is 8-6 the new 9-5?

by Alison Green on October 8, 2015

A reader writes:

I wanted to get a perspective from you and your readers on whether you think a majority of businesses and industries are now expecting longer workdays from their employees.

Colloquially, “the 9 to 5” has been a phrase to discribe full-time jobs conducted during normal business hours. Obviously all individual offices will vary, but based on my own experience and the experiences of people I know, it seems like “the 8 to 6” would now be a better descriptor. I have held multiple positions over the past 10 years where I was expected to be in the office at 8 and not leave until 6. These hours didn’t account for unpaid lunch time, either. I almost always ate lunch at my desk while working on something or during a “working lunch” meeting (which is different from a “lunch and learn”; these were mandatory weekly meetings where normal business was conducted).

From talking to friends and family, I am far from alone in this experience. Is the 10-hour workday and 50-hour work week the new normal?

For some people. As you point out, there’s tons of variation.

Some people do indeed still work jobs that are truly 9-5. That’s still very common. The assumption is usually that they’ll have a half hours for lunch, so they’re really working 37.5 hours a week.

But other schedules have become more common too, and you’re right that many of them are longer. 9-6 isn’t unusual, and neither is 8-5, and lots of other variations. The thinking behind those is often that they include an hour for lunch — so you’re still working eight hours, but the finish time is nine hours after your start time because of lunch. I question this reasoning, because tons of people with this schedule don’t actually take a full hour for lunch, but that’s where it came from.

And of course, many people routinely work longer hours than that.

Additionally, even in jobs where the standard hours really are 9-5, some people might come in at 7 and leave at 3 or work some other form of a flexible schedule.

Like so many other things, it really depends on the job and the workplace.

I do think, though, that “a 9-5 job” has taken on a cultural meaning that doesn’t strictly mean “a job that starts at 9 a.m. and ends up 5 p.m.” Its cultural usage has changed to mean “a professional office job with fairly standard business hours, Monday through Friday.”

As for the broader picture on how many hours people are working:  The average work week for full-time employees in the U.S. is nearly 47 hours, according to a Gallup report released last year; that’s held pretty steady for the last 14 years, but — unsurprisingly — it was lower before that.  That said, 42% of people work 40 hours a week, so that’s still pretty common too.

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how to show leadership even when you’re not the boss

by Alison Green on October 8, 2015

Even if you’re not leading a team, you have opportunities every day at work to show leadership – and acting like a leader is one of the best ways to build your reputation, increase your value, get better projects, and set yourself up for promotion.

How can you demonstrate leadership if you’re not actually leading people? Here’s how – and you probably have the opportunity to do each of these every week, if not every day.

Think about the company’s perspective, not just your own. It’s pretty easy to figure out how a proposed new project, process, or policy will affect you or your team. Part of leadership, though, is stepping back and looking at things from the organization’s perspective – which may be the same, or may overlap in some but not all areas, or might be entirely different. You’ll be able to make far wiser and more useful contributions if you keep the organization’s perspective in mind.

Be inclusive. Good leaders go out of their way to make sure that they’re pulling more people inward, rather than pushing them out. You can do that by helping to make sure everyone’s voice is heard (for example, “Karen, I know you have experience with this – what do you think?”), genuinely listening to people’s ideas even if they’re not the top expert in the room, and even just looping people in on your own (like stopping by a junior colleague’s desk after a meeting to fill her in on points she might find interesting).

Pick your battles. Good leaders are strategic in choosing where to focus their attention. They might see multiple battles they could fight, but they’ll figure out what’s most important and where they can have the most impact, and will focus there. You’ll probably have loads of competing issues that you could take on, from your team’s inefficient project ticking system to the difficulty in getting what you need from Marketing. Figure out where it makes most sense to expand your time and political capital; don’t try to fight every battle at once.

Take responsibility for mistakes. People’s instinct is often to downplay or even try to hide mistakes, but you’ll show far more leadership by being blunt about what happened. For example: “I called this one wrong. I thought X, but it turned out to be Y.” Or: “Last month I argued for moving forward with Z when Bob felt it was a bad idea. Since then, I’ve realized he was right.” This is a powerful move – it takes responsibility, shows that you’re not afraid to call out and learn from your mistakes, and shows you have the confidence to publicly rethink your opinion. It’ll make you look stronger, not weaker.

Banish defensiveness. If you get defensive when your decisions or questioned or you’re given critical feedback, it’s probably harming the way you’re perceived. Strong leaders want to get input and continuously improve how they do things; defensiveness will make you come across as less confident, easily threatened, and harder to work with.

Help other people. Leaders often become known as leaders because they’re so good about spotting ways they can help others in high-impact ways, whether it’s helping with the messaging for a new service or connecting two contacts who will benefit from talking with each other. If you’re generous with your time and assistance, you’ll strengthen your relationships and become known as a valuable resource.

