Ask a Manager

It’s a special “where are you now?” season at Ask a Manager and I’m running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past. Here are three updates from past letter-writers.

1. If you’re unhappy with a change at work, should you bring it up before you start job-searching?

It hasn’t been that long since I sent my question, but I wanted to send an update now that the situation is at least partially resolved.

First, I noticed several people in the comments wondering about the 10am-6pm hours of Jim’s workplace, so I wanted to clarify that one of the primary functions of the non-profit he works for is running an after-school program, so obviously all the staff running those programs have to have later hours. Jim doesn’t work with the kids, and he’s not support staff for the teachers; he’s a database admin, which is why there’s not much reason for his hours to line up with everyone else’s. There were also some questions about whether Jim had brought up feeling negatively about any of the changes leading up to the working hour changes, and as far as I know, he hadn’t. Since he was one of the last people to start working from the office part of the time, he didn’t feel like he had much standing to push back on that, and it was more an annoyance than a major problem, at least until his hours were changing. Anyway, onto the update:

My fiance decided he liked his job enough that he wanted to see if he could stay. We were also right in the beginning of buying a house, so it wasn’t an ideal time to be changing jobs, which might’ve provided a bit of extra motivation. The reorg originally happened because his previous boss (and the one who had hired him for his role) left the organization for a great opportunity elsewhere, and Jim wasn’t sure how much of the things he’d negotiated when he started were things he could expect to continue as conditions of his employment there, or whether they were more informal agreements that just stood with her. He ended up having a meeting with HR to get clarification, and they told him that given he is the head of a department (even though he doesn’t have any direct reports because his department is only him), he has a fair amount of autonomy and should expect to keep the things he negotiated for unless there’s a clear and compelling reason to change them. So he went back to his boss prepared to fight to keep his current hours, and then it turned out he didn’t have to. Apparently his boss had gotten confused about what Jim does and was also very stressed about other aspects of the reorg, but had realized on his own after a couple days that it didn’t make any sense to change the hours of the few people who were different from everyone else. So it turned out to be a pretty easy resolution!

Except… just a couple weeks after that, his boss, citing the stress from earlier, quit without notice and without a job lined up because he was so frustrated with the leadership. So Jim is in the middle of yet another reorg. Currently he answers to the CEO who has too much on her plate to really be involved with his job day to day, so he’s down to once a week in office and basically whatever hours he wants so long as his tasks get done. Also, apparently over the last couple months, the entire finance department has also left one by one, and the leadership is scrambling to get those positions filled. Because Jim collaborates with several departments, but is his own separate department, he’s pretty isolated from whatever leadership problems are causing a lot of people to leave and is still really enjoying his job. There’s bound to be more reorganization in his future since there are vacancies to fill and nobody is sure who Jim should really be reporting to, but he’s feeling a lot more secure in his position after that conversation with HR. Plus, he’s been here longer than most other people at this point, so he’s doing a lot of training newbies on the systems they use and being very visibly useful to the organization, which gives him a fair amount of bargaining power when they can’t really afford to lose more people right now. He did just get a tip-off from one of the board members that there’s a push within the board to bring everybody back to the office full time, but now he knows that he has the standing to push back on that if he wants to. And, with our house purchased and no more major purchases in our immediate future, he’s free to search for a new job with no worries if he decides it’s time to move on.

2. I’m not productive every single minute of every day (first update; second update)

I just wanted to write and say that the new job is going very well. I’ve been here about two months now, and I’m enjoying it. Management here is a lot more consistent and I’m much happier in the role.

The irony? They have a time tracking system! We log our time in 15-minute increments and it needs to add up to eight hours. But they’ve been very clear that it’s meant to be a fairly rough estimate and that things like breaks and mental downtime should get rolled into the nearest category. I still don’t love time tracking, but they at least have a good reason for it: the hours are used for grant reporting purposes and being able to say how much time we spent on specific projects is valuable to our funders.

