Ask a Manager

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

1. My daughter has lost two jobs in one year

My 44-year-old daughter has been fired from two different employment agencies in the last 12 months. The first time, the company did not give a reason. The second time, the company said budget cuts were the reason.

I understand that it is entirely possible that the firings might have nothing to do with my daughter’s work performance or attitude. But how many times should this happen before it is reasonable to suspect that it is because of her work performance or attitude?

The reason I ask this is because she has appeared extremely stressed and tightly wound for at least three years. It is to the point where I spoke with her last year about seeing a therapist. I gave her examples of ways I see her stress affecting her husband and children. I wonder if her attitude at work is similar.

She has not gone to a therapist. I am concerned that if I speak to her about therapy again, she may react negatively or think I am blaming her for the these two job losses. Her husband has already spoken to her. Should I stay out of this?

Stay out of it. It’s possible that her behavior at work has contributed to the two job losses. But it’s also possible that it hasn’t, and there’s no way to know. (Twice in 12 months could simply be bad luck.) If you knew for sure — like if she told you she was fired because she had a screaming meltdown — well, even then you’d need to tread carefully unless you have a very close relationship. But in this case it would be pure speculation, and you’d be intruding into an area of her life (her career) that she hasn’t invited you into.

It’s natural to care because you’re her mom, but trying to guess at what happened at work when she hasn’t asked you for help carries a high risk of feeling invasive and boundary-crossing to her.

2. Are laundry products included in office fragrance bans?

Thankfully, this isn’t an issue at my workplace because most of us use laundry products that have little or no scent, but are the heavily fragranced detergents and fabric softeners that have become so popular included in office fragrance bans? The kind that are touted as leaving a “fresh” (read: huge amounts of chemicals) scent on your clothes for weeks? I’m asking because I went to a museum last week and ended up with a horrible headache and sore throat from being bombarded with laundry fragrances I could smell from 30 feet away. Even if I didn’t have a chronic respiratory disease, the odor would have been A Lot. At work, it would make it hard for several of us to function due to asthma and other issues. I’d love to know your thoughts on this.

Yes, typically offices with fragrance policies include heavily scented products of all kind, including laundry detergent.

Whenever this comes up, people ask how an employer can regulate what products you use in the privacy of your own home. You can use whatever products you want at home, but your employer does have the right to say you can’t come to work smelling heavily of fragrance.

People also tend to want to know what happens if you’re, say, using the one and only affordable laundry detergent that doesn’t make you break out in hives and it happens to be scented. If you have a coworker who can’t breathe because of the fragrance, then it’s handled like any other situation with dueling accommodations: your employer needs to look for solutions to accommodate both of you (which could be things like seating you far away from each other, having you meet with each other by phone rather than in-person, etc.).

3. I need to cunningly find out 40 names

I am terrible with names. I’ve always worked in small teams where it didn’t matter that I didn’t know the name of the person in some other wing of the building. Now I’m at a smaller company with 50-odd people — been here four whole years. To be honest, I’m supposed to know more names. Most people know mine! In fact, I have long kitchen convos with people whose names I still don’t know. But it’s been so long, I simply can’t ask them! And asking someone else to reintroduce me to 40 people who think I already know them doesn’t seem like an option either.

This is my own doing. Everyone has a fatal flaw that would kill them in a Greek tragedy, and this is mine. But I am now determined to stop the wheel of fate, and figure out who is who and remember who does what. Do you have any suggestions? Alas, we don’t have a website with handy mugshots.

You need a confidant! Pick someone who you like and trust, explain the situation, and ask them to discreetly help you learn people’s names. You could even take a walk around the building together with them muttering names in your ear as you pass people. (Although it will be way too overwhelming to remember 40 names all at once, so this will need to happen slowly over a period of weeks.) I would be delighted to do this for someone, and I bet you have some coworkers who would be too.

4. Requesting vacation time with a friend/coworker

A few months ago I started a job that I was referred for by my best friend. We now work together in the same department, but we haven’t let on how close we are because I’m a woman and he’s a man and we want to avoid gossip (I’m also gay but that probably wouldn’t stop their fun if word got out).

We were hoping to take a trip together at the end of the summer but our managers are likely to try to get whoever doesn’t ask for the time first to cover for the other if we don’t admit that we’re taking the time off to spend together. Is it better for us to go in to talk to our supervisor together or should my friend be the one to speak to him since he has seniority? I feel awkward talking about our personal relationship at this point and I’m not sure what the most professional way to go about this is.

