Posted by Ask a Manager

https://www.askamanager.org/2025/09/client-befriended-me-and-now-isnt-paying-employee-is-disputing-her-review-and-more.html

https://www.askamanager.org/?p=33021

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

1. My client “befriended” me and now isn’t paying for my work

I am a self-employed home manager. I gained a new client via referral a few months ago. She is very nice and friendly, and I am a friendly “relationship building” type of professional. This has served me well in getting and keeping clients and in sales previously. I admit, I do struggle with crossing the line — oversharing too much personal info, experiences, etc. — and with this particular client, it has backfired.

After working with her for a few weeks, I offered to help with one task at no charge to help her out during a very difficult time in her personal life. She was so appreciative and touched. We had a payment arrangement set up so when she did not pay the next time I worked, it wasn’t concerning. She then gave me a gift to thank me for the free help. She was over the top grateful. It was a generous gift equal in worth to about two days work.

The next time I visited, she gushed about how great I was. She’s been treating me like a friend, wanting to chat over lunch/drinks, asking a lot about my personal life, etc., which is nice of course, but I’ve started realizing that she may have turned this into a “we’re friends now, you don’t charge friends, right?” kind of thing. She didn’t pay me for that time and I thought perhaps since the gift was so generous, it was rude of me to ask for payment. I’ll accept that gift as payment for the last round, but now it’s even and going forward I’m not sure how to tell her she has to pay me without hurting her feelings, since she thinks she’s gained a friend.

On the other hand, she’s offering to tell everyone how great I am, like she wants me to work for exposure. I can’t tell if I’ve been had, taken advantage of, or she just can’t afford it. I’m worried I may not be cut out for self-employment if I can’t find the line between business and friendliness.

When the next round of work starts getting discussed, be explicit about payment before you do anything. For example: “I’ll plan to invoice this at $X — does that work for you?” If she expresses surprise or pushes back, you can say, “I was able to do X at no cost as a one-time favor, but it’s not something I can do more than that one time.” Don’t beat around the bush about this; be warmly matter-of-fact. Of course you charge for the labor that you perform as your livelihood, and you don’t need to feel awkward about that.

Even if she’s thinking she’s gained a friend, gaining a friend is not the same thing as gaining an unpaid laborer. If she’s growing unclear on that, it’ll be far less awkward to clarify it now than down the road.

2. My employee is disputing feedback in her review I was directed to put in by someone else

I am a first-time manager doing employee reviews for the first time. While finishing up my reviews, my manager asked to look over them. She wanted me to include some feedback that I was completely blind to and have never heard about. I pushed back enough to get something more concrete. (The original feedback was similar to, “The VP feels like the employee doesn’t make enough teacups.” I pushed and got the goal, “Employee should be making one teacup an hour.”)

I went ahead and included it in my review. In the meeting, I did note that this was from above me and not my personal feedback. Because the info was last-second, I really did not have time to determine if this was a bona fide issue or not.

Now the employee has noted she is going to dispute that section of the review. According to her, she actually has been meeting the goal that I had them settle on. She asked if it’s okay and I’m not going to tell her she can’t disagree with something in her review. What should I do now? Should I just play a neutral body? If HR asks, is it okay for me to say that my manager wanted me to include this info and I wasn’t aware of this beforehand? What’s the best way to handle this?

You should take an active role in navigating it. Is it true that she’s meeting the goal that the review said she was failing at? If so, your job as her manager is to go back to the VP and say that, and jointly figure out where the disconnect is — why does the VP have one impression and the employee has a different one? Is there some other way in which her work is falling short and the VP didn’t have enough details to accurately capture it on the first attempt, but there’s a genuine issue there if you look more closely? Or is the VP just mistaken, in which case their impression needs to be corrected? What you should not do is just be a neutral bystander; as her manager, you’re ultimately responsible for what’s in her review, and if it isn’t correct, you do have a responsibility to sort through it and get it fixed.

Ideally, too, when the VP first raised the feedback, you would have dug in to get more details — not just about the VP’s impressions, but about what was actually going on with the employee’s work. You were right to push for something concrete, but when they came back with “she should make one teacup an hour,” the right next move was for you to (a) decide if you agreed with that goal and raise it if you didn’t, (b) look at what the employee’s output actually was (so that you could see if there was an issue or not, and be better prepared to work with the employee on it if there was, and (c) go into the review prepared to own the feedback if at all possible. There are times when you might need to pass along feedback from above that you disagree with and therefore can’t own, but before you do that you really need to dig into what’s going on and where the lack of alignment is coming from. You don’t want to see your job as just passing messages along without getting more involved.

3. Is disorganized interview scheduling a red flag?

I have a low-stakes question. I’m writing this while waiting for an online interview to start, though I’m pretty sure I’m being stood up.

I saw a job ad online, applied, and had my first interview with an external recruiter. It went well and she asked if I would be available for another interview on Friday at 9 am with the hiring manager. I said yes, and was told the hiring manager would send the invite. That’s when things started to get a bit .. not great.

