I think my incompetent coworker made up her work history, my office told me to pump in the bathroom, and more by Alison Green on November 21, 2023 It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go… 1. Should I have told anyone I thought my incompetent coworker made up her work history? My organization hired “Jane,” a coordinator for my department, about six months ago. I didn’t interview her or knew anything about her before she was hired. I am one level below her manager, who is in my department but on a separate team. I interacted with her mostly by helping her with a few tricky process things that are hard to understand if you’re just starting. While working with Jane, I noticed that she seemed pretty unprofessional for a person with her work experience, and she seemed to have kind of weird email etiquette. For example, she basically just declined to do a training because she didn’t want to, and instead kept asking me to do her requests even after I said, “I’m sorry, I don’t have the capacity to help you with this, you need to do the training so you can do it yourself.” She told a very long, overly personal story about her boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend at a company happy hour. We have a pretty informal email culture at my workplace, but her emails were super casual, along the lines of “heyyyy girl” to higher-ups. When she was in charge of organizing a team retreat, she forgot to order lunch (so other team members ran out to pick up food for everyone) and was 30 minutes late to the first session (about 90 minutes after she was supposed to be there to set up breakfast) because she didn’t plan for traffic. All of this added up to some red flags for a person about 40 years old who claimed on her resume that she had worked as an executive assistant at several large, well-known companies and had managed large admin projects. Because I am nosy and probably unwise, I did a Google deep dive and couldn’t find any evidence that Jane had worked at the companies she claimed. She does not have a LinkedIn profile. I couldn’t find anything at all to support her professional history, although I did find tons of other internet trails (social media profiles, etc.). But, of course, I had no real evidence that she had lied on her resume, I don’t want to be a person who goes around assuming someone is lying, and in any case, I wasn’t her manager or even directly on her team so it was probably weird for me to be spending time on this in the first place! I also think that, while making up a work history on your resume is obviously a big deal, it’s a more immediate problem that she was not doing the basic duties of her job. And that part was visible to her manager (including the training stuff, which I had filled in her manager about) so I figured there was no reason for me to get involved. Cut to this week. I got an email saying, “Jane is no longer with us as of today.” My organizational culture is really forgiving, so I assume she must have done something pretty serious to be let go with no notice and so quickly that her email was still active (in my six years at this large organization, the only other instance I know of someone being fired without notice involved embezzlement). I don’t know what happened. Should I have brought my concerns about her resume to her manager or my manager before things got to this point? Since Jane’s manager definitely knew about her performance concerns, was there any reason for me to bring up my nosy internet sleuthing? Nah, I don’t think so. The performance issues were your business since you were training her, and hopefully you didn’t sugarcoat those when you brought them to her manager. But it’s up to them to do their due diligence before hiring someone — and, as you point out, the immediate problem was that she wasn’t able to do her job. It would have been different if you had clear, incontrovertible evidence that she had made up her work history, but you didn’t have that. And really, lots of people don’t have LinkedIn or don’t talk about their jobs online. So maybe she did lie about her experience or maybe she didn’t — but either way she couldn’t do the job, and that was the thing to focus on. 2. My coworker uses everyone else’s trash cans I have a coworker who tends to throw away their garbage in other people’s bins. Everyone has their own trash bin at their desks, including this person. But they still make the rounds to “chat” while also taking the opportunity to throw away anything in their pockets or in their hands. Yes, including stinky lunch leftovers. I don’t want to sit next to someone else’s smelly food for the rest of my day. How can I tell this person to stop without sounding like excessively controlling? For food: “Would you mind not putting that in my bin? Whenever there’s food in it, I smell it all day.” For other stuff: I don’t think you can reasonably stop him from throwing, like, scrap paper in your bin since it’s a trash can and that’s what it’s there for. If he’s filling it up, that’s a different story — in that case you could say, “Could you take that to your bin so I don’t have to empty this” — but otherwise let that part of it go. 3. My office told me to pump in the bathroom I recently had a baby and am currently work from home until the new year. My child is exclusively breastfed, and I pump and store milk regularly. I went into the office today to pick up some items, and I quickly came the realization that my breasts become full and painful rather quickly if I’m not pumping or around my child. This prompted me to ask HR what accommodations would be made when I come back in January. I jokingly typed “(not in the bathroom please)” when asking where I could pump. To my surprise, he said I would actually have to pump in the bathroom until other accommodations are made. I am not doing that (for a multitude of reasons), and I’m not sure how to respond. Nope, that’s illegal. The PUMP for Nursing Mothers Act, signed into law in late 2022, requires employers to provide nursing employees with a private place to pump, and the law explicitly says it cannot be a bathroom. Send HR a message saying something like this: “I wanted to make sure you know that federal law does require us to provide nursing employees with a private place to pump, which cannot be a bathroom. (Details here — the law just passed last year so the company might not have been aware of it.) Can we arrange for me to reserve times in a private office space or locking conference room once I’m back in January?” Read an update to this letter. 4. Using a pet photo as my Slack profile photo Most people in our internal Slack have icons of themselves or no icons. My boss and I both have pictures of our pets. We work not directly with animals, but in an animal-focused area of a much larger business. The great majority of our communication is internal within this animal-focused subsection. Is this a bad idea? It really is a job focused on animals and everyone’s pets are an incredibly common point of friendly conversation in the office and online. Mostly I think its funny, but I’m newer to this kind of job and my boss is known to be a character (he’s great!). I think you’re fine. You work in an animal-focused area and your boss has a pet photo as his image. Even if those things weren’t true, it still wouldn’t necessarily be a problem — but because those things are both true, you definitely don’t need to worry. 5. Explaining why I’m quitting with nothing else lined up I have been using your tips to land a different role but have come to the conclusion that I am just too burned out at this point to put in the hours needed to successfully pivot to a new-to-me, competitive role. Thus, I am gathering my wits to resign from my current role without another lined up. What is a fast, truthful, information-lite way of conveying this to my current job (they will ask due to concerns about competitors) and to interviewers? “Taking time to explore my options” seems trite. To your current employer: “I want to take some time off for some personal projects and to think about what I want to do next.” To interviewers: “I was in a position to be able to take some time off in between jobs so I can be really thoughtful about what to do next.” You may also like:I don't want to stay in an Airbnb with coworkers, illegal requests for salary history, and moremy coworker keeps whispering sexually explicit things in the office bathroomI feel guilty about getting a job in my competitive field when others are still struggling { 492 comments }