The big question is whether you can take vacation at the same time. If you’re each other’s cover, vacationing together right now might be unrealistic. But if that’s not the case — if it’s more like you’d be the default coverage but something else could be arranged if your boss knew the situation — then one of you should just tell your boss point-blank what you want to do and ask if there’s a way to make it work. That should probably be your friend since he’s been there longer and has the more established relationship with your boss.

That said, once you do that, the cat is out of the bag — people are going to know you’re closer friends than they had realized since it’s not reasonable to ask the boss to hide that for you.

(Also, in some cases it might be odd if it comes out that your friend recommended you without disclosing that you’re a close friend. If it was more a referral than a recommendation, or if he stressed that he couldn’t vouch for your work, I’d worry less; it’s hard to say without knowing more details, but consider whether that’s something to factor in too.)

5. Can I apply with a new version of my resume soon after using the old version?

I have a question about sending different resume versions to the same company. A couple months ago, I applied for a job at a large company and sent my resume. A week later, they emailed me that they decided to cancel the job posting, but to please apply to any new ones that may come up. Since then, I have revamped my resume. Everything on there is accurate of course, but it looks very different and has some different details. So, my question: If I find another job that I want to apply to at this company, would it be weird to send the new version so soon? I imagine they have my old one on file.

Totally fine to send the new version. It’s unlikely that they’ll bother to compare it to the old one, but it’s not a problem if they do (assuming the job history and other key facts match); people change up their resumes periodically.

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

1. A manager thanked my husband for letting me work with them

A department I work with organized a social dinner at a restaurant after work one evening. People brought their families and so I brought my husband. A manager I work with came by, so I introduced them to each other. It was a very usual interaction, until the very end when the manager said to my husband, “Thank you for letting her work with us” and returned to the far side of the table. It happened so quickly and then he walked away that neither of us had a chance to say anything to correct him. People sitting near us who heard it asked me, “Wait, did he say…?” It was so awkward.

What would you do in this situation? Ideally I would have said something in the moment, like “Oh, my husband has no say in my work activities” but the opportunity’s already gone. I don’t want to approach this manager now and bring this up and say “Hey, this was disrespectful, don’t say things like that again.” There’s a chance that conversation may go well but I think it’s more likely he would just say, “That’s not what I meant/said, you must have heard me wrong” and kind of invalidate me and make me feel silly for coming to him about it. But if I don’t, I’m just enabling things like that to continue happening. But also why is this now my burden to correct?

What do you know of this manager in general? Does that kind of comment fit in with things you already knew/suspected about him? If not, I think it’s reasonably likely he meant something more like “thanks for loaning her to us, she’s great”? Obviously your husband is not loaning you to your company either, but that’s the sort of thing people sometimes say to spouses of either gender when they’re trying to compliment the other partner. Still a little awkward, but very different from a sexist “thank you for permitting your wife to work outside the home.”

But if you do have reason to think he meant it exactly the way you heard it … well, then this one comment is probably the least of the problems. You said you don’t want to address it, and it’s fine to just roll your eyes and not raise it. But it would also be fine to say to him, “Roy, did you thank my husband the other night for letting me work?”

2. My boss threatened to kill himself over a minor work issue

I’ve worked for my company for a few years. I’ve seen many changes, and many layoffs, in my time here. My old boss was transferred to a different subsidiary earlier this year and I got a new boss. My new boss is fine, if high-strung, a bit neurotic, and way too all over the place.

Recently, we made a post on social media and a small error was made, nothing huge and one that was fixed that day, but it caught the attention of the president of the company after a complaint. Due to this, the president decided to put another leader in charge of social media temporarily. This led my boss to call me freaking out, blaming me for what happened, and telling me that if he lost this job, his wife would leave him and he would kill himself.

This was very unprofessional, in my opinion, and a complete overreaction, as we met with the president later that day and it was not as big of a deal as it seemed. I have not spoken to my boss since, as he pushed back our weekly meeting to another day, but I believe he knows he went too far. What do I do in this situation? I am very upset with his reaction and the fact that he keeps blaming me for a simple mistake that was not life or death. I also don’t like that he called me on my personal number and threatened suicide, it was very disturbing. I was already thinking about looking for a new job, but in the meantime how do I handle this?

The safest thing to do when someone makes a suicide threat is to take it seriously. If it turns out it was serious, you won’t regret doing that — and if it wasn’t serious, then responding as if it was can show the person how out of line they were and discourage them from making fake threats again.

