Ask a Manager

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

1. Is the term “junior” derogatory?

I recently had a minor dust-up at work that surprised me. I had a contract service scheduled to happen on-site at a vendor. Two of my coworkers expressed interest in attending in person with me to learn how it is done. These two coworkers are relatively new grads, about 10 years less experienced than me, and have job titles below mine, though I don’t supervise them. I sent a note to the vendor requesting permission for them to attend and in doing so referred to the two coworkers as “junior colleagues” of mine.

The coworkers were hurt. One brought it up to me.

I apologized for any hurt feelings and explained, sincerely, that I didn’t have or intend any negative associations with the word “junior.” I had used the word because I needed the vendor to be prepared for inexperienced people on the job site (they need physical monitoring). I also wanted the vendor to be prepared to answer more than the usual number of questions, and though I doubted they’d refuse the visitors, I wanted to give them a polite out if they didn’t want this particular job to be used as a learning opportunity. I also needed the vendor to understand that I still was the point of contact on the project and to some degree (by virtue of being there) was responsible for the conduct of my colleagues in a sensitive location not accessible to the public. I wasn’t just mentioning rank for funsies; it was relevant.

I spent a long time in academia, and there “junior” and “senior” were very normal words to describe grad students, postdocs, researchers, fellows, etc., of varying levels of experience. Usually, you literally were just referring to how long that person had been there. It was also very common for informal mentoring and teaching relationships to exist between “junior” and “senior” people within a level; I guess I thought that was part of what was being asked of me in having these coworkers attend this service site with me.

I certainly won’t use the word again now that I know these coworkers have a sore spot with it. Is this just them, or does this term have a broader connotation I’m not aware of? Is there a better way I could phrase things when I need to communicate a difference in seniority—oops!—I mean, in title, level of responsibility within the organization, or experience?

It’s completely normal to use terms like “junior” and “senior” in a work context! Sometimes it refers to how long someone has been there (particularly with “senior”) but more often it’s a reflection of the level of the position and responsibility the person holds or their amount of experience in the field overall. Sometimes, too, it’s a description of relationships relative to each other; you could be senior to me/my position but still junior to your boss.

Assuming “relatively new grads” means your colleagues graduated a year or two ago, they are junior; you’re not required to pretend that they’re not, and you had relevant reasons for mentioning it. (And in some fields they’d be considered junior far longer than that; it’s pretty field-dependent.)

If they weren’t actually junior, it would be understandable for them to feel like you minimized their expertise and competence, but that doesn’t sound like the case. You used a normal term in a normal way.

Related:
my coworkers say I should hold back because I’m early-career … but am I?

2. All-female staff at women’s health offices

I was recently at a gynecologist appointment, and noticed yet again that all of the staff who work there are women. This has been the case at several different OB-GYN offices I’ve been to, as well as at the women’s center where I’ve had my mammograms done.

While male OB-GYNs do exist, there haven’t been any at any of the practices I’ve been a patient at. But even beyond the doctors themselves, all nurses, medical assistants, ultrasound techs, phlebotomists, and even the receptionists have all been women. I know why they do this — many women don’t want men in the room during a pelvic exam or a mammogram. But how can they legally get away with only hiring women? Especially for non-clinical roles? I doubt the law prohibiting hiring discrimination based on sex has an exception for female-target health care. Is it really that men just tend not to apply at gyn offices?

The law prohibiting gender discrimination includes an exception for what’s called “bona fide occupational qualifications,” which allows employers to make a job single-sex-only if it’s truly necessary to the work. The law recognizes this exception in three circumstances: privacy (for example, you can preference women when hiring a women’s locker room attendant), “authenticity in the arts” (like in casting for movies or TV), and when the qualification “relates to the normal operation or essence of the business” (like the mandatory retirement age for pilots for safety reasons).

However, customer preference for men or women in a particular role doesn’t normally qualify.