the fraudulent bread pudding, the fig fight, and other food stories from work by Alison Green on November 20, 2023 All this week to get us in the holiday spirit, I’m going to be featuring holiday work stories readers have shared here in the past … and then updates season will start next week! To kick us off, here are 12 of my favorite stories you shared about potlucks and other food gatherings at work earlier this month. 1. The savage “It was your average office holiday season potluck. The room was festively decorated, thanks to some volunteers with holiday cheer, and Christmas music was playing on someone’s laptop. A colleague brought in a whole rotisserie chicken from the grocery store and placed it with the other food. It was hot and fresh – a lovely contribution – delivered just a few minutes before people would begin filing into the room to make their plates. ‘I’m going to go grab a knife from the kitchen so I can carve it up,’ my colleague said as she exited the room. Dear reader, what happened next still haunts me to this very day. One of the office’s more chaotic characters stepped up to the buffet and announced that a knife was not needed. She then proceeded to rip the chicken carcass apart with her bare, unwashed hands. Another colleague and I watched in horror as she savagely tore the chicken limb from limb, her hands dripping with grease from the succulent, now ravaged meat. In the distance, Mariah Carey was singing (or was she screaming?). Our duty was now to warn the others. ‘Don’t eat the chicken,’ we whispered as more guests began filling up the room. ‘Don’t eat the chicken.’” 2. The divinity candy “Around the holidays, it’s not unusual for our office break room to contain an assortment of treats gifted to us from vendors or customers. Several years ago during this most festive time of year, I noticed a tray of what looked like divinity candy sitting out on the break room table. Divinity is not my favorite holiday candy, but it was early in the season, and the pickings were slim, so I decided to have a piece. Just as I took a bite, a coworker walked in and said, ‘Oh! You’re trying out my candy – let me know what you think of it!’ By this time the bite had well and truly settled on my palate, and let me tell you, I had opinions. Being a polite sort of person in real life, I was hesitant to tell her what I thought (which would have been difficult without swallowing, which was not an option at this point), but I can tell you – it tasted like a dog turd rolled in powdered sugar. Or what I assume a dog turd would taste like, having never sampled a dog turd myself. I stepped around my coworker to grab a paper towel to ostensibly wipe my mouth (and discreetly spit out the offending ‘candy’), then turned back around to address my coworker. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever had anything like it,’ says I, in what I hope was a pleasant voice. ‘What’s it called?’ Coworker replies, ‘I haven’t really thought of a name for it – it’s just something I experimented with.’ Then she tells me how she made it. Y’all. It was mashed potatoes. And not even real potatoes, but the boxed potato flakes. Prepared in the normal way with butter, milk and salt, then mixed with peanut butter, Karo syrup, and powdered sugar, then rolled in another healthy dose of powdered sugar. Dear coworker had made too many mashed potatoes for dinner the night before, and in an effort not to waste food, had decided to try her hand as a confectioner. I’m having flashbacks of the nauseating flavor and texture just typing this out. So gross. So, so gross. I mumbled something polite that probably came out as more of an ‘Oh! Hrrmm, interesting’ or similar, then bolted from the room to warn the rest of my coworkers NOT to try the ‘divinity’ in the break room.” 3. The chili “Work did a chili cook-off. We had a couple employees who don’t eat meat who basically got mocked by several other coworkers (think those guys who proudly brag about how they won’t eat vegetables and ‘pick the green bits out’ of chicken pot pie, etc.) when they mentioned bringing vegetarian chili. I got into a Mood about it, and my Moods can be … petty. I decided to bring a vegan option (I wasn’t vegan whatsoever). I spoke to friends of mine who are, though, got all their best recipe tips, tested and worked on it for a month and a half leading up. We ate so much vegan chili. We were so sick of it, but I was bound and determined to figure this out because I hate people who think it’s hilarious to make other people feel bad about what they eat. I entered my vegan chili in the cook-off but nobody listed ingredients so you didn’t know whose chili had what and it could be ‘so and so’s secret recipe,’ although of course the vegetarian coworker who participated made a veggie version, etc. The coworkers who had mocked my vegetarian coworkers also mocked their bean-based chili offerings, of course (their chili was so good actually!). They LOVED mine, which to them had what looked like meat in it. Talked it up! I explained it was vegan. Not a single animal product involved. Even though I didn’t win anything, I kind of still felt like I did when I saw the look on the one guy’s face.” 4. The lactose revenge “Several of my coworkers are painfully lactose intolerant. I also work with an extremely diverse group of people so anything cheese- and meat-related isn’t optimal due to religious reasons. I compiled a list of catering places of a similar price range but with more non-dairy options and asked the admin to please consider literally any options as pizza excludes 30% of the office. She refused. It is always pizza for company lunches and catering, even with holidays. The Fart Wars have begun. A coordinated crop dusting attack of lactose intolerant people with just enough Lactaid in themselves to not create a mess will walk passed her desk in the tiny welcome area.” 5. The bread pudding “I make an awesome bread pudding, if I do say so myself. The reason it’s so awesome is I make it using pound cake. At a long ago job, I took it to the first holiday potluck I attended there. I brought along copies of the recipe because hey, someone always asks for it. The wicked witch of the finance department (I’ve worked with many lovely finance departments — she drove off so many employees in her department, including three finance directors in the five years I worked there, but that’s another story) raised a stink about how it was NOT bread pudding – it had no bread! And there is no such thing as cake pudding, what was I trying to pull? She accused me of trying to invent something and it just shouldn’t be done, especially at a potluck where if you sign up for a dessert, you must bring a traditional potluck dessert, not something made up! In the days ahead, she filed a complaint with HR as after reading the recipe closely, she discovered I used a boxed pound cake mix and recommended a specific generic brand that, in