Ask a Manager

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

1. Our off-site includes a body fat analysis

My company recently merged with another and we’ve been invited to an off-site coming up soon. At a briefing meeting this week, our group was given a preview of the agenda for the off-site, which is a combination of working sessions, outdoor activities, and group meals.

However, the agenda also includes a two-hour slot for an InBody test — which, for those not familiar, is a body composition analysis that provides a detailed breakdown of body weight in terms of muscle, fat, and water. It’s been presented as an “optional,” “fun” activity. Even so, am I off-base to think this is a completely inappropriate thing to have in a work setting? Most worrying, it’s also been mentioned as a “traditional” activity, which now has me wondering about what sort of culture I’ve ended up in.

You are not off-base. This is inappropriate in a work setting.

It’s optional, so skip it. If anyone asks why, say “Oh, it’s not my thing” or “No real interest” or “I’ve always figured that’s between me and my doctor.” If you’re comfortable with it, you also could ask some coworkers about it — “they said this was a traditional thing — what’s up with that?” Who knows, maybe you’ll hear the CEO loves it and no one else participates, or that at least a bunch of other people think it’s weird. I wouldn’t necessarily conclude you’ve ended in a completely messed-up workplace culture; lots of companies have This One Weird Thing We Do. But I can see why you’re alarmed.

2. We have to use six PTO days to take a five-day vacation

Several years ago, I worked for a company with a vacation policy I found truly bonkers. I worked at the corporate headquarters of a large regional chain. Everyone at the corporate office was salaried and exempt and worked a standard 40-hour work week, Monday through Friday. It was incredibly rare to work late (and no one worked on weekends). We got three weeks of PTO a year.

The weird thing was: if you took off a full work week of PTO Monday through Friday, you were required to use six PTO days, not five. The reasoning from management was that technically, we were all supposed to work a 46-hour work week (eight hours Monday through Friday, plus six hours on Saturdays), but they simply never enforced the “requirement” to work on Saturdays. And this policy only applied to taking off Monday through Friday—you could take off five (or more!) consecutive work days (for instance, Wednesday through Friday, then the following Monday and Tuesday) without having to use an extra vacation day for the Saturday you “missed.”

Neither the 46-hour work week nor the weird PTO policy was ever communicated before hiring, and it wasn’t documented in the employee handbook—people would find out about it through the grapevine or when they tried taking a week off.

Naturally, this caused a lot of anger among staff, but nobody would push back because management was very toxic and punitive whenever someone questioned authority (that’s a whole separate letter). People just accepted it or found some workaround to avoid losing an extra vacation day. In one memorable instance, a co-worker took PTO Tuesday through Friday, came to work on the following Monday, then took PTO the next Tuesday through Friday (they actually flew home to work that Monday, then flew back to their destination to finish their vacation!).

I know that in cases like this, the answer to “Is this legal?” is almost always “Yes, but it sucks.” But I’ve always wondered if this at least tiptoed up to the line of something shady (especially since the company was known for sketchy labor practices, like hiring long-term freelancers and treating them like employees). I also cannot fathom the reasoning behind such a policy — there was zero impact on workflow if someone took a Monday through Friday vacation, and we were never asked to actually work on Saturdays.

Can a company really require salaried, exempt employees to take an extra PTO day for a weekend day they are never actually required to work? And why on earth would a company do so?

What?! That’s one of the most bizarre policies I’ve ever heard in my 100 years writing this column, and that bar is quite high. (To be clear, there have been many far more bizarre occurrences. But as a corporate policy, this is up there.)

They claimed they had a 46-hour work week that no one was ever informed of and that wasn’t practiced because it was actually fake? And it was fake — as demonstrated both by the fact that no one ever worked Saturdays or over 40 hours a week, and by the fact that they didn’t tell new hires about it. If you have a policy of working Saturdays in a corporate job, you tell people about it before hiring them. They didn’t, because the policy isn’t real.

As for why a company would do this … I cannot imagine. Maybe a decade ago they really did work Saturdays and no one ever updated the policy once that changed (still pretty indefensible). Maybe there’s a sociopath in HR. Who knows.