The positive side to the time tracking is that they don’t want you to work more than eight hours a day, and in the rare cases that I do work overtime, the time-tracking system is used to award time in lieu. Interestingly, this even applies to management, despite it not being legally required.

It’s been a very good fit so far, even with the time tracking! There are a few little oddities, part of working at a small non-profit, but no major red flags. The overall culture is much more relaxed and there’s a definite sense that upper management cares about the staff as people, not just productivity robots. Many of the other employees have been here 10 or even 20 years, just because it’s actually a good place to work.

Thank you to you and your readers for the advice, support and encouragement. It helped me get through a very difficult time, and I’m happy to be settling in at the new job.

3. Asking my office to unblock an “adult content” website (#3 at the link)

I asked the IT guy around the corner casually how hard it would be for him to unblock a site and tried to be pretty matter-of-fact about it, without saying Autostraddle’s name up front. The IT people in the comments had the next part right: he said I’d need to put in a ticket and he’d have to escalate it to his boss (at the director level). He said it wouldn’t be a problem if I needed it for work, I said I didn’t, and we left it there. It’s definitely not worth the effort that would entail, though I’m considering bringing it up with HR as a DEI issue (because, as many commenters wondered, we do not block any other remotely comparable content). Instead, I’ll be saving articles – the obviously safe for work ones – to Instapaper to read offline.

It’s a special “where are you now?” season at Ask a Manager and I’m running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past.

There will be more posts than usual this week, so keep checking back– there’s more to come today!

Remember the letter-writer wondering whether their job was the problem or they were? Here’s the update. (First update here.)

Three years have passed since I wrote this question and I have a resounding answer to the question – it was the job.

At the time of writing the letter, I was working in a sector that is infamous for its lack of work-life balance. In particular, I worked in a job that entailed dealing with emergencies and putting out fires on a regular basis, and during COVID involved being in touch with communities that were experiencing death on a weekly basis. It was not a great set-up. I resigned from my job a year after writing the original letter to pursue work in a new field. I had a lot of questions and hesitations about ever working in the sector and in the particular type of job I’ve held, and did not know if I ever wanted to do similar work again.

I am happy to report that I am back to doing this type of work part-time in a different field, and plan to build my career in this sector. I realized that while the work itself is very stressful, the stress was made worse by the particular work environment I was in. During my employment, my boss added more responsibilities to my role, and I ended up with what could have been 4-6 full-time jobs, some of which I had no interest in. I therefore always felt behind, trying to manage many tasks and always failing to do them the way I would have liked. My workplace culture was very touchy-feely and involved sharing feelings and personal details about our lives in every staff meeting. At one point, we talked about how our family dynamics showed up in our work relations, if that gives you any hint of the type of culture we had. The expectation was toxic positivity, and the feedback for any idea needed to always be enthusiastic and over-the-moon excited. Giving feedback for improvement was seen as mean or problematic and resulted in scapegoating. My boss was not a direct communicator, and tended to be passive aggressive and gaslighting. I always felt that he didn’t like me, even though he respected me as an employee and could see the quality of my work. His lack of clear communication resulted in me feeling insecure in my employment, and I walked on eggshells in my workplace. My friends and colleagues outside the workplace often told me to quit. Out of our five-members team, three people resigned in the first year of me being there. I resigned two years in, and two of the replacements we hired lasted a year before resigning as well.

Since working at Toxic Positivity Inc., I have worked a lot on my coping and stress reducing skills. I started meditating regularly, taking walks to decompress, and emphasizing work-life balance. Through building these skills, I have also learned that skills aside, some environments are too stressful and too toxic to be sustainable long-term. I consider my former workplace to be one of them. And while it’s true that I do have high work ethics and tend to work very hard, putting me in a risk for burn-out, I have realized that some environments are gentle and supportive enough to help me prioritize my needs, and some environments will see my traits as a way to get more work out of me or control me.