my opinion, made a fantastic pound cake. The HR director danced around a strong suggestion that in future I not bring a bread pudding made with pound cake – this was a city government and there were unions involved and finance witch spent a great deal of time being counseled but never crossed a line to anything fireable. So next year, I brought a bread pudding made with chocolate croissants. There was a hissy fit of epic proportions but every crumb of my bread pudding was gone be the end of the potluck.” (The recipe is here.) 6. The best and brightest “I worked in a tech company years ago which had a huge institutional ego problem, as in ‘we only hire the best and brightest, etc.’ and we got both our regular toaster and toaster oven taken away from us, the former because someone tried to make a grilled cheese in it apparently not understanding the thermoplastic nature of cheese and setting the (vertical) toaster on fire when it melted onto the heating element (as above) and the latter for putting a slice of pizza wrapped in plastic wrap and melting the plastic, filling the kitchen with petroleum-product-based smoke and fumes. So, just in case you ever feel a creeping inferiority complex around someone who went to Harvard or MIT … don’t. 7. The stealth party “At former workplace: On a Wednesday, my direct supervisor told me that she was buying lunch for me and her other direct reports as a holiday party. Sounds good! Then she tells me it’s a secret and if anyone asks, to say it’s a meeting. Okaaaay, little weird but whatevs — free food. Thursday, as planned, we all go to her office. There’s food, but we’re all crammed into her office, the door is closed, and she mentions that her boss doesn’t know that we’re having this party and she doesn’t want him to find out. Errr, okay? She tells us that we’re doing a great job (yay!) no matter what anyone else might say (wait, what?) and to eat and enjoy. It’s awkward. At one point, there’s a knock on the door and my boss sidles up to the door and sticks her head out. It’s the person who handles payroll and she is clearly confused why she can’t come in the office, but nevertheless she tells boss that she has processed the paperwork for the raises and just needs my boss to sign off on them. So now we’re all wondering who is getting a raise. (Spoiler: It wasn’t me!) My boss is clearly regretting trying to hold stealth meeting/party and more or less kicks us all out after that.” 8. The figs At a Thanksgiving party in my old office we had a HUGE cheese and fruit plate that had a giant mound of whole figs. Several people in the office had never seen a whole fig before. One asked, ‘What’s this?’ Someone else said, ‘It’s a fig.’ ‘A what?’ “a fig. You know, a fig.’ ‘What’s a fig?’ Others joined in (possibly emboldened by the wine that was available): ‘A fig is a fig is a fig!’ ‘Are you figging kidding me, you don’t know what a fig is?’ Finally someone shouted, ‘I don’t give a flying fig!’ which prompted someone to throw a fig. It became a game of dodge fig. Luckily the skirmish was restricted to figs, which are easy to clean up (and I have no problem with wiping off a stray fig and eating it – no sense in wasting it). One colleague evidently collected a lot of them and over the next few months people would find figs mysteriously appearing on their keyboards, in their desk drawers, in their mail boxes…” 9. The coffin “A few jobs ago, I was the manager of a front line team in a theme park/hospitality adjacent business. We were given a budget of $500 a month from our corporate office for morale/team-building, and a lot of the times, that meant food. (Before people come in and say we should have been giving raises instead of pizza parties, I totally agree, and it was something I fought really hard for … but at the end of the day, I wasn’t the person who dictated labor budgets and didn’t have the power to make final decisions.) One time, I decided, as a fun Halloween treat, to get a coffin of donuts from VooDoo Donuts — it was 50 or so donuts displayed in a literal 3-4 foot pinewood coffin. It was a nightmare to carry to my car from the shop, and from my car to our work locations — I got so many odd looks haha. The team LOVED it — the donuts were delicious, and the coffin was super fun and unique … but immediately started causing massive fights. A few different people decided that the coffin was up for grabs, and insisting that it would be going home with them. I had to step in and say that the coffin wasn’t going home with anyone, which prompted several kidnap attempts, as well as people running to other leaders on the team, trying to get permission despite the fact that I already said no. It culminated in a screaming fight between a couple of my employees (a known troublemaker and, surprisingly, one of my quietest employees) which I had to break up. I then promptly removed the coffin from the common break area where it was clearly causing problems, moved it to the leadership office, and wrote ‘PROPERTY OF BUSINESS – DO NOT REMOVE’ in big bold letters on the side. It lived there for several months, and at one point we used it to hold various paper supplies. I intended to eventually raffle it off to an employee in a fair way to get it out of our office, but then the pandemic shut our business down. I have no idea where that coffin ended up, but I’m assuming someone on the crew brought in to break the business space down saw their opportunity and ferreted it away.” 10. The secret ingredient “Many years ago, a colleague made a crockpot dish for an after-work office celebration. The dish was delicious – every morsel eaten. Days later, the coworker confided in me when he dropped his supplies in the kitchen early that morning, he plugged in the crockpot not realizing it on, in fact set on ‘high.’ Inside the crockpot were the tomatoes he planned to use IN A PLASTIC PRODUCE BAG. At lunchtime, he went to assemble his dish so it could heat all afternoon. The plastic bag had completely melted into the now-cooked tomatoes. Not sure what to do (???), he just added the rest of the ingredients, let it cook all afternoon, and served it!” 11. The missing slice “At a party for something I can’t remember a woman brought a beautiful home made cake … with one slice missing. A small sign on a toothpick was stuck in the cake: ‘Larry was here.’ (Larry being the baker’s hubby.)” 12. The farm “One year, as a team building activity, my company had us go to a local farm that was one of the big attractions of the city, and the activity was for us to prepare our own 1890’s style meal working with a wood fired stove, campfire, and other 19th century tools and skills. They broke us into groups and each group prepared a part of the meal. The worst part was was that it was outdoors on a 96 degree day, and some of the work was strenuous and difficult. The people who worked there were supposed to be there to help, but if you asked them questions they were super vague and kind of patronizing. There were SO many issues, like not enough cooking utensils, the campfire stove took way too long boil water for the potatoes, and … one person literally had a heart attack and had to go to the ER. When we finished we had to sit on picnic tables outdoors, and we all looked ragged like we’d been through something traumatic. Then after all that, we all had to clean the tables and wash all the dishes, take the trash out, etc. Almost no one was into it, and we haven’t done a team-building activity since.” You may also like:when are potlucks a bad idea?when my office lets us out early before a holiday, why don't they tell us in advance?our polyamorous employee wants to bring their 3 partners to the holiday party { 509 comments }
