respond. I hear you about being given too much work, but they insisted on 12 month’s worth of notice but can’t respond when someone is trying to follow up? That seems more like a deliberate snub, or total incompetence.

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        4. huh*

          Okay, so the LW is giving them ample time to complete these projects – what then? It’s not like she’s going to marketing saying I need this done tomorrow.

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        5. Kelly*

          Completely agree! As someone in marketing, this was my first thought of what’s going on too. We get literally 1000s of requests and projects a year – everything from major campaigns to changing the color on a flyer. We’re responsible for prioritizing based on what has the most impact to the organization. Those guidelines are sometimes vague, but are usually based on what has the most impact to the bottom line.

          This means that sometimes projects aren’t worked in a timely manner, which typically leads to those clients being convinced that marketing isn’t doing anything. They raise it to leadership, who “agrees” with them, but mostly because they don’t really want to get involved. Trust me: if we’re working on something leadership doesn’t want us to work on (or not working on something that’s a priority), they will tell us. That means that despite what your CEO is telling you, most likely, they’re fine with marketing’s work and prioritization, and likely have more insights into what’s going on.

          To be clear: this doesn’t mean marketing should blow you off! They should explain this, and attempt to find alternatives, which may include connecting you to an outside designer. Unfortunately, the resources aren’t always there for that. Ideally they’d be developing a template library too, but that isn’t as straightforward as most people think. The best solution is a full platform for it, which (again) requires funding and manpower to build. One-off templates often don’t live in a format others can easily use, and even if they do, people are VERY likely to tweak the template to suit their own needs unless key elements are carefully locked.

          I will say, that based on your description, the request process seems terrible. A form is very normal for marketing requests, even for things that have already been discussed. However, it’s NOT at all normal to ask you to submit an entire year’s projects within two days. I do wonder if the part about being unable to work projects because they’re reviewing requests is a misunderstanding though. Depending on the size of the org and team, it’s not unusual to have a trafficker whose sole job is to review and manage requests. I wonder if somehow they were referencing what that person is doing, and not what the whole department is doing.

          All this to say: your frustration is valid! And I’ve definitely worked with marketing people who simply aren’t invested in finding a solution, which could be the case here. I don’t want to discount the possibility that it really is incompetence. However, I also feel the need to point out that it’s very likely LW doesn’t have the full picture, and that even with new team members, this may still be a care of bandwidth and prioritization. Marketing is a very common scapegoat (which is clear in the comment section here too). While sometime it’s deserved, there very often is more to the story.

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          1. Nebula*

            Yeah this is a good perspective. To be clear, as I’ve been complaining a bit about this, to me it seems like a communications issue, and that was the case with my former marketing department that never did stuff for us. I get that everyone only has a limited amount of time and is under-resourced, my issue with this in the past was a flat refusal to work on any solutions. If the work needs to be done and it’s not getting done, then there needs to be an honest conversation about what’s needed, instead of just “we can’t do that for you but we also don’t want you to do it yourself”.

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        6. Beth*

          But you don’t really expect that if 1) another team has a project that they’re charged with completing, and 2) you’ve told them you have no bandwidth for their project, and don’t expect to in the next several months, then 3) they’d just give up on doing projects – right?

          It’s completely understandable to have too little bandwidth to complete every project that every team sends your way. It sounds like you’re understaffed for the volume of work your company directs your way. But the teams sending you work aren’t doing projects for fun. Typically, a team’s workload is what they think they need to do to meet the goals that leadership tasked them with. They probably have some wiggle room to choose how to implement that, but it’s not like they’d be doing less work if they decided against approach A–they’d just be doing approach B instead. If you can’t help, they’re going to look for other ways to get it done (an external contractor, a team member who took that one graphic design course back in college, whatever they can find) so the project can move forward.

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          1. supply closet badger*

            In an ideal world, yes, I would like them to consider dropping the project if we don’t have the resources to complete it in a timely manner — or if the project is critical, tell us what else we can drop or delay in order to make it happen. But, this is probably getting too deep into open thread territory as it’s more about my own job and probably not that relevant to the LW, so I’ll leave it here :)

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    5. Your former password resetter*

      It absolutely sounds like a leadership problem to me.

      Between the weird and inconsiderate demands, the complete failure to communicate their plans and requirements, the extra headcount that don’t fix anything, and the weirdly belligerent attitude, their leadership is either the source of the problem, or utterly failing to adress the massive problems in their department.

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    6. OhGee*

      my team had this kind of relationship with marketing and I learned that a) marketing was pretty understaffed and b) they loathed working with us because one of our high-level managers was extremely difficult to work with (this person is, in fact, one of the reasons *I* left the job).

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    7. Lacey*

      Yeah, I was trying to puzzle that out too. I’m part of an inhouse marketing team, so I expected to see a really obvious error on the OP’s part, but… they seem to be doing everything correctly.
      As far as we can tell from the letter.

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      1. I NEED A Tea*

        What is their deal. Normally anything for C suite people are priority. I wonder if the marketing team knows that.

        Reply ↓
        1. bamcheeks*

          Well, except that the C-suite knows about it and doesn’t seem to be doing anything. So it’s perfectly possible that this is a nice-to-have rather than business critical even though it’s coming from the top, and that the marketing team is prioritising correctly (but communicating it badly.)

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      2. jez chickena*

        When I was a corporate marketing VP, I implemented agile project management for my team, ensuring complete transparency regarding projects, intake, and status.

        I know we are supposed to take everything the LW says as the absolute truth, but I’m skeptical. The form that is causing all the drama is probably a creative brief. These are necessary to complete most marketing projects and make the resulting product actually useful.

        We used to get all sorts of pushback regarding the creative brief. Apparently, it’s too much work for the requestor to know who the audience for the project is and what we want to tell them. The classic example is some dude-bro sales guy requesting a brochure that answered every question a prospect could have, so he didn’t have to communicate with the prospect. We started doing formal intake meetings in the CEO’s office so she could see the quality of the requests. We ended up taking fewer requests because she was shocked at how the requesting departments balked at supplying any information whatsoever.

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    8. Hyaline*

      One thing I wondered about is that the marketing team seems to want to plan out all of their projects way in advance, but LW‘s team is responding to current events and seemingly needing a relatively quick turnaround time to respond to them (understandable!). I wonder if they have a huge mismatch in working styles and haven’t talked it through and/or gotten guidance from someone above both of them to help them understand how to prioritize and plan the workflow.

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      1. RagingADHD*

        They submitted all their plans for the year. That’s not what I would call “quick turnaround time,” unless they’re writing entire books.

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        1. Lacey*

          Well, I did wonder if that was the case based on the description.
          Or if the project could be otherwise far enough outside the scope of marketing that it’s actually a really big reach for the team to complete it.

          Most marketing teams aren’t going to have a lot of experience setting up a book correctly. So it will take longer than it should because they’re not used to it. They’ll probably use the wrong program. They won’t know the shortcuts.

          And they’ll hate the department that keeps asking them to do a production task when their job is marketing.

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          1. RagingADHD*

            But they explicitly don’t want the department to do it, and keep saying Marketing
            should be the ones to do it! LW also said they do most of the formatting.

            I think attempts to make this the LW’s fault aren’t going to work, because the marketing response is so contradictory.

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    9. Phony Genius*

      If they were given extra people and nothing changed, then upper management needs to step in and set everybody straight. If you’re turning down work because of volume issues and you’re subsequently given extra personnel, it doesn’t look good to the higher-ups who approved the increase if you continue to turn down the same work.

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    10. Sloanicota*

      That’s so funny, my response to this letter was “ah, t’was ever thus” – especially with marketing / comms for some reasons. I assume if it’s a nonprofit, most of their time is already booked for the CEO/Board/Annual Report and the rest of this “internal client” stuff is not important to them. I agree with whoever said OP’s team probably need to get a budget for design work that they either pay to Marketing, thus increasing their importance, or hire someone external.

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    11. RIP Pillowfort*

      Yeah it’s just so utterly bizzare.

      I could understand a snub. There’s ongoing issues with IT and my department stemming from a previous manager being difficult to work with. Like that completely tanked our working relationship no matter how reasonable the rest of us are. That manager left, has been gone for several years, and we’re still trying to repair that relationship. We still get marked low priority for anything submitted* and have to escalate through Department heads to resolve it. But that’s really no secret to any of us dealing with it.

      *My stuff doesn’t get shrugged off as much as others. It really is an obvious snub to the specific unit that manager headed. It’s better since he left at least.

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    12. Generic Name*

      Agreed! I think it’s insane the marketing team has so much power. And I’m sorry, but you have no standing to complain about something you refused to do.

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    13. ThatGirl*

      I work in marketing and I cannot IMAGINE this happening, like … everything goes through our project managers, so they could in theory say no but 99% of the time it’s one of the following:
      – they say sure no problem, whatever it is gets put into our normal workload
      – they say we can do it but it will have to wait a week/a few weeks
      – if it’s urgent and we don’t have capacity, a freelancer might get involved or other work might get shuffled around

      and that’s pretty much it!

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      1. Agent Diane*

        Yes, I was thinking this too! Or the fourth option:

        We say we can’t prioritise the work, the other team complains to their Director who complains to the CEO who then tells us to do it anyway so we have to deprioritise something else.

        Marketing and comms is a strategic function, not just a tactical one.

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  5. SunnyShine*

    #3 I’m glad that Alison can figure out what they meant when they use “llama”. I always find these letters confusing.
    But yes, escalate. I find it weird that she didn’t even let you know that she was doing that.

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    1. Myrin*

      I mean, it’s just a stand-in, there’s honestly not much for Alison to figure out in this case (although there are letters where stand-ins appear in such a way that they confuse more than they clarify) – OP says the newsletter is about llamas but in reality it might be about cars or flowers or phones or hair products; it could be literally anything and the llamas aren’t really more or less clear than any other example OP could’ve chosen.

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    2. Sharpie*

      Alison herself has used llamas and teapots in discussing work. They stand in for any work product/job – often, if OP were to talk about their actual job or product, it would be identifiable information if someone they worked with were to come across their letter, so it’s a way of anonymising themselves, especially if knowing the actual job or work product isn’t necessary for answering the question.

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    3. Poly Anna*

      As I understand it, she uses llama/teapot supplies or services as a stand in for the actual business or organization. It helps to make it more anonymous. People who send in questions have started doing the same, sometimes.

      Reply ↓
      1. allathian*

        Indeed. Seems to me that llama grooming is a stand-in for some sort of service while teapots are more like manufacturing/design.

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          3. Nightengale*

            I’m pretty fond of the grain based language Alison pulls out from time to time. Rice Sculptor and Oatmeal University are two that I recall and I know groats came up at one point.

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          4. KateM*

            They would still use “llama groomer” or “teapot designer” and nobody wouldn’t even conside the possibility that they are the real one. Double bluff!

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      2. SunnyShine*

        I’ve noticed that. I’m Autistic and dyslexic so metaphors aren’t easy for me when they are used like this.

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    4. Varthema*

      It’s also an equalizer – even if no one was concerned about anonymity, there are lots of industries where the things made or services rendered would sound even more like gibberish. So “teapots” stands in well for products and “llama grooming” for services because we can all imagine teapots and llamas and would have a very vague sense of what’s needed to make them or groom them. (apologies to any real teapot makers or llama groomers for minimizing the complexities of what they do!)

      They’re slightly whimsical but no more nonsensical than, say, “widgets” and I suspect that’s why some people like them but some dislike them. And actually can be clearer, because we can use other related vocabulary as analogues (“spouts” for components or “brushes” for supplies) without adding further clarification.

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      1. Socks*

        Plus they keep the comment section from getting derailed on irrelevant details. If the LW had included the actual topic of the newsletter, I think there’s a very good chance the comments would’ve been filled with debates on whether LW’s coworker’s newsletter was similar enough to LW’s to justify sending it to LW’s contact list.

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        2. Elsajeni*

          Yes, I think this is really key! Even with a different placeholder — there have been letters where someone used, like, “recipe writing” as a placeholder, and explicitly flagged it as “let’s say it is recipe writing; that isn’t really it, but it’s similar” in the letter, and inevitably there were a bunch of comment threads suggesting ways the OP could improve their recipe writing, pointing out that it was just an example, arguing about whether, if recipe writing was actually close enough to the OP’s real context to make a good placeholder, the recipe-writing-specific suggestion someone had made probably WOULD still apply actually, and so on. The benefit of the llama barn is that everyone knows it’s a placeholder and even people with real llama-grooming expertise can generally resist the temptation to be like “well, ACTUALLY, it sounds like what you need is to spend more time on the undercoat and never mind braiding the mane–“

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      2. Hlao-roo*

        It’s also an equalizer – even if no one was concerned about anonymity, there are lots of industries where the things made or services rendered would sound even more like gibberish.

