Ask a Manager

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

1. How do I quit volunteer work I’ve been doing for a decade?

I informally volunteer for a nonprofit. I live near an environmental feature they want tested routinely. The job started by me calling them to ask a question about that feature. They said they did not know the answer, but suggested that since I live here, I might purchase some small inexpensive equipment, test it myself, and give them the results. (Think soil or water testing.)

They told me what data they wanted, and I bought the equipment and started testing three or four days a week. I take a notebook into the field and keep a chart of all the information they requested. The first year, I made copies of my handwrittten field notes, which were quite clear and arranged in a sort of a spreadsheet fashion, and sent it to them. They told me they wanted a typed spreadsheet. I did it for some years, but frankly I hate it. I do not like data entry, I don’t like making spreadsheets, and I don’t want to do this anymore, even though I love the testing portion, because I don’t want to have to turn it into the format they want to receive it in. Also, the environment does not lend itself to electronics.

This year I hired my friend’s recent college graduate kid to enter the data into the spreadsheet. But now I’ve realized I have to check her work before I submit it. I don’t want to. They have also required me to add some columns that require looking things up, such as the weather for the previous two days, instead of simply the weather at the time that I’m testing. I don’t have time for that, nor do I have the desire. This year, I had the intern look it up for me. But I don’t want to pay her to do this anymore. And she’s not even available because now she has a real post-college job.

I’m happy to do the testing and give them copies of my field notebook with all the info they need except for the past two days of weather, but I’m not interested in doing more than I’m willing to do. They don’t even have an official volunteer program. And I’m not a biologist. I’m just a random neighbor who asked a question and agreed to provide them with this information, and have done so for probably a decade now.

Unfortunately I’ve let it get to the point where I am not willing to do one more second of data entry. Life is short. How can I politely tell them that they can either have a copy of my notebook pages or they can have nothing? Politeness and tact are not my strong suit. I could use a script!

You never even intended to volunteer for them and yet you’ve been doing fairly involved volunteer work for a decade! You’re allowed to be done.

If you’re really willing to continue the testing itself as long as you don’t have to do the rest of it, say this: “While I enjoy doing the fieldwork portion of this project, I no longer have time to produce the spreadsheets or look up the prior days’ weather. If you’d like, I can switch to submitting my handwritten field notes from the testing (sample attached) and you can take it from there. Or would it make more sense for me to end the project entirely since I can no longer do all of it?”

If you’d rather be done with the whole thing, say this: “After a decade on this project, unfortunately it has started to take up more time than I have available and I’m going to need to end my work on it. I hope the data I’ve sent has been useful, and I’ll remain a strong supporter of your work.”

2. Explaining a period emergency

To preface, this hasn’t happened to me before. But it’s always a fear of mine that I will surprise start my period and bleed through my pants at work. What do you say to your supervisor when that happens? Can you say, “I bled through my pants and need to go home to change”? What if it’s a male supervisor?

If you don’t want to lay out the specifics (and you shouldn’t need to), you could say, “I’ve had a wardrobe accident and need to go home to change” or “I need to go home to change clothes; I’ll be back in an hour” or “I’m having a small personal emergency and need to run home; I’ll be back in an hour.”

Also, since you mentioned you’re always worried about this, keeping an extra pair of pants in your car or your office might give you peace of mind.

3. Should I tell my colleagues what to get me for my wedding?

I am getting married in a little over two weeks. The last time someone got married in my workplace, the team raised money to buy her a gift. I haven’t worked here long enough to know if this is an established pattern or was just for her, and I don’t know if they’re planning to do the same thing for me.

I asked all the guests at my wedding to donate to a charity fund in lieu of presents. If my team is planning to surprise me with a gift, I’d like for it to be a donation to this charity. However, it feels presumptuous of me to tell my boss, “Here’s what you all should get me for my wedding,” if the team wasn’t going to do that.

Should I say something like: “Hey, I hope this doesn’t sound presumptuous but I know you got that lovely collection of llama figurines for Karen when she got married, so I just wanted you to know that I’m not accepting gifts for my wedding and would prefer that you donate to the International Llama Rescue Foundation instead”?

Or should I just keep quiet and see what happens? I can always make a donation of equivalent value to the charity if they do end up giving me a gift.

The general etiquette is not to assume they’re getting you a gift, not to direct them on what to buy unless they specifically ask, and to just accept it graciously if one materializes. I don’t really love this approach because I don’t like people spending money on unwanted gifts, but it’s the considered the polite way to handle it within our existing system of manners.

(That said, if you’d been there long enough to see multiple marriages and were sure they were going to buy something for you, I could see politely warding it off ahead of time anyway, etiquette be damned. But since you haven’t worked there long, I wouldn’t try to predict.)