should I warn job candidates that we don’t give raises? by Alison Green on November 20, 2023 A reader writes: My organization recently replaced merit increases with capped bonuses. While I think this is a bad policy and I’m pushing back on it, in the meantime I’m concerned about my responsibility to new hires. I would never have thought to ask about this as a candidate. I’m hiring a new junior staff person, who will likely be a young woman, given our field. I want to be up-front about growth potential and tell them about our policy. However, I’m also really concerned that we will lose top candidates and I desperately need to fill this position. How do I balance equity and transparency with hiring top talent? Can I, given this policy? I answer this question — and three others — over at Inc. today, where I’m revisiting letters that have been buried in the archives here from years ago (and sometimes updating/expanding my answers to them). You can read it here. Other questions I’m answering there today include: My coworker comments on my appearance — a lot Taking unpaid vacation to “save” paid vacation for later My client implied my work is so easy and fun that I shouldn’t need to unplug You may also like:should I push back against getting annual bonuses instead of raises?my new job doesn't give raises -- everhow can I hire good candidates to work in a dysfunctional environment? { 150 comments }
my employee times her bathroom breaks to avoid the tasks she doesn’t want to do by Alison Green on November 20, 2023 A reader writes: I own a business and have noticed recently that my receptionist, Lisa, has been going to the bathroom at really inconvenient — and suspicious — times. We have people coming in by appointment, and especially in the last several weeks, she has gotten up to go to the bathroom right before a difficult customer is scheduled to come in, or right before she’d have to have a difficult conversation (for instance, collecting no-show appointment fees), or when someone has to make another appointment but the person they need to make an appointment with is pretty solidly booked — sometimes even when the phone rings and the caller ID shows someone that I have reason to think she doesn’t want to deal with. She makes sure to announce that she cannot wait any longer to use the bathroom. This leaves my back-end person to pick up the slack, which is interfering with his job duties. Lisa already works shortened hours so she can be home when her kids get home from school, so my back-end person and I are already picking up some extra work and trying to fit in our jobs in fewer hours (which we both knew when I hired her), and this is putting more strain on us. Everything on your site says you can’t police someone’s bathroom habits, which I totally agree with. Lisa isn’t going to the bathroom an excessive number of times, or for long periods of time, just at really inconvenient times that feels like she’s skipping out on the hard parts of the job. I’ve had the conversation a few times about looking at the schedule before doing things like going to lunch, or getting a snack, or grabbing more envelopes from the storage room, or whatever. Is this a “name the pattern conversation”? How do I bring this up without sounding like I’m policing her bathroom habits? And if she says that she can’t change this pattern, do I just have to drop it and put these things on the back-end employee and myself? I don’t want to be “that boss,” but come on! Yeah, that sounds like a pattern. It’s not about policing her bathroom habits; it’s that she appears to be deliberately avoiding the less desirable parts of her job. Of course — and this is important — that assumes the tasks Lisa wants to avoid are occasional enough that the pattern of avoidance is obvious. If, though, her job has her dealing with difficult customers all day long, of course she would end up being away from the desk for some of them, because she has normal human bathroom needs. But for the rest of this answer, I’m going to assume that’s not the case. One way you might be able to address it is by talking to Lisa each morning and naming anything you want her to be sure to be available for that day — like, “Can you make sure you’re available at your desk at two specific times today: first when Tangerina Stewpot comes in at 11 since she often has questions, as well as at 12:15 when Apollo Mongoose checks out so you can flag the late fees he has accumulated?” But that sounds like that will only get at parts of the problem; it won’t address the ducking out when she sees a particular person on the Caller ID, for example. So it’s okay to address the pattern itself. You could say something like: “I’ve noticed you’re taking your breaks right as a difficult task is coming up — like right as a difficult customer calls or is scheduled to come in, or when you’d need to have a difficult conversation like X or Y. Of course you can’t be glued to your desk all day, but it’s happening frequently enough that the pattern concerns me. So I wanted to talk about what would solve it. One option is that we could look at the day’s schedule each morning and make sure we’re aligned on which appointments you should make sure to be available at the desk for. I also wondered if you’d like more help with how to handle some of those difficult conversations so they start to feel easier, or if there’s something else going on that’s making you uneasy about those tasks.” The idea with this conversation isn’t necessarily to come up with a foolproof plan that will solve 100% of the problem, but being candid about what you’re seeing might go a long way toward changing things. And if there is context that better explains what Lisa is doing (like if she does need more training, or if Apollo Mongoose treated her horribly last time he was in, or there’s a medical thing in play), this creates an opportunity for her to raise it. You asked what to do if she says she can’t change the pattern. There’s a good chance that this conversation will change things, but if she says she can’t, try implementing some of those solutions yourself: give her more training on tough customer interactions (including role-playing some of them and also letting her observe you handling them) and start doing that daily schedule-aligning. If there’s still no change and the avoidance pattern is unmistakeable, then you’d need to look at whether she’s well suited for the job, especially in combination with her already shortened hours — but hopefully this can steer things away from that point. You may also like:my coworker keeps taking the office's magazines into the bathroommy assistant uses eating to avoid workinghow can I shut down a nosy receptionist's questions about my appointments? { 157 comments }