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if you’re encountering problematic ads here…

by Alison Green on October 8, 2015

Hey, y’all.

I know some of you have had problems with the ads here recently — video ads that automatically play sound without your permission and Flash ads that hang up your browser. My ad network is working on it, but there are also several things you can do that will help:

1. Ads with sound: Ads that auto-play sound are supposed to be turned off entirely on this site, but unscrupulous advertisers have found ways to send them through anyway. If you encounter one of these, I’d be grateful if you’d send me the URL the ad links to so it can be tracked down and removed. If you do that, it will usually be removed from the system that same day.

2. Turning on a Flash blocker should stop all of the problems people have reported. Here are links to Flash blockers for Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari, as well as some alternate instructions that might be helpful.

3. Or you can stop video ads from playing automatically by following these instructions.

4. Or you could install an ad blocker if you’ve been having problems, and that should stop any issues too. (In theory, I’m opposed to ad blockers because ads are how sites continue to provide the content you’re reading for free, but where ads are causing problems for you, you have my blessing.)

Thanks for bearing with me during this. It’s something that’s currently frustrating lots of websites and that lots of ad networks are struggling with, and I know it’s a pain.

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I don’t want my employees working from home as frequently as they currently do

by Alison Green on October 8, 2015

A reader writes:

I manage a small team of three entry-level employees, two of whom are new (they started about two months ago). Our company has a very lenient work from home policy – essentially, if you meet your goals and are available for important meetings, you’re able to work from home with manager’s approval. Different teams use this policy to varying degrees, but generally people don’t take more than one day/week at most to work from home. I generally use it once every week or so myself.

My situation is this – both new employees have been utilizing the working from home option quite frequently, generally two days per week. Sometimes it’s a matter of necessity such as car trouble or doctor’s appointment, but usually it seems to be a matter of preference. While both are meeting their goals and are very responsive when working from home, I still feel that they should be in the office more than they currently are. However, since both are doing well, I’m not sure how to frame this for them, especially if I were to reject a request to work from home. My only rational is that it makes my team look bad (those who sit near me have commented on my team not being present). Am I being old-fashioned in expecting my new employees to be in the office the majority of the time, or should I not worry about the working from home since performance hasn’t suffered?

Not necessarily, but the problem here is that you haven’t told them your expectations — and the only expectations they have heard (from the company policy) say that it’s okay to do what they’re doing. So you need to tell them your expectations or they won’t know, and that’s not fair to them.

First, though, you’ve got to first figure out what you actually want your work-from-home policy to be and why. I’m a huge fan of telecommuting, but there are plenty of legitimate reasons for wanting people to work from the office most of the time. For example: the work you do is collaborative, it’s hard to schedule meetings when people are frequently out, things often come up that need to be handled in-person, it allows you to better give feedback and input on people’s work, or whatever it might be. It’s also completely reasonable to want people in the office while they’re new, even if it’ll be fine for them to work from home more once they’ve been there longer. There’s lots of in-person learning that goes on when people are new, even aside from formal training — things like absorbing the culture and how you operate — and it’s generally easier as a manager to get a feel for a new person’s work and give useful feedback when they’re around most of the time. And these are entry-level employees, so that all goes double.

You noted that people have been commenting on how often your team is gone, and that’s a consideration too. If your staff is doing something that’s out of sync with your company culture and causing eyebrows to be raised, you might decide that you’re willing to spend some political capital defending it — or you might decide that you’d rather save that capital for other things.

Anyway, you need to decide where you stand on these factors and what you want your policy to be, and then you need to communicate it to people. The problem currently is that you have expectations that you haven’t shared with your two new hires. You’re frustrated/concerned that they’re out of sync with what you want, but you haven’t actually told them what you want. You need to do that, because it’s not fair to penalize people (even if just mentally) for not following a rule that you never actually told them about.

You might be thinking, “But even though I didn’t tell them explicitly, shouldn’t they have picked up on my expectation anyway, by noticing what others on our team do?” It’s true that many (even most) people will … but not everyone, and especially not entry-level workers who generally are just figuring out workplace norms anyway. And entry-level or not, some people are literal and if the company says “you can work from home with your manager’s approval,” they’re going to think that’s the policy, period, without factoring in cultural cues about how people actually use the policy. So if you want them to do something differently, you need to tell them.

If you do end up deciding that you generally want people limiting their working from home to one day a week, I’d say this: “I want to talk to you about our work-from-home policy. In general, I prefer people to work from home no more than one day a week, because of (reasons). On rare occasions, I’m willing to approve more than that, but I’d like the default to be no more than once a week. I realize I didn’t clarify this earlier, and you haven’t done anything wrong by doing it more often, but going forward, please stick to this guideline.”

Also, say this now rather than just rejecting their next work-from-home request and explaining it then. This is a big-picture conversation to have since they’re now used to doing it a different way, not something to spring on them the next time it comes up.

