Ask a Manager

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

1. Do my full-time coworkers think I’m a lady of leisure because I work part-time?

I work part-time at an elite private high school that my oldest child attends. How our very middle-class family ended up with a kid at this school is a long story, but please know it was a necessary last resort for my kid’s mental health.

Very luckily, just before school started, a part-time receptionist position opened up at the school and I practically ran to apply, as it comes with a partial tuition remission. I was nervous about this school. I thought it might be stuffy and elitist. I was so happy to discover this to not be true at all! My kid is happy at the school and I love working there! It’s only two days a week.

At work, I make sure I go above and beyond to be a top notch receptionist. I recently heard feedback from a coworker that my name came up in a meeting of the school administration about what a great hire I was and what an asset I’ve become to the front office.

The only problem is that there are a lot of affluent parents and I think some of my coworkers assume I am one of them. Every Tuesday, before I leave for the week, several people wave to me and say, “Enjoy your LONNNNNNNNG weekend!” or “Gosh, I wish it was MY Friday too.” At first I just laughed it off, but it’s been almost a year, and it’s every week. It’s getting old.

Do they think I’m this woman of leisure? If it matters, my clothes are from Old Navy and Target and my car is a not-fancy station wagon that’s older than my kid! On the days I’m not here, I’m taking care of a child with intensive medical needs, tutoring my oldest so she can keep up at school, cooking, cleaning, driving (my husband travels and is gone the majority of each week) and at night after my kids are in bed, I do freelance work. I average about 4-5 hours of sleep a night. I work HARD. To me, my weekend is the two days I’m at the school! They are the quietest, most relaxing days I have. I get to sit down!

I know I’m taking it too personally, right? Who cares what these people think? I guess I just don’t get why people would say something like that to someone they don’t really know? How about “Have a good week!” and leave it at that? After a year, would you snap and say something?

I think you’re reading too much into it! Maybe they think you’re a lady of leisure, or maybe they don’t. But either way, their comments almost certainly aren’t meant to be pointed barbs about the luxurious lifestyle they imagine you have. The comments sound more akin to hackneyed office commentary like “is it Friday yet?” or “another day in paradise!” — the cliche phrases that get thrown around every office that are really just a way of saying “ugh, work, amirite.”

But if it really bothers you, one option is to share more about your life with your colleagues — since if they get to know you better, they might still make the comments but you’ll probably be less likely to read an “enjoy your riches” subtext into them. But you could also just laugh and say, “Yeah, right. It’s way more relaxing here than at home.” (Although writing that last one out, I’m second-guessing it; you don’t want to sound like you’re minimizing their own jobs compared to your home responsibilities, particularly in a cultural context where moms who work often feel judged by moms who don’t and vice versa.)

2. Jobs with no negotiation and a huge salary range

I recently came across a job listing that stated they would be using a salary algorithm to determine compensation and would not be allowing any negotiation. I found this a little odd, especially since the range given for the position was quite large ($145,000-$225,000). The organization gives signs of valuing equity and inclusion (generous PTO and six months paid parental leave, explicit professional development benefits outlined in the job posting), so it feels like this is their attempt to ensure all applicants get treated fairly in determining compensation. Am I right that this is a little off-base, especially since they weren’t clear what variables are fed to the algorithm? Or is this the way all jobs should be looking to make salary negotiations more fair?

I have no problem with not allowing negotiation if they’re clear up-front about what a job pays and the initial posting is both accurate and thorough; people can then decide whether or not they’re interested in applying.

But a range this big? Whether negotiation is possible or not, they need to explain what skills and experience would get you placed where in that range (and the larger the range, the more important that is). Clearly they know because they’ve programmed their algorithm with it. Telling people, “Our offer will be take-it-or-leave-it and, by the way it could fall anywhere within an $80,000 spread” is BS — and a good way to make a lot of candidates question whether they want to invest time in interviewing. (If they tell you where you would fall in their range during the first phone screen, I’m less annoyed, but it’s still not good practice.)

