Ask a Manager

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

1. Our building is full of bats, sewer smells, moths, and more

Do you have advice on how to get upper management to take concerns about our facilities seriously? My coworkers and I haven’t been successful in communicating what seem like very obvious, major problems. For context, our employer is one of two tenants in a seven-story building downtown. The other floors have been vacated. The building is clearly run down and not maintained — e.g., the escalators are barred off and the awning is crumbling. The building itself is very outdated, but frankly, that’s the least of our concerns:

– There are bats in the office. Twice in the past month, there’s been a bat on the ceiling above our receptionist’s head (she is very freaked out). This has been an intermittent issue for years. At one point, someone discovered a bat in the office popcorn machine.

– The HVAC is spotty at best. If the AC is running, it creates a loud, distracting rattle on my side of the building that I need noise-canceling headphones to work through. Other parts of the building don’t seem to get AC, and it’s not unusual for most offices to be over 80 degrees through most of the summer. In the winter, we don’t have the ability to turn the heat down. I used to work with my window wide open in the middle of winter, but the windows have been replaced and don’t open now.

– The public restrooms — the ones we send our guests to use — smell like a sewer. One of the two stalls in the public women’s bathroom has been broken for over a year.

– Our offices adjoin to an empty space on the same floor. (We think this is where the bats live.) We think non-employees are accessing our space after hours through this empty space; for example, we found a man’s wallet left on the couch in the non-public women’s restroom.

– The air quality sucks. You get hit with a blast of musty/mildewy smell when you walk in the front door of the building. An upper floor flooded at one point, and we know that because of that, at least one of the director’s offices has mold in the walls.

– Dead cockroaches and moths on the floor and in stairwells are a common sight.

– We technically have a cleaning crew, but they’re spotty at best. We’re lucky if they take the trash out. They don’t vacuum.

Our lease is up next year, and upper management was exploring the possibility of moving to a different floor in the building that was renovated to our specifications. Those negotiations broke down, and now it sounds like we’re just planning to renew our existing lease. I can’t wrap my head around this — for what we’re paying for a downtown space, we could absolutely move to a newer, better maintained building anywhere else in town. I don’t think our director understands how bad this space is for morale, because he has a military background and has said in all-staff meetings a few times that our building conditions aren’t that bad compared to the spaces he worked in while he was deployed. We’re at-will employees, not service members.

I’m at a point in my career where it would make sense for me to move on soon, and the building condition is high on my list of reasons. I don’t understand why these issues aren’t being taken more seriously. Am I being unreasonable to want to work in an office free of bats and mold? How many times can I express displeasure at our circumstances before I get labeled as a whiner or a diva? If upper management has already said what course of action they plan to take, is there any point in me continuing to speak up?

Good god, no, you are not being unreasonable! It’s one thing to work in a building that’s on the older side and has some of the normal issues that come with that, but you work on what sounds like the set of a horror movie. Some of this is an actual health concern.

Your best shot at getting any movement on it is to organize a group of coworkers to all speak up and say the problems with the building have become untenable. It’s possible it’s not too late for your management to change course — but also there’s power in numbers, and you’re a lot less likely to be labeled as the problem if there’s a whole group of you pushing the issue.

Some of this is likely reportable to your local health department as well; it’s worth a call to find out.

2. My company requires us to notify HR when we go to urgent care

My workplace apparently has a policy of having staff notify HR when they go to urgent care. HR’s reasoning is so that they can proactively assist with accomodations if needed. This makes me uncomfortable, as I don’t really like the idea of HR knowing when I go to urgent care. I’m wondering if this is a normal thing for an HR department to step into.

No, it is not normal. Moreover, requiring that you inform them of medical issues will, in some situations, violate the Americans with Disabilities Act (depending on the reason you’re seeking urgent care). There are lots of types of medical information that you can’t legally be required to disclose.

It’s also nonsensical since if you have time to alert HR you’re at urgent care, you would have time to instead alert them about any accommodations you need as a result of whatever brought you there. They can just ask you to inform them if/when you need accommodations (which you would presumably do anyway); they don’t need to monitor or track your urgent care visits.

