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metafilter_feedmetafilter_feedmaru_feedaskamanager_feedIt’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…
1. My boss keeps calling me his assistant (I’m not)
I am in a small department of two — myself and a director. My official title includes “specialist” but I will also use “[role] manager,” a promotion my boss agrees I’m overqualified for — maybe even deserving of assistant director. He, as well as his boss and pretty much everyone else I work with, know I’m very knowledgeable and talented and come to me for advice or projects regularly. He’s been my boss for about four years (I worked in this department for nine years before that, working up to my current role).
Even though I’m almost more qualified than he is, he will occasionally refer to me as his assistant when introducing me, as in “I’ve copied my assistant [name] on this email” or “I’m so-and-so, the director, and this is my assistant [name]” in person, even at professional conferences! It pretty much only happens with people we’re both meeting for the first time. While I do assist him in the technical sense of being below him in the hierarchy, I am not an assistant, nor his assistant. I think the inappropriate nature of that introduction is heightened by him being a man and me being a woman about 20 years younger than him, so more likely to be assumed to be an assistant.
The first few times it caught me off guard and I did nothing. Since then, I’ve tried just clarifying to the recipient — restating my name and real title in person while shaking their hand, and including my full signature with my job title by email. But I’m not sure at this point if there’s a way to bring it up to him without it being supremely awkward. It’s not like it just happened for the first time, but has been every so often over the years. For some context, he is a corporate classic, lightly misogynistic, older man, and generally oblivious to how he’s impacting those around him (including some of your other classic emails — humming or burping loudly at his desk, no poker face, thinking he’s whispering but everyone can hear him), stubborn and emotional in his ideas. But frankly I can deal just fine with all of that and I’m fine pushing back on ideas — it’s the assistant thing that rankles me more than anything.
Can you ask him to call you his deputy when introducing you? I suspect that’s what he means by it, and he’s not thinking about how his wording is misleading people about the nature of your role.
I’d say it this way: “I’ve noticed when you introduce me, you’ll sometimes call me your assistant — and you probably don’t realize this, but especially as a woman in this field that seems to prime people to misunderstand the work I’m doing. I think when you say that you mean something more like ‘deputy’ so I wondered if that would work instead? Or even just my title, if you’re comfortable with that.”
To be clear: this is not about assistants not being valuable. It’s about people misunderstanding your role against a backdrop of our long history of people automatically assuming women are support staff, regardless of their actual jobs.
2. My coworkers complain constantly about our in-office days
My company is finally following the trend and forcing a post-Covid return to the office on many employees. Personally I think they are being pretty reasonable and flexible with their new policy (still lots of WFH time). There are many people on our team, especially new hires, who need significant in-person time with experienced employees to learn our complex roles, and things have not been going well for the last couple of years for the new team members.
We’ve had an ultra-flexible “recommendation” in place up until now, which just resulted in most employees ignoring it and not going in at all. Our company gave a six-month notice period back in March, and by the end of this month everyone who is not officially classified as remote is expected to be in the office for a certain percentage of their work hours.
My main problem with this is not actually returning to the office. The problem is that the team I work with (I’m an IC, not a manager) has a horrible attitude about it and it makes going into the office miserable. Any in-office day, you’re sure to hear at least five people who will not stop complaining about how mad they are to be in the office, how they hate the new policy, etc. etc. I understand an annoyed comment here or there, but it’s like having the world’s most annoying podcast playing in the background for the whole day and it seems like everyone feeds off each other’s bad energy.
I’m not a manager and many of us have different managers, so I don’t really have a leg to stand on when it comes to addressing any behavioral issues, but these people are just miserable and make everyone else miserable when they’re around. (And honestly, some of the biggest complainers are the ones who need to be in the office the most…) Do you have any tips for making things better? I don’t think a firm “no complaining” stance would work as morale is already so low. I have quite a bit of sway with the team as I’ve been around a while and am well known.
Can you be honest with people? “Honestly, it’s so much worse when everyone keeps complaining about it and we’re all just making each other more miserable with the complaining. For my own peace of mind, I can’t keep talking about it.” Feel free to alternate that with: “It seems pretty reasonable to me, especially compared to what a lot of companies are doing, and I think it’ll help new hires.”