3. Covid precautions at a client dinner

I am a high-performing WFH employee at a very small company. I take more Covid precautions in my daily life than anyone else at this company (I technically am high-risk but with a very common condition). When the team gets together, I wear a mask, and the rest of the team has seen this but never commented. In a few weeks, a client is coming to town and a few members of my team are taking them out to dinner. Client management like this isn’t in the scope of my work, but I anticipate being included in this invite.

I do not want to go and want to explain that any precautions I would take at this dinner (mask when not eating, portable air purifier) would look “weird” and run counter to the dinner’s goal of soothing and retaining clients. Is there a way for me to communicate this clearly without making it a “big deal” in such a small company? (We do not have a formal HR department.) I have a yearly review scheduled for the same week and don’t want this to occupy mindshare.

“Because I’m high-risk for Covid, I’d have to mask and bring a portable air purifier. From a client relations perspective, my sense is it would be better for me to sit this one out so that my precautions aren’t the focus.”

Also, if you’d feel safer not going even if they want you to come despite this warning, then I’d skip that and just say that because you’re high-risk, you’re avoiding indoor dining with large groups (if that’s true).

4. My boss told me not leave documents out — is her reason correct?

My boss has me filing work order documents, I left two folders on my desk to work on the next day. When I came in the next morning, she told me that I needed to make sure to put the folders away always, and not keep them on my desk because if we got randomly audited she would get in trouble.

I don’t know if this is true or she used it as an excuse to have me keep the files in the drawers. I would just like to know if we would get in trouble if we were suddenly randomly audited and work order files were found outside of the cabinet.

Sure, depending on the contents of the documents and if they’re confidential, it’s possible that an audit could take issue with them being left in the open. It’s also possible that your boss just doesn’t like documents left out and is borrowing the authority of the auditor rather than owning her preference, who knows.

More to the point, though, it doesn’t really matter! If your boss asks you to store documents a certain way, you should store them that way. Unless your boss is asking something unreasonable or unrealistic, you generally need to do your job the way she asks you to. (That doesn’t mean there’s no room for pushback if you have a reason for wanting to do it differently. But ultimately it’s her call.)

5. Is it legal not to pay someone if HR’s software fails?

A weird situation, and for legal context all of this is happening at a university in Massachusetts. I’m just so angry, and I can’t tell if I have a right to be angry or if HR is correct.

We hired a student in May, but HR’s software made a mistake and only hired her for September. The student, bless her heart, didn’t tell us about this until three pay periods had passed, and we, of course, emailed HR to ask them to fix this. They, in their “wisdom,” hired her and put her on the normal pay period as she had just missed the cutoff, so she will now have not been paid for two months.

I have been emailing back and forth with HR asking them to pay her sooner than the normal payroll, or make her whole beyond what she is owed, but they keep insisting that because she was only hired at the official time there is no reason to. I say, however, that if their software makes a mistake that does not mean that she was not hired, and she is owed her money as soon as possible and with restitution.

Honestly, I am going to continue to suggest to the student that she work with her union to file a wage complaint, but am I crazy? Does a software mistake on HR’s part mean that this student was never “hired” and therefore does not need to be paid as if HR made a mistake?

You are right and HR is wrong. Employers are legally required to pay employees within specific time periods set out by state law, and “our software messed it up” doesn’t release them from that obligation. Here’s what Massachusetts’s pay deadlines are.

Caveat: government sometimes excludes themselves from the employment rules they lay out for everyone else, so if this is a public university you’d need to check whether they’re exempt from this (although I doubt they are). Either way, I suggest saying to HR, “State law requires us to pay wages owed within X days of the pay period ending. She’d be within her rights to file a wage complaint with the state if we don’t comply with the law.”

Also, if you’ve been dealing with the same HR person through all of this, consider escalating it over their head.