I suspect what you’re seeing is largely self-selecting — for example, men tend not to go into mammography at all, and I suspect they apply for other jobs at women’s health centers in lower numbers too — but it’s probably mixed in with at least a bit of the people who are hiring giving preference to female candidates and no one having challenged that.

3. Can I address my struggling employee’s use of PTO?

My office has a generous time-off benefit, with about five weeks of vacation and 2.5 weeks of sick time, plus all the usual holidays and a two-week winter closure (paid). Most people end up needing to take 1-2 days a month just to stay under the vacation cap, but I have one employee who has the opposite problem and often uses up his accruals immediately. He takes many vacations each year, and needs additional time off for external commitments. This means he usually hovers around a balance of 2-3 days banked (compared to most other people who have 15-20 days available at any given time).

I’ve always believed that a person’s PTO is a compensation benefit and wouldn’t make anyone feel guilty for taking the time they are owed. But lately this person’s performance is starting to dip, and a few balls are being dropped because he’s overwhelmed. Would it be reasonable as a manager to say that he may have an easier time staying on top of things if he was around more often? It feels unfair that I may need to adjust projects and reassign work to others in the office to make up for his extensive travel schedule.

Yes, it’s reasonable to say, “The expectation is that you’ll manage your time off in a way that ensures balls aren’t dropped and doesn’t require others to regularly cover for you.” It’s also reasonable to point out that an especially demanding period isn’t the right time for optional time-off (that’s why some teams have vacation black-out dates or all-hands-on-deck periods) or to say, “I can’t approve a week off next month because it’s right before the major event you’re responsible for / you just came back from a week off and you have an accumulating backlog that needs to be processed by October 1 / or so forth.”

It wouldn’t be reasonable to say either of these things if they meant a responsible person would have a tough time ever taking vacation; if the guy’s workload is such that he’s never going to get time off without you adjusting projects and reassigning work, then adjusting projects and reassigning work is what you do … but otherwise, yeah, you can say this. But look at his workload first to make sure.

It’s also pretty common for companies not to permit unpaid time off at all, or to put limits on it. If you offer 7.5 weeks off per year, you presumably hired assuming the position would be staffed 44.5 weeks a year and it’s reasonable to require that (with flexibility for extenuating circumstances). So you might take a look at how the additional unpaid time off is playing into this.

Note: I’m assuming you know these are actual vacations and he’s not using the time off for medical reasons, which would be a different thing.

4. Stuck in the middle of a conflict with my employee and my manager

One of my staff members and my direct supervisor recently had a bad interaction on the public floor (both seem to be at fault). Both reached out to me after the incident. My supervisor asked me to bring my staff member in to have a meeting with the three of us. Is this appropriate?

It’s not inappropriate. But if at all possible, you should talk to them each individually beforehand and hear about what happened from their perspectives, plus find out what your manager’s goals are for the meeting so that you’re not walking in unprepared. Your manager should be willing to to prep you for what the point of the meeting is and, since you manage the staff member, should be open to hearing your input on the best way to handle it.

Ideally, if they were really both at fault, your role would be something like a translator — “Jane’s concerns were X, which is why she said Y / Rupert was coming from a place of concern about Z / here’s my take on how we can move forward.” But that won’t work in every situation; it depends on exactly what happened.

5. Still no photos on resumes?

I was wondering if your “no photos on resumes” (in the U.S.) ruling has changed at all since 2012? I’m curious because my friend asked me to review her resume, which she had created with a snazzy online tool. It looked nice, but it had a spot for a photo, which I always thought was a no-no. Have norms on this changed since most people have photos on LinkedIn or other easily-findable places?

Nope, it’s still the rule. Photos do not belong on resumes.

What’s happened, though, is that there are a number of truly terrible resume templates online  created by people who know a lot about design and absolutely nothing about resumes, and so you end up with awful templates that don’t suit their purpose at all. (See not only photos, but also templates with hardly any room for the stuff employers care about most, like job history and accomplishments.)

