Arduinna

Posted by Ask a Manager

https://www.askamanager.org/2025/10/are-all-workplaces-full-of-disgusting-coworkers.html

https://www.askamanager.org/?p=33390

A reader writes:

I work at a government agency (not in the U.S.) and it’s a good job. It’s a relaxed environment that definitely puts people’s safety and well-being first.

However, and I never thought I’d be saying this, I think it might be too much of a good thing.

People spend all day chewing on their fingernails and then touching everything (we are moving to a hot-desk only workspace).

We’ve got a few people who are constantly coughing or throat-clearing, and typing/clicking so forcefully that the desk shakes.

The person who sits near me arrives late almost everyday, having come from the gym, and simply changes into work clothes without showering, then spends half an hour eating breakfast, before leaving half an hour early.

I even have a coworker who constantly has their hands down their pants and pulling at their crotch. Even while presenting at a meeting, the hands are down the pants. Another coworker is not as bad, but similarly is constantly adjusting their underwear.

If I wear a blazer and jeans to work, I get comments asking if I’m going to court or to a job interview. I work in a typical office, and I don’t care what people wear, but the constant questions and comments on my clothing is starting to irritate me. I don’t want to wear sweatpants and a hoodie to work!

Is this lack of professionalism ridiculous? Or do I just need to buckle up, bring some sanitizing spray, and carry on? Are all workplaces like this?

It’s like a daycare in here. I feel like I’m going to have a panic attack from the non-stop noise and concerns about germs.

No, all workplaces aren’t like this.

But this seems like a mix of some genuinely gross stuff along with much more mundane stuff.

Genuinely gross and not typical: the hands down the pants (?!),  touching everything after having their fingers in their mouths, and coming into the office sweaty and unshowered. (And how has their manager not addressed, at a minimum, the person presenting with their hands down their pants? What kind of presentations are these? But since they haven’t, you have standing to ask their manager to deal with it.)

More mundane: the coughing and throat-clearing, loud typing, and casual dress. The coughing and throat-clearing is just part of working around other humans. It can be annoying and distracting, but it’s pretty par for the course. Same for the loud typing. And the casual dress isn’t remarkable if your office allows it, which it seems like it does. (And there are offices where wearing a blazer, even with jeans, would stand out as dressier than the norm. If you do it regularly, people will probably come to see it as your style and not remark on it, but it’s still possible it could be out of sync with your particular office’s conventions.)

But isn’t the hot-desking a blessing in disguise, in that you can move further away from the sweaty gym-goers, the coughers, and the, uh, self-caressers? Carry a supply of disinfectant wipes, clean off whatever space you’re working from that day, and try to keep maximum distance between yourself and the worst offenders.

The post are all workplaces full of loud, germy, sweaty coworkers? appeared first on Ask a Manager.

https://www.askamanager.org/2025/10/are-all-workplaces-full-of-disgusting-coworkers.html

https://www.askamanager.org/?p=33390

Posted by Ask a Manager

https://www.askamanager.org/2025/10/can-i-ignore-a-toxic-employee-during-her-last-few-days.html

https://www.askamanager.org/?p=33233

A reader writes:

I have managed someone, let’s call her Rachel, for over a year and a half. The majority of the experience has been negative — she’s rude, feeds on drama, and produces low-quality work. I’ve had several discussions with her on improving her performance. After a lot of painful experiences, she resigned while I was on vacation. She only gave a week’s notice, and since I’m on vacation we will only have two days overlap.

I know as a manager I have the responsibility to be professional and courteous, but I can’t stomach the idea that we even have to interact at all on those two final days. I have even contemplated rescheduling our team meeting to the day after she leaves because I don’t want to hear some passive-aggressive spiel from her about how she’s going to some place that appreciates her and her skill set. And I certainly don’t want to have a fake conversation where we thank each other for our time and work together, because that would be a lie. While previously I’ve tried to be encouraging in difficult conversations, now I feel like I don’t have to put on any pretenses anymore, especially since she resigned in a petty way. Is it okay if I ignore her or have very minimal interaction with her on those final two days? And what are your thoughts more broadly about minimizing interactions with toxic employees that you manage directly or are part of your division?