        Yeah, for example I work in engineering and if I were to write in about how I was in charge of a newsletter about thermal fluid expansion and my coworker was in charge of a newsletter about oxidation rates, and there was a recent breakthrough in how to integrate an oxidation rate equation that could potentially be applicable to how we derive thermal fluid expansion equations so my coworker thought she should send the newsletter to my list too, I don’t think most people would be able to follow that.

        (I don’t run a newsletter, this is just an example to illustrate that using actual industry jargon can be much harder for people outside the industry to understand than “llama grooming and llama feeding are two different processes that both have to do with llamas.”)

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    5. PhyllisB*

      Has anyone but me noticed more Llama merchandise since Alison has started using this example? Everywhere I go I see Llama socks, t-shirts, stuffed animals, ect.

      Reply ↓
      1. Juicebox Hero*

        As a knitter, I’ve noticed this, too. But I think it’s just part of the cycle of trendy animals – sloths, hedgehogs, foxes etc.

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    6. Generic Name*

      Yeah, I’m with you. I don’t love the extended analogies people seem to love here. I often I’ll just skip a letter if I can’t figure out what the hell it’s about.

      Reply ↓
      1. appo*

        absolutely, especially because half the time the analogies aren’t needed to provide the context for the issue

        Reply ↓
      2. MK*

        If you can’t figure out what is happening when a (fairly simple in my opinion) analogy is used, what should people do when they want advice about their more technical or niche workplaces? Even if anonymity wasn’t an issue, the average person won’t be able to make sense of a description of a workplace they have no inside knowledge of.

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        1. SunnyShine*

          When people use teapot and llamas they tend to over explain things. It’s almost if they are trying to make up an alternate job to remain anonymous, but it over complicates the question and directs attention into details that aren’t needed.

          I don’t think any of our comments will change that though. And that’s okay because my original point is that I’m glad people get it.

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  6. Alexis Carrington Colby*

    Similar to #1, but I’m on the marketing team, where the other departments won’t do their job which impacts the whole company. The root of it is our incompetent CGO, who doesn’t hold anyone account, and oversees my department, and those other departments. He will sit on calls but offers zero help, he won’t even ask the head of the missing stair department why he isn’t doing his job. But my company thrives on chaos and people pretending to do their job. I’m trying to leave.

    If your CEO doesn’t care, there isn’t anything you can do. Do you have a boss between you and the CEO to help? Please don’t actually do the marketing team’s jobs for them.

    I hope we get an update!

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    1. Kai*

      My daughter is CCO of her uni student council (huge job), & also works (paid) with the uni marketing & communications dept.
      So I’ve seen the other side of “we did all the prep work correctly & submitted everything they asked for!”
      Only they.. don’t. Its not useable material sent to Comms or Marketing at all, as much as they might think it is. I cannot tell you how often Comms & Marketing stay late to finish, the pressure they are under for turn around, how the constant demands on their creativity are draining for them. How they have to pick through what you’ve submitted to meet standards plus what you are looking for, whether you have the ability to communicate your ideas effectively or not. It’s a huge job.

      If they won’t work with you & it’s consistent they won’t, but will with pretty much everyone else, it’s not them.

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      1. Poly Anna*

        I was thinking this, I have seen a lot of people (usually in good faith!) misunderstand how much work was needed to make their work publishable. I wonder how much of a workload they have apart from OP’s content. And what was happening that they were allowed multiple new hires.

        I mean, the solutions are largely the same, talk to the marketing manager, or higher management if they’re genuinely slacking off. And then true up, one way or another, the workload with the available workers and hours.

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      2. Happy meal with extra happy*

        No, if the marketing team isn’t telling OP’s team that they’re not submitting useable information, it’s the marketing team. If there’s an issue with the request, they don’t just get to ignore it.

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      3. FD*

        While it is certainly possible that the materials submitted are insufficient, just saying you don’t have time is unlikely to rectify the situation. The marketing department in the LW’s situation could kick back the materials and say “we can’t complete it until you do x, y, and z” but that doesn’t appear to be happening here. Given the multiple submissions they’ve done and the amount of lead time, I don’t think that’s a reasonable read for this particular situation.

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      4. Insert Clever Name Here*

        Perhaps, but then why is OP only getting “we don’t have time” as the reason it’s not done?

        I’m in supply chain management and there are very specific items I need in order to issue a purchase order. If someone doesn’t send me the requisition authorizing funds or a scope of work that includes appropriate detail about the work to be done, I tell them what I need. When they check in and say “have you issued the PO yet” and I’m waiting for information from them, I don’t say “I don’t have time to help you,” I give them an itemized list of things I still need!

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        1. JTP*

          It’s possible the marketing team … doesn’t have time. The form submission is probably to help them evaluate how much work is coming from each area of the business, how much time those projects require (a flyer takes so much less time than a video), in an effort to determine staffing needs.

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          1. Sloanicota*

            My thin-stretched org’s departments all love forms, and now we’re in a “battle of the forms” where each department implements a form to hedge off requests from other departments, who promptly implement a form in response. Everybody likes creating and defending the form, nobody really likes filling out a form. Our forms are also, IMO, weirdly long, which doesn’t help. My department’s form is several pages in a google poll with quite complex info; not sure what people are expected to do if they start the form and realize half way through they don’t have something they’d need to answer it. Also, it has trick questions lolol. It’s a weird culture.

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          2. Jackalope*

            If they insisted on havi mg all potential projects submitted at the beginning of the year then they need to make the time now. It’s not one of those, “Everything was thrown at us last-minute and we’re scrounging for info,” situations. If this is a chronic issue then they now have the option to complete a basic list of what they need for each project (graphics of a specific size and resolution, or Y number of basic bullet points on the campaign, or whatever). They don’t get to just not communicate what they need for all of the projects for an entire team for the whole next year.

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          3. Lenora Rose*

            I think at some point, “I don’t have time” stops being a useful reason, though. The difference in time between responding with “I don’t have time to help” and “We still need X, Y and Z info” is generally relatively short, significantly less than an hour, but makes a HUGE difference in actually moving things forward.

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      5. Dust Bunnt*

        But then the marketing department needs to say that! They’re not going to get usable submissions if they don’t say that they’re not usable and why. At that point, even if the LW’s department isn’t submitting what marketing needs, it’s now marketing’s fault for not clarifying.

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      6. huh*

        Unless LW is threatening them with physical violence, all these what-ifs don’t matter. If the work LW is sending them isn’t correct or requires a lot of additional work to fall into branding/publication guidelines, then marketing needs to tell LW that!

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      7. RagingADHD*

        I don’t see the part where marketing informs the submitting team that their stuff isn’t useable and what they need to change.

        Simply refusing to do anything about the request, or communicate, or give any rationale, or follow through on their own plans / requirements, is not a reasonable response.

        Reply ↓
  7. Raida*

    4. Coworker’s microphone doesn’t work well
    “Your mic is dying, have you ordered a new one via [IT request system]?”

    Reply ↓
  8. EA*

    I had this problem with a marketing department where I worked. The root problem was that they saw our requests as “extra” – which made no sense, because it was a key part of the company’s work – but they didn’t perceive it as part of their core work plan, but rather something to do if they had spare time. We ended up outsourcing and that worked best, although it always annoyed me that they didn’t think our requests were a central part of their job.

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    2. allathian*

      Well, it depends. I work comms adjacent so I see what the marketing team has to deal with on a daily basis. Most of our projects are known in advance and the resources for them can be budgeted. The comms director asks all the divisions in our agency for their preliminary plans for the following year to be submitted by December. Some departments within those divisions are notorious for never having any plans but coming up with “urgent” projects seemingly ad hoc that have to be scheduled because they’re mission critical. In reality, the department has had at least a preliminary idea about the project but they haven’t bothered to inform our department, in spite of repeated requests.

      Our director was getting fed up with this never changing, and in one department meeting when we were discussing an employee survey and the workload caused by urgent ad hoc projects came up, I actually heard her say something like “their lack of planning doesn’t mean you have to scramble.” Our organization’s fairly flat, the director’s grandboss is our Big Boss, and he’d been talking the talk about better planning to avoid overwork, so now he had to put his (employer’s) money where his mouth was. Scuttlebutt had it that the big boss himself had told the department to send the work to a company we partner with sometimes and to pay for it out of the department budget rather than the comms budget those things would normally be paid out of. We’ll see later this year if they’ve learned anything.

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      1. Poly Anna*

        Maybe you are extra? I don’t know what they’ve been told or how they run things. Marketing is a strange space when it comes to planning.

        It’s not unusual to plan to ‘budget’ a number of hours a week for ad hoc requests together with the marketing department. Otherwise, they’re going to assume you don’t need anything or at least, nothing urgent. They need to be able to plan things efficiently, there’s usually nobody solely assigned to deal with tickets as they come in, as a help desk would. But that is a mental model many people have of marketing, rather than a department with their own planning that also cooperates with other departments.

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        1. allathian*

          Sure, the marketing department does have some room for ad hoc requests in their schedule because sometimes these things just come up and it can’t be helped.

          But it really puts a spanner in the works when the departments get lazy and refuse to inform us of their tentative plans, with confirmation once they’re confirmed. It’s simply an inefficient use of overall resources. Like the time one department announced they needed help to set up an event for 5,00 people in three months when the lead time for these is generally at least double that. The team starts planning some annual events as soon as the last one’s been debriefed.

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      2. Myrin*

        Unless I’m misunderstanding your point, that’s explicitly not the case in OP #1’s situation, though:

        “This is not a timeline issue either; we always send out heads-up and check-ins on these projects weeks or months before we need to deliver them.”
        and
        “So we redo all the work we did preparing for those meetings months ago, throw it in these forms, and get them in by the deadline. We covered as much as we could think of since we effectively had to plan a year’s worth of programming in three days.

        Reply ↓
        1. allathian*

          Yeah, here it seems more like they’re not getting the materials they need for the marketing work early enough.

          Reply ↓
          1. Analytical Tree Hugger*

            Could you clarify what you mean by “here”? Are you referring to your workplace or the LW’s?

            Reply ↓
          2. huh*

            ?? LW’s team has repeatedly gotten them materials weeks or months ahead of time. If you’re talking about LW scrambling to put things together in three days, that was marketing’s fault because they announced on a Wednesday that they needed these forms by the end of the week.

            Now, if even weeks or months of notice isn’t enough for marketing, they need to communicate that with LW’s team!

            Reply ↓
      3. Sloanicota*

        One of the fundamental issues in our org, I think, is that marketing really wants a whole-year schedule set out in December, which they can do for their work (the newsletter! the annual report!) and that’s just … completely unrealistic for our work, which is largely grant-driven. We don’t know in December if we’ll get grant X and Y. We may not even know that we’re going to end up applying for grant Z when we’re approached by another org to partner on it! Everyone disagrees with what is core mission critical.

        Reply ↓
  9. fluffy*

    LW4: Unless your coworker works in a 1950s recording studio, “warming up” isn’t really a thing for microphones. More likely she just has her volume turned way too far down and the “warm up” time is the meeting software applying slow automatic gain control to it. It’s probably just something that can be fixed in her operating system’s control panel.

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    1. Seashell*

      What I know about operating systems could probably fit on the head of a pin, but that sounds like a reasonable explanation.

      If there was an actual “warming up” issue, I would think that could be solved by her turning on her microphone 2-5 minutes before the meeting. It’s odd that she hasn’t tried that if she thinks it is the explanation.

      Reply ↓
    2. sb51*

      Yeah, there’s a reasonable chance this is software, not hardware. We had a similar issue with some of the in-office mics/speakers (so IT was responsible for the hardware and had lots of replacement parts/access to the system) but it turned out it wasn’t a hardware issue.

      Reply ↓
    3. Account*

      Thank you! I was confused by this, but I have zero knowledge so I didn’t know for sure. But yes— it doesn’t seem like a microphone would need to physically “warm up.” Thus, buying a new one might not solve it. Right?

      Reply ↓
    4. Varthema*

      +1! even the microphone I used in the 90s didn’t need warming up. I agree that it’s just turned down too far and the only reason she hasn’t copped it as the issue is that the chat software fixes it for her.

      Reply ↓
      1. Sloanicota*

        It’s so weird to me that nobody has said in the first sixty seconds, “Lucinda, can you turn up your mic?”