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

1. Our communal music is too repetitive

I work in a creative department at a fairly conservative company and am in the office four days each week. My coworkers and I share an enclosed space with individual cubicles. Much of my job involves writing. Though I can often write without “locking in,” “getting in the zone,” etc., sometimes I do really need to focus with minimal distraction.

Recently, a coworker brought in a small bluetooth speaker, and we have taken turns playing music to liven up the space a bit. My manager is fully on board. To make it easier and spend less time fiddling with bluetooth, we’re using a shared device to connect to Spotify. My coworkers – understandably – are not taking too much time to find and select music to play. They come in, press play on the device, and let the playlist roll.

I love listening to music. I don’t love listening to the same playlist over, and over, and over again. But it apparently only bothers me to hear the same songs day in and out. I will try and put on other music, which helps for a bit, but eventually we find our way back to the “default” playlist, which I guess is based off what you have played previously on the platform (It’s only about 150-200 songs). When this happens, I can barely focus on what I’m doing. I’ll pull out my own ear buds, but they tend to mix with the music on the speaker and make the problem worse.

I really don’t want to be the person that needs to turn off the music. This seems like something my coworkers really enjoy, based on how often they’re finding their way back to turn on the speaker after it’s been off for the day or after a meeting. But it’s beginning to make me hate certain songs that I had no feeling about previously, let alone the effect on my productivity. I guess the solution is just to get up and change the music when it starts bothering me — but I worry I’ll come off as overly concerned about playing DJ when really, I just don’t want to listen to “Bittersweet Symphony” for the fifth time this week!

If it really becomes a problem, I know that I would be able to just say I need some quiet for a bit and turn it off. But do you have any suggestions for how to handle that without being the office spoilsport?

I think you’re overthinking it! Just say, “Y’all, I love having the music on but I can’t take so much repetition, so I’m going to take charge of switching up the playlists unless someone else wants to” and then do that. It shouldn’t be a big deal. If anything, people will probably appreciate it.

Alternately, spend some time this weekend making a ridiculously huge 30-hour playlist and then never think about it again.

But it’s also okay to say that having music on all the time isn’t working for you! Having to write while subject to someone else’s musical choices would be rough for a lot of writers.

2. Coworker is taking advantage of our WFH flexibility

I lead a highly engaged team of exempt employees that work remotely ~90% of the time. Our department is very supportive of work/life balance and doesn’t penalize for things like doctor’s appointments or getting kids off the bus. As long as meetings are covered and work gets done, it’s all good. We have a few required in-office days each month which occur on a regular, predicable cadence.

One team member bends this flexibility more than anybody else. Although their work output is good, there have been several instances of this person sending the team a list of sporadic upcoming times that they may not be available during the day due to their child’s daytime extracurricular activities. This once resulted in a last-minute scramble to move an important meeting that had been scheduled weeks ago. Another time, they asked our manager to be exempt from all in-office days for a couple of months to accommodate a different voluntary, child-related activity (manager said no). This employee recently called into another important meeting but couldn’t be heard over the background noise. They were out of the house on an errand that could have happened at another time.

I reported this to our manager (who agrees with me) but can’t help wondering if I’m being unfair. If this person was working around something more necessary and immovable, like healthcare needs, I wouldn’t think twice. I don’t care if people work from a public place like a coffee shop or library as long as they can be fully engaged in meetings. I don’t have kids myself but have never encountered anybody else who has required this level of daytime flexibility for non-essential activities. Nobody else on the large-ish team does this.

I understand that if this person had just quietly blocked their calendar without providing any details, I would probably not be writing to you … but here we are. Is there any way to equitably standardize what appropriate flexibility looks like, or should I just erase the details from my brain and pretend they’re shuttling the kids back and forth from doctor’s appointments?

Extracurriculars are different from medical appointments. It’s reasonable to say that while your team tries to allow employees flexibility with life stuff that comes up during the day, including kid-related needs, people are expected to prioritize important meetings, participate in in-office days, and take work calls from a quiet place where they can focus and without disruptive background noise, in all but the most unusual/unavoidable of circumstances. And it’s reasonable to define “unusual/unavoidable” as medical things or rare personal emergencies.