laser tag for team-building, company insists on shipping wine to our homes, and more by Alison Green on November 20, 2023 It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go… 1. Laser tag for team-building I’m curious to get your take on laser tag as a team-building exercise. We all work from home at my small nonprofit and gather together in person for a few days several times a year. Earlier this year we did an afternoon of laser tag during one of our in-person meetings and there were at least a few of us who didn’t have that great of a time. We were dismayed to discover last week that our org has scheduled another laser tag afternoon for our next in-person gathering. Aside from the fact that it has absolutely nothing to do with our work (and I think it’s a waste of both our time and the org’s money) (and these kinds of team-building activities are a scourge upon the earth), I also really don’t like the idea of having to run around with guns and shoot at my coworkers. (And yes, I know they’re not real but the whole thing is still very war-like in my head.) I already raised this with my supervisor, who I get along great with, and felt confident that she would see my side of things but she said I should go anyway. I also plan to ask my fellow coworkers who hated it last time to bring it up to their supervisors as well so we can push back as a group, but won’t be able to until next week as most of them are away at a conference this week. Any thoughts on this? I’m already feeling kind of sick about the whole thing. Laser tag is a horrible choice for team-building, especially if it’s mandatory. It’s not at all inclusive for anyone who has physical activity restrictions, has any kind of trauma associated with gun violence, or just plain doesn’t like guns or running around. That’s a lot of people. (Personally I can’t even enjoy movies with a lot of shooting right now; I’m definitely not going to run around with a fake gun. I’d be pissed off about being required to do this.) How firm were you when you talked to your manager? If you downplayed your feelings at all, go back to her and say, “I’ve thought on this more and it’s not something I’m comfortable participating in — and given sensitivities around gun violence right now, I doubt I’m the only one who feels that way. I’ll attend if it’s mandatory, but it’s not something I’ll participate in. Is there a spot where I can wait for everyone else to be done?” Read an update to this letter. 2. Anonymous complaints about my department meeting I am the sole member of a one-person communications department at a small firm where I’ve been employed for three years. I organize and run a biweekly (meaning once every two weeks) “touch-base” meeting attended by about 10 people from five other departments. If I don’t have any urgent updates or need input from any group members, I am happy to cancel the meeting out of respect for busy schedules. If we have the meeting, I keep an organized agenda and usually dismiss everyone within 10-15 minutes. In the last three company-wide annual anonymous surveys, one person (based on the small number of complaints and wording) has been consistently complaining about my meeting — that we should cancel it more often, that we don’t have enough to discuss, that the deadlines are too far away, etc. I don’t want to cancel it more often because my job consists of managing long projects with strict deadlines that require input from a lot of other departments/people and awareness of deadlines. Should I address the group about this since I can’t identify the complainant? Or just ignore it? It is possible that I’m just irritated that someone is whining about a very short, biweekly meeting. Address it with the group head-on: “We’ve had complaints on the anonymous survey that we should cancel this meeting more often, so I wanted to get everyone’s input on how these meetings are working for you. They’re useful for me because of ___, but I’m open to hearing if there are changes you’d like to see.” If it’s just one person being a grump and everyone else thinks the meetings are fine, the open discussion may shame them into quitting with the anonymous complaints. But it could also be a valuable discussion, so go into it with an open mind and see what you learn! Sometimes meetings are necessary even when people grumble about them, but sometimes they’re not or there are ways to streamline them that are worth hearing. One note: I might be reading too much into your statement that you hold the meetings if you “need input from any group members” (emphasis mine), but if you’re making the whole group gather when you just need input from one or two people, they’ll probably be happier if you just meet with those people rather than making everyone assemble. 3. My company insists on shipping wine to our homes and I can’t opt out I have been an employee at my mid-sized company for several years and I love my job. I have a supportive and knowledgeable boss and grandboss, and my peers are competent, respectful, and frankly the best at what we do. Our workforce is entirely remote across the world, and has been for the entire time that I have worked here. The only thing about my company that I dread is the holiday season. Our CEO is passionate about wine. Every year as a holiday gift to the U.S.-based employees, our CEO sends a selection of one to three wines through the mail delivered directly to our homes. This delivery is accompanied by an invitation to a company-wide virtual wine tasting, led by an expert. The first year this happened, I appreciated the thought but was disappointed that I wasn’t given an option to opt out. My closely held religious beliefs exclude me from being in the drinking crowd. Unusual in my industry, but not unheard of! I ended up gifting the wine to my parents and sent a message to my manager and HR letting them know that I would appreciate an alternative choice in the future. The second year, I became slightly annoyed. Shipping notifications were sent with no warning or announcement beforehand. I planned on refusing the package, but my mail carrier left it without a signature. Again, I reached out to my supervisor and HR, and reiterated that having alcohol in my home was in discord with my religious beliefs, and that I was unhappy that my message from the previous year had been ignored. I was told to submit for reimbursement for a bottle of soda as an alternative. Years three and four went similarly. No opt-out option was offered and my follow-up messages were brushed off with no meaningful change. I’m not the litigious type, but by this point I’m pretty upset that my beliefs are being so blatantly and knowingly disrespected. Simultaneously, I truly appreciate the thought! I know our CEO means no harm, and is sharing their passion with us in an attempt to build community and camaraderie. I just wish that the leadership team would make a better attempt at imagining me and people like me as someone that they want to respect and hold space for within our community. I don’t need a gold star or a special gift — I simply want to be able to quietly opt out, without seeming ungrateful or judgmental. Am I off-base here? Or, is there some method of persuasion that I’m not thinking of? No, you’re not off-base! It’s awfully disrespectful that they’ve continued to mail you alcohol year after year when you’ve told them it’s at odds with your religious beliefs. I don’t blame them for the first year — wine is a common enough gift and people who don’t drink will usually just give it away, even if they’re slightly annoyed — but after that there was no excuse, particularly after the second year when you clearly spelled out that it’s not just that you don’t drink, but that you cannot have it in your home. If you want to give it one more shot, you could say this to your boss and HR: “I’m not sure if I haven’t been clear in past years, so I want to be very clear now: for religious reasons, I cannot have alcohol show up at my home. I have said this in past years and it has arrived anyway. So I am requesting a formal religious accommodation to opt out of the wine. How do I ensure the company respects my religious beliefs and does not ship me wine this year?” Also, if you’ve been dealing with a low-level HR person on this, go higher. Make sure to use the words “formal religious accommodation.” 