Ask a Manager

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

1. I haven’t told my employer I don’t have a car

I’ve been working in a new job as an assistant for a few months. Due to a few different circumstances, I don’t have a car, but recently, I found a coworker who I can carpool with. However, my employer has asked me a few times to run errands for him. In order to run these errands, I’ve been using Uber and just swallowing the cost.

Today I was asked to do an errand, but was unable to do it due to my carpool situation. As a result, this drew another employee away from the office. Later, he expressed that I needed to bring my car in for occasional errands.

Is it appropriate for me to mention my transportation situation? They just assumed that I have a car, and never asked me; I also don’t have to do it very often. But I don’t want that to put my job at risk in any way.

You have to explain that you don’t have a car! You absolutely shouldn’t be using Uber and paying for it yourself and letting them believe you have a car (which will just lead to more of these requests). It’s going to be weirder now than it should be because when your colleague asked you to bring your car in, you didn’t take the opportunity to say right then, “Actually, I don’t have a car.” But you still need to say it! Go talk to your manager and say, “I wanted to mention to you that I don’t don’t have a car. I used Uber the few other times you asked me to run errands, not realizing it would be a regular thing, but since it sounds like it will be, I wanted to mention it. I’d be glad to take a cab when we need errands run if I can expense it, but I’m not sure you’d want me to do that.”

It really shouldn’t put your job at risk since you say the need is only occasional. (I mean, it shouldn’t put it at risk regardless because if a car was a job requirement, they should have told you that up-front, but you especially shouldn’t need to worry about it in this case.)

Read an update to this letter here.

2. I’ve learned that my mentee isn’t a very good person

I recently left a manager job where my duties included hiring recent college graduates and training them in my field (there’s a shortage of talent in my field in the city I live in). One guy really took to the job, and I think he could have a bright future in our industry. He eventually got a much better job somewhere else, and I wished him well and offered to continue being a mentor to him.

When he worked for me, I got the sense in one-on-one chats that he was kind of arrogant and tended to be negative and critical in his judgments of other people. The quality of his work was good, though, and he was a good collaborator who everyone liked working with, so other than mentioning it as an area to work on, I didn’t have to take any other action as his manager.

Now that neither of us works for the company anymore, I’ve hung out with him several times with other former coworkers. I think he feels he can let the “mask” slip now that we don’t work together anymore, and frankly, I’m starting to think he’s a horrible person. He seems to openly despise anyone he feels isn’t as smart as he is, and is vehemently anti-religion, so will spend time spewing invective about many of our former coworkers (most of whom are perfectly nice, normal people). This is a really ugly side of him and not something I want to be around.

If this happened with someone I just knew socially, I would just stop hanging out with him. I know that he sees me as a mentor and looks up to me, though. If someone called me for a reference, I think it would be appropriate for me to keep my comments to what I knew about what he’s like to work with, not how he is as a person. Knowing what I know now, though, I wouldn’t hire him to work for me again – and I’d be hesitant to do much to introduce him to my pretty substantial network of industry contacts. Do I owe it to him to talk to him about this?

I don’t think you owe it to him, and if you’d prefer to just distance yourself, I think that’s fine. But I also think that you’d be doing him a service if you did choose to say something. (Ideally, it could have been in the moment when he made those comments, but there’s no reason you can’t do it now.)

Frankly, I also think it would be reasonable to factor this into future references. The knowledge you gained of him after you stopped working together is perfectly fair game for references; you’re not obligated to endorse someone who you now think is an awful person. But even leaving that aside, while you worked together you observed that he was “arrogant and tended to be negative and critical in his judgments of other people.” That’s relevant information that most reference-checkers would want to hear (along with the fact that the quality of his work was good — and then let them decide how much to weigh each factor). So if you think he’s likely to provide your name as a reference, I’d definitely err on the side of talking with him and sharing your concerns.

Read an update to this letter here.

3. Fired employee keeps getting lots of personal email at his old work account

After a member of our team was fired, I was given the task of managing his projects. Since a big chunk of that is communicating with customers, I took over his old email mailbox and monitor it for correspondence that I might need to answer.

Here’s the thing. He apparently used this email for personal reasons too– I keep getting emails from his lawyer, family members, doctors, accountant, plaintiffs in legal cases, and exes suing for child support. This despite having an auto-reply saying “this email account is no longer active”– I still get repeated pings from the same people, with increasing urgency.

This a) is super awkward and makes me feel like a creepy voyeur even if the only thing I read is the teaser line from Outlook, and b) kinda makes me want to reply to some of these to let them know that he doesn’t have access to it and other people do, and maybe send them his forwarding address or forward it to him. I mean, there are HIPAA violations, violations of lawyer confidentiality, etc. Plus I don’t bear the guy any ill will and feel like it might be a problem that he’s missing these. My boss does bear the guy ill will, so if I ask he’ll say don’t bother, but he won’t care either way. What would you do?

I’d write back and say “Joe no longer works here, so please stop sending emails to this address.” Alternately, if it’s not a huge pain, I might send the email from your own address so they know it’s not just Joe pretending not to work there in order to avoid his exes.

I don’t think I’d get into providing his new address (unless you have his permission) or forwarding him the messages.

Also, is there any legitimately work-related email coming into that account still? If not, you might just have the whole account turned off, so that people who email it get a bounce message saying that their email was undeliverable (and so you don’t have to sort through these messages anymore).

4. My boss asked me what my goals are, and I have no idea

My boss asked me today to write down some professional goals for furthering my career, and I am totally stuck. I currently work as a program coordinator for a nonprofit (and I love it), but the position is temporary and will only be for the next year. Since I am new to the workforce, my boss really wants to mentor me and help me along … which is awesome, but I don’t know what I should want to improve on. I’ve been working here for a year and have never really had a performance review, so besides what can be achieved through self-reflection, I don’t know what/if benchmarks I’m not reaching. Any direction on this would be greatly appreciated!

Actually, this is a great thing to discuss with your boss in response to his request. You could say something like this: “Since I’m at the start of my career, I feel like I don’t yet have a good handle on what goals for myself at this stage might look like. I’d love your guidance on what I should be thinking about since I’m not sure where to even start, but I like the idea of doing some work to figure it out.” (That last part is there so that it’s clear you’re not just punting, but genuinely asking for advice.)

Also, keep in mind that this kind of thing isn’t necessarily about what benchmarks you’re not currently reaching. That could be part of it, but don’t limit yourself to thinking of deficiencies; think about strengths you’d like to build too, and what kind of professional path you’d like to set yourself up to follow.

5. Taking dessert home when someone treats you to lunch

When a friend treats me to lunch at a restaurant, is it proper to order a dessert to take home, when I’m full and cannot eat it there?

I don’t think this is a work question, but I’ll answer it anyway: No, that would be rude. Your friend invited you to share a meal with her; it wasn’t an offer to buy you food for later. (Of course, if your friend says, “Please get something and take it with you for later,” you can take her up on that — but you’d need to wait for her to offer it.)

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

1. Requiring people to be on time when the rest of the organization isn’t

My new (10 months on the job) executive director does not seem to care one iota if people stroll in late to work in the morning. Even our front desk receptionst staff are often dashing into the building 5 -10 minutes after we open. It is commonplace behavior and has become a disturbing part of our office culture. As a manager, I expect and require my staff to be ready to work, and at their desk at their scheduled start time. How do I respond to push back from them about “but not even the E.D. cares if we are a little late!” I feel like I have boarded the crazy train.

“In this department, being on time matters because ____.”

As long as you can fill in that blank with something that truly makes sense there, it’s perfectly reasonable to require this, even if other parts of your organization don’t.

That said, if there’s any chance that one of your people might go around you to the ED and try to get her to say it’s okay for your team to be late too, talk to her first and make sure you’ll be able to head that off.

2. Should people get advance warning about layoffs?

I manage a team that has been in dire need of restructuring, but we have not been able to implement the new plan until now. I know that in an ideal scenario, a firing shouldn’t catch an employee off-guard. But what about layoffs or restructuring? I mean, we’ve talked about the needs on the team and what we are lacking, but I think this is going to totally blindside one of my employees. Unfortunately he does not have a skillset to fit the new structure. We’ve had talks about fit, and I’ve expressed the needs of the department, but either he didn’t want to hear what I was saying or I wasn’t being clear enough.

Have I dropped the ball by not better preparing my team for the layoffs? Reasonably, I also couldn’t be very open about a potential restructure and sometimes companies can’t be for good reason. So it is understandable that layoffs take employees by surprise? I feel terrible. I may not be able to “fix” this situation, but I want to make sure I am ready if the situation ever arises again in my future.

It really depends. It’s pretty common not to give employees an advance heads-up about layoffs, substituting severance pay for notice. Is that the right way to do it? It’s easy to argue no, but it’s more nuanced than that — having laid-off employees still at work can make it harder for remaining employees to move forward, and sometimes those who are being laid off are too angry or upset about the layoffs to effectively do their jobs, and in some cases can be pretty toxic to an environment that’s already quite shaken up.

And if you just give general notice that layoffs are coming (rather than getting specific about which people/which roles), you can end up with a really tense and anxious environment because everyone is worried about who will be cut. Sometimes that means that you’ll end up losing your best people, since they’ll assume they need to be job searching and — being your best people — may find jobs quickly. (You can often head that off, though, by talking to your strongest people one-on-one and assuring them that their jobs are secure, if indeed that’s the case.)

In your particular situation, it sounds like you have had opportunities to prepare this particular person for the fact that the needs of his team have changed, and if he hasn’t gotten that message, then yeah, it’s possible that you should have been clearer, both with him and with others. It’s hard to say without knowing more. But in general, I’d say to err on the side of transparency unless there are very specific reasons not to (reasons that you’ve reality-tested with someone whose judgment you trust). But when you haven’t, it’s additional reason to do what you can to cushion the blow with however much severance as you can manage.

3. Emailing a former mentor

I have a question about contacting old mentors. A couple of years ago when I was interning at a place I got a really great reference from this older colleague that was supervising my work there. I also got a near perfect placement evaluation and we kept in touch for a few months, but ever since I moved on with my career. I’m doing reasonably well, but I haven’t contacted him because my former boss is more familiar with my work and a reference in our field, so I don’t need him as a reference. I was wondering if it’s ok to email to let this person to let them know how much it helped having that great mentorship and reference on my first year as a new graduate. I don’t want to seem like I’m just wasting someone’s time. What do you think about this?

Good lord, you will not be wasting his time! He will almost certainly be delighted to get an email like that, and will probably cherish it. I say this as someone who gets a lot of thank-you notes (which is a very nice side effect of running a blog like this); I appreciate each and every one of them, I save them, and it never stops feeling fantastic to read them. And some of them have arrived on days when they were very needed.

Pretty much no one receives this kind of message enough. Send it!

4. Does the order of names in an email matter?

This might seem like a minor question but it’s something I’ve wondered about in passing from time to time. When sending an email, does it matter the order in which you have people’s names in the “to” section? Like should it be based off order of title importance or relevancy to the topic at hand, or does that not matter at all? For example, if I’m emailing the president of my company along with my boss and then an entry-level person (all who are directly affected by my email, so wouldn’t necessarily go in the cc section), would it be strange to list my president last?

In general, it doesn’t really matter. That said, there are some companies where this kind of thing does matter and people do pay attention. In case you’re at one, I’d just pay attention to how other people at your company do it — particular your boss and other people senior to you — and if you notice that they seem to list names in order of hierarchy, it’s smart to do the same. (But know for the record that this is a weird thing for a company culture to care about.)

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

1. Prospective employer is asking me to do a major project for free

I’ve been working in a sales role for a brand represented my company. With full support of my existing employer, I have pitched myself to the brand for a future role. It would be a hybrid marketing/sales and management role, all of which I have done in previous jobs. It didn’t exist as a role but I identified gaps in their existing and future markets and thought it was worth a shot.

While I realize they weren’t expecting this and need to test my abilities and thinking, as well as my theories, I have been asked to complete a task, and I really don’t know if this is normal. The brand has been very positive and responsive, but have come back to me with a brief, and asked me to give a “formal brand response,” upon which which they would then develop a strategy and implement while theoretically taking me on in the role. They have given me almost two weeks to complete the task, it involves a lot of research and planning, and in exchange they can’t provide me with a reasonable answer to what kind of a role I would have, if it would be part or full time, or what the salary would be. They have asked for actual costing, budgets, projections, new market entry strategy, target audience research, growth drivers, setting KPIs, and targeted sales and marketing plans for three countries for three years.

My gut is saying “beware.” I’m reluctant to provide a full-scale plan without an indication of whether I have the role – what if they take my strategy and move on? I realize that equally they could take the strategy and hire me, but is this normal? I fear it may be a case of them taking the milk without buying the cow.

It’s increasingly common for employers to ask to see candidates in action at some point during the hiring process — to do exercises or simulations that demonstrate what their work is actually like. This is a good thing when it’s managed properly because it can dramatically improve hiring decisions (and that’s good for candidates too, because it decreases the odds that you’ll end up in a job that you’re not right for). But those exercises should be no more than an hour, or two hours at the most — not the sort of project that you’re describing here. What they’re asking for is way, way too much unless they’re going to pay you for it.

I’d say this to them: “I absolutely understand the need for you to get a sense of my work, and I’d be glad to provide a short simulation to let you see my work in action. I don’t feel comfortable taking on a project of this magnitude without an employment agreement, but perhaps we could talk about whether there’s a less intensive version that would get you the information you need so you can make a decision? Or, I’d be glad to do it via a short-term consulting agreement.”

Of course, be aware that whenever you push back on something during a hiring process, there’s a chance that your balking will make the employer balk and things will fall apart. I think that’s a reasonable consequence to accept here — because, again, what they’re asking you to do is unreasonable — but you’ll need to decide that for yourself before you act.

2. I’m paying for water for a bunch of my colleagues

I need a way of asking my coworkers to chip in on the water for the cooler. Our employer will provide water cooler jugs, but we have to pay for it ourselves. The five-gallon jugs cost $5 each and we go thru at least 15 a month. So far, a manager and I have absorbed the complete cost and we are not happy about it. It seems that since folks have found out that there’s a working cooler here (from my understanding, before I arrived it had been dry for three years), they come and come and come. I need a creative way to say “hey, pitch in!”

You don’t need a creative way to say that. (Why do people always want to put creative spins on straightforward messages?) You just need to be direct. It’s likely that your coworkers don’t realize that you and another colleague are personally funding this water supply, since it’s pretty normal for employers to cover that cost. So let them know, and ask if the other water-drinkers are willing to work out an arrangement to share the costs. I’d say this: “Jane and I have been paying for the water jugs for the cooler ourselves. It’s $5 a jug, and about $75 a month. If people want to continue having water there, can we come up with a system for sharing the costs?”

That said, this stuff can often be hard to work out fairly, and it sounds like you might also have people from outside your team coming and drinking from it … so if you can’t find a pretty quick solution that feels fair, I’d be prepared to just stick to individual water supplies (like bottled water that you buy for yourself rather than using the cooler).

3. What’s the ethical approach in this weird temp employment mess?

I’m currently in kind of a strange position at work. Company A hired Company B to do some administrative work. Company B pushed that off on to Temp Company C, who hired me, along with two other workers, for what was supposed to be a two-month project. This was my first job out of college, and I received no training at all for the position. A solid year later, I’m still working on the project, while the others were let go.

Over the last couple months, Company A decided that they want to step up the speed on the project, so they asked Company B for more people. Since then, it’s become uncomfortably clear that Company B lied outright about their recruiting and training methods. They’ve been claiming that they have a stable of well-trained employees ready to be dispatched at a moment’s notice, while they’re still using the same temp company that recruited me to find people, and (as of the last month) having me train them on the job. This feels wrong, for obvious reasons, but I’m not sure if I can speak up without endangering my position. Do I have any obligation to tell them that the new hires are, well, new and inexperienced, and actually slowing everything down? Who would I even talk to, to confront them about this? Am I just overreacting?

Ugh. Your employer here is Company C and to a lesser extent Company B, which puts you in a particularly difficult position with Company A.

Absent any other information, I’d say that you shouldn’t go out of your way to speak up about this, but you shouldn’t lie. If you’re asked about it, you should be honest and straightforward.

But it’s also possible that there are specifics of your situation that I don’t know that would make it easier for you to speak up proactively. For example, if you work closely with decision-makers at Company A and have the kind of relationship with them where you could tip them off about this without it coming back to bite you, that would be an argument in favor of doing it.

4. Giving notice right before my boss goes on vacation

I work for a small (10 people) company. I am a member of the management team (one of two directors), and my boss is the principal. The only other person more senior than me is my boss’ wife, who serves as the COO.

I have been in talks with a new company for a while, and an offer might be coming soon. Here’s the twist: I expect the offer to come either late this week or early next. My boss leaves for vacation next Thursday, and will be gone through the following week. His wife will be away with him as it’s a family vacation.

Based on the timelines I’ve discussed with the potential new employer, I would like to tender my resignation Tuesday or Wednesday of next week. I’d be giving 2.5 weeks notice in that scenario but I have 1-2 days off already scheduled in there (thus my desire to offer slightly more than two weeks).

How should I handle resigning right before he leaves? I don’t want to ruin the man’s vacation and I don’t want to burn any bridges with this job. Realistically, though, I’m not sure I could wait until the Monday when he returns.

You’re probably not going to ruin his vacation, but even if you do, you don’t have a choice; if this is the timeframe that ends up making sense for your notice, that’s when you need to give it. This kind of thing happens, and he’ll survive.

You’re being more courteous by giving it earlier than waiting until he’s back and giving him less time to plan the transition. Yes, it means he may end up doing work on his vacation, but it should be his choice whether or not to do that — with full information about the situation — rather than you trying to manage his reaction for him.

5. How to reclaim tips from an employer

This is a question on behalf of my husband. He works for a husband/wife catering team who basically focus on corporate catering (but also periodically will handle full-serve events). Right now, he is working for them as a “jack-of-all-trades,” including food prep, delivery, and as a bartender/event staff. He found out through one of the sale managers that many customers are including gratuities on both deliveries and events. His job is not gratuities-based; he does make a decent hourly salary from this company. However, because he has worked for them for the past year, the missing gratuities total probably works out to over $1,000 (totaling more that he makes in a week, actually.)

He has (non-aggressively) confronted the owners about this, and has been told that they did not keep track of these gratuities (basically considering them income for the business). There IS a way for the tips to be tracked through the ordering software, but it consists of comparing the order total to the actual payment, and would take a pretty significant chunk of time. One of the owners promised him that it would be sorted out “by March,” but, of course, nothing has been done yet.

I know that it’s pretty small beans in the grand scheme of things, but $1,000 would really help us out. Is there a diplomatic (but firm) way for him to demand his money? (I’ll also note that he is actively looking for another position to get out of that company, so is not super worried about keeping that job long term.)

If your husband qualifies as a “tipped employee” under federal law (meaning that he regularly receives more than $30 a month in tips), then it’s illegal for his employer to confiscate his tips. They are allowed to require tip-sharing among employees, but they can’t just confiscate the money. Here’s the law.

The big question in his case is probably whether or not he qualifies as a tipped employee as the law defines it.

But even if he’s not covered under the law, they told him that it would be sorted out by March, and it’s reasonable for him to follow up on that. (Keep in mind, though, that it’s the early part of of March; I wouldn’t assume yet that they’ve let it drop.) I’d start by just saying, “Where are we on correctly distributing those gratuities to the people they were supposed to be directed toward?”

Read an update to this letter here.