        Reply ↓
        1. Elsajeni*

          I’ll be honest, I did not know that was a thing you could do! I mean, I’m aware of it as a thing for professional audio equipment, but as far as my $20 headset that I use for video calls goes, my belief has been that the mic’s gonna pick up what the mic’s gonna pick up and I don’t really have control over that. So 1) now I know, and also, 2) I’m not THAT surprised that Lucinda hasn’t fixed it/no one has suggested fixing it, because I bet I’m not the only person who didn’t know I could adjust that setting.

          Reply ↓
  10. jesicka309*

    OP #1 – As a marketer who coordinates similar things for my organisation, I’m going to ask some tough questions (please don’t take offence before you’ve read my whole reply!)

    – Who are your resources for? How many customers are actually engaging with your content? Can it be measured?
    – Is your content a ‘mandatory’ or a ‘nice-to-have’? What happens if your work doesn’t get completed (aside from your own annoyance) – are sales or other metrics affected?
    – How much time would you say the marketing team would have to spend developing your work, compared to other work that would generate incoming revenue/customers?
    – How long is your content ‘in market’ for? Is it a slick brochure that will displayed for the next year, a pdf that will sit on the website for a long amount of time, or a paper flyer to go with a single event? Is it time sensitive or evergreen?
    – How tricky is your work? Do marketing have to do a lot of work to make it presentable for the public? Is it low touch for them or high effort?

    I have a few stakeholders ask us for similar things like branded educational resources, and they seem to have low engagement from our audiences, don’t bring in any extra customers or revenue, are useful for a day or two and then obsolete, and seem to take up 80% more of my time than other, more critical projects. So they tend to get deprioritised. If I managed this work on a first come first served system, or squeakiest oil gets the grease system, I’d never actually get to the high impact work that generates the most revenue.

    This isn’t to say this is what your work is, at all! But the questions I posed above are useful to consider when approaching upper management. Your team might be the most organised of all and the first to get briefs in, but knowing where your work sits in terms of org objectives and priorities might answer some of your questions about why your work isn’t getting actioned. You may be getting directives from the CEO, but potentially you are working on a few ‘passion project’ types of initiatives that are getting bumped down the line by other core, critical work that marketing can not delay lest revenue is impacted (think catalogues, advertising, expensive promo materials with unmoveable deadlines).

    The solution for us in the end was to upskill some of our team who were getting stuck in the backlog the longest – give them access to some basic templates so they could keep their projects moving. We also did a bit of an education piece – we weren’t palming off their work, just changing so that the time they spent briefing us then waiting in backlogs were spent instead just creating the work. The final thing we did was have a really candid talk about the level of work they were asking us to do – did they actually need all those materials? Could they consolidate? Could we find a better way to do it that wasn’t held up in our backlog? Sometimes people get so lost in the trees that they can’t see the forest, but marketing do often see everything across the whole org and how it’s all working together.

    Like Alison says, have those discussions up the chain, but just be aware that the response might be not that the team is too busy, but they’ve been directed to work on other, higher priority work, and that hasn’t been communicated until now.

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    2. ApollosTorso*

      Yes to all of this! As a graphic designer for marcomm, this is a lot of it. And as an earlier commenter said, often the materials we received needs more work than people might guess. I’ve taken to training other departments on basics on design in templates. There’s a 50 50 chance the other person abandons their own project when I explain why it needs to be redesigned or rewritten and how to do it well.

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          1. len*

            I think that’s huh’s point though — the commenter went out of their way to justify the marketing dept’s actions but the scenario they describe can’t account for how the marketing team in the letter actually behaved. To me that makes it less likely that the commenter’s scenario is relevant to this letter.

            Reply ↓
    3. Poly Anna*

      This! Often marketing is seen as something of a support department, like an IT helpdesk. But there are usually through lines and other things going on where it’s useful to get a feel for how you fit into that.

      Upskilling contributors can definitely be part of the solution! In many organizations, you would end up training and coaching those people yourself, though, which can be tough when you’re already overworked. I’ve definitely made an effort, only to have a manager/colleague immediately assume I have more time now that I’ve ‘handed it off.’

      Reply ↓
      1. bamcheeks*

        jesicka309‘s comment is great but this really nails what I’ve come across when I’ve had to dig in to why we were strugging with our marketing department:

        Often marketing is seen as something of a support department, like an IT helpdesk. But there are usually through lines and other things going on where it’s useful to get a feel for how you fit into that.

        I have had roles in several different organisations where I’ve needed to work from the marketing department, and it’s always taken quite a lot of work to get to the point where I understand how we fit in to their workplan. I have absolutely come across this thing where the view of marketing outside the department is “you are a service department and I am a customer” and the view inside is “in theory, 90% of our work is fixed and stable, and 10% is external requests from different departments, but for some reason that takes up 50% of our time to manage and we are not resourced for that aaaargh”. It took a while to get to the point where that was clear though, and I had to do a lot of diplomatic asking the question in different ways: there was a lot of reluctance to say, “your work is not a priority” or “we are not resourced to do this”.

        I’ve also encountered a couple of marketing departments who are in a permanent state of “we are trying to introduce A System which will help manage these requests, please fill in this form” but then, non-marketing people don’t know how to fill in the form, so it becomes a conversation anyway, or the requests are way to diverse to prioritise properly, and then other things start sneaking around the edges, and it never quite gets embedded.

        The places it’s worked best have been where we were able to either train or hire someone directly into our team who could speak Marketing to Marketing but could just get on and create posters, newsletters, etc in the appropriate branding. But it does take some pushing and someone willing to recognise that if the organisation wants this done, the money has got to be spent somewhere — whether it’s better-resourcing your marketing and comms team, hiring someone with marketing / design skills into your team (even if it’s not their full job), or outsourcing it to an agency.

        Reply ↓
        1. bamcheeks*

          (Also, I would do what you can to take the blame out of it. It is super frustrating but if you go in with an attitude of “the marketing team isn’t doing its job! why isn’t someone making them!” you will probably not get the outcome you need. I have had way more success with, “The marketing department doesn’t seem to be able to service these requests, these seem to be the reasons, what are some alternatives?”

          Reply ↓
          1. Lenora Rose*

            Maybe it’s just the letter, but I also feel like in LW’s case, they’re missing the “these seem to be the reasons” pieces.

            Reply ↓
        2. Sloanicota*

          Yep, if you’ve got a low-priority department with high needs in design, you’ve GOT to introduce simple templates (not in InDesign if they don’t have InDesign!) that meet the bar of what you’re willing to accept, and then do a LITTLE training – ideally a recorded video you can constantly redirect them to for the big picture stuff, and then have them chat you with a quick question about a specific issue they’re having. That’s a way better action plan than just pawning them off forever while not explaining that you don’t think their work is important.

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    4. Analytical Tree Hugger*

      …okay, but LW’s team is doing the work AND THEN their marketing colleagues are annoyed that LW’s team did the work. How does that square with your suggested framing that the marketing team is being told to deprioritize the work?

      The marketing team can either do the work or let others do the work (and explain why). I don’t see justification for grumbling about others doing the work if they aren’t doing it.

      Given that these requests originate from the CEO (and the CEO agreed them not being completed is a problem), why would the marketing team get to decide whether the requests are worthy of their time? Because that’s what your questions suggest to me, that the marketing team should be able to override the CEO.

      Reply ↓
      1. bamcheeks*

        IME, it’s a combination of “because bad design makes us sad” and “because we are tasked with creating and maintaining a high-quality and consistent brand for all outward facing communications across the company but nobody wants to resource us well enough to do that for real”.

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        1. Nebula*

          Again, that then needs to be explained to the LW if that’s the case. This seems to be the fundamental issue here, there are potentially all sorts of legitimate reasons why the marketing department can’t fulfil the LW’s requests, but if they’re not telling LW what those reasons are so that a proper solution can be implemented then it’s a waste of everyone’s time.

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          1. bamcheeks*

            I mean, I don’t disagree, but that’s not actionable advice for LW. LW can go and ask questions about that, though.

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          2. JSPA*

            That’s what I heard, based on what the LW relayed. I figured the LW was hearing it, but in any communication, there are many levels of assumptions that people know what the correct resolution is…except that people don’t know. (Thus the recent thread on being handed a cactus in place of a budget.)

            “When you say X, what concrete changes do you need to see” is one way to cut through the “obvious / oblivious” divide.

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          3. Great Frogs of Literature*

            Yeah, there are plenty of legitimate reasons that this work isn’t a priority for the Marketing team, but it’s LW’s job to get this content out, and SOMETHING needs to change — whether that’s adding Marketing people whose job it is to do this work, or enabling LW’s team to do the work in a way that’s acceptable to Marketing.

            It’s possible that it’s an overall org priorities problem, not a Marketing team process problem (at least, not entirely; communication hasn’t been great, to my mind), but it’s still a problem and still needs a solution. LW can’t accept “Just don’t do your job because it isn’t a high enough priority for Marketing for them to ever get it out the door.”

            Reply ↓
            1. Great Frogs of Literature*

              *There could be plenty of reasons.

              It’s not entirely clear to me that that’s what’s happening here.

              Reply ↓
        2. Calamity Janine*

          honestly… if there’s genuinely too much work that needs to be done, i get the marketing department frustrations. but if no templates are to be shared and no marketing time is available, even with lots of lead time, the fact is that if marketing can’t do the work then they can’t do the work and need to accept that. maybe it will be bad design. maybe the kerning will make you wince, maybe the color match is off, maybe they’re even using comic sans. but if the only message conveyed to the other party is “we don’t have time for this and can’t do it”, then… it means you’ve got to fully cut it loose. not, as this department is doing, be mad that the group doesn’t magically know things they were never told (and the marketing department continues to refuse to tell them).

          if anything this may help prove points that marketing needs a bigger budget – “see what happens when they do this on their own? you need marketing expertise! anyway i’ll let you go start drafting apologies to Clint for the results of perilous font choice and kerning mishaps when his name gets written in all caps…” (…poor Clint)

          letting them fly loose is a win-win for marketing. either they’ll do a good enough job with some style guides and templates already made, or they’ll crash and burn and marketing can go “this is why you need to expand our department by 150% like we’ve been telling you all along”. sometimes an important part of solving a problem is not trying to cover it up with bandaids if the problem is bigger than a bandaid, y’know?

          Reply ↓
      2. Cmdrshprd*

        One thing I wonder if the CEO is being consistent on their messaging and seeing the big picture.

        Is the CEO telling marketing they only have say $500k budgeted to work on for the year. But then the CEO ends up approving $600k or $700k worth of work to separate individual departments $100k approved to 6 or 7 departments, but when the marketing teams goes to the CEO he tells them they have to stick to $500k. So the CEO is not keeping track of overall budgets.

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    5. PurpleCattledog*

      But surely if they are choosing not to do the work because of reasons they should – share those reasons? It shouldn’t be up to LW to somehow come up with explanations for why she’s told DO X but then hit roadblocks because the next step in the line gets told don’t do your part of X.

      Why require forms to be submitted to request work if they won’t do the work because it’s not important?

      Why complain about them doing things themselves if they never intend to service this group? Surely if the group’s work is so low value that it’s not worth doing properly, but is problematic to do informally – it would make more sense to abolish that team and drop the work they do.

      If these tasks aren’t right for marketing, or are so low priority they’ll never get done – marketing boss needs to talk to LW’s boss and tell her that the jobs won’t be done they need a different plan. And then big bosses need to give orders and change how people are evaluated to match their expectations if they want this stuff done anyway.

      Reply ↓
      1. JSPA*

        I can think of so, so messages that have a large “shoot the messenger” component. All FanFic, but all loosely based on crud I’ve seen or heard of:

        “The CEO agrees with anyone he’s talking to; what he tells you, and what he tells us, will generally be unrelated.”

        “Our budget for your projects plus the projects of three other departments is 1/200 of our project budget, but realistically represents 1/20 of the work hours, so we obviously first handle the ‘real’ jobs.”

        “Our boss has been trying for years to get additional licences for [software] / a company-wide license / the updated version / stop illegally using a personal or academic subscription for commercial use. Cutting back on service on internal requests from groups who have the talent, and only need sotware access, to produce simple documents, is our best shot, given that we can’t publicize how illegal the situation is.”

        “The board, CFO and COO are not fans of the CEO’s unwavering commitment to [your group’s function] to the point where we’re putting our jobs on the line if people from project streams A, B and C so much as suspect that their project was delayed by a day, while we worked on yours.”

        “Your time estimates are often bonkers, so your jobs automatically go in the ‘don’t trust the time estimates’ pile.”