On Friday, at around 7 am, I get a text from the hiring manager asking if I’d be available for an interview and offering four different time options for that same day — including the 9 am slot. It seemed like there was some miscommunication between the recruiter and the hiring manager, but these things happen, right? So I asked if we could talk at 3 pm, since the afternoon would work better for me, and … nothing. No acknowledgment of my reply, no response at all. At 3 pm, I messaged her again asking if she still wanted to talk that day. She apologized, said she had an emergency, and suggested Monday at the same time. Great, right?

Later, she changed the meeting time to 2 pm without asking me, but I accepted anyway. At 2 pm today, I joined the Teams meeting — and I’ve now been waiting for over an hour, with no response from the hiring manager.

These are red flags, right? I mean, one or two of these things would be understandable, but all of them? Anyway, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

Yes-ish.

At a minimum, it’s an indicator that the hiring manager might not be super organized, in ways that will be annoying or frustrating if you work for her. But the word “might” is important there. It’s possible that she had a crisis blowing up that week and this was out of character. It’s also possible she is kind of scattered but she’s good enough at other things that you’d still be able to happily work for her. Or, yes, she might be a chaotic mess. It’s hard to know with such a limited data sample — but you also can’t ignore that all the data you have so far has the same theme. It’s just that it’s a really small amount of data. (On the other hand, hiring managers draw conclusions on similarly small amount of data all the time! But they’re also in a different position; they might have loads of candidates to choose from, while you might not feel you have loads of jobs to choose from.)

So I’d say that if it’s a job you’re otherwise interested in, proceed in their process and watch for what other clues you see. If it keeps happening, that’s much more definitive.

4. Is it reasonable to wait 60 days to be paid?

I am getting laid off as of next Friday. I’ve been offered a contracting position for 20 hours per week for the next few months. I’m going over the consulting agreement, and it says that they will pay invoices within 60 days of receiving the invoice. Is that reasonable? Can I try to get them to agree to do it faster? That money will be my only income, and it will be tricky paying bills if I won’t get paid for two months after I’ve done the work.

You can try. It’s reasonable to say, “Can we change the payment terms to 30 days rather than 60 days?” That said, they may or may not agree. Particularly if it’s a big company, this might just be the way they handle accounts payable and you might not have the leverage to get them to change it. The smaller the company, the more open they might be to altering that. The larger the company, the less likely it is.

Related:
customers with ridiculously long payment times

The post client “befriended” me and now isn’t paying, employee is disputing her review, and more appeared first on Ask a Manager.

https://www.askamanager.org/2025/09/client-befriended-me-and-now-isnt-paying-employee-is-disputing-her-review-and-more.html

https://www.askamanager.org/?p=33021

Posted by Ask a Manager

https://www.askamanager.org/2025/09/lets-talk-about-signs-of-financial-trouble-at-work.html

https://www.askamanager.org/?p=33211

In response to the letter earlier this week about a company that announced it would no longer clean out office fridges, we talked about how cuts that save only minor amounts of money can be a harbinger of more significant problems to come. Today, let’s talk about what other signs of financial trouble you’ve seen at work — the early signs that foretold something worse.

Some examples shared in the comments:

“This was back in the financial crisis of 2008. One morning we get a company wide email with the subject line ‘Milk.’ Went on to say that we since we had been spending so much money on it, the company would no longer provide milk for coffee/cereal (they kept the non-dairy creamer). Sure enough a few months later — massive layoffs.”

“A company I worked at modified all the paper towel dispensers in the bathrooms to use smaller paper towels. Like, they actually installed a bracket inside of each one. They also sent out an email that plastic spoons would no longer be provided in the break room (but kept the knives and forks). Definitely a harbinger for cost cutting.”

“My partner’s employer removed all living plants from the building in a cost-saving effort.”

“My indicator was when they locked two of the stalls in the ladies room and all but one in the men’s room to cut down on cleaning costs. The place closed a year later.”

“I observed the CFO rifling through desk drawers throughout the building looking for extra pens. Later, doling out office supplies one at a time.”

“Drastically increasing the price of parking; changing free electric charging to pay-for chargers; changing plain visitor parking to paid parking through an app; increasing ID replacement costs; changing rules around reimbursements for various things to be much more onerous; no more dishwasher detergent for dishwashers provided; changing toilet paper from regular to cheap one-ply; requiring justification for using any vendors not on a suddenly created, very short list that doesn’t include vendors historically used for years upon years previously … There are so many ways a company can start nickel-and-diming their employees if things get tighter. Some might make sense as a one-off, but if you get a lot of them all together…”

Please share your own examples in the comment section.

The post let’s talk about signs of financial trouble at work appeared first on Ask a Manager.

https://www.askamanager.org/2025/09/lets-talk-about-signs-of-financial-trouble-at-work.html

https://www.askamanager.org/?p=33211