You won’t necessarily get through to everyone, but by giving an honest response, you might at least discourage them from venting around you quite as often.
3. I created something that saves a lot of time, but it might not be usable after I’m gone
I am skilled with a certain Microsoft Office product that’s included in most licenses but isn’t not one that people use very often. Using a program created within it is simple, but creating the program is not. I have learned how to make complex programs over the years of working with it. I used my knowledge to create a program for a work process that saves a lot of time and makes it much less prone to errors. It is a really good improvement.
I’m starting to wonder though — is it right for me to have created something that requires specialized knowledge to make future changes/improvements? While I’m not currently planning on leaving the company any time soon, I’m sure I will at some point. Over time the program will need tweaks, have errors, etc. and once I’m not around it will be much harder for them to address those.
You should talk to your boss about this! Lay out what you did here — you’ve created something using specialized knowledge that’s saving a lot of time, but it’s not necessarily something the team will be able to maintain/alter after you’re gone and so, knowing that, does she want you to do anything differently? There’s no one right answer here; it depends on lots of different factors, and is definitely a boss discussion.
4. Employer reluctantly moved start date out by three months … and now I have another better offer
My husband and I recently moved countries and were lucky to both secure employment in our new city. Unfortunately, we couldn’t secure summer childcare, and our son is far to young for a work-from-home-while-caring-for-toddler situation to be effective.
My husband brought the issue to his future employer, and they grudgingly agreed that he could move his start date by 12 weeks, which is the soonest a local daycare could fit us in. He’s deeply grateful to have the security of a job lined up while also getting to enjoy all of this quality time with our child.
At some point during the summer, a recruiter at a second company contacted him and invited him to interview. He made it through the process and has received a written offer. It’s for 33% more salary and the commute is half as long. He obviously will be accepting this offer. However, he feels bad about taking the other employer for a bit of a ride. Can you help us with a script for the most polite and professional way to say, “Sorry but it turns out you low-balled me big time and I found something way better”? For what it’s worth, he already tried negotiating with the first employer for a higher salary and they said this was the best they could do.
All he can do is to be polite and straightforward and acknowledge the inconvenience. I’d say it this way: “I really appreciate you being willing to work with me on the start date, and I’m sorry to be writing with some unwelcome news: while I was very much looking forward to joining you in September, an offer I wasn’t expecting fell in my lap and it’s not something I can pass up. I’m sorry I won’t be able to join you in the fall, and I wish you all the best in your work.”
5. Quitting my job while my manager is on vacation
I have been interviewing for a new job, and I think there’s a very good chance I’ll get it! I’ve had a lot of good signs and while I’m not certain yet, I feel pretty confident I may be changing jobs soon!
However, my manager is currently on two weeks of vacation in another country. I’m worried about potentially putting in my two weeks while she’s out. I really like my manager and coworkers, and would want to leave on good terms and with all my projects in a state where they can get easily picked up by someone else.
What’s the protocol in a situation like this, if I get this job while she’s out? Should I ask my potential new job for some extra time to make the transfer? Even if I don’t get the job, this would be useful advice to have for the future.
No, you wouldn’t normally need to ask the new employer for extra time (unless there were really unusual circumstances). Instead, you’ll give your resignation to your boss’s boss or to HR, and ask them how to handle the transition period while your boss is out. It’s true that your boss won’t be there to do some of the transition work they’d normally be covering, but that’s just how this stuff goes. You’re not expected to not accept a new job or to delay your resignation just because your boss is away.
That said, since you don’t have the offer yet and your manager’s two-week vacation is already in progress, there’s a good chance the timing will work out fine. Offers often take longer than people expect them to, and then you might ask for a few days to think it over, and she may be back or very close to the back by the time you’re ready to give notice anyway.
Related:
how do I give notice to my boss if they’re on vacation?
The post my boss keeps calling me his assistant (I’m not), coworkers complain constantly about our in-office days, and more appeared first on Ask a Manager.
metafilter_feedEvery chapter in My Life Story includes information about me, my work, my family and my friends. It also includes information about events that took place locally and nationally, etc. that I thought important enough to include. You'll also find that I've included films, musicians and recordings/videos, in addition to books that were released in a given year.Over the decades, Diaz grew up in Tucson, figured out he was gay and came out, volunteered in theater and radio, served as a union steward, became a librarian, and did a bunch of other interesting things I don't know about because I haven't finished reading the whole series.