But while there might be a state law out there that this would violate (California, is it you?), in most states this would be legal. No law requires your employer to give you vacation time, so companies can generally make up whatever weird rules they want to about it.

P.S. I’d bet money you shouldn’t all have been categorized as exempt though.

3. Should my resignation letter include 700 words on why I’m leaving?

I have decided to leave an organization that I have worked at for almost six years. I have some frank, critical feedback that I would like to submit to the organization’s leaders; it is a small organization and I have worked closely with them in the past. Is the resignation letter an appropriate place to outline the reasons why I am leaving? My current draft is about 700 words.

They have done exit interviews in the past, but not consistently, and I want to document my feedback in writing before leaving. I will not need them as references as I am quitting to work for my own business.

Noooo, don’t do it. First, a resignation letter absolutely is not the appropriate place to offer feedback. A resignation letter should be about two sentences and is used solely to document your decision after the conversation where you resign. Second, if you want to give that kind of feedback, I’d strongly recommend that you do it in a conversation, not in an unsolicited letter — but I’d even more strongly recommend that you reconsider doing it at all. If they were truly open to input, you probably would have had opportunities to give it earlier. Critical feedback shot at people as you’re walking out the door doesn’t generally carry a ton of weight or credibility, and it’s an investment of your emotional energy into a place that you’re trying to sever ties with.

(Also: don’t write off the possibility that you might want them as references at some point. Hopefully your new business will thrive and you’ll never apply for a traditional job again, but business ventures don’t always work out that way.)

Related:
should I tell the truth in my exit interview?

4. Did my teacher ruin my college applications?

When applying to college, I asked my high school history teacher to write a letter of recommendation for me. Our school had a system in place where the teachers would submit letters through an online portal. The student cannot view the letter until after submission, and only then if they request a copy.

Months after submitting my applications I needed to use this letter for scholarships and so I requested a copy. To my shock, I saw that my teacher had, in fact, used my older sister’s name repeatedly throughout the letter, instead of my own. All of the facts listed were the same, we both were 4.0 students, both class president, and both had this teacher for the same AP class, just two years apart!

I got rejected or waitlisted by every school I applied to. It has been almost a decade now and I still wonder. How bad of a mistake was this? Is this enough to reject an applicant on its own? Would it be worse in a professional context, rather than academic?

Nah, they’d almost certainly just assume the teacher sent the wrong letter. I doubt it was a major factor in your applications.

Professionally it might be a little weirder, although there too you’d generally assume the teacher messed up. (Although in most industries, written letters of recommendation for jobs aren’t much of a thing anyway, especially from high school teachers.)

5. Explaining why I’m leaving a job after 15 years

I’m struggling with how to best explain my decision to leave a company after 15 years of employment. The job had run its course and I was not making the money I should have after being there that long. I don’t want to appear negative or money hungry at an upcoming interview.

First, it’s not money-hungry to believe you should be earning more. But you’ve been there 15 years! You don’t even need to mention money; you can simply say, “I’ve been here 15 years and I’m ready to take on something new.” Everyone will get that. It’s one of the easiest answers to give and to understand.

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

1. Should I accept my employee just isn’t well suited to a task?

We are a small team of very silo-ed job types. Twice a year, for about a week each time, we have a meeting with lots of external stakeholders to review content for a textbook. The stakeholders are all subject matter experts (SMEs) and are focused on accuracy, completeness, etc. One of the roles in the review sessions is to serve as the note taker, capturing every edit the group of SMEs comes up with. This note taker is not an SME. There are a couple internal staff roles to whom this note taking has typically fallen. These are individuals who are not intimately involved with the crafting of content; they basically just come in and serve as the note taker these few times of year. I was one such person when I started in the role 10 years ago and I continue to do so now (although I am now in a leadership role).