        “Jan in accounting believes your jobs are something fake we use to pad the accounts due to a bad joke someone made a decade ago about your team’s acronym, and so refuses to release funds without repeated resubmission.”

        “When we asked you not to submit rasterized images, someone on your team stripped the metadata to remove ‘rasterized’ from the description, then resubmitted the file; when we called them on that, they put the through some online bogus ‘derasterization back processor’ and submitted the resulting mess complete with pixel tracking and a virus. Is it any surprise we’re not eager to go through that again?”

        “Everyone else knows we run two days late, and changes their ‘need-by’ date to compensate.”

        “Three times we busted our butts to get your stuff ready on the day specified, it turns out that you’ve gotten anxious two days before deadline, made your own mock up, and run with it. Nobody’s ready to bust ass for work that won’t be used.”

        “Your stuff is intrinsically incompatible with our style guides and with our sense of taste. You’re not willing to drop the pale tan lettering on grey courduroy background or the bubble-effect 31 point papyrus, so working on your stuff makes us professionally queasy.”

        Then there’s all the rogue operative options: the one person on their team who has it in for one person on your team, and wrote a script to downgrade all your requests? The problem person who claims your requests as they come in, because they look easy, but then goes silent due to personal stress issues? The person who for some reason opposes your specific sort of outreach, and has deemed themselves the anti-spam or anti-litter crusader?

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      2. Sloanicota*

        Also my experience is that nobody agrees what the important/high impact/priority work is and isn’t. Departments that don’t tend to have this type of work generally want to get one, so they’re pitching what they hope is a big idea. The people at the very top will talk out of both sides of their mouths because they don’t want to demoralize a department by admitting their work isn’t a priority.

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      3. huh*

        No, you don’t get it – marketing gets to decide what’s important AND act all high and mighty about LW’s team not understanding this. This comment section is giving me a migraine.

        Reply ↓
        1. JB (not in Houston)*

          Yeah, I am baffled by comments here making excuses for the marketing department. The LW says that she’s providing all requested information well in advance, and the only reason she’s being given for the work not being done is that marketing doesn’t have time. The LW said, “They don’t respond, say they don’t have time, or send an older version of the product for us to update ourselves.” All of the others reasons provided by the people defending the marketing department here don’t align with what the LW is being told. If there are other reasons, it’s on the marketing team to tell the LW what those reasons are. Is the team overworked or not getting the right info from LW? Maybe! But she can’t know that without being told.

          And if they are sending her older versions for her to update herself, they can’t complain if it doesn’t look the way they want it to.

          Reply ↓
          1. bamcheeks*

            it’s on the marketing team to tell the LW what those reasons are

            In an ideal world, yeah. But an absolutely key skill in a large organisation where different departments work together is understanding what to do when that is not happening, and starting from a non-judgmental place in assuming there are reasons why we’re not aligned / different workflows / lack of clear prioritisation is way more likely to get you results than “x are useless teacosies who aren’t doing their jobs”.

            Reply ↓
          2. Lenora Rose*

            I’ve seen a couple of people in marketing making sense of issues they’ve had from their perspective, and I do appreciate that, but by even their own comments, this marketing department is doing *something* weird.

            Reply ↓
          3. jesicka309*

            Just want to point out that often the ‘marketing’ teams we are talking about here consist of 2-3 individual contributors (often very young) reporting to a head that manages many other functions as well.
            Don’t know about you, but I’m not expecting the 23 year old marketing coordinator who has been told by the head of their department to deprioritise another department’s work to be saying ‘sorry my manager said to only do OP’s requests once my catalogues are done because OP’s work is not as critical’.
            In reality, that young coordinator is going to deflect and say ‘oh we are busy, haven’t gotten to it yet’ as much as possible. They don’t have the capital to give the honest answer!

            I honestly believe there must be some politicking happening behind the scenes and Op’s team and marketing are stuck in the middle.

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    6. Your former password resetter*

      If OP’s work is genuinely too complex or low priority, then it’s even more important that the marketing department communicates that clearly.

      You can’t set up all sorts of meetings and bureaucratic procedures for submitting requests, and then just ghost your colleagues about the projects that are now your in your court. This department can’t even be bothered to send an email explaining which projects were rejected and why, or arranging some tools for people to do it themselves.

      Reply ↓
      1. WellRed*

        Yeah just the fact alone if them suddenly requiring these new forms and then not having time to do marketing work because they were reviewing all the forms says to me that the marketing team us the disorganized problem.

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    7. Whoopsie*

      I’m just reading a whole lot of excuses for a marketing team that refuses to communicate and do their job. Not sure how I’d feel about your marketing team either, if you never bother to explain this.

      Reply ↓
      2. Nia*

        Agreed. All I’m hearing from marketing people in this comment section is that they think they’re more important that everyone else and don’t want to do their job.

        Reply ↓
    8. Hroethvitnir*

      I genuinely think these are useful questions, but I think it’s extremely unlikely from the letter that the problem is not the marketing dept.

      Your final comment does not mesh at all with the projects being directly from the CEO and said CEO agreeing it is a problem. Upper management just agreeing with whoever is in front of them *is* a thing, but so is upper management being completely ineffectual at managing any teams that are actively being obstructionist.

      The LW has been very clear about seeking information to *get their work done*, whether that’s getting updated templates to do it themselves or just any way at all to have the marketing dept… do their marketing. A lot of “don’t have time” going around, but this is wasting a lot of the LW’s time. Which is noted as expensive!

      I think the “current events” part is getting glossed over here a lot. It seems occam’s razor points to actively obstructionist here – to be clear, I would actually support this depending on the messaging! But the amount of projection from people in marketing (less you than many) is deeply frustrating.

      Reply ↓
      1. jesicka309*

        See I can DEFINITELY see the CEO of a company saying something like ‘oh wouldn’t it be wonderful if all our new products had a lovely educational brochure attached, yes, OP, get your team on that!’ without checking in with the other department heads about what work is already happening and capacities.
        And then deflecting when OP complains about no support from marketing because the CEO totally knows that what’s he asked for is probably not a core business priority but they won’t just admit that.
        I’ve also seen many cases where the team making requests have no idea about where their own work sits in the grand scheme of the business. Every team thinks their work is the bees knees, but not every project can be priority number 1 for marketing at all times.
        Is it marketing’s job to say ‘hey, your department’s work, while serving a definite important purpose, is sitting like 9th on our priority list on a day to day basis. Our manager has told us that your work is never going to be a higher priority.’ That’s the kind of harsh truth that department heads should be having with each other, not individual marketing contributors.

        Reply ↓
  11. Zelda*

    LW2, I’ve never started a new job without, at some point, having a crisis about “OMG, what have I done?” Sometimes it’s a few weeks in, once it was five minutes after I signed the paperwork, but always it’s just nerves.

    Alison makes an excellent point that you haven’t mentioned a specific problem with the new job. Usually, when a student changes their answer to a test question during last-minute review, they were right the first time. We tell them that if they can identify a specific piece of evidence that they missed before, or can point to a specific error in their process, go ahead and change. But if it’s just because they’re not confident in their answer, they should trust their past selves to have done the best reasoning they could with the information available.

    Reply ↓
    1. Beth*

      Same! In my latest move, I was quitting a really toxic place in favor of what seemed to be (and has proven to actually be) a really lovely environment. I had every sign in the world that I was making the right choice. And I STILL got to the point of actually giving notice and had to work through a big wave of “oh god what if I’m doing the wrong thing????” anxiety. Change is inherently nerve-wracking. Second thoughts are normal.

      But from what you’re describing, your old place offers really uncertain stability (your role at risk in the near past, still in a financial crunch/hiring freeze), and your manager already expects you to leave. Yes, the people are lovely and will be hard to leave, but it sounds like all the “is this actually a smart place to stay on at?” signs point to no. On the other hand, your new place is financially stable enough to hire you on, went through a careful consideration process to choose you as the right candidate, and has worked with you well to accommodate your start date preferences. You don’t know them well enough yet to know if they’re as lovely as your current team, but you haven’t mentioned any red flags.

      Unless there are reasons to stay that you haven’t mentioned here, I’d trust your past self who thought it was worth investing time and energy in job hunting. The anxiety will fade, and you’ll end up in a more stable place. That’s a win.

      Reply ↓
      1. RedinSC*

        Yes to both of these.

        in my last job move I was leaving a totally toxic place, and I still had that “Am I making a wrong decision!?!” moment.

        I agree here, LW, stick with your first instinct to get that new job, and go get the more money, less stress and enjoy the learning process of a new job for what it is, a chance to learn.

        Reply ↓
  12. bamcheeks*

    It’s technically within the law because the same entity gathered their info

    LW3, if this means you are somewhere with GDPR or similar, then your organisation may have a Data Protection Officer. (This might not their whole job title — it might be a responsibility that someone has with a different job title.) You may not have one if you are a small company which literally only has email addresses for newsletters and staff data, but If you are larger or hold more complex data, you definitely will, and they’re a great resource for you here. They should care whether you have specific permissions to send a newsletter on llamas, or broader permissions to send marketing and related material, and they should be able to help you set sone policies around how your mailing lists are stored and used. Good luck!

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    1. Tau*

      Yeah, it’s really interesting to me that everyone is going “well, it’s the same organisation so no legal issue” because pretty much this exact scenario cropped up in my data protection training as a possible GDPR violation – using data the company had collected for purpose A for purpose B instead. If you only had consent for purpose A (ex: the person had signed up for the specialised llama grooming newsletter only and did not tick any box involving other materials) and there’s no legal reason or justified interest for coworker to use the data that way which it sure sounds like there wasn’t… that sounds like a possible breach to me.

      So yeah. LW is right to see this as serious, and should definitely talk with their DPO if they have one.

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    2. hedgewitch*

      Second the suggestion to involve the Data Protection Officer. A good one will absolutely want to know about this.
      Even within the same organisation, the collected data should only be used for the purpose for which it was collected and to which the people it was collected from consented. Whether this use was legal probably rests on the exact wording of the consent form and the privacy policy.

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    3. Smithy*

      If this OP is in the US, this genuinely is likely legal.

      With a number of international entities, it’s why they keep a number of database streams separate because what can be done in the US is different. Based on what the OP has already done, it’s very likely that the questions they’ve asked have already resulted in getting this answer.

      I work on a team where we have some people based in the Europe and others in the US, and every so often we’ll have an “idea” that they flag they cannot do because of GDPR data protection regulations but in the US we can. From the US side, it’s still always good to double check both to confirm assumptions – but how to approach the conversation if its an idea you don’t care for. As the OP said, it’s technically legal – so if there’s still a desire to push back – it needs to be for reasons other than compliance.

      Reply ↓
      1. bamcheeks*

        Depending on the size of the organisation, DPOs help with a lot of data management and processing issues, and can advise on best practice as well as compliance. This might be purely a marketing issue and they don’t care, but it can still be worth asking because some of them will care and will have some good advice.

        Reply ↓
      2. bamcheeks*

        Oh sorry, I think I’ve misunderstood your comment– I thought you were saying it would be legal even if they were in UK/EU (which is might be!) and therefore there wouldn’t any point contacting their DPO. But you were saying it would be legal in the US. I get that– I was just assuming that LW wasn’t in the US because I didn’t think there were any laws governing data management in the US outside of education and health.

        Reply ↓
        1. Smithy*

          The data management that does exist is far more about financial information such as credit card/banking information. So it’s not to say that it entirely doesn’t exist, but more so that it won’t lead to the most effective argument.

          Where I work, there is often some tension around essentially larger mass emails from our CEO – whether as an update or sending an invitation. Even if that mailing list is small, I will often still push for certain emails to be dropped from the list or receive a completely bespoke email due to concerns about it getting lost as a “mass emailing” and not having the specialness of communication that’s clearly more personal.

          Being overwhelmed by mass emails is a genuine concern, and the balance of what is enough to not be forgotten vs too much to become annoying. All to say, that I think the OP will have a better time being heard finding their most effective points with that approach vs data protection/compliance. If those people are in the US, they’re going to be far more concerned about privacy around customer financial information, which just may not give the nuance the OP is looking for.

          Reply ↓
  13. Kenelm*

    LW4: would it be possible to have her borrow a mic or sit next to her to see if she’s setting things up properly. She comes off as someone who does not take interest in these kind of tools, so maybe she’ll like the aid.

    Reply ↓
    1. LW 4*

      No, we’re all remote and spread across the world, so the ability to hands-on help is more limited. Though if she wanted, I could be in a call and tell her if troubleshooting settings on her existing mic is helping at all.