Since your manager seems to agree with that, she needs to clarify those expectations with your coworker, who seems to be translating some flexibility into total flexibility.

3. HR has implemented a screening test for applicants that nobody can pass

Several months ago, our HR department implemented a screening test for all applicants that they must pass before being hired. This is a timed test, and the questions and acceptance criteria are the same for all jobs. None of the hiring managers had seen the test or knew anything about the questions when it was implemented.

Only about 5% of screened applicants have passed the test. As you might imagine, this is causing issues with hiring managers as they are unable to fill open positions with candidates they have already evaluated and identified as good hires.

There has been such disruption that HR decided to have all current employees take the test and use the average score to consider adjusting the acceptance criteria (individual scores are supposed to remain anonymous). This was the first time any of us had seen the test questions, and now it is clear why applicants are not passing. Most, if not all, of the questions do not pertain to the jobs we are hiring for. There are math word problems, word analogy problems, inductive reasoning pattern problems used to screen engineers, logic puzzles, etc., all with a big timer counting down the available time at the top of the screen.

I see a LOT of issues with this. The aptitudes and abilities being tested are not relevant for all positions, and some are not relevant for any positions at our company. (Nobody here needs to know the exact definition of “obfuscate” as part of their job.) It is biased against candidates who are functionally fluent in English but use it as their second language. It is biased against candidates who would perform their jobs well but do not perform well on timed tests. It may not be illegal, but I can’t see how it is useful.

I raised these concerns with HR, and also told them that if this test had been required when I applied to my position several years ago, I likely would have withdrawn my application. I would have seen it as a huge red flag that my performance would not be evaluated objectively based on the job requirements but on random criteria instead. I suspect many applicants are either not completing the test or choosing answers at random because they have similar concerns.

Am I off-base that this is a bad practice? Is there anything else I can do as a hiring manager to convince HR to change this practice?

You are not off-base; this is ridiculous. It’s a fundamental principle of hiring effectively that you screen based on the must-have’s and nice-to-have’s for the role you’re hiring for, not on factors that have nothing to do with someone’s ability to perform the job. Coincidentally, that also happens to be a fundamental principle of ensuring you have a diverse workforce with diverse perspectives.

HR shouldn’t have this kind of power. You and other hiring managers should push back hard, pointing out that HR’s job is to support managers in hiring people who will perform their jobs well, not to throw up roadblocks to finding and hiring those people. Insist on hearing a justification for the test and why it should trump your own assessment of what you need in candidates, insist on seeing data about outcomes, and escalate it as high as you need to.

4. Adult photos at work

Is showing a coworker a nude pic of a celebrity considered sexual harassment?

If they don’t want to see it, yes. If there are people nearby who don’t want to see it or hear about it, yes.

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

1. Employee made a racist comment to her office-mate

I work in a fairly small office. We have about 12-15 people in the office. Recently, our company hired two new CSR’s. “Anne” is white and in her late fifties/early sixties. “Leah” is Black and probably in her thirties.

Anne and Leah share an office and were getting along great. You could hear chatter and laughter throughout the day coming from their office. Then yesterday, Anne made a comment to Leah about “those colored folk.” Leah told her that was inappropriate and offensive. Anne immediately got defensive and claimed that she didn’t say anything hateful.

I heard their direct manager make the comment to someone else in the office that Anne is from an era where that kind of talk was acceptable. This is raising alarm bells for me. Also, Leah is currently the only Black employee we have.

I feel like this is being mishandled. They are talking about separating them to keep the peace. What do you think should be done in this situation? I don’t manage these people, but I’m curious what your take would be.

If Anne is in her late 50s or early 60s, she’s not from an era where that phrase was acceptable. But even if she were, it doesn’t matter; she’s had decades to catch up with the times. Moreover, not only was her language not acceptable, but neither was her reaction when Leah let her know that. The right response was, “I didn’t realize, thank you for telling me, I apologize.”