Your boss threatening self-harm is way above your pay grade, so this is something to escalate. Ideally you’d talk to HR — or to your boss’s boss if your HR is incompetent or nonexistent — and explain what happened. Say you don’t feel equipped to handle a suicide threat from your boss, and ask that they take over from here. If you feel awkward doing this, consider: if your boss does need help, someone in a position to provide that help needs to be alerted. And if the threat wasn’t real, then it was an incredibly manipulative thing to say and it should be addressed as such by someone who isn’t you.

3. How much exaggeration is too much on LinkedIn?

I have a coworker who has been making some updates to their LinkedIn profile that got me thinking about how much exaggeration is too much when it comes to describing your work. I do think there is an ethical line here, but my coworker has found some interesting ways to make them sound more experienced in certain areas without lying outright. Here are a few examples:

• “With over 20 years of experience in education and editing” (I believe the education part is true, but they have been editing for less than two years and are struggling to reach a professional level of competency.)
• They are “looking for opportunities to further develop their expertise in project management, management, and training” (They are technically doing some project management now, but they are struggling, and to my knowledge they’ve had no experience with management or training. I don’t think this would strike me as questionable if a different word than “expertise” was used, like “interest.”)
• “Manager and leader at heart” (I think this one is the most interesting because they do not have management experience and are not a leader on our team, but the phrasing doesn’t necessarily imply that they are, just that they feel they could be).

This really has no direct effect on me, and I have no plans to bring it up with my coworker; I just thought it was an interesting thought exercise, and I’m curious to hear your opinion.

Nothing here is technically a lie, but they’re definitely puffing things up.

That said … a lot of people do this on resumes and LinkedIn (which is why good hiring managers look at actual experience and accomplishments more than anything else). I don’t like and wouldn’t write it that way myself, and in my experience the people who do this are never the strongest candidates anyway. Plus, it can backfire! If having tons of editing experience is important to an employer, they’re likely to be annoyed if they interview this person and discover the “20 years” is actually two. But “manager and leader at heart” is the worst part of it of to me — a little cheesy, but also if I saw that on a resume from someone with no management experience, I’d be digging into that pretty hard to find out what it meant. People who aren’t managers but feel managerial at heart are often problems or have an unrealistic idea of what management is.

But none is it is wildly outside the realm of how some people market themselves.

4. Applying at my old company with a new name

I worked at my first job out of college for five years, then moved on to a different job for the following 10. I’m now hoping to return to the first company; however, any record of me there is under a different name. The change is not me going by a nickname, my middle name, or new surname. I’ve legally changed my first name. Instead of “Dana Katherine Scully,” I’m now “Gillian Katherine Scully.”

There’s no trauma associated with my former name so I don’t mind it being referenced, I’d just like to know how best to include it on my application so that my first company can verify my past experience there under “Dana” without too much confusion.

I considered omitting that first position from my resume altogether, but this company has a strong culture of hiring from within, so I feel like my prior position is worth noting. I left on great terms after a contract ended with no openings available at the time.

Yeah, definitely don’t omit the job from your resume; that would be odd to do just because of the name issue! The fact that you worked there previously is highly relevant (and they’re also the only other employer you have aside from your current one). You could include a note in your cover letter, but cover letters often aren’t read after the initial screen so that’s not a reliable way to do it. The easiest thing would be to explain in your interview — but if you want them to know before you’re at the interview stage, I’d just include a small note on your resume next to that job like this:

Teapot Factory, 2010-2014 (employed as Dana Scully)

You wouldn’t do that for resumes you’re sending anywhere else, only for this one.

But also, do you know anyone who still works there? If so, you should be contacting them anyway about your application, and can just explain it to them.

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

1. I suspect my colleague was drinking before our morning meeting

I held a meeting late morning on Friday with my colleague, “Janet.” During our meeting, her behavior seemed fine, if even a little more level than her normal frenetic energy.

During the meeting, we pulled our chairs together to look at something on her screen and I very clearly smelled vodka on her breath. The smell was like she’d taken a shot right before coming into my office; this was not a case of being hungover and smelling like old booze.

Now I don’t know what to do. Recently, I witnessed her at a fancy work event drinking heavily (7-8 glasses of wine in a little under two hours) but since that didn’t cause any issues, I didn’t say anything to anyone (and still wouldn’t). But the fancy event drinking did put on my radar that she may have a problem with alcohol, and I was immediately reminded of it when I smelled the vodka.

What do I do now? She is well liked and respected in our office, and her work hasn’t suffered (to my knowledge). Am I obligated to tell our manager? Can I talk to my colleague? Say nothing and wait until this maybe happens again?

I know that my biggest priority is making sure she is safe and getting help, but a very, very close second is not getting myself in trouble for withholding information from my superiors.