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metafilter_feedaskamanager_feedEarlier this month, we talked about coworkers overstepping their expertise in disastrous ways. Here are 12 of my favorite stories you shared.
1. The cocktail hour
At a past job, I worked at a substance use treatment center. My boss was planning a fundraising event and was completely floored that his idea of having cocktails at the event was immediately shot down by everyone. He kept saying “I have decades of experience in this and cocktails are the way to go” and leadership continued to push back with a hard no. He was a fundraising expert but was brand new to the recovery industry. Many of our donors were in recovery themselves so it would have been exceptionally poor taste, on top of just being bad optics. Not sure why he never understood that.
2. The punctuation
I used to work in corporate communications. I was helping the IT department set up a new internal site, which featured a gorgeous graphic of all the company’s various platforms. There were only three or four paragraphs of copy, which the team sent me in Word. I lightly edited and approved all the copy.
Imagine my surprise when I logged in a few weeks later and found a solid block of word soup. Every period, comma, and dash had been removed, as had spaces between paragraphs. No words were capitalized, aside from the names of IT platforms. I assumed it’d been some kind of technical error, but when I asked the team member, she told me, “Oh no, I removed the punctuation before we published the page.” Long pause as my brain malfunctioned. “But … why? Why remove punctuation?” “It made it all so cluttered.” Another long pause. “Huh. Well. In this company, we use periods. Punctuation makes sentences easier to read. So could you go ahead and put those back?”
“If you really think it’s better,” she said, somewhat miffed. i do i said i do this is not a %4*& eecummings poem this is a corporate website for the it department for the love of god put the damn periods back where they go
3. The title change
I had a friend change her own title on email and other correspondence from “Manager Assistant” to “Assistant Manager” because she thought it flowed better and meant the same thing. It definitely did not.
4. The command
My very first job out of college was as a computer programmer for a major financial institution. I could write a book about all the stupid and toxic stuff I encountered there, but this particular thing happened in my first week. The team manager (who was supposed to also be a programmer, but I saw no evidence of it during the year I was there) asked me to create a command-line script that could be called with two options. One option would list all the processes running on a specified production machine, and the other would kill all the processes. So I created a script with the options “-list” and “-kill”. The manager said this was too slow and inefficient, and I should change it to “-l” and “-k.” I did that, but added a confirmation prompt, so that if someone typed “-k”, the script would ask if they really wanted to kill all the processes, and they would have to type Y or N in order to continue. The manager said this was also too slow, and demanded that I remove the confirmation prompt. I pointed out that l and k were right next to each other on the keyboard, so it would be way too easy for someone to kill everything by mistake. I also pointed out that the script would be run once a day at most, so taking a few extra seconds to run it would hardly affect anything, while restarting everything after an accidental kill all would take much longer. No matter; everything must run at MAXIMUM SPEED!
So I removed the prompt as instructed, put the script into production, and sent out a group-wide email explaining the new command and warning everyone to be careful and not type k instead of l. Guess what happened less than five minutes later? Go on, guess?
After that, the manager grudgingly allowed me to put the confirmation prompt back in.
5. The article
The owner of a prominent local business won some big industry award and my editors told me to do a story on it (the newsworthiness of it was questionable, but that’s another issue). I reached out to the business owner, who I had done a profile on a year before, and she proceeded to condescendingly school me on how to properly write the story to ensure her many previous honors, talent, and business acumen were included and highlighted. Then she sent me a previous story about her that she said was a prime example of the best journalism she had seen, and I should try to copy that one because unlike me, that reporter was an expert who knew what they were doing.
That previous story was mine. She sent me my own story to tell me I was both an excellent reporter and a rank amateur.
6. The certification application
About six months ago, several Very High Up people at the university where I work received a Very Scary Email from a government agency with the subject line, “Recertification Request Denied.” Cue panicked calls and emails. Several people are immediately called into meetings to investigate what is going on.