I answer this question — and two 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 company is skin-crawlingly positive
• Telling my employee about a job somewhere else without seeming like I’m pushing them out

The post can I ignore a toxic employee during her last few days? appeared first on Ask a Manager.

https://www.askamanager.org/2025/10/can-i-ignore-a-toxic-employee-during-her-last-few-days.html

https://www.askamanager.org/?p=33233

Posted by Ask a Manager

https://www.askamanager.org/2025/10/hr-says-i-cant-use-sick-leave-for-a-family-emergency-coworker-wont-do-his-work-and-more.html

https://www.askamanager.org/?p=33275

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

1. HR says I can’t use sick leave for a family emergency

Recently, “life happened” and I took a day off from work because I needed to take care of some things and I wasn’t feeling mentally well. I emailed work in the morning and said that a family emergency came up so I needed to take a sick day. That seemed like the most honest description of what was happening at the time without giving too much detail.

When I returned to work the next day, I submitted for sick leave. HR emailed me asking for details, saying that sick leave is provided for employees’ illness or injury, and that for other situations we need to use PTO. In hindsight, now I know that I should have just said I was feeling under the weather — but in this situation, how would you recommend replying to HR for the best chance of being approved for sick leave?

Yeah, the problem is that once you said it was for a family emergency, you conveyed that it wasn’t actually in the “sick leave” category. Now that you’ve said it, I don’t think you can really backtrack. Just know in situations like that going forward, you should say you’re not feeling well.

(There are some employers that will take a more expansive view of sick leave, but HR is telling you pretty clearly that yours isn’t one of them.)

Related:
what do I say when I’m calling in sick for a mental health day?

2. My coworker won’t do his work and we get stuck with it

I work in a front-facing position with one other person on shift with me. Most of my coworkers are great but “Bill” drives me crazy. He doesn’t split the work 50/50 like we’re supposed to and the work that he does do is slipshod to the point where customers and employees in other roles complain about him. I end up shouldering a lot more work on days he works. We have talked to him about where he needs to improve but he just brushes us off. Management is aware but for some reason has not intervened.

My problem is when I work with Bill, I find it really hard to stay calm when non-Bill-related problems happen. I catch myself getting aggravated with other employees and customers because I’m already in a crummy mood. Obviously I don’t lash out but I get impatient and crabby in ways that aren’t fair to these people. I know it’s Bill-related because when I’m scheduled with other employees I take things in stride easily.

We don’t have enough staff for me to be scheduled away from Bill permanently and even if we did, no one would want to be the permanent Bill babysitter. So how can I keep an even keel when working with a frustrating coworker?

What would happen if you stopped covering for Bill? Stop doing his share of the work; when customers complain about him, let them know you’ll share their complaint with your manager; and when employees in other departments complain about him, tell them they should talk to Bill’s boss. Right now your management doesn’t need to act because you and your coworkers are shouldering all the burden of mitigating Bill’s problems. The more you decline to cover for him, the more it will become their problem rather than yours.

That’s easier said than done, but it’s likely to be the most effective option if repeated conversations with your boss haven’t worked.

To your question about staying calm when Bill-related problems happen: if every time there’s a Bill problem, it gets dumped on management, hopefully it’ll be less aggravating — and you can remind yourself that the more that pile grows, the more likely they will be to eventually do something about it.

3. Mandatory ridiculous training videos from IT

I’m wondering if you think it’s worth pushing back on something our IT department has recently started requiring of us. We have to watch a 10-minute video every two weeks. It’s an ongoing story that’s a dramatization of a business getting inflitrated by a fake IT guy and becoming the target of corporate espionage. Doesn’t sound too bad, but here’s the thing: we’re a K-12 private school, not a corporate environment. I’m totally baffled by what they want us to learn from these videos and they feel like a complete waste of time. They’re also full of very technical jargon that most of us don’t understand.

So far we’ve had to watch two of the videos and at the end we can rate them and leave a review, but I don’t know if that review gets read by our IT department or just goes to the company that makes the videos. I’ve left polite but honest reviews both times saying I’m not clear on what I’m supposed to be learning from the videos.