As for what should be done, someone in authority needs to talk to Anne and explain that. I don’t believe in making adults apologize, but someone should have the sort of conversation with Anne that makes her want to apologize of her own volition. From there, wait and see how things go. Meanwhile, someone should also check in with Leah and see how she is and whether she’d prefer to have a different office-mate at this point.

Read an update to this letter. 

2. I’ve heard my senior coworkers think I earn too much

I work a job that is often considered entry-level in my field (think paralegal or medical scribe), but most of the folks on my team are quite seasoned and have been doing it for a decade-plus because we enjoy the work and have never been in a financial situation to afford additional degrees.

I am quite close with some of the junior professionals in our office, and I often hear from them that two of the high-up professionals who I’m often assigned to assist, Sasha and Erin, have a lot of disdain for our team and spend a lot of time badmouthing us at work lunches. They complain about how uneducated and unqualified we are and how easy our work is compared to theirs — that we are lazy and “basically do nothing all day.” One comment I heard that they made at a recent work lunch really ground my gears, though: They complained that we are overpaid. Specifically, they said our work “is basically intern work” and so we should “be paid like interns.”

Since hearing this, I haven’t been able to get this comment out of my head whenever I have to assist Sasha and Erin (who are, of course, perfectly nice to my face). Clearly Sasha and Erin don’t know this, but I make minimum wage, as does pretty much everyone who holds our position: We could not legally make less than we do. Fortunately we are not in a high cost of living area so the money is not a problem, but I still feel so angry working with these two people who have this opinion about me (and who certainly make way, way more than I do).

Is this comment, which I heard secondhand, a reasonable justification for me to ask not to have to assist Sasha and Erin anymore? If not, any suggestions for how to cope with this frustration?

Hearing that secondhand is not enough justification to ask not to assist Sasha and Erin.

It’s possible Sasha and Erin didn’t even say those things, or didn’t say them about you, or that the people passing it along to you are pursuing their own agenda in some way. In fact, in your shoes I’d be concerned about why the colleagues telling you about it are telling you about it so often; it’s one thing to give you a heads-up, but hearing it from them often sounds like they’re trying to stir the pot, and I’d be wary of that — and would consider telling them to stop (“I’d rather not hear this; I need to work with them and it’s easier if I’m not hearing a steady stream of this stuff”).

Focus on how Sasha and Erin actually treat you.

3. My employee works long hours even though I’ve told her to stop

I am a manager of a small department, where I have one full-time employee and one part-time employee who I share with another department.

My part-time employee has horrible work-life balance. She will not stop answering emails from home or when she is on PTO. She will come into work when she is sick or on work-from-home days. She is non-exempt and I know she’s not tracking this time.

I have forced her to turn off notifications before she leaves for the weekend. I have had conversations about it being okay for people to wait, or that it is hurting the rest of the department when we do not reply after-hours and people get mad. Despite her complaining about the workload, she will not take steps to help herself.

Despite being on the same page with me, the other manager seems content to tell her to work less and leave it at that. Ideally, I don’t want to escalate this to HR — she would fail the PIP or hide her actions, which would be worse. She is a wonderful person and I hold her in high regard. There may be nothing I can do, and I definitely to not want her fired. Do you have any other suggestions for ways I might be able to encourage her to sign off and stay off?

Because she’s non-exempt, you’re required by federal law to ensure that she’s not working during her off hours or that she’s paid when she does (including time and a half if she’s ever over 40 hours in a week). Legally, you don’t have the option of just encouraging her to set boundaries; legally you need to require it.

Sit down with her and let her know that your past conversations about not working in her off hours are no longer suggestions; they’re requirements of her job. Explain that she’s opening the company to legal liability by not reporting those hours, that you personally could get in trouble for allowing it, and that effective immediately it cannot happen — and if you see it’s continuing to, you’ll need to treat it as a disciplinary issue. Ask if she foresees any problems sticking to that; if she does, you want her to raise it now so that can get worked out.