      Reply ↓
  14. Problem!*

    Graphic designer here.

    Let’s say our main focus is making a quarterly publication on the status of the llama grooming industry. We get people asking us for stuff all the time that’s outside our main responsibilities, like helping with a PowerPoint deck on a particular facet of llama grooming. We are more than happy to help out but since this isn’t our main work area we ask for a charge number to bill it to before we get started. 99.9% of the time it’s met with silence and we never hear back from the person making the request. Then we hear down the line that those people whining we “wouldn’t help them”. Well yeah. We need to be able to accurately charge our time and if we don’t have a number to charge it to we won’t touch it.

    Reply ↓
    1. Your former password resetter*

      But I assume you actually explain these things when people ask about their projects?
      Especially when those projects were filed six months ago according to the procedures you laid out? Because that’s what OP is doing, and they’re having trouble just pulling a response out of their marketing.

      Reply ↓
    2. huh*

      So many marketing professionals in these comments that can’t read – the LW is apparently doing everything they’re supposed to be doing, but marketing isn’t explaining or communicating why they can’t get to LW’s projects!

      Reply ↓
      1. len*

        Seriously. These commenters do seem to be explaining why LW is having issues communicating with the marketing department, just not in the way they think they are.

        Reply ↓
  15. Richard Hershberger*

    LW5: I am workers’ comp adjacent in my job. Most of the time, eligibility is straightforward. But there are edge cases where it depends on the facts. Also, workers’ comp law is state-level. I would not assume these edge cases fall on the same side in every jurisdiction. This would be a case for consulting with an experience workers’ comp lawyer in the relevant jurisdiction.

    Reply ↓
    1. Delta Delta*

      I’m workers’ comp adjacent in my house (Mr. Delta is a comp attorney) and this is the best possible advice. In some states this would be covered as a comp injury and in some states it wouldn’t. The best person to advise would be an attorney who handles this kind of work.

      Reply ↓
    2. Librararian*

      Adding to this (as someone who deals with WC, DBL, and other fun stuff) to say that a serious injury while away on a business trip *may* fall under a Business/Group Travel Accident policy if the organization has one. That policy accounts for repatriation, dismemberment, etc, BUT has defined classes and benefits. A more robust policy *could* cover local, immediate care or getting you back to your country of origin but often these policies are only for Executive-level people.

      Other than that, 100% that WC is very state-based and the states that I work with have pretty solid online portals for the state WC Board with tons of Q&A on weird situations.

      ALSO, since it was an off-work event, there could be some DBL coverage if time off is needed for injury (but the DBL pay where I am is shite so it’s barely even worth it).

      Reply ↓
    3. Gingerpop*

      I’m in Australia but this would definitely be covered under our business travel insurance policy – do companies in the US send staff on a work trip without covering them with travel insurance?

      Reply ↓
  16. Don't You Call Me Lady*

    I agree with the advice on #3. I wouldn’t think of it as “escalating” it (that kind of implies someone did something wrong) but rather just clarifying the policy on lists, contacts, emails, etc.

    Reply ↓
  17. el l*

    OP2: You applied for new job… for a reason. You went thru a lengthy hiring process and signed an offer letter…for a reason. There is ringing silence in your letter about any of these reasons changing, and from everything we’re told here new job is doing things right.

    Go. No more overthought. Sounds like normal job switch fears, amped up because there’s a long notice period.

    Reply ↓
    2. OhGee*

      Agreed. OP seems to be dreading the impending change. Some people experience that and it has nothing to do with whether the new situation will be good or bad. Start the new job!

      Reply ↓
    3. Any Given Fergus*

      Agreed. Plus, OP2 says their job is safer now, but the company is still in a financial crunch and their role won’t be backfilled. It sounds like your role is still not totally secure. What happens if you stay, find yourself in a similar position a few months down the road, but now you don’t have another job lined up (or not one that comes with a promotion and pay increase!)? How much will you regret not taking the new position?

      Reply ↓
    4. LaminarFlow*

      Totally agree with this take! Also, LW, it seems like you could use a bit of time off. If you have unused PTO at your current company, can you take it soon? And, if you can, definitely use the time to clear your head of work obligations. Don’t engage with work, don’t think about work. People leave jobs, jobs leave people, onboarding emails will be sent to new hires, Teapot Decorating Councils will meet, etc., etc.

      Notify the folks who you interface with a lot that you will be OOTO, put your OOTO response on your email, and take the break. Use it to dig into rejuvenating yourself – a hobby, baking, reading, windsurfing, binging your favorite show, knitting, a trip to a relaxing destination…..whatever will enable you to have a reset.

      Reply ↓
  18. vacationaddict*

    The first letter could have been written about the marketing department where I used to work. I spent some time with them before I left (my boss asked me to see if I could figure out why everyone was so unhappy with them) and got a glimpse of part of the problem. They did not know when they were finished. To them, they were finished when time ran out. Because marketing is in part a creative endeavor, they kept revising and revising and revising and every project went to the last 5 minutes of the deadline.

    They did not have leadership that balanced the creative needs with the business needs. Once they got that position filled with the right person, things got a lot better.

    Reply ↓
  19. sinus waves*

    Slightly tortuous analogy, but say we’re a teapot company…

    …For anonymity, let’s say they’re all about llamas, and each version is about a different aspect of llamas, like grooming, feeding, health, etc

    No. No to all of this. I get that people don’t want to dox themselves but saying that you’re a project manager or an accountant or whatever the heck, does not actually dox yourself. And in the case of these two specific letters–especially with the teapot analogy in the first example–it just makes things even more confusing. If I wasn’t already in danger of checking out by the time I got to the “slightly tortuous analogy” part, then I sure was now. Same with the letter involving llamas that aren’t llamas.
    All this does is throw a wink and nod to the in-crowd here that the LWs have read the website long enough to sit with the cool kids at lunch. Yay, good for you.

    Reply ↓
    1. Myrin*

      That’s an awful lot of ire for something that’s ultimately not particularly terrible!

      The topic comes up every so often and Alison has said that she edits out cutesy stand-ins when she feels they’re distracting but leaves them in when she thinks it doesn’t matter either way.

      I personally will never understand the attitude you’re expressing here because… you can just ignore the stand-ins you don’t like? I’ve asked about why some people seem to find this so terrible when it came up before and the answer was overwhelmingly that it’s boring to always have the same two or three stand-ins to which I have to say… well, I’m not reading AAM for the riveting and in-depth worldbuilding in its letters and I can deal with seeing reoccuring metaphors from time to time.

      I agree that most often, a stand-in isn’t even needed at all, but I do think they’re generally sweet and harmless when they’re included.
      (I really disliked Game of Thrones and found it slightly eye-roll-y when basically every letter used names from the show as pseudonyms for the people involved, but I didn’t actually care because they’re just words and if people found letters more engaging that way, who am I to comment on that when it doesn’t harm me in any way?)

      You’re also ascribing malice when there probably isn’t much thought involved at all beyond “I think mentioning llamas is fun”.

      Reply ↓
      1. Bird names*

        “… well, I’m not reading AAM for the riveting and in-depth worldbuilding in its letters” I liked the comment overall, but this bit especially made my day.

        Reply ↓
    2. Emmy Noether*

      I don’t see how it’s confusing. Often unnecessary? Yes. Too twee and beating an in-joke to death? Arguably. But I’ve never once been confused by this even once. What is unclear in this letter?

      Reply ↓
      1. Emmy Noether*

        That said, making logical sense of convoluted or clunky phrasing is literally part of my job, so my tolerance may be high.

        Reply ↓
    3. ecnaseener*

      Okay, wow. No one’s making you read the letters if they piss you off that badly. Some people like the stand-ins, some people don’t, some letters use them, some don’t. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

      Reply ↓
      1. JB (not in Houston)*

        Yeah, two commenters today have said that this kind of stand-in info is confusing, and I don’t get that at all. Do they black out when they read the words “llama” and “teapot”?

        I gotta say, though, I’m a little jealous of anyone who has the energy and mental bandwidth these days to get that worked up about something so innocuous.

        Reply ↓
        1. Eldritch Office Worker*

          Right??? I think someone could spontaneously combust right in front of me and my nervous system would just filter it out at this point

          Reply ↓
        2. Lily Rowan*

          Yeah I don’t see how that’s any more confusing than saying, “My newsletter is on topic A, and my coworker’s is on topic B, which is sort of an umbrella topic to A.”

          Reply ↓
        3. londonedit*

          Yep. I’m starting to think that there are two distinct ways in which people’s brains process information like this, because I’ve never had a problem with any of the analogies – teapots, llamas, rice sculpting – that people use. In the vast majority of cases (unless the whole thing is less than clear anyway, which it would be without the analogy) I really don’t have a problem extrapolating the general situation from the description given. But it seems some people really do have a problem doing that.

          Reply ↓
          1. Myrin*

            I honestly don’t even really extrapolate anything – letters might just as well say “I work in Stuff as a Thinger” and I’d be like “okay yeah sure so what’s going on in the Stuff business where you are?”.

            To this day, I have no earthly clue what “widgets” or “TPS reports” are and those are real things which get brought up here all the time, and yet I haven’t let that stop me from getting the gist of letters mentioning them.

            I feel like some people might be very literal when the situation (reading a letter on an advice column site) doesn’t really need that at all.

            Reply ↓
        4. Texan in Exile*

          “I’m a little jealous of anyone who has the energy and mental bandwidth these days to get that worked up about something so innocuous.”

          When the nurse asked me today if I have been anxious or worried in the past few weeks, I just laughed and she said I know right?

          I wish AAM letters were the thing that bothered me these days.

          Reply ↓
          1. Analytical Tree Hugger*

            Haha, aww…even though the cause is terrible, I find it heartwarming to hear about this moment of human connection!

            Reply ↓
        5. peony*

          “I gotta say, though, I’m a little jealous of anyone who has the energy and mental bandwidth these days to get that worked up about something so innocuous.”

          I think it’s possible for people to both:
          –be concerned/anxious/angry/etc about the state of the world today
          –be annoyed (or get worked up or whatever) about done-to-death, dumb metaphors in letters
          People can hold more than one thought in their head at a time.

          Reply ↓
    4. Lirael*

      I think the LWs are kind of in a catch-22. It’s totally possible that LW 3 explaining the actual extremely niche slightly-overlapping newsletter subjects in her niche newsletter drama it would actually make it obvious to all her colleagues that she wrote this letter. If she used a non-obviously-fictional job (“Let’s say I send a newsletter about updates to a particular accounting software…”) there would inevitably be many commenters who missed the part of the letter saying she was just using the industry as an analogy and started earnestly discussing how things work in the world of accounting software. I’ve seen it happen on this site before. If she didn’t use her real job or an analogy (“I send newsletters about various aspects of subject X, such as subjects X-A, X-B, and X-C, and my coworker sent a newsletter to my very specific X-A1 mailing list that was related but was more a broad XA notice…”), I think that’s a lot more confusing than just using llamas! I think if what you’re talking about is both detailed and niche enough llamas/teapots are your best option, even if some people find them annoying.

      Reply ↓
      1. Eldritch Office Worker*

        I agree, and also it might just be a preference and that’s okay too. LWs should be able to anonymize in the way that makes them the most comfortable sharing.

        Reply ↓
        1. Calamity Janine*

          the idea of letter writer comfort is fantastic to underline here, and one of the things i have seen repeatedly here is… anonymity doesn’t have to always be absolute. there have been letter writers who start on one level of anonymity, but as they delve into the comments and respond to them, they *make the choice* to drop another level of anonymity and reference something more concrete because it genuinely lets them get more information (often by talking with commenters who may have expert knowledge about the field).

          but important to your point – it gives the letter writers the agency to choose, whatever they feel comfortable with. i think this goes along fantastically with the other ways Alison does this (such as the commenting rules, not ever wanting to do a “worst letter writer” contest the way “worst boss” is fine and disqualifying odious bosses who wrote in from that yearly tradition, et cetera). all of this is a worthy effort that makes Alison a more trustworthy source, imho :) hopefully for the folks who are irritated by it, the utility of it can make it tolerable.

          Reply ↓
          1. Myrin*

            “Anonymity” also doesn’t have to mean “anonymous to literally everyone”. A lot of letter writers in the past have said that their coworkers and/or family read AAM and they didn’t want to make it obvious to those people that they’re the ones who wrote the letter.