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calling my new colleagues by their first names, I don’t want to talk about my injury, and more

by Alison Green on October 8, 2015

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

1. How can I start calling my soon-to-be-colleagues by their first names?

I am in an awkward situation with the managers at the company where I accepted a job offer. I started addressing the managers and recruiters by Mr/Mrs. Last Name in emails, while they address me as by my first name. Also they would end the emails with their first names. I should have started addressing them by their first names when I noticed this. However, about a month later, I am still addressing them as Mr./Mrs., and I feel like I lost my opportunity to start calling them by their first names. I am still in the hiring process, and we communicate each other very often.

What can I do in this situation? I don’t know if it’s a good idea to address them by their first names in the next emails after addressing them by Mr./Mrs. all this time. But I also don’t want to make them feel awkward because I am addressing them as Mr./Mrs. I really don’t know what to do.

Just make the switch — really. It’s not going to be a big deal. Especially since this has all been in email, they may not even be paying much attention to it. They’re calling you by your first name, they’re signing off with their first names — it’s fine to just switch to using their first names.

Also, a side note for the future: Please don’t use Mrs. to address people unless you already know they prefer it. Many, many women don’t use Mrs. (preferring Ms.) and bristle at having it chosen for them. Unlike Ms. (which is used for both married and single women), Mrs. refers to marital status, and (a) you might be getting it wrong, and (b) many women rightly feel that their marital status doesn’t belong in business communications anyway.

2. I don’t want to talk about the details of my injury when I return to work

I lost the tips of two fingers in a lawnmower accident recently, and will return to work after two weeks off. I don’t wish to provide the details of my absence or injury whatsoever to my peers. It doesn’t help that I work in a large school and am the department head of technology, and should know better about safety around machinery. What is a polite way to answer about my absence and/or bandaged fingertips? I’m truly dreading returning to work for this one reason.

“It’s a long story, but I’ll be fine!” — said cheerfully and followed by an immediate change of subject.

Or “Oh, it’s too gruesome too talk about.” Or “I’m in denial that it even happened. Tell me about where we are with the X project!” Or “Just an accident, and I’m working on forgetting about it.”

The key with all of these is to say them cheerfully and immediately change the subject.

Polite people will get the message that you don’t want to talk about it. Rude people may continue to push, at which point you can say, “I’m really trying not to relive it — thanks for understanding!”

Another option is “I’d rather not talk about it,” but I think that will make it more dramatic and cause some people to speculate on what happened and why it’s off-limits.

3. Using a class project in my job

I currently work in an academic research environment in a support role (meaning I do entry-level work, not research or management or anything high-level). While in this position I decided to go back to school to get a degree in computer science, in order to make an eventual career switch. My choosing this degree was completely unrelated to my job, except in that … computer science is related to everything!

So, I’m currently in a class where we need to choose a class project to complete by the end of the semester. I realized that, serendipitously, we have been talking recently at work about creating a system that fits in with the subject of my coursework, and I could easily create the prototype for this work project as my class project. I would implement it in a more generic fashion for my class, basically, but it would result in me having built something that would be super useful at work.

Is it totally weird or wrong to choose to do a class project that I can eventually recycle at work? Normally, I have pretty strong boundaries about work/life balance and getting paid for my professional work, but in this case I would actually LOVE to build this project and implement it at work, because it would make my job so much easier. (It’s not a super-efficiency measure that would eliminate my job, either; it would just make doing my job way less annoying.) I realize I’m not being paid to do this, but it’s interesting to me and obviously I would be doing it for some tangible reward (a grade). The IT/tech staff at my job is apparently way too busy to ever build this for us, so if I could just make it happen… that would be awesome. Anyhow, I’m really curious to hear what you think!

I say go for it. There’s no reason that you have to create an artificial barrier between work and school, and in fact school usually gets a lot more meaningful when you can relate to things you’re doing at work or in life. You’re excited about doing it, you’d find it useful, it will ground your class work in something real — why not?

(I realize that the “why not” might be “because it feels weird to do something for work without being paid.” But you’re excited to do it, and our jobs benefit all the time from intangibles outside the strict confines of our job, from ideas we have in the shower to professional contacts we meet socially. You don’t want to be taken advantage of, obviously, but you want to arrange your life in ways that make you happy, and this sounds like it would qualify as that.)

4. Company is implementing weird new pay scheme

I’m an engineer (and classified as exempt), and my employer is instituting a 44-hour work week. In the meeting where this was announced, with legal and HR in the meeting, they told us that we are classified as “hourly exempt.” We have a base salary, and we can work 40 hours and take a pay cut to this base salary, or maintain our (current) base salary by working 44 hours. There has been no decrease in our base salary.

We can choose to work only 40 hours one week and take the hit to our pay that week, and then work 44 hours the next week and get our base pay. Or to hopefully put it more clearly, our pay will vary based on the number of hours we work per week, and 44 is our new baseline work week.