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

1. I don’t see the point of taking PTO

I work a customer-service-heavy role, and my manager has been wonderful about encouraging us to take PTO if we’re feeling burnt out. Except … I don’t see the point. Yes, I’m burnt out from work, but taking time off work doesn’t magically make all my issues go away: I still have to cope with a special needs dog, I can’t “do anything” because my partner works nights and I either have to pick up the pieces for everything he can’t do or don’t want to disturb him while he’s sleeping, I don’t have enough money to take a vacation, solo or not (and even if I did, who will get groceries and take the dog to the vet while I’m gone?), and I’ll come back to everything being worse because my out-of-office messages aren’t read and customers/team members are wondering why no one has replied to them (yes, this has happened before). PTO doesn’t magically make anything else in my life go away and, if anything, it winds up making worse when I get back. I’ll take a day for doctor’s appointments or similar when there’s a chance I won’t actually get work done, but I just don’t see the point in taking more days than I “need” to. Why should I bother taking it in the first place if I’m not actually going to end up relaxed and recharged?

(For what it’s worth, I don’t think it’s an inherent problem with my life/job; it just doesn’t actually make sense for me to take time off.)

For starters, all those days of PTO that you don’t use are days you’re working for free for your company. Your salary is calculated on the assumption that you’ll work X weeks a year and have Y weeks off. Are you willing to work multiple weeks for free each year? Right now you are.

Of the reasons you listed not taking time off (the dog, the sleeping partner, the lack of money for a vacation, etc.), all of them are true of the weekends too, except for the time off making your workload worse when you return. But you still presumably take and enjoy your weekends, right? Or at least aren’t voluntarily spending them working when no one expects you to? That means the biggest issue — and the one you can potentially change the easiest — is the workload problem. So you should raise that with your boss! You said she encourages you to take PTO so she’d probably be receptive to hearing, “I find myself not taking time off because I always come back to a mess, like (examples). Can you help me figure out how to take PTO without customers and team members getting upset that no one has helped them while I’m gone?” Your boss should be able to find solutions to this — maybe it’s having your email forwarded to someone rather than using an out-of-office message, maybe it’s her reassuring you that you don’t need to care if people complain, maybe it’s hiring a temp, who knows. But talk to her because this is a work problem that should have a work solution.

The rest of it is a mental framing problem, in that you need to see days off as valuable even when you’re not doing anything big with them. There’s value in having time to lounge around and read, or binge bad movies, or build a tree house for your dog, or whatever it is you like to do to recharge. You don’t need to take a capital V Vacation to make time off valuable. If a one- or two-week stretch of that sounds like too much (although I take all of December off every year and I don’t do a damn thing and it’s glorious), start by trying some three-day and four-day weekends, and practice relaxing and doing nothing.

Do not work for free for your company.

2. How do I explain my black eye on Zoom calls?

A couple of days ago, I was walking my normally well-behaved large dogs when another dog charged them, unprovoked, and they tripped me, and I ended up hitting the sidewalk hard. Thankfully the other owner ran to get my partner (I was a block away from home) and my partner took me to the ER. I have a concussion, a small fracture in my rib, and various other bruises and bumps. But what is most noticeable is my black eye. I hit my head just above my eyebrow and my eye looks like someone drew on me with a purple sharpie, and since I’m very pale, it’s not going away soon.

I took a few days off from work and screens but since I primarily work from home and have a bunch of Zoom meetings backed up, I’m back at it on a limited basis. My team was shocked when they saw my face, but they have all been supportive and said it’s fine and they’ll get used to it. My problem is outsiders! Most of my meetings are on camera, and I feel weird saying I want to be off camera because of a face injury (sounds worse than it is) but then if I’m on camera it is very distracting and I can feel people staring.

An added complication is that some of the organizations I meet with support people who have experienced domestic violence, and I look like a poster child for getting punched in the face. (In my case the assailant was the sidewalk, but from the way I look you wouldn’t know that.) So my look is very triggering. In a couple of days, I could probably use some makeup on it, but it’s too tender for that right now. I just need an easy way to explain away this massive black eye that doesn’t sound dismissive.

Oh no, I’m sorry!