I am happy to report that I am on a new career path that utilizes my old skills in a new field. I am in school part time to support this career change, and am working part-time in the field as well. I love the work I do and the people I work with. When I think about the work I will be doing in the future, I cannot help but feel “I can’t believe I am going to get paid to do this!”. The work is challenging as well in many ways, but having supportive, balanced bosses that respect boundaries and are truly invested in me as a person makes all the difference!

If you are wondering if it’s you or the job, trust your gut – it’s probably the job. No matter how great the work is, you will be able to find similar work that doesn’t entail mistrust towards your coworkers or isolation in your work place. You deserve so much better!

It’s a special “where are you now?” season at Ask a Manager and I’m running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past. Here are four updates from past letter-writers.

There will be more posts than usual this week, so keep checking back throughout the day.

1. My coworker prayed that I’ll return to Jesus

I’m the writer whose colleague prayed for me to come back to Jesus even though she knew I was Jewish. I talked to my boss and also HR even though I knew it would be a lost cause. Nothing was really done minus for them to tell her to stay away from me. Thankfully, she did. A month ago, she retired. There was a huge building party for her that was thankfully on one of my remote days so I could avoid going. Good riddance to her.

This has definitely made me re-think working in the division of the university I do, and I am actively job searching in a different school at the university as well as other universities in my city. I have a few applications in but no bites yet, but I polished my resume and cover letter with the help of the on campus Career Center as I am also a part-time student.

These things have hit my mental health hard. I’m not doing well between being stressed over work and dealing with post-COVID issues, but I am managing. I know there are other departments and divisions that are not toxic. And there are several universities in my city. I have hope of better days. I figure as long as I have hope, then I’m hanging in there.

Thanks for posting my original letter and all your wonderful advice. It’s helped me a lot over the years.

2. Can I get my coworker to stop using awful corporate jargon?

Like many commenters noted, my aggravation with my coworker’s choice of corporate jargon was a real “bitch eating crackers” sort of thing. Jargon can be grating in the best workplace, but the reality was, this coworker also been aggressive and condescending toward me from day one, and when I brought up the issue with my boss, my grandboss, and HR personnel, everyone was in agreement that this person had a “strong history of disproportionate criticism” — and no one expressed any interest in making any sort of change. Her bullying was dismissed with “But she’s such a great worker,” which was weird, because when I joined, I was tasked with completing a project she’d been managing and discovered it was missing so much work it was effectively nonfunctional. The situation forced a change in release date while I rushed to build out more than half of the program and write more than 18,000 words of necessary new content (most of which happened while the bully was on maternity leave). The whole project was the opposite of great work on her part.

As you can probably guess, the work environment surrounding this situation was pretty awful overall. We were working internationally in an aid context and doing things that I felt were often mismatched to needs, or in one notable case, likely to be destructive to the organization we had pushed into a collaboration with us. One major project involved volunteers, and one had severe founder’s syndrome, which was causing ethical issues that the manager and grandboss acknowledged but refused to address. I had a painful and preventable work injury, and my direct supervisor spent half of a weekly meeting reprimanding me for the harm I caused her (!) by reporting it as per company protocol (!!). The list goes on.

Eventually, facing the prospect of traveling internationally with the bully, I just… couldn’t force myself one step farther. I resigned with nothing else lined up, knowing I could freelance and had enough in the bank to cover an eight-month job search. The bully was promoted on my last day, so she would’ve become my direct supervisor if I stayed. I felt I’d dodged a bullet.

Here’s the plot twist: it took less than eight weeks to be offered three new roles, including being snatched up by a place that values my creativity, is far more functional, and is paying me DOUBLE what the last place did. It’s a big change for me and my family, and while it’s mighty early to draw any conclusions, I’ve considered that I might end up retiring from this place — in 30 years. We’ll see. For now, I’m just so relieved and happy to have that last place in the rearview.

Oh, and no one at my new job is saying “touch-base.” Which is nice, too.

3. My abusive boss was fired after I complained about her — what do I say to coworkers? (earlier updates here and here)

I first wrote you in December 2019 about how to deal with the aftermath of blowing the whistle on a serially abusive manager (“Hedra”) who suddenly resigned after HR found in my favor. Shortly after my first update, Hedra’s enabling boss (“Jared,” he-who-swore-and-shouted) also resigned. His successor Cecil then began legally, compassionately, and efficiently cleaning house.

I’ve now been promoted twice in a company where that’s unusual, resulting in significant salary bump. Even happier news is, I successfully fought for my team to hire a quiet overachiever (Kaya) I recruited away from a much smaller role in another department. She’s as great as I hoped and has just been promoted! Another previously-overlooked colleague (Lindsey) moved to our team and was promoted too. This means our team is being noticed as a place where women can be themselves and still thrive. (We’re in tech.) This rep has been a well-deserved feather in the cap for our manager Owen (who has taught me loads and has been so patient when I occasionally experience episodes of PTSD) and grandboss Cecil.

On the note of mental health—it took me a long time and the help of a book called “Forgive for Good,” but I have forgiven the one remaining employee (Amy) who directly participated in harassing me. She was Hedra’s other report and is still here. Like most follower types, Amy is currently harmless under good managers. I pushed myself to be collaborative and professional after Hedra left, but I didn’t stop wishing Amy her “just desserts.” The book was critical in that it let me see what a long-term burden I was taking on in exchange for the dark, momentary pleasure of righteous anger. First, I was able to nudge Hedra and Jared out of my brain, and am now at a point where I could be normally happy for Amy if she overachieved on her goals and was promoted. That to me is a victory. Carrying the burden of hatred numbed me to joy. After I quietly forgave Amy, the news of Kaya and Lindsey’s promo hit and I felt like I’d won the lottery—it made me so happy, I was goofy with it.

I’m going to share one last thing: the reason Jared gave for resigning. He announced that he’d been offered a position that he knew would be his life’s work, and even though our Big Tech asked him to please stay, he had to carpe diem. According to LinkedIn, he went to sit on the board of an also-ran delivery app available in just a handful of cities. The gap is so painful, most people in my org who remember Jared take it for granted he was fired.

4. How do I tell my coworker not to bring his kids to work every week? (first update here)

I have a good news update! I’ve finally been moved to an above-ground office that isn’t full of cubicles. It’s still a shared space, but I have two wonderful office mates who are great about coordinating our schedules so that we don’t disrupt each other, and I should be getting news of being converted to an ongoing contract soon.

I also put my reading of your site to good use so that I could stay in this office. I submitted a request for accommodations to get a UV filter added to my window, and the person in charge of accommodations for my department suggested moving me back to the windowless basement cubicle pit of despair. I used what I learned on Ask a Manager to professionally push back and explain that I did not want to lose the professional opportunities afforded to me by being in the same building as my colleagues. And they listened! It was a little scary, but I had good support from the folks who work with disability accommodations and also from knowing that I wasn’t asking for anything ridiculous.

Thanks so much for answering questions big and small!

It’s a special “where are you now?” season at Ask a Manager and I’m running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past. Here are three updates from past letter-writers.

1. Taking over the office of a colleague who died (#5 at the link)

First, it was nice to hear from you and the commentariat that I was basically on the right track. Second, it was exceptionally helpful to hear from the people who said that having a memento might be problematic (when would I get rid of it? how would that make feel? etc.). And it also encouraged me, when I moved, to leave behind a memento from the first colleague who’d died. So thank you all for that.

Other things that happened:
– I think I mentioned that I was planning to call the EAP (employee assistance program) – I am now a huge fan. I called them, they responded really quickly, and I met with someone (over the phone) once who was a great match for me. That was very helpful and we actually started a second session but we agreed that I just didn’t need it.
– I think I also mentioned that I was planning to speak to my supervisor who was lovely about it but said that there were no other spaces so she said I should try it out and then we’d see how it was working.
– Big thanks to the person (people?) who suggested moving the furniture around. In the end, I couldn’t move the desk because of outlet access — but! I got a new desk that looks really different (both color and style) from the old one so that was a huge help. I also cleared out (what felt to me like) excess furniture, moved the location of the bulletin board, yadda yadda yadda and, overall, the office just feels really different.
– One thing that the EAP therapist helped me with was to stop calling it Deceased Friend’s office and start making the transition to calling it my office.

Lesson to be learned? Coming at a problem from multiple perspectives — mental re-framing, physical redecorating, consulting with supervisor, getting a little mental health support, and consulting with you all is a great plan!

I’m still sad of course, and there are times I still look around and can see her sitting in it but, overall, things really are fine.

2. How do I stop a coworker from using a diminutive version of my name? (#3 at the link)

I have a nice update – everything worked out fine!

I stopped worrying too much about finding a “good moment” to correct my coworker on my name and just said it the next time it happened – he used the diminutive while asking me a work-related question, I answered the question and then added “By the way, I prefer to be called Carmen, not Carmenita” (borrowing the names from a comment). He apologized and started using my first name.

And to speak of the comment section… Many people shared their anecdotes about names, nicknames, shortened versions and so on. A fun read (and I learned some stuff), but much of it wasn’t applicable to my situation. I really should have mentioned in the letter that these conversations were not in English, and that a diminutive is not a shortened version. Diminutives are a grammatical function that modifies nouns, with the literal meaning being to indicate smallness, and a very wide range of figurative meanings. And regardless of the intent, one shouldn’t pick a name for someone else that is different from the name they presented, especially at work.

Thanks for the straightforward advice!

3. Could being difficult mean you won’t get extra training? (#3 at the link)

I wrote back in August last year about my friend who works at a secondhand store and has intense jealousy issues.

The situation has become extremely… weird. They pushed back on getting therapy vehemently (to the point where when both my significant other and I suggested online therapy to try to alleviate their concerns, they were outright gleeful when the site we suggested ended up not being the best). But professionally, it’s… even weirder, somehow.

Recently, they were working on the shop floor and very stressed out when they dropped something and ended up swearing in front of a customer. The customer complained, and so they ended up having to have a disciplinary meeting. They proceeded to complain about the disciplinary meeting every single time we spoke (and they contact me at least every other day) for the whole two weeks leading up to the disciplinary meeting. Not only that, all of the complaining was phrased as if the entire incident wasn’t their fault at all. They got mad at their managers and outright called one of them “fake” (not to her face) because she was usually pretty nice, but was “harsh” when she spoke to them about the incident.

The problem with their statement that it was “harsh” is (as mentioned last time) they have a bad habit of negatively perceiving EVERYTHING. Once when a coworker told them they were improving at a task, they accused him of saying they were bad at the task. It’s very hard to believe any statements where they say something is harsh or mean when they have a habit of twisting it into their being the victim.

Honestly, the friendship is very unhealthy, and it took evaluating it from a much more professional standpoint to fully realize that.

It’s a special “where are you now?” season at Ask a Manager and I’m running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past.

Remember the letter-writer whose new admin, Pam, lied about crashing the company car? Here’s the update.

Thank you so much for responding to us about the admin situation! I was waiting to write an update until we were a bit further removed from it. Husband did not fire Pam, and I wanted to see how everything worked out in the longer run.

We read through your response and all the comments that day, and it really helped him in thinking through his response, so a big thank you to all! Once he got more clarity on the circumstances from talking to Pam and the others, it became apparent that some of the strongest assumptions/arguments “for firing” didn’t really fit the bill.

When husband confronted Pam, she confessed and explained that at her old (super corporate) job, any damage to vehicles was automatic grounds for firing, no discussion. So when she scraped the car trying to park, she panicked and assumed that she was going to lose her new job that day if she admitted to hitting the car herself. Honestly, while not ideal, reacting like that was totally understandable to him. He made it very clear to her that this wasn’t the case at his company, and scrapes on an already dinked working van were not a big deal, but lying about it was. By the way, thanks to the commenters who suggested putting this into an official employee handbook and orienting whomever is driving to the fact!