If it were any other department at our school, I’d feel fine pushing back, but the faculty has had a contentious relationship with the head of IT that has only recently become more amicable. He’s done a lot of other irritating things in the past, like getting our student devices to us weeks late, which played havoc with our lesson plans; auto-blocking every website with the word “game” in it without warning, which blocked a lot of educational sites some of us use on a daily basis; refusing to send techs to us when we need help, instead insisting children as young as five carry their devices to the IT office across the campus; requiring very complicated unique passwords for young children who can’t even type yet, so they forget their passwords or type them in wrong all the time and get locked out, etc.

I’ve also heard rumors he’s done some more egregious things, like having a list of teachers he finds annoying so he puts their tickets last in order of priority, and making some misogynist comments about his female staff members. But none of this has been enough to fire him, so the general sense is that for some reason or another, the head of school or the school board won’t fire him. Not that I think these videos would be cause for firing, but just to give a picture of the circumstances we’re dealing with here as it factors into deciding whether to push back or not.

I’m pretty sure it’s futile to speak up about this, but every time a new email comes barking at us to watch the video, I get pissed off all over again. So if I say something, maybe I’ll stop being pissed off because at least I tried, but I might risk riling up more tension between faculty and IT again. What do you think?

Eh, I’d leave it alone. Keep sending your polite feedback since they’re asking for it, but it sounds like this is the least of the problems with this guy! If you want to complain about something, the issues in your third paragraph are much more worth escalating (so are the issues in your fourth paragraph, but it sounds like you’ve only heard rumors about those).

For what it’s worth, I don’t think the issue with the videos is so much that you’re a school, but rather than people don’t understand the language in them and it’s not clear what the outcomes are supposed to be. Those would both be worth bringing up under normal circumstances — especially the unclear language — but it’s not worth the energy and capital in the situation you described.

4. Should you accrue PTO during paid parental leave?

My husband gets 10 weeks of paid paternity leave, and we just found out that he will not be accruing PTO during that time. On one level, that seems fair, he isn’t actually working, but on another level, I’ve always viewed parental leave as something that occurs on top of your normal compensation. What do you think?

It’s up the employer, but it’s pretty typical to do it that way. It’s similar to how at many companies you don’t accrue PTO if you’re on unpaid leave. This happens to be paid leave, but it’s not coming out of his PTO bank — he’s using a whole separate bank of leave that’s a specific paid paternity benefit. If he were using his own PTO for the time, then sure, but I don’t think it’s outrageous that he won’t accrue PTO while getting 10 weeks of completely separate paid parental leave.

A different way to look at it: say he normally gets, I don’t know, 20 PTO days a year, so he accrues 0.38 PTO days per week. That means that in a normal 10-week period, he’d accrue 3.8 PTO days — versus the 50 paid days he’s getting during parent leave. He’s still coming out way ahead.

5. I was rejected for an internal job and now it’s been reposted

I applied for a government job as an internal candidate. After a first round interview, I was told they had to repost the position due to a lack of candidates. A few months ago by, the job is reposted, and I am invited to a second round interview. I was an extremely strong candidate for this position, and was told twice by the hiring manager I was a top candidate. To my surprise, I did not receive an offer. The hiring manager told me I was a strong candidate and to look out for other jobs she would be posting soon.

Today, three weeks later, I see this job has been reposted! There is one additional bullet point to the job description that’s inconsequential.

I’m worried about what factors went into my rejection now that I see the job has been reposted. Is it worth following up with the hiring manager, noting the new job posting and requesting any constructive feedback on why I wasn’t chosen?

I am a bit concerned my rejection could have something to do with the fact that I have an accommodation to work from home full-time. This was not discussed in the interview, but could be surmised based on my calendar.

Yes, you should follow up with the hiring manager. You were a strong candidate but for some reason they’ve reposted the position and not hired anyone? It’s possible there’s a reason that would make sense if you knew it — like you were strong in X and Y ways but she’s realized she also needs someone strong in Z (although government hiring is so regimented that if that were the case, it should have been in the job description, and especially in the revised one).

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if your WFH accommodation is the real reason. If that’s the case, she might not tell you. But it’s reasonable to ask for feedback.

The post HR says I can’t use sick leave for a family emergency, coworker won’t do his work, and more appeared first on Ask a Manager.

https://www.askamanager.org/2025/10/hr-says-i-cant-use-sick-leave-for-a-family-emergency-coworker-wont-do-his-work-and-more.html

https://www.askamanager.org/?p=33275