This whole situation sounds fishy to me, because I’ve never heard of nor seen anything online that refers to hourly exempt as something that exists. Do you know what they’re referring to, or is this something you’ve run into in your experience?

Well, if you’re exempt, you need to be paid on a salary basis, which means that your salary remains the same from week to week regardless of the number of hours that you work. It sounds like they’re using the idea of “base pay” to try to get around that, but it sure doesn’t sound legal to me. You’d need a lawyer to look at it and tell you for sure, but salary basis is one of the most fundamental requirements of treating people as exempt.

And if I’m right and this is indeed illegal, that means they’d actually be treating you as non-exempt and thus would owe you overtime pay for any hours worked over 40 in a week, once this goes into effect.

Read an update to this letter here.

5. Update: do I have to organize a Boss’s Day gift?

Remember the letter-writer last month who asked if she really had to organize a Boss’s Day gift in her new job, as her predecessor had instructed her to? Here’s the update.

I wrote a few weeks back asking about whether or not I needed to have my department set something up for Boss’s Day. I ended up sending out a survey to see if people wanted to contribute and what kind of recognition we would want to give, if any, and I was genuinely surprised with the response.

Everyone agreed that a brunch was a good idea (we live in the South so we love our food), so I then gave the people who responded positively to the first survey the option of contributing food, a card, or money so I could buy whatever we may be lacking after sign-ups. It’s gone surprisingly well so far and everyone seems to be looking forward to it.

Since doing something for Boss’s Day is just part of the culture here, I thought it would be nice to proceed in a way that makes the activities 100% optional. It looks like that approach went over much better than the last Admin. Assistant sending out the “I’ll be collecting money from each of you for gift cards” email, so I’m happy with the way it turned out.

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my boss is strong-arming us to “volunteer” for company events

by Alison Green on October 7, 2015

A reader writes:

Recently, and with little notice, my boss and our PR person have issued mails calling for volunteers for events outside of working hours.

Of course, no one wants to turn their five-day week into a 12-day week, for no additional pay/leave. However, my boss and our PR person have made last-second promises, and they can’t be seen as liars. So the next email comes out:

“I strongly recommend you consider to volunteer for the chat booth this weekend. Have a good Friday!”

“Leadership is something that is taken into account during evaluations. I think volunteering for the annual shoelace knitting competition shows leadership. Not volunteering, however, does not show leadership.”

“I don’t want to work with those who don’t feel a strong need to volunteer for the football weeny roast. I was just talking to our PR person, and she says I don’t need to worry… Right?”

Those aren’t exact wordings, but they capture the tone of “volunteer or else.”

I suppose they can’t say, outright, that attendance is mandatory or it would be an item that went onto job descriptions, and they don’t want to give anyone ammunition to bid for a raise or promotion. That’s not great.

However, there are a few things going on lately that have me angry-typing that “Ask-A-Manager lady” my wife is always reading:

1. These mandatory volunteer requests have very little warning time and are coming during one of the busiest times of our year.
2. My boss and the PR person are, of course, exempt from volunteering. They haven’t show up to one such event, but demand… sorry… request with utmost severity that others give their time.
3. These demands are frequently fielded by the same few people, and that strikes me as unfair.
4. They have started “strongly” suggesting that we donate money to various charities/events.

Adding insult to injury, I’ve been around long enough to know that minimal effort is rewarded exactly the same as those who are being coerced into giving up their weekends.

What do you do with a boss who uses thinly veiled threats to “encourage a spirit of volunteering,” but never outright requires attendance?

And since I’m exempt, couldn’t he just out-and-out require I (or anyone) attend? Why wouldn’t he just say, “Sally, Mark, John, Joe, see you at the tree hugging ceremony on Sunday. It’s your job”? Why all the carefully worded mails?

Yep, since you’re exempt, he could indeed just require you to attend. (He could require it if you were non-exempt too, but he’d have to pay you for the time.) And he could require it even though it’s not in your job description; job descriptions generally aren’t comprehensive lists of everything you might end up doing, and no law requires that employers stick to what’s on a written job description.

I suspect he’s not outright requiring it because he wants to maintain the fiction that these are truly volunteer assignments. Usually when managers do this, it’s because they like the idea of people volunteering for this stuff; it signals to them that people are enthusiastically supporting their team or the company. If they simply assign someone to do the work, the work gets done, but they don’t get the cozy feeling of “look at how my team pitches in to staff these events.”

Obviously, that’s ridiculous, because by the time that you’re basically ordering people to volunteer, that fiction should have collapsed. But somehow in their heads it doesn’t.

I think you have a few options here:

1. Ignore the emails. Take him at his word that he’s looking for “volunteers,” and decline to volunteer. Be aware that this option may come with penalties, such as not getting the same consideration for raises and promotions as people who volunteer, and/or simply not currying favor with your boss, which can potentially affect everything from what assignments you get to how far he’s willing to go to bat for you during a financial squeeze. On the other hand, it’s also possible that it’s won’t really affect you much at all. His language about taking it into account during evaluations could be a lot of bluster. (And your comment that minimal effort is rewarded exactly the same seems to indicate that might be the case.)