3. How do I remember to follow up on emails I’ve sent but haven’t heard back on?

I work in local government, where we are generally under-resourced and trying to spin too many plates at once. This means that emails sometimes go unanswered and need chasing up.

I’ve had success using your chasing script in the past, but how do I keep track of which need to be followed up on in the first place? For example, I recently emailed April asking her to provide data on the number of flowers in our parks, to be included in a public document. April did not reply, and by the time I remembered that we still needed this information we were two days from the deadline and the wider Parks & Rec team ended up having to rush to get us the data we needed. We also had no time to ask April follow-up questions or for more detailed data on specific flowers.

Ideally everyone would always respond to every email the same day, but in reality this is not going to happen without a change in how we are funded. Is there a way I could keep track of emails I’ve sent that still need a response without spending ages making some kind of behemoth spreadsheet?

You need a “waiting for” folder in your email — a folder where you drag any messages that it will be important to hear back on, so they’re all in one place and you can see at a glance what you’re still waiting for. You can achieve this with labels too, depending on the email program.

The key, though, is that you need to commit to going through the folder regularly or it won’t do you any good (I go through mine once a day to see if there’s anything I need to follow up on).

Related:
you need a “waiting for” folder

4. What if I really really REALLY know I don’t want to return to work after I give birth?

I know the advice is never say you’ll quit your job instead of taking maternity leave because you don’t know how you’ll feel once your baby arrives, but what if I feel really, really sure about it?

I have always wanted to take a year or more off after having kids, and while no one knows how they will feel, I have nannied and babysat and helped out my sisters pretty significantly after their babies were born, so I don’t feel like I’m going in totally blind. We have also stepped up our already aggressive savings plan to put away the equivalent of my take-home pay for a year to both build up a buffer of short-term savings and to see how easily we can live on my partner’s salary alone, and it is eminently doable, even if we have to step back on saving as much for a few years.

Also, I don’t like my job. I don’t like the company I work for, which is news-making levels of dysfunctional, and my team is understandably a mess. The idea of returning here after giving birth makes me feel physically anxious. I also know I might feel bored and want to work, but I can’t imagine any universe in which it would be here. I was aggressively applying to jobs before I got pregnant and would have set a hard deadline to leave by the end of the year if I hadn’t gotten pregnant, even if it was to go back to freelancing. And really, if I do find not working incredibly dull or we do find money tight, I’ll transition back to freelancing at the end of my self-funded ‘maternity leave’ whenever it feels right.

So where does that leave me? Plenty of friends have suggested taking the maternity leave knowing I won’t come back and just telling my boss things have changed at the end of it, but even the thought of having to talk to them ever again also makes me feel anxious. I really just want a clean break and to never have to deal with these people again. I know it’s a huge privilege to even be able to entertain this thought, but since I can, is there a reason not to just go for it? And if I do, when should I tell my boss? I know there’s a chance of being pushed out before I’m ready, but there is a hiring freeze at my company (see: high levels of dysfunction) and I would be really surprised if they were even able to maneuver to replace me any sooner than they had to.

The advice not to decide anything ahead of time is just meant to highlight that once the baby is actually on the scene, things can change in ways you didn’t expect. Often people assume they know what they’ll want but then their circumstances change — and they can end up regretting it if they already locked themselves into not returning.

In your case, you’ve already thought all of that through, and you were ready to leave even if you hadn’t gotten pregnant. The one thing I’d suggest thinking about that you didn’t mention is whether you’d want to hold onto the job as a safety net in case something happens with your partner’s job. If so, then the safest course of action is to hold off on your announcement that you’re not returning until you’re closer to that date.

But you also get to balance that against the anxiety you’re feeling when you think about having to talk to them again. You might decide that outweighs other considerations, and you’re allowed to make that call. Just make sure you won’t wish you could backtrack later if your circumstances do change between now and then.