4. Candidate sent a million post-interview questions

I’m hiring for a mid-level position and brought in a handful of promising candidates to meet with me and some of my colleagues after having done initial screenings over Zoom. We’re all mindful of leaving time for candidates to ask questions; each applicant probably had a total of an hour for their questions over the course of these initial interviews. Candidates know that there will be one more round of interviews with those selected as finalists.

One of the candidates we met with yesterday sent a follow-up email with a list of a dozen questions they didn’t ask in the meetings, from big weighty things (“What are you doing related to DEI and how does it show up in your work?”) to things like the dress code and standard business hours.

I did at the end of the interview (after she said she had no other questions) say my standard, “If you think of any other questions or anything else you want me to know about you, definitely feel free to reach out.” But I’ve never had anyone take that so literally — it usually is one, maybe two questions, or a note clarifying an answer they didn’t answer as well as they’d have liked in the moment.

I’d already decided not to move ahead with this candidate — I liked her, but she doesn’t quite have the right experience we need. I’m planning to respond to her questions, at least briefly — I don’t want her to think I’m rejecting her because of these questions and it feels wrong to reject her in a reply to this email. But is that the right move here? And is there something I should be doing differently in the interview process, or in the language I use in those parting words, to prevent this type of follow-up?

Yeah, that’s a candidate who isn’t reading the subtext correctly, and isn’t thinking about how much time they’re asking you to spend writing out answers to numerous and (at least some) complex questions.

It is reasonable for a candidate to realize, “Oh crap, I didn’t ask about X and I need that answered before deciding whether to accept the next interview.” But that probably doesn’t apply to the full dozen they sent over.

When I’ve had this happen, I usually say some version of, “I can’t do justice to all of these in an email, but here are quick answers to some of them and I will make sure we set aside time to discuss the rest in our next conversation if we move forward” (or just “X isn’t a topic I can do justice to in a short email but I’ll make sure we set aside time to answer all your questions about it if we move forward”).

I don’t think you need to change what you’re saying, since you do want people with a more reasonable number of questions to know they can ask them. Most candidates will read what you’re saying correctly (as they’ve been doing), and you have a way to handle it when someone does read it wrong.

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

1. My company wants to micromanage internal goodbye emails

Since we’ve had new leadership come into my small nonprofit organization, one of many new policies implemented by Head Boss is a requirement that any staff leaving the company must have their “all-staff goodbye” message reviewed and approved by bosses before sending it. These are very banal “farewell, I’m moving on to a new company, wish you all the best, etc.” type messages.

Is this a common corporate practice that I’m not aware of? It’s accompanied by other new restrictions — our front desk person of 20 years was told she has to have her voicemail greeting approved — but this feels particularly draconian. I’m a comms manager so I’d like to push back against this if possible.

If you didn’t have new management, I would have bet money that this stemmed from someone sending a goodbye message that rubbed someone in management the wrong way. But given the other details in your message, it sounds like it’s just new management that wants a lot of control.

To be fair, if your front desk person’s voicemail message is the one that callers to the organization’s main number hear (in other words, it’s the organization’s main voicemail message), it’s not unreasonable that they’d want to sign off on that. But micromanaging people’s internal goodbye messages in a small organization, particularly if there haven’t been issues or reasons to fear issues, is A Lot.

If you’re seeing a push for a lot more control over casual, low-stakes internal communications, that can be a pretty big change and it could indeed be worth a conversation about the likely implications for culture and morale. But be prepared for the possibility that they might be just fine with those implications.

Read an update to this letter.

2. My employee is feigning ignorance of office policies

I have an employee who “forgets” well-established norms and/claim they were not aware of something. For example, last week they took an hour plus for one lunch. I approached them immediately after and said our lunches are a half hour unless they want to have a longer lunch and stay later/come in earlier to make up the extra time. They replied that they thought lunches were always an hour. I have a really hard time believing that someone who has worked here for four years suddenly forgot what the standard is.

Also, our sick leave and vacation leave are separate; you can only take sick leave if you can’t work due to illness or a sick family member. This employee has tried several times to use sick leave for time off that doesn’t fit that criteria. Every time I remind them of they policy, they claim they weren’t aware and/or forgot. Aside from documenting the problem, do you have any suggestions for how to handle this?

Is the employee forgetting other things too? And is it always in ways that work to their favor, never to their disadvantage? If it’s always in their favor, name the pattern and ask them to review your office policies again so that they have a refresher. For example: “You’ve recently forgotten a number of core policies that you previously followed, so I’d like you to take an hour this week to re-read the employee manual and make sure your knowledge is up-to-date.” And then if it keeps happening after that, it’s reasonable to explain that they’re responsible for knowing and following your policies, ask what they need to ensure they can, and then treat it like any other performance expectation.