4. Participating in Secret Santa as a manager I am an assistant manager of a government office of about 30 people. We normally do a gift exchange for the holidays, such as a Secret Santa or white elephant gift exchange. I realize holiday gifts from employees to managers are problematic, but should I participate in gift exchanges like the ones I described? Is it uncomfortable for people to draw my name and be my Secret Santa since I’m their boss? Is it awkward for them to steal a gift from me in a white elephant gift exchange? Or, am I overthinking this all-in-fun activity? If I decline to participate, do I then look like a Scrooge? The rule against gifting up (or managers expecting gifts from people they manage) is because of the power dynamics in the relationship; people shouldn’t feel pressured to buy gifts for people with power over them. But something like a Secret Santa or white elephant exchange is different, because everyone is opting into participating and it’s more of a round robin / group activity than one with traditional gifting dynamics. It’s fine for you to participate if you want to. This assumes you are behaving like a normal person and not, for example, making it clear you expect your Secret Santa to exceed the dollar limit or giving dirty looks to anyone who steals a gift from you in a white elephant exchange, etc. 5. Boss asked me to take on more supervision to “demonstrate to HR that I should be promoted” My supervisor has recently asked me to start informally supervising a colleague (who is a peer on my team) to “demonstrate to HR” that I should be promoted. I’m not sure how to feel about this. On one hand, I know that there needs to be documentation that I have excelled at my current job to be promoted. On the other, I feel that I am taking on more work without any increase in pay. Is this reasonable? What does “informally supervising” mean? You need real authority to supervise someone, and they need to be aware that you have that authority. If your boss just means she’d like you to start reviewing your coworker’s work and providing feedback, that’s one thing, as long as your coworker has been told you’ve been charged with that and there’s a clear limit on how long your boss envisions you doing this for. But if it’s anything more than that, she’s talking about a significant increase in responsibility, and that needs to be accompanied by the actual authority to do the job (and appropriate pay for doing it). That said, some companies do operate like this and realistically in those organizations you’ve got to go along with it if you want the promotion. If yours is one of those, make sure you talk to your boss about the intended timeline for considering a promotion (it should be a few months at most, not a year) and get very clear about exactly what your company would need to see before you’re promoted. If they can’t tell you those two things in fairly concrete terms, be extremely wary. Related: can I refuse more work without a raise? You may also like:how can I keep my temper at work?my office loves expensive, physically demanding team-building activitieswe have to write deeply personal poems and share them at a staff meeting { 691 comments }
weekend open thread – November 18-19, 2023 by Alison Green on November 17, 2023 This comment section is open for any non-work-related discussion you’d like to have with other readers, by popular demand. Here are the rules for the weekend posts. Book recommendation of the week: A Family Daughter, by Maile Meloy – Building on the events of Meloy’s Liars and Saints, which followed a close-knit Catholic family through four generations, this retells the story but from the perspective of the youngest daughter. * I make a commission if you use that Amazon link. <span style="display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;" data-mce-type="bookmark" class="mce_SELRES_start"></span> You may also like:all of my 2021 and 2022 book recommendationsall of my 2019 and 2020 book recommendationsall of my book recommendations from 2015-2018 { 1,199 comments }
it’s your Friday good news by Alison Green on November 17, 2023 It’s your Friday good news! 1. “At the beginning of the year, my office received approval to hire for several positions across two departments, one of those departments being mine. We knew we were likely to have many strong candidates internally, and externally. In a managers’ meeting, I advocated that we send our interview questions to all candidates being interviewed ahead of time. I was an asked to serve on hiring panels for two different departments for these hires. As we were planning our strategy for the hires, I again advocated for sharing the interview questions with the people we chose to interview and both of the hiring managers agreed. Almost everyone we interviewed commented during the interviews how much they appreciated having the questions in advance. From my perspective, I think it lessened the stress candidates have when trying to answer questions off the cuff and allowed them to provide thoughtful and informative responses to our questions. I have been part of many hiring panels over my career. I would say these were some of the best interviews in which I have participated. One reason for this was because we shared the interview questions ahead of time. We hired some fantastic internal and external candidates for these positions who are already making great contributions to our organization. Thanks to you for the idea of sharing the interview questions in advance. I would do it in the future for any hiring in which I am involved.” 2. “I’m so excited to be writing in for good news Friday! All of your advice has been so excellent for me! I focused my resume on accomplishments instead of duties, like you always advise. I wrote out answers to likely interview questions and rehearsed them. I did a mock interview with a friend. I asked the magic question and found out what accomplishments to focus on. One interviewer gave an audible ‘hmm!’ while I was talking, like he was happy to hear about that experience. I used my thank-you notes to follow up on the questions asked by each specific interviewer. After the interview, I started doing research for and preparing for a possible negotiation. I knew they would lowball me on salary, and they did. During the convo where she offered me the job, I asked for a senior VP title (this job was set at VP level) and made the case that it was an international position with significant responsibilities, and the title needed to hold weight with the staff. I also explained that the job description was more in line with a chief officer job than a VP-level job, justifying asking for a $10k jump over what they offered me initially. I had done my salary research. On top of that, both the title (this is a new position) and the name of the new department that I’d be heading up were outdated. So I made the case for the title and dept name change by explaining how it would make my work so much easier if clients could look at the title/name and know exactly what my role was. Well, they came back okaying the title bump, title change, and department name change, and $8k over the original offer. I’ve been reading your blog for years, read your books, and it paid off.” 3. “I emailed some time back because my job, which had been perfect for a partially disabled person who needs a flexible schedule due to other responsibilities, had become absolutely terrible: hours cut and cut again without diminution in my task load, unwritten management tree changed to include multiple bosses for just one me, reprimands for not doing things that were not in the job description that none of my new bosses had even read, extra work dropped on me out of the blue but God help me if I asked for the time I needed to get it all done, and managers taking me aside to give me nice little chats about improving my work efficiency while I was on the clock with a deadline looming. And also ‘making a place for’ important documents in the numbered filing system that I had created with my own hard work, without writing down where that place actually was. And so on. Well! I