The easiest way to handle this is to just stay off-camera. Don’t make a big deal of it. Just say something like, “I’m recovering from being sick so my camera’s off today” or “long story, but I’m going to leave my camera off today.” Be matter-of-fact about it, as if it’s not a big deal because it’s not, and it’ll be fine.

3. My friend posts screeds on social media complaining about being rejected for jobs

I have a friend who is neurospicy and extremely brilliant, and is having trouble finding work. Which is a thing for a lot of us right now, for sure.

The trouble is, my friend takes every post-interview rejection so personally, that they will screed on social media about how they were “lied to” and “deceived” and grumble about “blasting them on Glassdoor” to “get even.”

I’ve used all of the reasonable points I’ve seen you make — maybe the firm promoted from within, maybe the position was put on hold — but my friend just can’t hear any of it, due to the panic they feel over not having a stable income at the moment. My concern is, they are posting this on their socials under their own name, and I’m worried it will harm their job prospects. Any advice?

Rather than try to make them see reason about the rejections themselves (you’ve tried, it’s not working), shift your focus to the fact that they’re shooting themselves in the foot: “You know, employers google candidates, and an employer who sees you talking about other employers this way will be reluctant to interview you. You’re hurting your job search by posting this stuff.”

But also … say it once and then wash your hands of it. It’s a kindness to talk to a friend when you see them self-sabotaging, but after that, assume your friend is an adult who’s going to do whatever they’re going to do. It’s a favor to flag it once, but then drop it. It’s not your job to fix this, and it won’t be good for you or for the friendship if you get too invested in trying to make them see it the way you do.

4. My boss didn’t want me answering urgent calls in meetings

Years ago, I worked for a healthcare third party that was integral but adjacent to the functioning of hospitals. Every few months we received an urgent call from one of our hospital customers (emergencies important to hospital functioning but not to patient safety). Since our days were filled with (Zoom) meetings with our other clients, from time to time the two would intersect. If this happened, my strategy was to apologize and excuse myself from my ongoing meeting, triage the message/set up a meeting with the client during my next opening, and the return to my current call. In total, this took me out of an hour-long meeting for 2-3 minutes. At the time, I felt this was a justified response. The meetings they interrupted were open Q&A sessions that often didn’t go the full hour and were not uncommon to reschedule due to small conflicts on the client or my side.

My boss, however, disagreed and said that when we were in a meeting, we owed the people in that meeting our undivided attention (outside of an immediate emergency like a fire or a family/friend/loved-one crisis) and phone calls should go to voicemail. He told me that any calling client would not be left to worry; if the initial call did not go through, it would be routed to a backup and then, if not answered, the backup’s backup, and so forth. There would always be someone to eventually pick up the phone.

Did my boss have the better method to handle urgent requests during meetings? Is total, undivided, uninterrupted attention reasonable for every meeting? I did watch him a bit during meetings we were both in, and he was pretty consistent in following his own rules, even during the totally optional and silly divisional game night.

I should also note that the rerouting of calls wasn’t always smooth. Often backups would prioritize their own client work doing no/only an abbreviated triage. Sometimes the person handling rerouting wouldn’t contact the backups but just me again via a different method (this happened once when I couldn’t answer … because I was on a separate emergency call). I learned my triage method from shadowing other, experienced coworkers during training. When should a company reiterate, retrain, or rewrite their policy if it conflicts with what’s practiced?

This is the kind of thing that’s really your boss’s call. You can try it the way that makes sense to you, but once your boss tells you “no, I want you to do it this other way,” you’ve got to do it his way. I can’t say from the outside whether he was right or not; it depends on all sorts of things I don’t know — but ultimately it doesn’t really matter because it’s his prerogative to decide.

However if you were seeing problems doing it his way, you absolutely should make sure he has the same information you do. So for example, you could have said, “My concern with letting calls go to the backups is that the backups don’t always answer. Twice last month customers with emergencies got shuffled from backup to backup and never reached anyone. If I shouldn’t excuse myself from meetings to take calls, can we do something to ensure the backups are picking up more reliably?”