2. Say something to him directly about the situation. For example: “Bob, I’ve noticed that you and Sue have been asking for volunteers at weekend events lately. I know you know what a busy time of year this is for us, and I’ve got other commitments on the weekend that I can’t break, so I wanted to explain why I’m not generally attending these events.” (Normally I might suggest that you call him directly on the veiled language, but if you asked something like “are these truly volunteer or are you instructing us to attend them?” you risk him telling you that you do have to participate … so it’s probably better not to open the door to that.)

3. If you calculate that it is actually in your professional interests to volunteer for one of these, suck it up and do it once. If you go this route, pick something particularly high-profile where you’re likely to have maximum visibility.

But yeah, no one likes to be voluntold. If it’s truly voluntary, treat it as voluntary. And if it’s not, don’t pretend that it is. And sure, there actually can be a middle ground there — the “you really don’t have to do this, but we do reward people who volunteer.” But when that’s the case, (a) you can’t pressure people the way your boss is, and (b) you have to really follow through on the promised rewards.

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when job candidates won’t share their salary expectations

by Alison Green on October 7, 2015

A reader writes:

I have always asked job candidates what their compensation requirements are, either before they come in to meet with me or after they have come in. Most candidates do not have any issues disclosing what they’re looking for, although some get a little uncomfortable.

Recently, I had a candidate who I spoke to over the phone, and I thought he was great. He came in to meet with us, and again, we thought he was great. I asked him to disclose his compensation requirements because we wanted to move forward with an offer and he didn’t want to disclose. Rather, he wanted us to come to him with an offer based on what title he fell under after meeting with him.

I’ve never had this happen.  I had no clue what his expectations are and he refused to budge on sharing. We discussed what we felt was reasonable and when I shared this with him, he came back saying he did a lot of research and thinks he’s essentially worth $30,000 more than what we want to offer. Had we discussed this early on, we all would have realized we’re not compatible and not wasted his or our time. Eeeeekkkk.

Is it not normal for recruiters and hiring managers to be asking for this information off the bat?  I’ve always operated that way to make sure we’re all on the same page, but this experience is making me feel otherwise.

You can read my answer to this question over at Inc. today, where I’m revisiting letters that have been buried in the archives here from years ago (and often updating/expanding my answers to them).

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my boss turns it into an ordeal every time I ask him a question

by Alison Green on October 7, 2015

A reader writes:

I’m a paid intern at a small technology startup. My boss wrote the entire codebase for our project; there’s no documentation, and also it’s my first time doing this kind of work outside a classroom. (I’m a woman in my mid 20s. My college degree is in humanities, and I had a totally different career for a couple of years before this; I took an intensive training course on programming over the summer, and have taught myself a lot.)

Naturally, I have lots of questions. Other programmers I know tell me this is normal even for experienced programmers; no matter how much you know about a programming language or framework in general, there are going to be quirks and requirements that are specific to a given project.

However, I can’t even ask my boss a simple question without it being a huge ordeal. Most times when I do, he 1) makes me play guessing games to figure out the answer instead of just telling me/pointing me in the right direction and 2) shames me for needing to ask in the first place. (I work from home most of the time and so most of the communication referenced here happened over email and instant messaging.)

Examples: I emailed him some code that wasn’t working as expected. Instead of saying “you need to fix X,” he said, “I saw the error just skimming over the code. Can you find it?” and let me flail about trying to figure it out for 15 minutes instead of telling me where to look. When he did point out what I’d done wrong, he added “that should have been the first place you looked.” It was one of those things that made sense once it was pointed out to me, but after poring over the code multiple times my brain just sort of lost the ability to distinguish what was going on, kind of like how it’s hard to catch all the typos when proofreading your own writing.

Earlier today, I had sent him a question about a new feature I was working on adding, and I had figured out most of it but had trouble figuring out what to do next. He messaged me an article to read and told me “this will show you how to do X to the Y.” I sent him a question in response that was basically, “So I should replace section A with B, right?” and he responded, “Read and understand first, then ask questions. :)”

I was really upset but just said “thanks” and logged off chat. I don’t know what to do about this. It would save both of us a lot of time if he’d just give me straight answers to things, and there’s no reason for him to be condescending when I haven’t even done anything wrong. He’s acting like I’m wasting his time by trying to understand the project and do a good job; I thought if I sent him an email demonstrating that I’d tried several things and asking for very specific advice, he’d be less of a jerk about it, but he just found a different thing to be condescending about.