have gotten a much better job by using your cover letter and interview suggestions. Higher pay, more hours now with a strong possibility that within two years I will be working as many hours as I can take on without endangering my health and no more, schedule still flexible, a clear (written!) chain of command, a job description that is reviewed every year, scheduled meetings, and everything filed, cross referenced, backed up, and updated using a system that runs like clockwork that I did not have to create in the face of indifference! There was already an emergency services manual when I got there! Already a manual for my job! I didn’t have to write any of it! I just had my first quarterly review, which was a revelation. (I got one employee review over my years at the other place.) Measured, calm feedback and sensible, feasible suggestions for improvement. And they noticed the extra I was putting in. Glory hallelujah.” You may also like:are short interviews always a bad sign?I didn't even get interviewed for an internal role I was told I was a strong candidate forhow can I hire good candidates to work in a dysfunctional environment? { 40 comments }
open thread – November 17-18, 2023 by Alison Green on November 17, 2023 It’s the Friday open thread! The comment section on this post is open for discussion with other readers on any work-related questions that you want to talk about (that includes school). If you want an answer from me, emailing me is still your best bet*, but this is a chance to take your questions to other readers. * If you submitted a question to me recently, please do not repost it here, as it may be in my queue to answer. You may also like:can I nap on my break?I have to share a hotel room with a coworker who screams in her sleephere's a bunch of help finding a new job { 960 comments }
coworker has temper tantrums whenever there’s noise, rigid vacation policy, and more by Alison Green on November 17, 2023 It’s four answers to four questions. Here we go… 1. Coworker has temper tantrums whenever there’s noise, then gives us apology gifts I work at a small construction company. When I started, it was our office manager, me, and one other office worker and we were completely remote. In the two years I’ve been here, we’ve grown rapidly (we now have 13 office employees). Earlier this year, our owners decided that with the increase in work and employees, we needed a centrally located office to hold meetings, etc. We are also a relatively new company, so we have a lot of processes and procedures to work through to ensure everything gets done and no one is duplicating work. Being in the office GREATLY helps with that. We moved into an office two months ago and were given plenty of advance notice that we would need to report to the office full-time for a few months while we get processes in place to ensure things are running efficiently. This has largely been a big success. It’s helping immensely to be able to bounce ideas off of each other, establish guidelines for how to handle things, etc. (Ultimately we will transition to a hybrid schedule and work remotely 2-3 days a week and in the office the other days.) I’m writing in regards to one coworker, Fay. Fay worked remotely for almost four years prior to this. Since settling into the office, she has at least 1-2 “temper tantrums” a week in regards to even the slightest increase in noise level. I’ve worked in a lot of offices and truly, this one is the quietest! Everyone is very respectful of each other’s space, that they may be on the phone or concentrating on something. However, it does occasionally get loud (example, when the field teams are in for a meeting, it’s going to be louder). Every time the volume increases, Fay throws a tantrum, yelling and swearing about how she “can’t work in these conditions,” “it’s f-ing ridiculous to expect her to get her work done with this noise,” and so on. The language doesn’t bother any of us (we work in construction, we’re used to that). It’s the sudden explosion of anger and that she’s taking it out on us when we’re not the loud ones. The rest of us put headphones on, take our lunch break, or work on something that doesn’t require as much concentration when the office occasionally gets louder. Fay does the same, eventually, but not until after she throws a tantrum and has a yelling fit. I handle her outbursts the same way I did with my kids when they were little — I ignore them. I’m not giving any of my time or energy to react because she can’t get her emotions under control and doesn’t want to be in an office. Every time, Fay approaches all of us one by one a few hours after her tantrum and apologizes. We accept and move on. Lately, she’s been buying little gifts for those of us who work in her direct vicinity (and take the brunt of her yelling) with an apology note. (Nothing expensive or crazy, think a mini size facial scrub, a scented candle, things like that.) Today, she had yet another one tantrum. Our boss has talked to her once about one of her outbursts, but she hadn’t witnessed it, she’d only heard about it after the fact. Fay apologized and was good for a week or so. Today our boss witnessed it and said she will handle it, and I know she will address it with her. She’s very good like that. However, I also know Fay will be making her rounds soon to apologize and there will likely be a small gift on my desk when I get into the office tomorrow. Is it awful of me to tell her I don’t want any more gifts (and frankly any more apologies) and I’d rather she just get her tantrums under control? I don’t want to be rude, but it’s like working on the edge of a volcano, never knowing when it will erupt. Nope, it wouldn’t be awful of you. Fay is wildly out of line and she knows it; that’s what the apologies and gifts are for. You could say this: “I don’t want or need any apology gifts, what I want is for you to stop exploding in the office because it’s really disruptive. If you do that, we’re good.” If she keeps pushing the gift anyway, say this: “I really don’t want gifts after this happens. Please just get your temper under control; that’s really what we need.” 2. Making sure halal and vegan buffet food doesn’t run out for the people who need it I work for a fairly large employer (about 300 full-time staff), and we are planning our holiday luncheon. The luncheon is a well-attended event, served buffet-style with typical American holiday foods (turkey, ham, yams, macaroni and cheese, vegetables, etc.) I had an employee approach me yesterday about providing halal options. We have a sizable community who would benefit from this and are happy to include this in our planning, but we also have had a few vegans express interest in more vegan options. What is the best way to include halal- and vegan-friendly options while ensuring that those who observe these diets have access? We have found that when we have vegan-friendly options in the buffet line, those who need it don’t always end up getting it because everyone else will eat it, too. We were thinking of setting these options up on a separate table with a small label indicating the type of food and saying “Reserved for our colleagues who observe these dietary requirements,” but I don’t know if that really sounds right or would make people feel like they are “outing” themselves in a way that would make them uncomfortable instead of included. We are too far in the planning to switch caterers, so we are adding a caterer who can do a few special options for us. But that means it won’t be enough to allow everyone to partake. Any ideas? One effective option is to let people with dietary restrictions go through the buffet first before you open it to everyone else — because otherwise, you’re right, there’s always a risk that the vegan and halal food will be gone by the time the people who actually need it get up to the front of the line. Read an update to this letter. 