5. Advice for former Hollywood freelancers

I have seen a lot of people looking to leave Hollywood because of the triple threat of writer strikes, actor strikes, and Covid after effects, and searching for “real” jobs when we have finally had enough.

In my case, my main question has to do with resumes: On my resume I list a lot of my production credits, but it kind of looks like I am a job hopper and that I really didn’t have much of an impact in these roles. Would it be better to combine all my credits into one large “Freelance Production Coordinator” role and just list the highlights?

You attached your resume so I could see exactly how you’ve done it, and it’s pretty clear that each of the jobs were show-specific; it doesn’t look like job-hopping, just a normal reflection of how jobs work in your industry (and even people outside that industry, like me, should understand that).

That said … it could be interesting to experiment with a resume that combines them all under one umbrella heading and see if you get any more bites with that version. Do some A/B testing and see if there are differences in results! Or it might even end up that when you see the revised resume, it will obviously be stronger or weaker than the other one. Try it and see what you think! There are no hard-and-fast rules on how to present stuff like this.

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

1. Senior coworker ruined my white sweater

I am writing you at 2:30 am about an incident that happened a few years ago and occasionally gets replayed in my head on sleepless nights like this one.

I was a new addition to a tight-knit team of five, and the youngest and most junior team member. A few months into the job, my boss held a semi-formal year-end cocktail party. I didn’t have appropriate attire so had borrowed a top from my sister. It was a white mohair sweater with crystal adornments at the neckline.

During the event, a photographer came by to take photos, and a senior team member wanted to avoid the camera. So she grabbed onto my shoulders and started to rub her face on my sweater for a good minute or two, while the whole team (and what felt like everyone else in the room) stood watching.

I was mortified and couldn’t react. By the time it was over, she had left a huge smear of foundation across the top of half of my white sweater. She didn’t say anything. No one on the team, including our manager, said anything. And I was left roaming around with a dirty sweater for the the rest of the party while everyone carried on like nothing had happened.

After I returned home, I did everything I could to clean the sweater, but the foundation never came off. Needless to say, my sister never lent me a single clothing item again.

Both the coworker and I have since left the department, but not once did she apologize for this during the time we worked together. Till this day, the sweater sits in the corner of the closet sealed away in a vacuum bag like a piece of forensic evidence. (I’m not keeping it as evidence, but I just don’t have the heart to throw it away). And for some reason, this incident still haunts me every now and then, even though I keep telling myself to not think about it.

I am wondering what my younger self could have done in that situation. Am I overreacting? Should I have pushed her away? Should I have requested compensation? If yes, how could I have asked her to be accountable for her actions without ruining our rapport?

It’s so normal to freeze when something really strange happens like that! Yes, ideally you would have pulled away from her — but you’re in no way to blame for freezing, and the sweater might have already been ruined by that point even if you had.

Ideally you would have let the coworker know that she’d damaged an expensive sweater beyond repair and asked her to replace it … but power dynamics are a real thing, and as the youngest and most junior member of the team, it’s not surprising that you didn’t do that. Maybe if you had, your coworker would have been appropriately contrite and rushed to make your sister whole … or maybe she would have been huffy about it and it would caused all sorts of problems for you on that team. Who knows.

While the sweater itself is one casualty of that night, the second casualty is your peace of mind! You’re still agonizing over it years later and hanging onto the sweater because all these feelings are now woven in with the mohair. You were young and inexperienced, your coworker was weird and did something thoughtless, and there’s nothing to be gained from second-guessing any of that. The best thing you can do is to give yourself permission to write it off to working with a kook and let it go. Let the actual sweater go too — it’s just keeping you mired in the bad feelings of that evening whenever you see it, and it’s time to toss it out.

2. The person who needs to confirm my employment dates always gets it wrong

I did some special ed teaching through an agency part-time for a couple of years when my child was a toddler, up until 2020 when the pandemic started. I was essentially a contract worker. The head of the agency, “Mary,” and I didn’t get along well, but I have references from others I worked with during that time.