From there, you need to enforce it. If you can’t do that on your own, then you do need to alert HR; again, this is a legal liability for the company, and it’s a big deal that you’re not letting them know. (In fact, you should loop them in regardless, because it sounds like your company owes your employee for unpaid hours.) You mentioned you’re worried the employee would fail a PIP, but this isn’t PIP territory; it’s a clear warning, maybe two, and that’s it. If you really think she’d ignore a clear, unambiguous warning about federal law, I think you’ve got to revisit the regard you’re holding her in.

Related:
my staff keeps working unauthorized overtime even though I told them to stop

4. Is it unprofessional to raise issues with your coworkers?

Over the last month, our team has had some major and minor changes to management, policy, and procedures. These changes have varied in inconvenience for the team, ranging from an extra few minutes to major team staffing changes with no previous notice.

I brought up in a team chat that it is concerning for these changes to be made with no real chance to voice our opinions, and was told that I was being “unprofessional.” This is my second time in the same month receiving the “unprofessional” feedback for voicing concerns. A coworker told me that I should save my opinions for 1:1s with my manager.

Previous to this job, I worked on a close team where we were encouraged to discuss team issues in a team setting. So now I am wondering if my previous team got me used to an unprofessional norm. Is it “unprofessional” to discuss concerns with your fellow employees? I’ve been proud to be a resource that some of my fellow employees have come to regarding topics such as wage disparity, benefits, and how to address issues with management, but maybe I’ve been giving bad advice based on unusual job experience.

I’m now waiting for my next 1:1 to get some additional feedback on how to increase my professionalism, but thought I would get some feedback from a neutral third party whose advice has served me well.

It’s not unprofessional to raise issues that affect your team within that team.

It can be problematic if you’re aggressive to the point of rudeness about the way you do it, or if you keep pushing when it’s clear the conversation needs to move on, or when it’s more venting than action-oriented. Even in those situations, though, it’s not necessarily unprofessional; it might be more impolitic than unprofessional. And sometimes issues need to be raised even when it’s impolitic, and sometimes “rude” really means “you’re making people uncomfortable, but you’re not wrong.”

Of course, you need to read the room. If the culture of your team or organization is that dissent is frowned upon … well, it still wouldn’t be unprofessional to raise issues, but you’d want to include that in your calculus so you can decide how much capital you’re willing to spend. (Also, that would be the sign of a tremendously unhealthy organization. Good managers want to hear about issues affecting their teams.)

But I’m curious who’s telling you that you were unprofessional. It sounds like at least once it was a coworker. Was it ever your manager? If you’re hearing it from multiple sources, there’s still important info here — either about your approach or about your team’s culture — but I’d consider the source(s).

Also: under federal law, you have the legal right to discuss wages and working conditions with coworkers. It can be to your employer’s advantage to make you feel weird about doing that. So factor that in too.

5. Asking for a raise based on a job title you don’t officially have

Asking a question on behalf of a friend, who I am encouraging to ask for a raise.

The friend joined a company two years ago as a temp with very little experience, and was hired full-time onto a newsletter marketing team. It turns out that even though the company is big and important in its field, the software and workflows for sending out the newsletters are counterintuitive, annoying, and really out of date.

My friend was so bored and annoyed that they taught themself how to code and automated the most annoying tasks. Now, they’re currently spending most of their time working with their manager and the web team to code programs and extensions to make their systems work better, which has already improved a lot of the process.

However, their title is still something like “newsletter assistant,” even though the work they’re doing now is much closer to “software developer.” Can they ask for a raise that references the market rate for a software developer, or would it be better to just list their achievements, even if they fall far outside their job description?

They should ask for a raise and a title change, framing it as “I was brought on to do X, but my role has become Y, and I’d like my title and salary to reflect the work I’m doing.”

That said, “software developer” might not be the appropriate title or pay rate; it sounds like their work has a fairly narrow focus that doesn’t necessarily match up with the way “software developer” is normally used, and if that’s the case, asking to be paid for that job’s market rate will come across as out-of-touch. But there’s a case for some sort of title change and raise.