            If you write a letter saying “I’m a bookkeeper at a pharmaceutical company” it doesn’t “out” you to me because I don’t know you. But if your direct manager also reads AAM and realises “wait, the medical fraud described in this letter sounds exactly like the situation we’re investigating at our pharmaceutical company right now” and then goes “okay, so our bookkeeper Milly has known about this all along?!”, that’s a whole different kettle of fish.

            Reply ↓
      2. londonedit*

        Yep, totally agree with all of this! You can’t win – if you obfuscate using teapots people get annoyed about the teapots, but if you say ‘Let’s say I work in accounting…’ then the comments fill up with people a) talking about accounting when that’s not the real industry and/or b) saying ‘I don’t think this is accounting…’ which also derails the discussion. And often if you do use your actual industry then it’s really hard to include enough detail (so that people don’t complain about that as well…) without making it obvious which company you’re talking about. I work in book publishing, for example, which is a really small industry, and I already worry that I post too much information that someone could piece together to identify me. If I was writing to Alison with an actual work problem, I’d definitely use an analogy like teapots, which would be easy to use to explain the sort of work I do without actually giving people the details of what my job is.

        Reply ↓
      3. Enai*

        See the many marketing people earnestly discussing the minutiae of marketing departments without ever acknowledging the point of letter #1: What to do to get marketing to a) communicate what the problem is or b) just give LW#2’s department access to the damn templates to make their brochures or whatever themselves.
        How an average marketing department works is entirely beside the point for that.

        Reply ↓
    5. exoboist1*

      This is a voluntary website you’re reading for fun, as am I. If it’s not fun, then there’s the whole rest of the internet for you to enjoy!

      Reply ↓
    6. Jackalope*

      There was a good write up earlier in the comments about why these can be useful. “Teapots” standing in for manufacturing or creating things and “llamas” standing in for providing services. I personally would prob use a different hypothetical example if I wrote in at this point, but I can understand the usefulness. Many jobs have obscure issues that don’t make sense if you’re not in the field, and this helps take the attention off the details and onto the main issue.

      Reply ↓
      1. bamcheeks*

        Yep! This has actually even worked for me as a problem-solving exercise: I mentally wrote a letter to Alison taking out all the personal and contextual detail that made it complicated, and was able to boil it down to “ahh, OK, this is essentially a conflict about what kind of brush we use.”

        Reply ↓
      2. Moose*

        I think if letter writers used it consistently in that manner it would be better, but they don’t. I’ve seen “teapot” as a stand-in for services and “llama” as a stand-in for what was clearly manufacturing before. I find it really confusing when this happens and wonder if maybe there’s room for some editing to make sure the metaphors are used correctly.

        Reply ↓
    7. cosmicgorilla*

      How is it possibly confusing?

      I do a job. My co-workers and boss reacted in x way. The actual job doesn’t often matter.

      It could be llama-grooming, sinus cleansing, or poop-scooping. The job could involve filing TPS reports on dog behaviors, training zebras to ring bells, or designing marketing brochures about the moon in Microsoft Word. It’s all noise. Irrelevant noise.

      What matters most in a lot of these questions is the behavior of the boss/colleague/spouse that the letter-writer is asking about. If you’re too focused on the details of the job, you’re focusing on the wrong thing.

      Reply ↓
      1. mysterious and important*

        I’ve thought this before, but in my case I realized that I also need to go back and reread 3 times even when the LW uses the real terms from their industry. I think job structures/processes can just be difficult to explain in a linear form like writing, making them difficult to read. Obviously ymmv, and there are probably plenty of readers who do fine with real industry terms but struggle to get through the llama/teapot substitutes.

        Reply ↓
    9. BlueHudson*

      You are absolutely correct about this. The responses to your post are a great illustration of why even A Manager herself has acknowldged finding the comments on this site…out of step with normal, real-world actions and interactions.

      Reply ↓
      1. mysterious and important*

        That’s true in general about the comments, but I think this in particular just one of those things that’s peculiar to advice column sites because it’s an advice column site. As others have said, using the real terminology can be a risk to anonymity, and substituting with terminology from another, more traditional field means wading through a bunch of derailing comments giving irrelevant advice on that specific field. Even if the LW takes care to say that that is *not* their field.

        My employer and position are unique enough that if I ever wrote in, I’d probably need to use some kind of outlandish substitute to preserve my anonymity and keep the comments relevant to my actual issue. It’s a practical choice more than a “AAM readers are out of step” choice, IMO.

        Reply ↓
      2. Calamity Janine*

        not to get tiresomely philosophical, but i’m not sure i have seen *any* comment section that faithfully replicates “real-world actions and reactions”! there’s a loss of information that comes endemic to the medium. no body language, no tone of voice, none of the other methods we use in communicating in those different forms and contexts… including the very existence of those contexts themselves (where you’ll find those societal norms that vary from country to country, city to city, job to job, office to office of the same job, et cetera). everything gets whittled down by the blunt necessity of what written language is and how it works.

        of course communication of people talking sitting around the meeting table in your company, with the context of your company’s culture and preexisting relationships, is going to look different than this comment section. and the communication is also going to look different when the table you’re sitting at is your great-aunt’s at Thanksgiving, right? code switching is not a sign of inherent unreality, it’s just a basic facet of how we communicate. “normal” is a perpetually moving target. to expect the same definition of it is to only invite frustration. we can still hold to some standards – and the commenting rules here are full of some really good ones that keep them grounded for some things that matter. but ultimately humans are gonna human. it would be pretty silly of me to expect this comment section to be the exact same as the normal, real-world actions and interactions at metal show, right? yet it’s not as if the mosh pit isn’t being normal for its context and isn’t created by real-world actions and interactions.

        don’t put tons of stock in the idea of a universal baseline, basically. (she says, dangerously close to navel-gazing.) (yes, i am always like this at least a little lol.)

        Reply ↓
      3. Myrin*

        I’m usually among the first people to call out unrealistic expectations and thought processes in the comment section but I don’t see at all how that comes up in any way regarding this topic.
        What does using a silly metaphor on an online forum have to do with normal, real-world actions and interactions?
        If you just mean that people wouldn’t talk like that to people in their real, non-online lives, well, two things: 1. of course not, because people IRL don’t generally need (or want) to obfuscate where they work and what they do when talking to, IDK, their neighbour or something, and 2. people use metaphors IRL too, it’s just usually not llamas or chocolate teapots (I’d guess!). I’d assume that someone who has, for example, a classified job they can’t talk about with anyone, they actually use stand-ins in IRL conversations, too.

        Reply ↓
    10. Calamity Janine*

      well, there are always browser extensions that can do find-and-replace jobs for text in the browser. it’s convention around here, and i think that’s fine – every online space is a community with micro-traditions, so to speak – but if you’re having a lot of trouble reading it, you can always set up one of those to filter specifically from askamanager. then your chosen term gets to be what you want instead, and you have an easier time with “i work as a teapot designer” now reading “i work as a $PRODUCT designer”, to give an example of a stand-in. (which is still a programming joke/reference, to be fair, but i don’t know what you know about and would prefer as a euphemism, so please imagine your chosen substitute instead.) others have explained that there’s benefits for the advice becoming generic by using a stand-in for something that is clearly fictional. i certainly appreciate that it keeps comments from getting too bogged down into industry-specific minutiae, and it means Alison has a chance to avoid that also and write advice that is more widely applicable to readers.

      or if you’re close to checking out, it’s okay to check out! though Alison’s advice is very real and pertinent, there is an aspect of an advice column that is also entertainment. there are other people who may dispense the same sort of information in a format and with a style that you appreciate. after all, if getting to the advice feels like pulling teeth, you’re probably not going to get much from the advice anyway, right?

      it’s okay if it’s not your thing. we all have different preferences. but i think that you may have wandered into taking this a bit personally. this isn’t something that people are doing at you specifically to make you feel inferior for not being one of the “cool kids” – it’s something that is the preference around here for some people. it’s okay if it’s not your thing. you’re not beholden to force yourself to like it. just as the people who *do* like it aren’t beholden to write to your standards instead, right? it’s just preferences, the same way i don’t like sushi but another person can really love it. they’re not trying to make me feel like i’m not one of the cool kids when they order sushi and i order my chicken teriyaki. we just want different dishes for lunch. :)

      Reply ↓
  20. Acronyms Are Life (AAL)*

    OP 2, not everyone leaves a job for a new one due to a toxic environment, you can leave a good job on good terms to get a better job! Just like how you can be a great employee that is well liked and you can still get fired, because of the needs of the organization. It’s always hard to leave what you know and are comfortable with and go to a new environment. I actually spent the first month or so of my current job (which I now love) thinking I made the greatest mistake ever.

    Also your current team will adjust and keep moving. If it was one of your other coworkers that left, you would just keep going and working, and you (hopefully) wouldn’t harbor any resentment about them leaving, because that’s just how jobs work, people come and go. They will figure it out!

    Good luck!

    Reply ↓
    1. Eldritch Office Worker*

      Yes! This is so important. There’s so much discourse around bad jobs that having a good one and leaving voluntarily can feel like some huge betrayal, but it’s not. Sometimes it’s just time to move on, and that’s okay.

      Reply ↓
  21. I should really pick a name*

    we also just never clicked that well so I don’t feel that comfortable talking to her about it myself

    Push past the discomfort.

    This is not such a big deal that escalating should be your first step.

    “I saw that you sent your last newsletter out to my mailing list. Please don’t do that. We want to ensure that our readers only receive content that they signed up for.”

    Reply ↓
    1. Silver Robin*

      I actually think Alison was correct about pointing out that there is no clarity about whether or not this is allowed. LW is feeling uncomfortable because it was done without her knowledge and seems to not usually be done at all, but just because it is unusual does not mean it is an overstep. Getting clarity on whether this is acceptable (and advocating for LW’s preference) will help ensure expectations are accurate and avoids LW making a rule nobody else has.

      Reply ↓
  22. Antigone*

    LW5, I suspect it is very fact dependent, but for what it’s worth, I have had workers’ comp cover an injury I received while on a work trip but outside of the hours I was doing work. I was injured while at my hotel vs. out sightseeing so that may be one of those important fact-specific differences, but it was no problem for workers’ comp to cover it. So certainly worth looking into, if you ever find yourself in that situation again.

    Reply ↓
    1. Kuddel Daddeldu*

      Yes, it’s complicated.
      A fairly famous ruling in Germany was that a worker who slipped in the hotel restroom while on a business trip was not eligible for worker’s comp, but another one who slipped in the shower was. (In the first worker’s case, they still received six week of full wages and a year of sick pay from statutory health insurance, though).
      I’m off work for three weeks right now from a biking accident on my daily commute so I’m covered under worker’s comp.

      Reply ↓
    2. Fly on the Wall*

      I had a coworker who was seriously injured in a weather related vehicle accident shortly after leaving the airport coming home for a business trip. They denied covering it however he did sue and it ended up being covered. He was able to proved that he would have not been driving in or near that area and the conditions were it not for the necessary work trip. He was off of work for months due to the injuries.

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    3. Jane*

      There’s also a well known Australian case about an employee who suffered an injury in a hotel while on a work trip.

      Reply ↓
    4. NameWithheld*

      Definitely look into it, but it’s very dependent. I had a car injury that happened on my lunch break, but since I was crossing the street away from ‘work’ it didn’t count. If I’d stayed on the property the office rental was on, it would have been covered, but since I crossed the street, it was not. (as a salaried employee, so it’s not like I ‘clocked out’)

      Reply ↓
  23. HalesBopp*

    It may not be your coworker’s microphone! Our company uses Zoom for video calling. Due to the way Zoom modulates background noise, myself and many others have the same issue, that for the first 2 minutes of a call, our spoken audio is just non-existent. This has been escalated to our IT department, who unfortunately have been unable to identify a good solution. I recently got a new laptop, and that didn’t resolve the issue unfortunately.

    Reply ↓
  24. Don't You Call Me Lady*

    The part I don’t understand on #4 is what happens in these meetings at the beginning? Is Jane talking and people say “Jane we can’t hear you” every single time? I don’t see how this has persisted for more than a few meetings, let alone a whole year??

    Reply ↓
  25. L-squared*

    I kind of disagree on #3. This is an email list that people signed up for. Most companies kind of reserve the right to send “other emails” that aren’t exactly in that bucket.

    For example, my company has collected email lists for various things over the years. We launched a new product recently, and we 100% used the list of people who had signed up for our old products, even though this one does something fairly new.

    From what it sounds like in the letter, this isn’t as much a situation where people are getting something not related to their interest, it seems like more of a territory of thing of “this is MY list, not yours”.

    I wouldn’t bring it up unless you get complaints and/or a rise in people unsubscribing. But as someone who has signed up for plenty of email lists, this just doesn’t seem like the big deal that OP is making.