What do I do? If I had more experience I’d apply for other jobs, and I suppose it can’t hurt to do that anyway, but I’m not very optimistic given that I don’t have a CS degree or any substantial experience in this field. I’d like to talk to him and explain that I’d work a lot more efficiently if he’d just be more clear about answering things–the work needs to get done badly, it’s not like they’re just making up stuff to keep the intern busy–but I feel like that just gives him an opening to be even more mean to me.

Have you considered that this is actually the behavior of someone who’s trying to teach you, both the actual subject as well as how to find answers yourself? That’s not a bad thing! It’s actually a very good thing, although I don’t doubt that it can be annoying at times.

You noted that you feel like your boss shames you and condescends to you for needing to ask questions in the first place, but that’s not how your examples are reading to me. They read like he’s trying to teach you how to find answers yourself and that he’s continuing to push you in that direction even if you resist it a bit. That’s someone who wants to help you grow. (It could also be someone who thinks you’re too quick to look to him for answers, but either way it’s the behavior of someone who wants to help you learn.)

I’d love for you to do a week-long experiment and see how you feel at the end of it: What if you resolve to totally drop your defenses around him for a week, deliberately decide to see his behavior during that time as as trying to teach and mentor you rather than as condescending/rude/annoying, and open your mind to doing it his way? It’s possible you’ll end up just as annoyed at the end of the week, but I think there’s a decent chance that when you purposely see his behavior through a different lens, this all might feel very different to you. You might still be annoyed that he won’t just give you the damn answer, but it might stop feeling mean.

Now, maybe I’m completely wrong and there’s more to this than what’s in your email. Maybe his tone is mean, or there are worse examples than the ones here … but based on what you’ve written here, my money is him just trying to develop your skills. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t sometimes take it too far, but that’s a different thing than being a jerk.

If you think I’m wrong though and/or you’re too irritated too try my experiment, you could also just ask him directly about his method. For example: “I’ve noticed that when I ask you questions, you usually prefer for me to figure out the answer myself even if you know the answer off the top of your head. I’ll admit that’s sometimes been frustrating to me, because often when I come to you, I’m out of things to try or my brain is exhausted from poring over code trying to figure it out for myself. Can you tell me a little bit about why you prefer to do it that way, so that we’re on the same page about how you see this stuff?”

I think you’re likely to hear that he wants to teach you how to solve these problems on your own — and that those skills will help you solve future problems (whereas if he just gives you the answer, he’s not helping you build the skills to solve things that come up in the future).

It’s up to you whether you like that style or not, of course … but I think you’ll be less frustrated if you see it as him coaching you rather than him insulting you.

Read an update to this letter here.

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{ 511 comments }

staff member got weirdly territorial with me, job makes us do business travel on personal time, and more

by Alison Green on October 7, 2015

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

1. My staff member got weirdly territorial with me

I am the program coordinator for a new adult day care (Alzheimers patients – providing activities, supervision and meals). I started in March and ran the whole show by myself for two months while interviewing and hiring my current staff. We are now almost six months in with staff.

We post our daily activities every day on the wall (time, location, activity, staff). As the program grows, we will be having multiple programs going on simultaneously that will require all staff, but for the time being my staff conducts the majority, allowing me to do all the behind-the-scenes stuff.

The issue: The agency was having an open house for potential donors in our space, so as proactive marketing I decided to fill the schedule as a sample of what is to come. Because there are three slots per time frame and three staff including me, I put everyone’s name up on the program schedule. Later on, one of my staff came and said she needed to talk, and in short told me she was insulted that I put my name on the board because I don’t run the programs! So I calmly told her first that no, of course I don’t run programs, that’s her job, and I then explained my situation with the donors coming for an open house and that they don’t even know who we are. I even reinforced that I recognize her efforts and putting my name on the sample schedule was in no way meant to discredit other staff. She said, “Well, no, your name is always up there and I needed to let you know how I felt.” I basically said “thanks for sharing your feelings” and excused myself to get to my work. Am I crazy or is this a red flag and out of bounds?

Yeah, it’s a red flag about possible issues with issues with territoriality and/or common sense. It is worth asking yourself whether she might have reason to be feeling territorial or like she’s not getting credit for her work, but if there’s nothing like that going on, it’s a weird and alarming reaction. And actually, I might use that question as an entry point into talking with her about it — sit down with her and ask if she’s feeling like she’s not getting appropriate credit for her work, and then explain that you were taken aback by her reaction the other day, reiterate your reasoning, and ask if it makes sense to her. If it doesn’t, it’s probably worth exploring what’s going on and seeing if you can get aligned on some general principles for this stuff going forward.

2. My job makes us do business travel on personal time

My company requires a lot of travel, pretty much every week, to an interstate destination by flight. Some are only 2 hours flight time (luckily) but some are red-eyes, from New York to San Diego, and are a killer.

My company says that the policy is to only allow travel to be done during personal time. This means I usually have to fly home week after week on a Friday night. In the case of the 2-hour flight, I usually end up in my own bed at 1a.m.; in the case of the San Diego flight, I usually end up in my own bed at 9 or 10 a.m. on a Saturday morning. I find this absurd and I don’t get paid for this use of half of my weekend nights each week.