As for lying to other employees, turned out that two employees were by the loading dock, saw the van, and asked about the damage, so she definitely didn’t purposefully spread the story around. She apologized to them and told them the truth after the conversation with my husband (this was a requirement by my husband in order to stay on, but he said she seemed eager to do it).

Pam continues to do well. My husband definitely paused on offloading HR logistics onto her after all this happened, but she’s slowly taking things on and so far he’s had no issues. He also has the general manager still handling all personnel issues and planning on keeping it that way.

It’s a special “where are you now?” season at Ask a Manager and I’m running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past.

Remember the letter-writer asking how to avoid “mom energy” with her younger employees after one called her “mom”? Here’s the update.

I have an update. Buckle up.

After the post, I took my concerns to HR, and we agreed to draw up a document with the exact steps that Annie needed to take when she was out of office, outline the consequences, and ask her to sign that she’d read and understood them. As well, I told Annie that I would no longer be reminding her of anything via chat, and instead she should expect consequences should the appropriate steps not be taken when she’s OOO. So far so good. After my meeting with Annie, I sent the document over via email and asked her to have it back to me by the next Wednesday.

She missed the deadline, so I put an appointment with me and our HR person on her calendar. Immediately she called me to ask why; when I said it was because she’d missed the deadline, she told me, “I only read the document. I didn’t read your email. Everyone in this company communicates via chat, you can’t expect me to read emails.”

Insert mind-blown emoji here.

As a result, we gave her an official warning during the HR meeting. She found that exceedingly unfair. In her view, any time I’d asked her to stop doing anything, she’d immediately stopped and never done that same thing ever again. Also, it wasn’t fair that I hadn’t told her about the warning when she’d called me. She then was trying to rules-lawyer the document because one part I had outlined wasn’t in her contract or the employee guide – HR had to tell her that as her boss, I was also allowed to request her to do things not specifically written down somewhere else.

She found all this so unfair that she set up an individual meeting with every manager-level member of our team and at least one of her peers, and tried to talk to the CEO, to the facilitator who had been at the original workshop, and to my boss – all this after we had explicitly told her that the way to appeal was through HR. The CEO, who was on her way to a meeting, declined – and Annie popped back with “Well of course you don’t have time for me.” The facilitator contacted me to ask what was going on, because they had the feeling that Annie was trying to manipulate them.

A few hours before our regular one-on-one the next week, right after my boss had called in sick and canceled the meeting she’d put on his calendar that morning, she told me she was not in a mental state to talk to me and that she would not be attending. When I offered to move the meeting, she said she would just wait for the next one. I told her I hadn’t offered skipping as an option. Annie promptly called in sick for a week and a half.

When she came back, it was with a letter from her lawyer demanding that we retract the warning. Aside from accusations about retaliation on my part and saying that she’d been forced to sign the document, she also doubled down on it being unreasonable to expect her to read emails – in her version, I was laying a trap by sending the document via email.

Rather than spending time and money on lawyers, we offered to accept her resignation with some severance pay, which she’s agreed to. Hopefully that’s the end of the saga.

P.S. Here’s the script I used to respond to the mom thing as part of this:

Thank you for your openness last time we talked.

I did want to follow up with you on one piece of what you said — the ‘mom thing.’ You’re not a child, you are a capable adult professional; and what I am doing is managing you, not parenting you.

Framing it that way undermines you, it sounds like you don’t understand the difference between a manager who is setting expectations and a parent who is scolding you. It also plays into harmful stereotypes about women and authority – a woman isn’t recognized as an authority, a leader, a manager – instead she gets called a “mom”, and that doesn’t happen to men. I know you didn’t intend it that way and didn’t realize how it came across, so I wanted to flag it for you.