    I also don’t know that there is a way to bring it up that won’t come across as you trying to get the other person in trouble.

    Reply ↓
    1. Whoopsie*

      Yeah, that’s the fastest way to get me to unsubscribed from an email list. I signed up for a specific reason. I don’t care about your other products, and now I’m probably avoiding what I was originally interested in too thanks to your spam.

      Reply ↓
    2. Hroethvitnir*

      People saying stuff like this is so alien to me. Yes, the US has minimal data protection, and it’s common to share like this/it may be beneficial to the company.

      Most people also hate it! But it usually takes more than one instance to see impact on subscriptions (ie: now is the time to address it), and nothing in the letter indicates this organisation wants this kind of behaviour (the LW’s comments back it being more likely they do not – metrics are based on interest from the community, it could be described as purely educational).

      Reply ↓
  26. Justin*

    I’m having the same problem as #1. I develop training programs for external audiences and they are supposed to involve the brief, occasional consultation of various experts in the company. But those experts are on the financial side of the company, so they insist they are too busy. However whenever they run into a problem of said external audiences (that they work with on loans) not knowing something they email us like, hey they really need to learn about xyz.

    But my solution is…. the company gives us access to training online so I’ve just been racking up financial/lending certifications.

    Reply ↓
    1. Observer*

      But my solution is…. the company gives us access to training online so I’ve just been racking up financial/lending certifications.

      That’s a key difference to what the LW describes. Because you at least have a way to get the information you need and no one is giving you flack for doing it.

      Reply ↓
      1. Justin*

        Well yes, that’s my point – the only issue is we’re being told to collaborate, I try, they don’t pull their weight, so I do it myself. If we weren’t being told to, I’d give up entirely. But now I know more stuff.

        Reply ↓
  27. Gigi*

    I swear I worked in the marketing department of LW1! Here’s some perspective from the other side of those marketing requests:

    1. The CEO has different priorities and is keeping the team busy with stuff you do not know about, and expects you to bump all other projects. This happens constantly.
    2. People not as responsible as LW1 come to you constantly at the last minute and NEED their materials for a timely event/accreditation/ something else that isn’t fair but bumps your place in line anyway.

    Those are the top two things probably happening to LW1, based on the description. I felt so bad when people were conscientious and gave us lots of notice, only to be bumped for less responsible people doing things like:

    3. People are submitting items they think are perfect, but use copyrighted materials, images scraped from Google, etc. Part of the marketing team’s job is to keep you from getting sued. You’d be amazed how many people think if it’s on Google Images, it’s free!
    4. People are producing work that they think is great, but it is actually jargon-filled, unintelligible to the average person and doesn’t meet the official editorial standards or reading level/accessibility guidelines (I worked in a hospital and nurses were terribly guilty of this! Say normal words, not abbreviations and technical terms that no one outside the medical field understands!)
    5. The marketing team has turned around work but have people who won’t let them be finished because they don’t like what the girl in the stock art is wearing, want to argue about an Oxford comma, are mad you can’t reproduce that perfect Google image they found.
    6. Laying things out so they print correctly, read well and meet all brand standards takes a lot longer than throwing together screenshots in Word, who knew?
    7. I promise you don’t know all of the projects they’re working on. Everyone thinks theirs is the most important one.

    I’m not saying there is no slacking going on for sure on LW1’s team. But the team I was on was months behind, never could catch up because of all the above, worked hours of overtime every day, our graphic designer had a joke “emergency exit” sign on his third-floor window due to overwork and stress. It was exhausting to have stayed many extra hours to get a project completed, only to have someone, who had probably also complained to the CEO about how long it was taking, turn their nose up because she didn’t like the colors or something and wanted it redone. We all had degrees, some quite advanced, in our field, but people thought of us as the stupid, “make it pretty” department and had no respect for our time and expertise. I ended up taking a pay cut to leave for a less understaffed place.

    Thanks for letting me say all the stuff I always wanted to at my old job!

    Reply ↓
  28. Cj*

    they applied for the job and signed the offer letter because their current job was at risk of being eliminated, and now it is safer. so they did say1 why the reason has changed.

    I also disagree that the new job is doing everything right. they were offered the job in january, contingent on the contract being negotiated, and they still haven’t received the contract.

    they have also received numerous emails about onboarding. this has been discussed here before, and a lot of people are of the opinion that they are not going to do any onboarding for a new job unless they are being paid for it, which I agree with.

    Reply ↓
    2. JB (not in Houston)*

      Yes, I had a question about the contract as well. We don’t know when Alison actually received this letter, but this seems like a pretty long delay! Maybe that’s normal in the OP’s industry, but if not, that would concern me if I were the OP.

      Reply ↓
    3. Trawna*

      The lack of a contract is what caught my eye, too. How can LW2 assess current job vs potential new job when most of the information they need is missing?

      Reply ↓
  29. LizbotEAV*

    #5, look up frolic and detour. Usually comes up in the context of company liability for employee acts, but might lead to related research questions.

    Reply ↓
    1. Junior Assistant Peon*

      I have a lot of business trip situations that would be edge cases here. A lot of my work travel is customer visits without a clear ending time, rather than a conference or meeting where you can safely book a flight home after the scheduled ending time. I tend to build some extra time into trips for wiggle room in case things go wrong, and end up doing touristy stuff when I have a half day to kill before my return flight. I could see something like this coming up for me if I trip and fall at some museum I was visiting on a business trip because I got done with my customer visit and the airline wanted a boatload of money to put me on an earlier flight.

      Reply ↓
  30. Do You Hear The People Sing?*

    #5 –Check your contract if you have one, it may be in there. Mine specifically states that injuries or loss on a work trip are covered up to $100k.

    Reply ↓
  31. Alton Brown's Evil Twin*

    #1 – I’m inclined to think that the new policy of “All forms for every project in the next calendar year had to be submitted by the end of the week (it was a Wednesday)” is a passive-aggressive way to saying “we aren’t going to do your response-to-current-events requests any more”.

    Regardless of the intent, there’s a fundamental mismatch between how the marketing/graphics department wants to organize their workflow and the actual needs of the business. Has this incompatibility been pointed out explicitly to their manager and the CEO?

    Reply ↓
  32. Lacey*

    LW2: When I quit a job I’d been at for a long time, I’d been trying to quit for several years.
    There were SO many problems with the place and I was under paid.

    But I still had SUCH a pang of regret when I handed in my notice. I was so sad to leave all my coworkers who I’d known for so long.

    It’s totally normal to feel this way, even when leaving is what you absolutely need to do.

    Reply ↓
    2. Just Thinkin' Here*

      I wouldn’t resign without a contract – assuming this is a position or country where that is the norm.

      Reply ↓
  34. ALCHAN44*

    Overwhelmed marketing departments is very common! Is there any way a few from your department could get “brand training” from your marketing department? This might be a good olive branch toward a compromise. Then, look into some Adobe Express subscriptions for your team. Marketing can make libraries of assets for you to use like the logo and other brand elements. The interface is very user friendly and there are plenty of options to get you through without the big ask of the whole Adobe package, which is probably way more than what you need. I used Express to create templates and manage assets for a team of six and it worked great. I also had to keep my mouth shut about their design – it wasn’t perfect but it moved the bottleneck!

    Reply ↓
    1. bamcheeks*

      We did this in my last job but with Canva. Comms gave us all the assets, colour codes, fonts and so on, and a couple of templates of different sizes and formats, and then we could update things like text, dates, venues, longer copy etc.

      As long as you have someone in your team who is strict about not introducing too much excitement, it can work really well.

      Reply ↓
    2. JustaTech*

      I did this once, just asked the marketing department for the color codes for our company colors. That’s it – I just wanted to be sure I was using the right colors for the scientific poster I was making. (Scientific posters are technical documents and not written by marketing, at least not anywhere I have ever heard of.)

      Someone got back to me with the colors, I went on my merry way making my poster.

      Later that day I got called into my 3X boss’s office to be soundly told off for “asking the marketing department to do my job for me”. Uh, what? Turned out the head of marketing had seen my email and decided (without checking with anyone) that I was asking them to make my poster, rather than to tell me what our colors were.
      The head of marketing them fired off a very angry email to my 3X boss, who didn’t bother to read my original email, and just yelled at me and wasn’t interested in my explanation about I was just asking for the colors and was in no way shape or form asking marketing to make my poster.

      I have no idea who had been making unreasonable requests of marketing, but I was pretty upset to be their punching bag on the subject.
      (The poster was just fine and very obviously not written by the marketing department.)

      Reply ↓
  35. Cat Lady in the Mountains*

    LW1 – it might be worth trying to meet with the head of marketing and the CEO together. You could frame it as problem-solving and alignment on priorities, not escalation. I think you’d want your goal to be “mutual understanding of decisions the CEO makes,” not “you get your projects done.”

    That gives the head of marketing an opportunity to voice any legitimate challenges with your deliverables, and it might make the choice points clearer to the the CEO if so far this has all been bilateral. Maybe the CEO is totally happy for the projects that they’ve asked you for to go out with more questionable templates, and they can communicate that to the marketing team so you stop getting criticism for them not looking good. (Or maybe the criticism doesn’t stop, but you can respond with “ok but that was what CEO decided, take it up with them.”) Maybe the marketing team is making weird prioritization decisions and the CEO can reorient them and get your projects prioritized. Maybe the CEO has unrealistic expectations for what the marketing team can deliver, and talking that through will build more empathy between you and the head of marketing about what you’re dealing with.

    (FWIW, I lead a marketing team. Marketing work genuinely is often misunderstood and devalued. And, this all sounds absurdly obstructionist to me — there really are ways to get things done even when workloads are too high. when I’ve encountered this on marketing teams it’s usually at its root a management/prioritization issue, a cultural issue of emphasizing process over outcomes, and/or an inability to understand when a product can be ‘good enough’ vs. when it has to be ‘great’. None of those are in your control.)

    Reply ↓
  36. Don't You Call Me Lady*

    From letter #1: “All forms for every project in the next calendar year had to be submitted by the end of the week ”

    This doesn’t make sense to me – how can you project what you will need from marketing 8 or 9 months from now? Especially if your work is related to current events

    Reply ↓
    1. Hyaline*

      I wonder if this is actually part of the problem. Maybe most of the organization is able to plan out what their marketing needs are going to be far in advance. For example , they are working with events, or product redesign, or other things that they’re aware of what is going to be coming down the pike way ahead of time (the LlamaGala is always at the end of June, we know now that we’re rolling out new alpaca brushes next fall). But LW‘s team is different. They’re responding to current events and presumably needing a fairly quick turnaround. It could be the part of the issue LW is having is a huge difference in expectations of workflow styles and they should probably have a conversation about that.

      Reply ↓
    2. Whoopsie*

      Exactly. Funny how everyone’s missing that in theor rush defend this marketing department’s poor behavior.

      Reply ↓
    3. Ask a Manager* Post author

      FYI, the paragraphs on that have been removed at the request of the letter-writer post-publication (to better remain anonymous) so anyone reading discussion on it afterwards is going to be confused. Wanted to flag that it happened so people aren’t baffled about where it went. (Note: please don’t do this! If you submit a question, be sure you’re comfortable with it being published as you submitted it, since I can’t always cleanly excise particular bits, although I could in this case, mostly.)

      Reply ↓
      1. Sabrina*

        Thank you for explaining, I read the question last night and again today and was so confused why brain made up a more detailed story! I

        Reply ↓
  37. anneshirley*

    #5: We had an issue a few years back where a coworker was walking from the warehouse to his personal vehicle for a break and suffered a relatively minor but still workers-comp level injury. Somewhere in the process he told the insurance company he was walking to his car for a break, and the insurance threw a big fuss about coverage because he wasn’t walking to his car “as part of his work duties,” even though it was company property and during the work day (and maybe even on the clock, if he was taking a paid break, I can’t remember). They even said specifically that if he had been doing the exact same walk to a vehicle but doing so for a work purpose (to retrieve a tool, etc) I’m sure things will vary a lot based on the company, the insurance, what’s disclosed to them, etc.

    FWIW, I’m not sure how ethical this is, but my manager was incensed on the employee’s behalf and told our team that if we’re ever in a situation like that, we were doing a task on her specific orders, full stop.

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  38. tiny*

    I’m currently interviewing after a layoff and I’m feeling OP #1 so hard, it’s difficult to escalate problems that are so obviously absurd. I keep getting asked “tell me about a time you worked with someone who was hard to work with? how did you solve that?” and my brain is going “By emailing them semi-monthly for two years and then getting laid off”.