Well. The university was indeed in the process of applying for a recertification (think something along the lines of, showing the Department of Education we should be able to continue getting federal financial aid dollars). At the same time, somewhere in an advising office, a well-meaning advisor told a precocious freshman to go set up a profile on a government website (think, making an account on the FAFSA site). Can you see where this is going?
Our dear freshman somehow found the backend government website used only for high-level university administrators and started an application as if he were a university applying for certification. Whenever he encountered questions like, “Who is the chair of the Board of Trustees?” or “Date of incorporation with the State Higher Education Regulatory Agency” (you know, things that would make the average person think, “Maybe I’m on the wrong form”) he conducted research on our university website to find the answers. This must have taken hours.
As it turned out, the email we received from the government said, in essence, that they had received our request from our wayward student, but the request was denied as there was already a well-established university with our name in their system.
7. The website redesign
I was the lead developer on a nonprofit’s website overhaul—clean, accessible, fast. Enter our events coordinator, Dana, who had recently taken one HTML course on YouTube and insisted she should “take a stab” at the homepage.
The next morning, we woke up to an absolute horror show:
1. The hero image was a 12MB TIFF of a cat in sunglasses (because “it’s fun!”).
2. All the navigation links were Comic Sans.
3. The “Donate” button now played an auto-looping MIDI version of “Eye of the Tiger.”
4. Somehow, she had embedded a YouTube video inside another YouTube video.
Oh, and she replaced the accessibility menu with a “sparkle cursor.” When I asked her what happened, she said: “I just wanted to add some ✨pizzazz✨ and I think I fixed the SEO too — I changed all the alt text to just say ‘hot website.’”
We had to roll back the site using an emergency backup, and our IT guy started labeling backups “Before Dana” and “After Dana.”
8. The stolen presentation
I came up with a new procedure that would save the company money. Said procedure was presented to all relevant departments, and all of those department heads approved the new process with one exception. One small department informed us that they just hired a new guy from another division who was a “genius” and he wanted to do a presentation on what he came up with.
The guy started the presentation by telling me “nice try” in front of many, many senior people, and then he proceeded to present my original idea using my original documentation. I requested that the guy zoom in on the bottom of one of the graphics on page 3, where I had typed my name in a very small font. The guy truly did not understand why everyone in the room laughed and walked out of the conference room.
My grandboss went up to the guy, shook his hand and said “Good luck in your future new career, whatever that may be.”
9. The explosive gas
I was responsible for a complex scientific experiment with many parts, involving explosive gas. We were ordered to shut our experiments down to prepare for a possible power failure and to have our supervisors check the experiments to make sure they were shut down properly. I shut it down and went looking for my supervisor. His colleague Jack said he’s not here but offered to do the inspection. I pointed out he doesn’t know anything about it and he brushed me off.
I brought him to the lab and showed him the experiment. He clearly had no idea what he was looking at. He asked me how the experiment worked and what different pieces of equipment did, and I answered.
He then nodded thoughtfully, turned to me, repeated back to me everything I’d just told him, and asked me, “Do you understand?” I was over it so I just said, “Yes, thank you” and he told me he was glad he could help.
And yes, I’m a woman.
10. The suggestion
A few years ago, part of my then-job was a focus on a specific agent process, including writing or revamping some of the procedures, and doing quality reviews of their adherence to said procedures. I did somewhere between 30 and 100 of these reviews a month; all were scored, but in a way where the points didn’t affect the agents’ performance ratings. My boss felt that the scoring had a psychological impact; also, it did give us insight into struggle areas and enable us to provide better and more targeted feedback.
So one day I get an email response to a review, in which the agent condescendingly told me that the procedure in question did not say what I claimed it said. I don’t remember the exact wording of the email, except that his final sentence began, “I suggest you educate yourself.” On a procedure that I wrote.
11. The complex mathematics
Eons ago, I got a job as a data analyst for a small company. The position had been empty for a while and a guy in marketing who was “good with numbers” had been covering it and providing KPIs for the team to use. He gave me printouts of the spreadsheets he’d been using and I didn’t understand anything. I eventually got him to email me the actual files and discovered he’d been using some very creative formulas.
Most egregious examples that have stuck with me for almost two decades:
– For the average, he would sum all values then divide by 2. