Posted by Ask a Manager

https://www.askamanager.org/2025/08/employees-recording-conversations-team-keeps-asking-me-about-my-feelings-and-more.html

https://www.askamanager.org/?p=32647

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

1. Employees recording conversations without consent

I used to share an office with a group of other managers. One of them was very disgruntled at the time and, unbeknownst to me, was keeping his phone open and recording all the various conversations happening in the office, I think hoping to catch someone in something he could get them in trouble for. I found out about this and brought it to my manager. I felt that it was an invasion of my privacy and felt pretty violated and annoyed. My manager framed it as, “Well, this is a one-party consent state, so there’s nothing we can do.” It was an extremely demoralizing response and one of many ways in which I felt unsupported by my boss. I didn’t realize until later that “one party” means someone in the conversation needs to be one of those parties. Someone can’t just record two people having a conversation they are not involved in themselves. I wish I would have known that at the time and pushed back more!

Anyway, that was an old job that I have thankfully left. However, a friend of mine is in a very similar situation where her employee has recorded multiple one-on-one conversations with my friend. Since that employee is one of the parties in the conversation, my understanding is that this is legal, but is it also realistic to want to shut this down and discipline the employee? My old boss would not have done that; he said since it was legal, there was nothing he could do. So really, my question is twofold: what would you do about the employee who recorded multiple people talking in an office, and what could my friend do to address her employee recording their conversations?

One-party recording laws refer to whether it’s illegal to record someone without their knowledge or consent. It has nothing to do with whether an employer can choose to have policies against surreptitious recording in their own office! An employer absolutely could prohibit that and discipline or fire someone for it, regardless of whether they’re in a one-party-consent state or not. Your manager was being ridiculous and was wrong when he said there was nothing they could do.

As for your friend, at a minimum she needs to tell the employee that she’s not permitted to record in their office without the consent of the people being recorded (or of management, or whatever makes sense for the situation). She also should figure out why the employee was recording her: does the employee feel the manager is saying one thing but then doing another, harassing her, or otherwise engaging in some form of misconduct? Or is it a purely adversarial move? Either way, your friend can prohibit the recording, but figuring out what’s behind it is important to figuring out whether something more than that needs to be done.

2. My team keeps asking me about my feelings

I would love some advice on how to deal with my new “touchy-feely” work group. In the past few months, my immediate team of three people was moved from Division #1 to Division #2. I actually like most of the people I’ll be working with in Division #2 on an individual basis, but the problem is that the division as a whole has a very “touchy-feely” culture that is making me uncomfortable. The thing I’m most uncomfortable with right now is that they start every meeting by asking everyone how they feel that day, and anyone who indicates they’re feeling less than “good” that day is asked if they want to talk about it. As someone who suffers from anxiety and depression (and is in a profession that is being seriously negatively affected by the current administration), I hate this. I don’t want to share my feelings at work, especially in a meeting of 6+ people.

The problem is exacerbated because everyone else almost always indicates that they are feeling “good” at the beginning of every meeting. I’m usually the only one who indicates that I’m feeling “neutral” or “bad.” I feel singled out, and I also feel like I’m going crazy because apparently everyone else is having a great day, even though our profession is going up in flames!

Should I just pretend like I’m feeling “good” at every meeting, or is there a way to get them to stop asking about my feelings all the time?

Yeah, if you say you’re feeling “bad,” it’s virtually guaranteed that any halfway considerate person is going to ask more about it, out of basic politeness if nothing else. The very easy way to solve this is to say you’re “good.” You’re not obligated to provide an honest answer about how you’re feeling if it’s not something you want to get into. (In fact, I’d argue that even if you did want to talk about it, a team meeting wouldn’t necessarily be the place for it anyway.)

So from here onward, your answer is always that you’re “pretty good” or “good” or “doing well” or so forth, and that solves the problem.

I do think it’s probably notable that you’ve felt compelled to answer honestly despite hating it, and it would be interesting to know if you’re overlooking other situations where bland niceties are permissible and would make your life easier!

3. My manager frequently mistypes words

My manager very frequently misspells words, names, and acronyms, or flip flops words in a sentence. For example, he might spell Robert as “Robret” or DHS as “DSH.” Typically there is at least one incorrect spelling per day in his emails. I think it makes our team look unprofessional, but readers can typically still understand the meaning of the email with the incorrect elements. Sometimes, this adds more work for me, because I have to review edits he makes to my documents with a fine-toothed comb. I have a hunch he may be dyslexic or have a similar disability, but he has never shared anything about that with me. Is there anything I can do here to improve the situation?

If you’re good at proofreading and like doing it, you can let him know you like to proofread and are always happy to proof things before they’re sent out, but otherwise no. (And if we’re mostly talking about internal emails, it’s unlikely to be a big deal, assuming your company didn’t hire him as, you know, a proofreader.)

If you were his manager, you could suggest he turn on spellcheck and read things over more carefully, but as his employee it’s not really yours to fix.

For the edits he makes to your work, though, a lot of programs have a Compare Documents function where you can compare two versions of the document and easily see what changed.

Related:
are senior execs too busy for spelling and grammar?

4. LinkedIn is watering down its hate speech policy

Just read this article about LinkedIn removing protections for trans people from their terms of service and wondered if it sparked any thoughts about LinkedIn, or whether your readers might want to know about this if they didn’t spot an article about it.

For people who didn’t click: LinkedIn’s “Hateful and Derogatory Content” page used to include language prohibiting the “misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.” Sometime recently, they quietly deleted it. They also edited their “Harassment and Abusive Content” section to remove “race or gender identity” from what comments targeting others will fall under their hate speech rules.

Yeah, it sparks some thoughts about LinkedIn, and those thoughts are that actively going out of your way to roll back protections on marginalized groups is a real shit move.

5. Including things from elementary school on a resume

My son is a rising college senior. He has been in a pre-health-professions major until this summer but decided that he does not want to continue in that direction (grad school and such). But the demands of the track he’s been on, including requirements for trainings and certifications, job shadowing, and so on mean that his resume is very thin in the work history area. He’s got a job now and so he has a year to improve that aspect, and we can package the trainings and field experiences to show, more or less, that he is trainable and maybe has some skills relevant to what he might want to do. But it’s still a short resume, mostly summer service jobs before this year, and he is applying now for a position that would start after his graduation that requires he submit a current resume.

His dad is recommending that he include some volunteer activities he did a few times in elementary school (“shows he is a good person”) and a national athletic title he won in eighth grade (“shows dedication”). I feel like the risk of having it come out that these were childhood experiences isn’t worth it. I see that you didn’t make strong recommendations about including or omitting hobbies on resumes, and recommended including volunteer activity only it it is relevant. In this situation, balancing the fear of presenting a thin resume with the worry about the filler being quite outdated information, what would you tell him to do?

He 100% should not include anything from elementary school or the eighth grade. It’s just not done on resumes. Work experience from high school, maybe in some cases. But before that, no — and definitely not as far back as elementary school. It would make his judgment look really off and cast him in a childish light.

A short resume with mostly summer jobs is fine for a current college student!

Related:
what to put on a resume when you have zero work experience

The post employees recording conversations, team keeps asking me about my feelings, and more appeared first on Ask a Manager.

https://www.askamanager.org/2025/08/employees-recording-conversations-team-keeps-asking-me-about-my-feelings-and-more.html

https://www.askamanager.org/?p=32647