    Reply ↓
  39. WC Anon*

    I handle worker’s comp, sightseeing is typically considered a substantial deviation from the performance of duty for personal activities and would not likely be covered. (Being hit by a car would also likely mean worker’s comp would require you to go after the driver for damages first, even if they determine your injury occurred in the performance of duty.) That said, I always encourage anyone who thinks they might have a claim to apply and let the examiner gather all the facts.

    Reply ↓
    1. WC Anon*

      And to clarify, I use “typically” and “likely” in the context of the jurisdiction in which I work. Worker’s comp, especially in travel, can be weird and complicated.

      Reply ↓
  40. Dinwar*

    #5: It’s complicated, and likely will depend on your manager and higher-tier staff.

    Where I work if you’re injured while traveling for work (as in, in your car, or on a bus, or in the air on a plane), that’s covered, even if you’re going early/leaving late. The idea is you wouldn’t be traveling if it weren’t for work, so it’s a work thing. If you’re injured going to/from a meal at the end of the day, that’s a work thing–you’re at that location because of work, and it’s unreasonable to expect you to not eat!

    Where it gets complicated is that you took some extra time in the area. It’s pretty common (it’s an incentive many project managers in my company use to get people to help with our onsite work), but it’s also personal time. That said, you’re only there because the job brought you there. So it’s really going to be up to the managers and higher-ups how they want to deal with it. Some will say it’s covered under work, some will say it isn’t. I don’t think either is wrong, but it’s important to know which your company is going to go with.

    Reply ↓
    1. Just a Pile of Oranges*

      In most places it’s not really up to the company, once a workplace injury happens it’s in the realm of Worker’s Comp what happens next.

      Reply ↓
      1. WC Anon*

        Yes, the company can decide whether they want to challenge the claim, but in the US they absolutely do not decide whether a claim is accepted or denied.

        Reply ↓
        1. Just a Pile of Oranges*

          Not in Canada either, but for example, my last employer would typically pay wages as normal regardless of what worker’s comp was going to do.

          Reply ↓
          1. WC Anon*

            That makes sense, the worker’s comp process basically establishes a bare minimum, but it won’t stop companies from offering more than required.

            Reply ↓
  41. Hyaline*

    LW1 if the marketing team is not willing or simply not able to respond to these quick turnaround, current events response needs, would asking them to design some new all-purpose templates be possible? Something with fairly easy to fill in parameters and few choices for you to make so that they’re happy with the design outcome and you’re happy with being able to put something out quickly? As others have said these kinds of graphics may simply not be a priority for them as dictated by higher ups (or staffing), but this seems like it could be a decent compromise.

    Reply ↓
    1. appo*

      I like this idea! If leadership isn’t going to take any action, both departments may as well meet in the middle

      Reply ↓
    2. Whoopsie*

      Marketing isn’t even able to process the the log of requests they demanded, do you really think they’re going to set aside their precious time to design templates for others?

      Reply ↓
  42. DramaQ*

    For #2 when I worked with a career coach she had me make a list of all the things I wanted in a new job. Then make a list of all the things I DO NOT want in a job like things that I wouldn’t take the job if it was the last job on Earth

    Then make a column with both jobs and start writing down in each column the things both jobs offer that you want and things you don’t want.

    This will allow you to look at things more objectively. If the new job has a lot of dealbreakers don’t take it. If all you can come up with is that change is scary/uncomfortable but it offers you a lot of the things you do want then it may be worth the leap.

    Reply ↓
  43. Gudrid The Well-Traveled*

    OP2: Have you written things down or are all these thoughts swirling around in your head? I recommend starting with a simple pro/con list on paper. Or talk to a friend who writes things down. And you’re still missing information. Don’t give official notice until you have that signed contract in hand.

    Reply ↓
  44. Just a Pile of Oranges*

    #5: I’ve had worker’s comp denied for employees who got hurt while they were taking a break. That said, I’ve had similar cases approved so it seems it really depends on how the adjudicator who gets the case interprets things.

    A company may have its own policies of course.

    Reply ↓
  45. DesignerWithCats*

    LW#1: I haven’t seen anyone else mention this but unless you’re specifically asked to, stop formatting your content before sending it to the Marketing team.

    Your formatting efforts won’t translate into the designer’s program—or as is most likely the case, they come in wonky and cause the designer to do extra work to counteract your formatting.

    Reply ↓
  46. Ialwaysforgetmyname*

    I have had the same challenge with marketing departments at two companies I worked for and I was always very baffled as to what exactly they were doing. Very frustrating to be told “we don’t have time to do this for you…. what you are doing sucks and doesn’t represent us well.” I’m immensely grateful that this is not an issue at my current employer.

    Reply ↓
  47. Stuart Foote*

    OP2, I have had a similar reaction every time I’ve gotten a new job. Massive amounts of second guessing, freaking out about whether I made the right decision, major stress. But every time the new job (especially given it’s a promotion and raise in this case) turned out to be definitely the right decision, no question about it. So I think this is normal and something to just get through on the way to things getting better.

    (Once, I emailed Alison about this and she was nice enough to respond quickly with reassurance–made me feel much better about my decision at the time).

    Reply ↓
  48. Jo*

    #1 I used to struggle with getting help from Communications/Publications for conference and training materials. It was a tiny team and simply not enough bandwidth. Sometimes they were able to fit it in; sometimes not and then I’d be stuck.

    So I insisted all the materials be designed in Word and other basic tools. Then I could handle edits myself and even re-use those as a template for the next time. Mine never looked 100% as professional as theirs, but it was close enough – better than me starting from scratch. When they were able to take on one of my projects, we’d get it to the point where the design was pretty solid, then I’d handle all subsequent edits.

    If nothing else, they should provide you with templates.

    Reply ↓
  49. Dawn*

    LW3: Unless your subscribers agreed to receive newsletters from your organization in general, your coworker probably broke the law when she used your subscriber list to send them an unsolicited email – and that’s something that your company should be taking extremely seriously.

    If you’re in the United States, under CAN-SPAM, “each separate email in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act is subject to penalties of up to $53,088”. This is absolutely something that someone needs to bring up with her.

    Reply ↓
  50. Jules the 3rd*

    LW2: Change is hard and scary. There’s a lot of hard and scary going around right now, which makes change even scarier. Only you can tell what your tolerance for ‘scary’ is right now, so like Alison says, dig deep into what you’re feeling. Yeah, sure, a purely rational approach would say, “of course you should go – more $, less stress” but that doesn’t include the very real stress of new people, new routine, more uncertainty.

    While I truly think that you are the best judge and am not trying to push you to take the new role, there are a few ‘pro-change’ arguments I have found useful:
    1) If your job was shaky before, it may be shaky again. The overall economy is going to tank and your current company’s situation is unlikely to improve.
    2) Change is like exercise – it gets easier the more you do it.
    3) Don’t get attached to a job / the people at a job. The job will change, the people will move on. Think about employment in terms of ‘what am I learning / how am I growing’ and if you’re not learning and growing, make sure you know why and that it’s your choice, not just accidental (eg, ‘I am taking a break due to life stress’).

    I reaaaaaally should have left my last job five years earlier, but I got out of the change habit. I’m now in a job where I’m really learning a lot, with a tentative growth plan, AND I’m serving my community in local government.

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  51. DrGlam*

    LW5: For what it’s worth: three and a half years ago, I slipped on a wet spot in the restroom at work (at a major university) and broke my shoulder so badly it required a replacement. Workers Comp denied my claim, asserting I could have fallen in any restroom, and that it was like having a heart attack at my workplace. Workers Comp apparently do not believer restrooms are part of the workplace. Thankfully, my health plan did cover most of my expenses.

    Reply ↓
  52. Just Thinkin' Here*

    OP #2: “Last week I asked for a delayed start date — mid-May — and they said yes. (They still haven’t sent a contract.)”

    You don’t hand in your resignation until you have that contract signed and delivered. Push back on the offering company that a contract is necessary before you put in your notice.

    Your anxiety is about change. Sit down and remind yourself why you are looking, what the pros and cons are of each job and talk to someone who is a independent 3rd party if you like their advice (this blog was a good place to start). Just because things are ‘going good’ for the moment at your current job, hiring freezes often lead to layoffs, especially when funding is cut. You’re probably better off leaving (as long as the new job isn’t reliant on the same funding sources).

    Reply ↓
  53. Space Cadet*

    OP #1 – Do you work for my old company?? We, too, always ended up just producing the materials ourselves and asking for forgiveness instead of permission.

    Reply ↓
  54. The Rural Juror*

    Related to LW4 – I have a coworker I’m often on virtual meetings with. They use hearing aids which are Bluetooth enabled, so they’re able to use them instead of a headset. But the devices pick up alllll the background noise and chatter in their open office. They’re aware it’s an issue but haven’t been able to find a solution, even with trying different audio settings. Sometimes it’s just distracting but other times I have a very tough time hearing them. It’s especially true if one of their coworkers close by is also on a call. I hear that person as if they’ve joined our call.

    Anyone have experience with this and know anything else to try? I know my coworker would be willing to try different options. It’s not fun for them to have a conversation where the other person can’t hear them.

    Reply ↓
    1. Hlao-roo*

      I’m no tech expert, but could they set their hearing aids as “speakers” and a headset as the “microphone” in the audio settings? That way they would be able to hear everyone else (because they’re listening through the hearing aids) and everyone else would be able to hear them (because the microphone on the headset wouldn’t pick up the background noise).

      If for some reason the audio settings won’t allow just the microphone portion of the headset to be used, your coworker could look into buying just a microphone with no earbuds/headphones attached to use as their mic.

      Another potential solution: would noise-cancelling headphones worn over the hearing aids cut down on the background noise that the hearing aids pick up? If noise cancelling headphones don’t cut the chatter that well, maybe the over-ear hearing protection worn at gun ranges and in similar loud environments would work? Just suggestions, I don’t know enough about the geometry of hearing aids + over-ear headphones/hearing protection to know if that will work.

      Reply ↓
  55. Tara*

    Re. letter writer #3. I unsubscribe to any email list that emails me more than once per month, with very, very few exceptions. I’ve unsubscribed to several lists that send me information that I like and want because the cost is also receiving emails that I do not want. You’re not overreacting.

    Reply ↓
  56. Elizabeth West*

    Apologies if someone already asked this, but if the content of the second newsletter (brushes) were something the llama grooming subscribers could use, could it be acceptable to add an option to subscribe to the original newsletter? Maybe Coworker could have asked OP to put something like, “If you are interested in more grooming content specifically about brushes, click here for this brush sub from Fergusina at Brush Unit.”

    Since it’s all the same company, people who want to read it could go ooh yes, I need brush advice, and then Coworker could have added them to her list that way. This might be something they could add to protocol.

    I would also like to add that I will never tire of the llama analogy. :)

    Reply ↓
    1. OP3*

      This is 100% what I would have preferred!! If she’d come to me and said hey, my list doesn’t have many people but higher-up-person here really wants to make sure this information gets out. Can you put a shout out on your next newsletter that overlaps with this content a bit and a link to sign up for this list as well? And I would have said yes, absolutely, that makes perfect sense. If people are interested, then they’ll sign up. And while not written, it’s what we’ve always done in the past. I’ve given shoutouts to multiple other newsletters (and in fact, have one in my next one going out already) because it’s content these same readers may be interested in.

      Reply ↓
      1. Elizabeth West*

        Is she still there and still handing a brush newsletter? You could still suggest it!

        I might still mention it to someone, since it really wasn’t great practice for her to do it the way she did, maybe in the context of “Fergusina did this, and it’s not the best; here’s what we *usually* do and I’d be happy to help her do that instead.”

        Reply ↓
  57. ShadowOctopus*

    LW3: as an in-house privacy counsel, I died inside when reading this. I’m assuming you don’t do business in Europe as this is wildly illegal there, but even in the US you’re on shaky ground if anyone on that list is in California and your opt-in isn’t drafted very carefully. Your co-worker could very well be putting your company at legal risk.

    Reply ↓
    1. OP3*

      I don’t but I’m considering moving there right now (spouse is from there) so this is also really good info to know!

      Reply ↓
  58. K.K.*

    It sounds to me like OP2 thought they were likely to lose their current job and may have been in a “need something, anythn, else ASAP” mindset when they accepted the new job. Now they feel they are less likely to lose the current job.

    If the only reason you were job searching no longer applies at all, no need to leave your job! I suspect the tricky part is assessing the degree to which it no longer applies.

    Reply ↓

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