I don’t think there’s anything actionable here. You didn’t see Janet acting intoxicated or see her swigging vodka. You just smelled something when you sat close to her.

If there were safety implications — if she operates heavily machinery or otherwise held people’s lives in her hands — that would change the calculus. But otherwise, there’s not enough here to act on.

Related:
I think my coworker is an alcoholic

2. We’re being forced to label all our office furniture

Our new chief operating officer is forcing our Engineering department to completely clear their offices of any items other than the desk, two chairs, and a filing cabinet and is mandating where our computers and phones sit on the desk. Though it sounds reasonable to have a clean office, we work in a manufacturing company and often we have items in our office that are being evaluated (we make valves). He has now told us that we MUST LABEL each piece of furniture in our office identifying what it is. For example, a label on the desk that says DESK. Yesterday we were told that we must take a picture of our office once it is set up to his specifications and put the picture on our wall to remind us of how our office should look.

This is a degrading exercise for a group of engineers and counterproductive given the industry we are in. Is this a practice that we are unaware of, or should we see this as a character situation with him? How should we handle this respectfully? You should know that he is not at all open to hearing our opinions directly.

This is extremely odd. It would be one thing if he just wanted less cluttered offices — a bit controlling but not outlandish — but labeling your furniture? So there’s no doubt that a desk is in fact a desk? Was there some safety incident with someone mistaking a trash can as a chair? This is so over-the-top controlling that there’s either a really weird incident that provoked this or your new COO has misplaced his gourd.

This is something where you want influential allies involved — someone with power and influence within the organization, like the CEO’s longtime and trusted assistant or your own boss who has the ear of someone powerful, or so forth — so you can tip them off and see whether someone can intervene. But I’ve got to think this is a sign of problems with this new hire and more trouble is brewing.

3. Can you fire someone because their spouse is a politician?

The recent news of Usha Vance resigning from her law firm — a law firm that reportedly has progressive values — leaves me wondering: If she hadn’t resigned, could they have fired her after her husband became Trump’s running mate?

Federal law doesn’t prevent private employers from discriminating on the basis of political beliefs. But some jurisdictions do — including Washington, D.C., where that firm has an office, although I don’t know if it was her office. (D.C’s law might seem strange since D.C. is a town full of employers like lobbyists and nonprofits where your politics play a role in whether you’ll get hired or not, but in a lot of those cases political beliefs are considered a bona fide occupational qualification, which gets around the law.)

Regardless of the law, in reality, given the nature of the situation, if she hadn’t resigned on her own it almost certainly would have been a conversation about optics/client relations/PR and a mutual agreement to part ways, not “you’re fired, clean out your desk today.”

4. Employer missed our scheduled phone interview

I am job hunting and recently applied for a job that I am really excited about. Less than an hour after I submitted my application, the HR manager emailed me to say I sounded like a great fit and they’d like to schedule a phone interview at specific time and date the following week. I responded an hour later thanking her for reaching out and confirming I was available.

My interview time came and went with no call and no email. I figured they might have had a meeting run over or a conflict pop up, so after about 15 minutes, I emailed them to confirm the call would still take place and offered to reschedule if there was a more convenient time for them.

It has now been over 24 hours since I sent the email and I still haven’t heard a peep. Is it overkill if I email them again to reiterate my interest and ask to reschedule the interview? I really want this job and genuinely think I’m a perfect fit for it, but I also recognize that it’s just a first stage interview and I don’t want to come across as obsessive and over-eager.

It’s fine to email one more time asking about rescheduling. After that, though, if you don’t hear back, assume that for whatever reason it’s not going to happen and move on and don’t keep following up.

Asking someone to set aside time and then ghosting them — and not even responding to an email about it afterwards — is incredibly rude, but it’s also not terribly uncommon in job-hunting. Hopefully they’ll get back to you, but some employers just have utterly chaotic hiring processes and the more you can let the rudeness roll off you, the better.

5. What shows up in a background check?

What info shows up in a typical employment background check? A friend has recently gone through a hard time and was staying in shelters and accessing various public aid programs. They’re doing better now, but they’re worried about that info showing up in a background check and an employer being biased about their previous circumstances. Would any of that actually be on a background check an employer would do? What’s usually in those and what are employers looking for with them?

They shouldn’t need to worry about that at all! Employment background checks are about verifying your employment history and education — confirming that you actually did the things you said you did (worked the places you said you worked, for the time periods you said you were there, that you’re not ineligible for rehire, etc.). Some also include criminal background checks. They don’t look the sort of thing your friend is worried about. The thing that could get the closest is that some types of jobs will run a credit check, but they’re not going to see whether or not someone received public aid.