We hired someone in late 2021 (Callie) to step into my previous role and now, based on tradition, she serves in the note taker role when needed. The problem is Callie is not good at this task. She has a hard time following along with the conversation, often needs one of the SMEs in the room to explain to her where the edit is to be made, requires a lot of time to ensure she gets the change correct, misses edits, etc. I have coached her on how to do this task better. Various SMEs have coached her on how to be better. SMEs’ patience often starts to run thin with her as a review session proceeds, most of all from the book’s managing editor, Paul.

Because this falls firmly in the “other duties as assigned” realm of her job description, how much can or should I focus on fixing this with Callie? Part of me feels like I should cut my losses and figure out an alternative for this task (for what it’s worth, an alternative will not be easy to come by for reasons that aren’t worth getting into here). The other part of me feels like it’s not unreasonable to hold her feet to the fire because the fact is this is a critical task and completing it doesn’t require anything that falls outside the realm of reasonable expectations.

A complicating factor that I know I need to ignore but just can’t — Paul (whose patience with Callie runs thin very quickly) is desperate for Callie to be better, as the clean-up work of things she misses/gets wrong often falls to him, but he also feels strongly that Callie isn’t putting in the effort to get better and that taking the task from her would reward her for poor performance. I don’t fully disagree with Paul, but also know that not every person is suited to every task. Help?

If she struggles to follow the conversation, she’s not going to be an effective note-taker, no matter how much you coach her on taking notes. If these meetings were more frequent, she might be able to get better over time, but twice a year? It’s unlikely to happen.

The big question I had reading your letters was: how’s the rest of Callie’s work? The issues you described — struggling to follow the conversation, missing edits, needing a lot of hand-holding on how to make changes — sound like they might speak to problems with her regular work too, unless it’s wildly different from what’s expected of her on these meeting days, so I’d want you to take a look at that. But if the rest of her work is great, stop making her struggle with something she’s bad at — and which isn’t working anyway, and which is taking up lots of time from other people to fix things for her, and where her work is frustrating everyone else — and find another solution. That’s not “rewarding her for poor performance” (and that’s a weirdly punitive way for Paul to look at it); it’s recognizing that she’s not the right person for this specific task.

2. Talking on a cell phone at lunch

Cell phone etiquette has obviously changed over the years, but I have always operated under the general understanding that if your phone call can be heard by others, then you shouldn’t be having it. (When I dissect that belief, I’m not entirely sure I can precisely pinpoint why it’s there, to be honest, but it’s there!)

I work in a very small office with, on most days, only three-five people working in the same space. I have a coworker who almost always eats alone after everyone else has finished and always talks on her cell phone while she’s eating. She is not particularly loud, but because the office is small, it is possible to hear the entire conversation. This is no different than when we all sit down to eat lunch together: people talk loudly and others can hear. But I’m having trouble not being annoyed at the situation involving a cell phone! Am I holding on to an old belief here for no reason?

Yes, I think so! It’s true that it’s rude to have a loud cell phone conversation in an otherwise quiet space, and sometimes it’s rude to have one at all in a space where people don’t expect phone conversations to be happening at all. But an office is usually a place where people will periodically be on the phone; there’s no expectation that it will be a phone-free zone (usually the opposite, in fact). I’m guessing you wouldn’t be as bothered if it were a work-related call; it’s something about it being personal that’s feeling off. But unless the norm of your office is “we all work in silence and we’re expected to go into a private space for calls,” I wouldn’t call this particularly rude.

3. Internship’s dress code is painfully vague

I just received the full dress code for my internship that starts in a week, and I’m thinking through how to navigate it.

It reads as follows: “The firm has adopted ‘business casual’ and ‘client appropriate’ as the everyday minimum dress standard, including Fridays. The term ‘business casual’ is not clearly defined in the community, nor is there general agreement regarding its meaning. The operative goal is to choose attire that will promote, rather than detract from, the firm’s image of professionalism, sophistication, and dedication to our clients.”

I’m struggling with the lack of a “not allowed” list. At past business casual jobs, most employers have include a “not allowed” list in their dress codes, e.g no open-toed shoes, no visible tattoos, etc. Would it be gauche to follow up and just ask point blank for such a list? The reason I ask is that I do have visible (not offensive) tattoos, and I’m game to cover them with makeup and/or longer clothing, but would prefer not to if I don’t have to. Do you have thoughts/advice on how to approach this?

That is a confusing dress code, although you’ll probably have a much better sense once you start and can see how most people dress. Meanwhile, though, since what you’re wondering about is tattoos specifically, why not ask them about tattoos specifically? They may not have a “not allowed” list anyway — in fact, it sounds like they don’t, although someone would probably talk you through the do’s and don’ts if you asked. But it sounds like you have one specific thing you’re really wondering about, so ask about that one specific thing! It’s fine to say, “I wasn’t sure from what I read about the dress code if visible tattoos are okay. I have tattoos on my arms (or wherever). Should I plan to cover them?”

Alternately, you can cover them your first day and get more of the lay of the land then, or just ask someone in person at that point.

4. Should we be able to see how much PTO my boss really has?

I am new to the world of PTO and can’t seem to keep enough to do anything with my life. I work in a remote office, not the corporate headquarters, so we get forgotten about often. It seems like my manager always has ample PTO to take three-week vacations in addition to monthly requested days off while us little people are nickled and dimed for everything. As her director is not on site, it makes for an easy scam situation and I (and the rest of the team) are suspicious of her actions. I have no proof, but is submission of PTO a private matter? Or is there a record that should be available to us to ensure the PTO time she tells us matches her approved requests with her director? It’s pretty uncomfy.

No, you don’t typically have access to your boss’s PTO records. It’s also possible she has more PTO than you and your coworkers do (it’s not uncommon for people to get more PTO if they’ve been there longer or are in more senior positions). Or she could be scamming your company, who knows. One way to bring it to her boss’s attention is to have a plausible need to contact her boss about a work problem where you can mention, “Since Jane has been out for the last two weeks, we didn’t know who to go to about this…”

5. Can my resume say “Mage’s Guild” if I am a non-player character?

If my job was NPC who only says “They say there have been unearthly noises coming from the mage’s guild on nights when the moon is full,” can I just put “Mage’s Guild” on my resume?

I needed Twitter to give me context for this, but now that they have, the answer is no. You don’t work for the Mage’s Guild! You’re just a person saying you’ve heard there are problems there.

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

1. Does being salaried just mean I work a ton of overtime with no extra pay?

My position became salaried a while back and, while I understand the general idea of it (no overtime compensation), I’m wondering how working overtime hours should or does function in the real world sense.

For example, I’m compensated based on a 40-hour work week. For a variety of reasons, my work week is routinely more than that and in the last few months has ballooned into approximately 48-55 with evenings and even a weekend day tossed in. It’s a workload and resources thing and, yes, my boss and I have discussed the non-sustainability of this schedule.

Now, I am afforded flexibility in my day. If I need to come in late due to a personal reason (doctor appointment, family health issues, etc.) or need to leave for a brief time during the day to deal with an aging parent issue and then come back, there’s no pushback. But my workweek is still over the 40 hours.

Does being salaried mean I just have to eat all this extra time and oh well? When I was hourly, obviously I got overtime pay or could take that equivalent time off. Now that I’m salaried, am I just … screwed? I work 50 hours a week, they get all that extra work, and if I ever want a day off I have to use a PTO day? So they get a lot of extra hours and days beyond a 40-hour, five-day work week and I get no extra compensation on my end? I love the flexibility when I have to use it but it’s not like I’m “stealing” that time and not making it up (and then some). So how is this supposed to work?

Yes, being salaried (or more to the point, exempt) is often a scam. It’s exactly what you wrote: you can end up working tons of hours with no additional compensation. In return, you get some flexibility. Depending on how that balances out, it’s very often not worth the trade-off. What’s more, we’ve somehow convinced people that being salaried is better and more prestigious! That’s the real scam.