On the other hand, if the person is forgetting a wider range of things, it’s worth suggesting they get checked out by their doctor in case something else is going on.

3. Should consultants charge for travel time?

I regularly do workshops and presentations for whoever hires me, mostly virtual, but an increasing number are asking for in-person versions. I have a rate for the sessions themselves, and places cover travel costs like gas mileage and a hotel room, but how does the travel time come into it? Even if the content itself is the same, it’s obviously a very different time commitment for me if there’s a lot of hours spent getting there and back, but I’m not sure how to account for that. Do people who do this sort of work have a system for charging based on travel hours, in addition to the literal cost of the travel?

You should definitely factor your travel time into your compensation since that’s time that you can’t spend on other work (or leisure). Some consultants have a standard travel time charge, broken out as explicitly that (by the exact numbers of hours, or by the half day or full day) and others roll it into the overall fee they charge for that project/that client.

As for how to figure out what that rate should be, some people charge their normal rate for that time. But it’s also pretty common to charge half your usual rate for those hours, unless you’re actively doing work for that client during the travel time (like if you’re doing work for them on the plane, in which case you’d charge your full rate for that time). And some of it too is just a judgment call — like if you know the client has a limited budget but you really want to do the work, you might try to keep the travel time costs on the very low end in order to make the project doable. Just don’t go so far in that direction that you’re under-valuing your time.

4. If I mute, will I be muted on the recording too?

I often have to be on the phone (we have a headset). When the call is recorded, can my boss hear what I say if I muted myself if and when he listens to the recording? I’m asking since I like to sing and don’t want anyone to hear when I do, as it’s not something I feel comfortable others knowing about.

If you’re muted, you’ll be muted on the recording as well. Given the sorts of things people do when they’re muted — things much more embarrassing than singing — that would be a terrible surprise for many people if it were not the case!

Nope, I’m wrong. Google this question for the system you’re using; apparently it can vary.

5. Overhead lighting wars

I joined my company about eight months ago on a hybrid schedule. On my first day, I noticed that about half the lights on my floor (it’s a huge multi-story office building) weren’t turned on. I thought it was odd, but it didn’t bother me. A few months down the road, the lights would be all turned on in the morning until one of my cubicle neighbors walked in and turned half of them off. Then my supervisor (“Ned”) said that a new manager (“Cersei”) on the floor (not someone my team reports to) had called a meeting to discuss the lights. Ned (with a long-suffering sigh at having been pulled into a meeting over this) asked what we thought since we’re the ones who actually work in the area that’s affected; all of the supervisors/managers work in individual offices that each have their own lighting, and the cubicles receive no natural light. The people on my team who have been there longer all said they wanted them off because people tended to get headaches when they were on, and I said I had no preference but would support what the rest of the team wanted.

Apparently we were either in the minority or our feedback simply didn’t matter, because Cersei sent out an email some time later saying that the lights needed to be left on but would be kept “dimmer.” And maybe it started out that way. But recently there have been days where they seem unbearably bright, and I’ve started getting migraines.

Other people are also saying they seem really bright. I’ve talked to Ned and he’s willing to bring it up again (I think his initial annoyance was due to the fact that Cersei is only minimally impacted by the lights). Ned has told me to tell the team to email him if they’re having problems; I did, and some people have. But is there anything else to be done? I’ve thought about ways to compare the brightness from day to day so we can see how it changes, but that seems over the top. The only other thing I can think of is asking Ned if I can work from home more (three days/week instead of two), but that still won’t solve the problem. I’ve been taking naproxen, but it seems incredibly unfair that I have to keep taking it for a seemingly arbitrary decision by a manager I don’t report to.

I keep trying to give Cersei the benefit of the doubt (maybe she has a team member with weak vision?) but it’s getting really hard when my head is throbbing and I feel like I might be sick on the train home.

You have the legal right to accommodations so your work space doesn’t trigger migraines, as long as the solution doesn’t pose an undue hardship for your employer.

Talk to Ned again and this time make it all about the migraines: “I’ve tried to live with the lights, but at this point I’m regularly getting migraines from them. Ideally I’d like to simply keep the lights off around my work area, which should stop my migraines. If that’s not possible, I’ll need to request some other accommodation, but since this would be the simplest solution, I figured I’d start here.”

That might give Ned the ammunition he needs to shut down Cersei’s meddling. If it doesn’t, then you can go the formal accommodations route (start with an email to HR with the subject line “request for accommodations under the Americans with Disabilities Act”) and propose whatever solutions you’d be willing to live with (a change to the lights, a move to a dimmer space, and so forth).