To make matters worse, in order to get back to San Diego the following week, I am forced to take a Sunday night red-eye back to San Diego, having to leave home at 4 p.m.-ish to get to the airport in time for my flight. Which gives me one night a week in my own bed. It just seems crazy.

Is this legal to force you to travel in your own time? I just can’t believe it!

Assuming that you’re exempt, they don’t have to pay you for travel time. They don’t even need to give you comp time or extra perks to make up for it. (If you’re non-exempt, they’d need to pay you for any travel time that occurred during your regular working hours but not outside of them, so they’d probably be off the hook for those evening and overnight flights.)

But that doesn’t mean that your company’s policy isn’t a bad one (requiring that travel time occur only on personal time is pretty crappy; it’s not like you’re doing that travel for non-business reasons), and it doesn’t mean that you can’t push back. You have a strong case for saying, “Look, I’m using half of my weekends every week on travel. I get that my job involves a lot of travel and that’s fine, but our current policy is leaving me with practically no time away from work obligations. If this were only occasional, it wouldn’t be a big deal, but it’s regularly eating up a significant portion of my weekend. I’d like to talk about comp time or another way to recoup some of that time.”

Be prepared to hear that this is the job and they’re not willing to change the policy — but if that’s the answer, it wouldn’t be crazy to think about whether you’d rather work somewhere that’s more supportive of their regularly-traveling staff.

3. Should I give my manager input into the dates I choose for surgery?

I’ve been dealing with a health issue that’s caused me to be severely anemic and has impacted my quality of life. At one point I was even hospitalized briefly for a blood transfusion, testing, and observation. I’ve spent the past two years researching alternatives to surgery without success. I’m currently on a medication that has kept the anemia at bay but has basically put my body into menopause. I’ve accepted that surgery is unavoidable and have even located a doctor in Virginia (not local as I’m in Michigan) who can perform a minimally invasive procedure with a shorter recovery period (2-3 weeks vs 6 weeks minimum for traditional surgery).

My question is whether I should include my manager as I schedule this surgery. I want to be fair to her and give as much notice as possible but I’m obviously concerned that if I include her at this stage, she’ll suggest the surgery take place much later than I intend. To further complicate things, I’ve not been in this position for very long. I’ve been with the company for nearly two years but have been working in this position since June 1. My manager previously indicated that I would have a review at the end of the year so that everyone on her team would be on the same review schedule. So next year I’ll be a full year into my review by year end, but this year it will just be six months. Is it unwise to have the surgery this year? Is it naive to think it won’t impact my review or should I not concern myself with that as my health is a priority?

Schedule the surgery for when you need to schedule it. If you have a bit of flexibility, it would kind to let your manager have some input on timing if that’s really workable on your end, but it needn’t be open-ended; you could say, “I need to do it by December; is there a three-week period before then that would be preferable to you?” But again, you don’t need to do that; it’s optional and only if you really do have some wiggle room on timing.

Since you’ve been at your company longer than a year (even though only in this particular job since June), you should be eligible for FMLA (assuming that your company has 50+ employees). If you take the time off for the surgery through FMLA, your manager legally cannot factor that time away into your evaluation. Even if your company is too small for FMLA, though, a good manager won’t let something like this influence the type of evaluation you get, so I’d only worry about that if you have other reason to think your manager is someone who would do that.

4. How can I get my manager to approve a new system I’ve come up with?

I work at a convenience store that uses self-checkouts. I’m having difficulty keeping customers at those lanes from time to time, and they won’t listen to me or anything I say unless an official “closed lane” sign is up (and sometimes not even at that point). When I use that sign on my live lane, people are more willing to use the automatic ones, and I have a system set up where I can help out everyone and get them checked out in a timely manner. The store has a policy for no hand-made signs, but the closed lane sign is meant only for the automatic lanes. I usually get scolded about this and the sign gets taken down, even though the system actually works.

Is there anything I can do to keep this system in place with help from my manager? She adores my innovation and ideas, but while she usually smiles about my ideas and tells me how great they are, nothing really gets approved.

Go to your manager and make a clear, direct case for the system you propose: “I want to begin doing X for Y reasons. I’ve seen that Z results when I’ve tried it. Will you give me permission to do this going forward since it’s getting such good results?”

If she says no, there isn’t really much you can do at that point, but it’s worth laying it out clearly, and specifically asking for exactly what you want and for a clear yes or no. (Telling you how great your ideas are is nice, but what you need from her is a clear answer. Ask the question in a way that forces her to give you one.)