That said, you can try setting some limits with your boss — saying that due to (fill in the blank — family commitments, exhaustion, health reasons, whatever you decide on), you won’t be available to continue working these same hours so you want to talk about how to prioritize. That doesn’t work every time, but it works more than you might think. (Big caveat: if you’re in a field where it’s widely understood that the whole industry’s norm is to work a ton of hours — typically although not always in exchange for high pay — think big law — this won’t work.)

Read more:
is being salaried a scam?

2. I got chastised for intervening with a friend’s hiring efforts

A colleague (Ben) just got promoted and will be hiring his own replacement. We work closely together, but I am not his direct report or in his department. Ben is one of the best colleagues I have ever worked with, and we are personal friends as well (we travel to see each other outside of work, we were at each other’s weddings, etc.).

I was nervous about finding someone who would do as good a job as Ben did and was eager to try to help, but I helped in the worst way possible. We had a detailed conversation about what the role would require, and afterwards I thought I knew some other folks at the company would be interested in applying. I told them about the opportunity and gave them advice about the role as I understood it. There wasn’t yet a formal posting for the role or a job description; however, the fact that Ben was being promoted was public knowledge, as was that there’d be a backfill.

This turned out to be a pretty big mistake. I felt instinctively “off” about it after I did it, and a couple days later I got pulled into a meeting with Ben and my manager. Ben told me that what I’d done was a major overstep and was a big issue for him; the conversations we’d had were expected to be private and I was giving advice I should not have been giving, which was not entirely correct, to people who shouldn’t have heard it yet. My manager also made it clear it was not acceptable and not something that could be repeated. I apologized immediately, told them all the details of the conversations I’d had, and after the conversation went over with my manager exactly what the problems were and reiterated my apology. I intend to apologize privately to Ben also, between friends.

In retrospect, I don’t know what I was thinking. I got way ahead of myself and made an error in judgment; I can see why they were upset. But I did not realize it was as serious a screw-up as it was, and I’m not sure where to go from here. I’ve rarely gotten feedback this negative in my career. I have no other discipline issues and have never had one this serious before. I’m good at my job and have never had a bad review. HR was not on the call, but they were on an email following the meeting where Abe summarized what I was to not do, and I responded by reiterating my apology and making it clear I understood.

I’m afraid I can’t recover reputationally. I want to keep my job, and more importantly, I worry I’ve jeopardized a friendship. How can I gauge how big a deal this is going forward? How can I work to repair the breach of trust with my colleagues? Finally, given that I made the mistake, what else should I have done — I think I should have told my manager sooner?

I think you will be fine! This stuff happens, it’s been addressed, and you immediately took responsibility for it, apologized, made it clear you understood, and said you won’t let it happen again. You weren’t doing anything nefarious; you were trying to help and just overstepped. It’s mortifying to get dressed down like that, but one incident like this against the backdrop of generally having good judgment and being conscientious is not going to follow you around forever. (And the intensity of your current mortification tells me that you are someone who’s generally conscientious; people who aren’t don’t respond like this.) It’s likely that two months from now, no one is going to be thinking about this much anymore, including you.

As for what you should have done, ideally you would have told Ben and your manager about it as soon as you started feeling off about those conversations, framed as, “I think I messed up. I thought it was okay to do X, but in retrospect I don’t think I should have because of Y, so I want to let you know what I said and to who, in case there’s any damage control we need to do.”

3. My coworker won’t share a file we both use

I work with, but am not the boss of, our department’s administrative assistant. We have worked together for two years, started around the same time.

The previous administrative assistant maintained a shared file of POs and invoices so we could all access them. I have asked the current assistant to maintain that shared file, but she just created a personal file that she maintains for herself. She has been off a little more regularly this year (vacations, sickness, surgery, bereavement, etc). When she isn’t in, I am her backup and people come to me with the questions they would normally ask her and without access to the file, it isn’t as simple to answer. This past Friday I asked her to share it before she went on a week-long vacation (early in the day, well before the time she was leaving) and her answer was no and that I should be keeping my own file on the same information. I said no, she keeps the file and if she didn’t share it with me then I wouldn’t be answering any questions while she is off all this week.

I have other responsibilities and keeping a separate file seems ridiculous to me, and it was shared previously. But am I wrong? Should I keep my own file? Or should I insist when she returns that she makes the file shared? I may have to get our boss involved. We are usually on friendly terms and while she can be a brat with others in the department, she is normally fine with me (there have been a few times that she has gone silent on me but I have brushed it off). Do I need to keep our relationship just professional and not be friends? We usually work well together and usually have someone I consider to be a friend where I work. Is there too much of a gulf between our roles to be friends as well as colleagues? I am at a loss of what I need to do in this situation and need some guidance.

You should absolutely tell her she needs to keep the file shared. You’re responsible for being her backup, which means you could need access to that file without much notice. It was shared in the past and it needs to be shared now. If she refuses, then yes, you need to take this to your boss. Your colleague is refusing an obvious and necessary workflow and making part of your job impossible.

Whether or not you need to move to a more strictly professional relationship with her is up to you. If you’re happy to stay friendly with someone who periodically goes silent and flatly refuses work requests, have it at! That sounds loaded, like obviously the answer is that you shouldn’t, but I mean that — it’s really just what you’re comfortable with. But don’t let a desire to be friends deter you from bringing your boss into this. Your boss would want to know.

4. When your mom is your only reference

My daughter is applying for full-time jobs. Right now her experience on her resume includes two part-time jobs that are vastly different skill sets. One is hands-on (think along the lines of camp counselor, birthday party leader) and the other is an office job, with admin duties.

The issue is that I am her reference for the job with the admin duties. She has been working here part-time through college and since she graduated. When she applied for the other job, (which is suited to young college-aged people and is not a career job), she listed me as her reference. We have different last names. There is no one else here who could be the reference for her. When they emailed me for a reference, I asked if they would call me. They did and I explained that I wanted to let them know I was her mother, because she didn’t want to mislead them and did not know how to get that across on her reference list. I gave them factual info about her duties, hours, and reliability. Now that she is looking for a more career oriented job, how do we handle this?

Yeah, you can’t really be a reference as her mom. You might be entirely willing to list off all her weaknesses as objectively as possible (my mom sure would; for all I know she’s doing it right now without being asked), but reference-checkers are going to assume that you’re biased and can’t speak in a reliable way to what she’s like an employee.

Which leaves her with the problem of what to do with a reference for her one and only office job! The best thing she can do is to be very up-front about it. She should only offer up references for non-you jobs and if someone asks for a reference for the office job, she should say (without any evasion or defensiveness), “My manager for that job was my mother, so I figured you probably don’t want to use her as a reference — although I’m happy to put you in touch with her if you do.”

Lots of people starting out don’t have office job references; people checking references for very entry-jobs will be used to that. (That said, if she has the opportunity to get more office-y references, even if it’s just volunteering or temping, she should do it.)

5. How to remind employees of policies when they break them

My organization provides therapy to children with disabilities. Our field requires extensive compliance and documentation to ensure fidelity with clinical and operational procedures. All employees sign off on the company employee handbook at the start of their employment. How can I best reiterate policies and procedures to employees without feeling like I am repeatedly throwing the handbook at them? For example, when an employee incorrectly requests time off, I usually snip the handbook policy and offer alternative pathways to ensure compliance from all parties. Is this overkill?

Interestingly, the subject line of your email to me was “if you sign the handbook, are you bound by it?” and that’s a different question than what your letter is asking — which I mention because I think that not recognizing that is muddying your thinking. Your employees are bound by the policies in your handbook whether or not they sign it — but that doesn’t mean that everyone will read it thoroughly or, especially, retain what they read there.

People are going to forget specific policies or just get things wrong. When that happens, sending them a copy of the policy is a pretty stiff/soulless way to handle it. Just talk to them! Remind them of the policy and, to the extent that you can, explain why that’s the policy. That’s more likely to help it stick in their head, and it’s better for people’s morale to feel like they’re interacting with a human who understands they may have been confused or not not have fully understood how the policy should have played out in their particular situation.