When I was applying for work more recently, I spoke with Mary to let her know someone might call to confirm employment dates and such. I started to sub in a public school district, but it was held up because Mary didn’t remember the dates correctly. I was told she said, “She did a few jobs around 2019, I think.” I have emails dating back to 2017 ( receipts!) and was able to submit them to the school district. I emailed Mary and linked to the old emails, reminding her of my employment dates, and she responded with a shrug emoji.

I’ve recently started a new job search and had some good interviews but was told twice that Mary did not confirm dates of employment and that they would be moving on with other candidates. I’m wondering if I should address this directly with Mary, and/or how to explain to potential employers that there may be a discrepancy. Mary is the owner/ operator of the agency and is the only person who can confirm the dates.

Two things: First, can you assemble your own documentation of the dates you worked there, such as paystubs? Then you can say to potential employers when you’re approaching the employment verification stage, “The agency owner has historically not tracked employment dates well and doesn’t give out accurate answers to inquiries about former employees, but I can provide pay stubs to document the dates I worked there. And if that’s not sufficient, please let me know and I’ll see what else I can find.”

Second, Mary is acting with reckless disregard for your future employment, and it might be worth having a lawyer send her a letter documenting your dates of employments and reminding her of her obligation to provide accurate ones going forward.

Read an update to this letter. 

3. My coworker jokes about suicide

Content warning: discussion of suicide

A few years ago, during a very difficult time in my life, I attempted to end my life. Nowadays, I’m doing better and undergoing treatment while taking my medications to prevent a relapse.

I started a new job a month ago, which was everything I had hoped for. However, I have an issue with my coworkers that I don’t know how to address. One of them frequently makes jokes about suicide in everyday conversations. Things like “I’d rather slit my wrists than write another report” or “I’ll go to the bathroom, and hopefully, I’ll drown myself in the sink before the meeting.” And this week, when he was called into the boss’s office, he made gestures of pretending to tie an imaginary noose around his neck and walk as if he had been hanged.

I know these are jokes, but they seriously harm my mental health. I can’t think of a way to ask him to stop without disclosing my past, something I’d really prefer to avoid. Is it possible to request this politely, or do I need to consider looking for a new job?

You can indeed request this, and you can do it without disclosing your past. One option is to simply say, “Please don’t joke about suicide.” You might not need to say anything more than that! Another option is: “Suicide is a really difficult topic for a lot of families. I’d be grateful if you didn’t joke about it around me.”

I’m glad you’re doing better now.

Read an update to this letter. 

4. My boss said if I didn’t switch locations, my friend would be fired

My manager called me, with my friend/roommate sitting in their office with them, and said that if I did not agree to exchange job locations with my friend, they would be fired. I agreed to the exchange, although I was very unhappy in my new location.

I finally was restored to my first job location but am wondering if I have any recourse due to the fact that this should have been an act that should have been done by HR or even not at all since it was a breach of confidentiality?

Legally, no. No law requires that kind of thing to only be done by HR, and no law would prevent your employer from informing you that your friend would be fired if you didn’t agree to the location swap.

That said, this is a very weird thing to have happened, and it’s possible someone higher up at your company would take issue with how your manager handled it. Whether or not to pursue that angle depends on what you know about your company, what options there are above your manager and your impression of how responsive and sensible those people are, how much leeway your manager is generally given to run things their own way, and how escalating it might affect things for you at work.

5. What to say to a temp who didn’t get the permanent job

We have a receptionist type role that was recently vacated, and we hired someone as a temp fill in until a permanent replacement was found. I know this person applied for the permanent role, but it was announced today that an outside candidate got it instead.

I am not this person’s manager and had no say in the hiring. What should I say that is sympathetic without seeming to disagree with the hiring decision? For what it is worth, my impression is that while this person is very nice, it is not surprising that there were more qualified candidates in the applicant pool for the permanent role.

You don’t necessarily need to reference it at all, but if you do, the words “really competitive pool” are usually helpful. For example: “I know there were a lot of applications and it ended up being a really competitive pool. But I’ve really appreciated the work you’ve done while you’ve been here.”