5. Asking for a lower salary so that I stay eligible for school assistance

I want to apply for another job, and on their ad it shows that the salary range is from $15-$17/hour, for 30 hours a week, for 180 days of the year. I did the math (hopefully it’s correct) and that means I would be making about $19,000-22,000 a year. I live and go to school in California, and the CalVet system pays for my school until I’m 27, as long as I make under $12,000 a year. If I get an interview for that other job, is it possible for me to ask for a lower salary? Around $11 an hour so I will be making only about $11,800 a year?

Hmmm. While you might be thinking it would be a great deal for them, it’s likely to make more decent employers uncomfortable; good employers want to pay you an amount consistent with their salary structure and what others doing similar work for them are making. I suppose there’s no harm in asking (the worst they can say is no, after all), but I’d be prepared for them not wanting to do that.

It sounds like the CalVet salary cap might be designed to discourage anything but very part-time work (less than 30 hours a week), but maybe someone with more experience with that system can tell us more in the comment section.

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team lead wants us to have weekly group meetings to air problems and grievances

by Alison Green on October 6, 2015

A reader writes:

At work, I have several coworkers with the same job title as me, but our supervisor has recently designated one specific person as “lead.” They are more experienced than the rest of us and have been here the longest, so this makes sense. She is to organize training for new members, be the point person for questions, take over scheduling, and restructure how we run our meetings, etc. She is essentially in the role of managing us on a day-to-day basis, but she’s not really a manager. She is our coworker and does the same job we do; she just has extra roles that she has taken on. She’s struggling with how to do this effectively.

In reorganizing our meetings, she has eliminated a couple of them and instituted an informal but mandatory meeting where we can all talk about what is going on in our week. The idea is for us to discuss things that we want to change or work on in the office environment, clients who are difficult or causing problems, things coworkers are doing or not doing that affect our ability to work, etc. She wants to give people a forum where they can talk about things, to manage the office culture in a proactive, ongoing way, rather than being reactionary when problems happen, and to foster ideas that might benefit everyone, but that we wouldn’t have come up with on our own. We are located in the Midwest, and everyone here is (notoriously) passive aggressive and doesn’t like to talk about their feelings. Our lead is a very kind, smart, personable character, but is very direct and was hoping to change this part of the office culture to facilitate more open communication. Behind the scenes drama drives her nuts.

Today we had our first meeting, and nobody wanted to say anything. We basically all sat there like we were in trouble. When the lead gave an example of what types of things she’d like for us to be able to discuss–a coworker of ours behaving unprofessionally in response to a comment–he got really offended and emailed her later to tell her that it was untactful and that he was upset. They’ve worked it out, but I don’t think a group setting is going to work well for our office. I think we all (except our lead) prefer to handle things quietly and one-on-one. She understands this, but thinks it is dysfunctional on some level and impedes our team growth and coherence. She wants to help move people to be more open about what is going on in the office so we can talk about issues and resolve them, rather than pretending like they aren’t there. Plus, many concerns affect more than just the two people immediately involved, and this meeting would provide an opportunity for everyone to be involved in the resolution.

Do you have any suggestions about how we might construct this meeting or approach this goal? How can we use this time for this purpose, given we’re all a bunch of really sensitive, introverted perfectionists who earnestly want to please people and have everyone be happy? How can we engage people to talk about problems or concerns, but not offend anyone? We’ve already established that we use “I” language, and that if you have a concern, you also need to come forward with a proposed solution, or at least some idea of where you want to go with it, so we don’t just complain or point fingers. So we’re trying to be really respectful about this. Would one-on-one office hours be better? Will it just be a tough transition, but eventually work out? Do you think this is even a good idea to begin with?

No, it’s very much not a good idea.

If your office genuinely needs weekly meetings to discuss difficult clients, problematic coworkers, and things you need to change, something is pretty damn dysfunctional. That kind of thing might come up here and there, but in most offices it’s not going to be a weekly meeting type of frequency, and most of that stuff isn’t going to be best addressed through a group meeting anyway — and especially not an unstructured, free-flow, “raise any random concern you have about a coworker with the whole group” type of meeting.

In fact, that’s a recipe for either uncomfortable silence (which is what happened) or demoralizing and upsetting people (which also happened).

Frankly, it sounds a bit like the idea of someone with little experience managing other humans coupled with grandiose ideas about what can be achieved by people just talking things out.

(To be clear, I’m a big fan of people talking things out. But not in this format with these prompts and this structure.)

Maybe you could say this: “You know, I don’t think we need a weekly meeting for this kind of thing. I’d like to just address issues as they come up. And I don’t think a format where the group addresses issues with one person will be constructive; I think that’s a recipe for tension and even drama. I’d like to propose that we continue handling those things one-on-one, as most offices do.”

If her concern is that people tend to pretend like problems aren’t there, well, she can certainly take the lead in raising them with the people involved to get the problem resolved. That’s what good managers do.

I hear you that you want to be respectful of her and open-minded to her ideas, but you also get to speak up when you think something’s a bad idea — and as long as you do that politely and respectfully, a good lead will welcome that input.

Read an update to this letter here.

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