3. Rigid vacation request policy I’m in a pretty typical nonprofit desk job. A manager on my team quit a few months ago, and now all six of us report to the team director. The director has instituted a new policy on vacation: all vacation requests must be made by two weeks into the quarter before the planned time off, and she’ll make decisions on them a month after the submission deadline (so requests for October-December vacation are due July 15 with approval or denial on August 15). This is weird and bad, right? She says it’s the only way she can ensure non overlapping leave and that she doesn’t have time to consider leave requests more than quarterly. I doubt either of those are right? I don’t know how doctors or firefighters do it but I think coverage is pretty essential there and I can’t imagine this is their system; similarly, I would bet there are at least some executives at major companies overstretched in the same way as this director, and I’ve never heard of them refusing to even consider leave? This is a new policy so we’re all still learning how it works. Apparently if your request is denied, you can submit a modified one for another attempt — but that won’t be reviewed until the next deadline. Also bad, no? What, no, this is a terrible policy. You have to know by July that you want specific dates in December and if you don’t, then too bad, there’s no way you’re going to get them any later? (Actually, it’s a little more reasonable with December just because that’s a popular month for time off — but requiring people to submit dates for June by January and so forth is not reasonable.) What if you get the opportunity in November for a cool trip in March, or you learn on July 20 that you’ll have family in town in November? You’re out of luck because of these arbitrary deadlines? Fielding leave requests just isn’t that burdensome, especially on a team of only six people. It would be different if she were telling you that you’d have your best shot at the dates you want if you use that schedule — but not even considering any outside of it is BS, and you might consider talking to HR about whether it’s okay for your benefits to be limited in this way. 4. Non-gendered honorifics I work in the front end of a major grocery store chain. Sometimes I’m in a checkstand, but I am usually behind the customer service desk. Our store has a large non-binary-gender population, in both employees and customers. While it’s fairly easy to ask employees about preferred pronouns, it’s a little more awkward with customers. For example, as a late-Boomer/early-GenX-er, my default would be “How may I help you, sir?” or Ma’am, you forgot your keys!” but I may misgender and/or offend some of our customers. Are there ungendered honorifics that can be used in these situations? “Hon” or “Dear” bug me for their sexist and ageist connotations. “Citizen” sounds like a bad sci-fi movie from the Cold War and isn’t appropriate for our large immigrant population. “Yo” or “Dude” are a little too casual. Some people say just not to use anything, but honorifics do help keep people connected and catch their attention when they’re looking away from me. How do I address people respectfully? I can’t think of a single non-gendered honorific that wouldn’t sound bizarrely out of place in that context, like your “Citizen” example. And yeah, definitely don’t use “hon” or “dear.” Some people will use “friend,” but that’s not everyone’s cup of tea, and some customers may find it overly familiar. (At first I accidentally typed “fiend” there, and now I’m sad that that won’t work.) But while I agree with you that honorifics can be very useful in the sorts of situations you describe, they’re not essential. When you need to catch someone’s attention (such as someone walking away who has forgotten their keys), calling out “pardon me!” will usually be nearly as successful as “ma’am!” (I agree it doesn’t sound as polite, but that’s because we’ve been conditioned to hear “ma’am” and “sir” as polite. I’d tell yourself that you’re prioritizing a more important form of politeness in not misgendering them.) Anyone want to suggest a better option? You may also like:most popular posts of 2023my coworker tries to guilt-trip peoplemy partner freaks out over any background noise when working from home { 1,207 comments }
does using humor risk undermining me as a manager? by Alison Green on November 16, 2023 A reader writes: I am a brand new manager at a rather small company and have one employee who reports to me, my first ever report. Typically in the past I’ve built relationships with coworkers and managers with work-appropriate humor and puns, with a decent amount of my jokes being self-deprecating (Think jokes about the thickness of my glasses or relating a story about my panic over a small mistake I once made.) This strategy has been successful for me in building up warm, collaborative relationships with my colleagues. My jokes are all safe for work, and I have never received a complaint about the context or the timing of any humorous remarks, and I tailor any humor to my audience and by reading the room. My question is, does using humor to connect with my employee come across as inappropriate or risk undermining me? Right now I am training them and am planning for them to have the freedom they need to run their areas as they see fit under general guidelines that I’m laying out, and I am finding myself automatically turning to my usual humor to impart lessons about mistakes in that position I’ve personally made and to build a friendly relationship. Could this cause me or my employee any problems in the future? I love this question because humor can be a great way to humanize yourself, connect with someone, lighten a conversation, and generally just making work more pleasant. But it can also come with risks. It sounds like you’re avoiding the obvious no-go’s (like sexual humor or humor based on stereotypes) but some of the other risks to be aware of are: inadvertently undermining yourself or someone else (more on that in a minute) making someone feel bad (you need a lot of trust in a relationship to joke about the other person, and even then need to tread carefully) making light of a situation that someone thinks you should take more seriously (especially as the boss) being sarcastic (which can come across as unpleasantly negative to people who aren’t heavy-sarcasm users themselves) seeming like you’re punching down (if you’re joking about someone with less power than yourself) In your case, because it sounds like you use a lot of self-deprecating humor, I’d say to be thoughtful about the quantity of it. Self-deprecating stories or jokes can be fine in small doses, but when they’re frequent, they can make people have less confidence in you (especially because you’re new) or make them feel like they need to prop up your ego, which you definitely don’t want at work. That’s not to say that there’s no place for self-deprecating humor at all, because there is; for example, if you’ve got a staff member who’s excessively beating themselves up over a mistake, it can help to share a funny stuff about a mishap of your own. But if you’re constantly self-deprecating, you can diminish people’s confidence in you. So the key is to be thoughtful about all of these things and get the balance right. If you do that, humor is a good thing. (Most of us would not want to work in this office, after all.) You may also like:can I use dark humor at work?my CEO is furious about a joke I madedo I need to have a better sense of humor at work? { 124 comments }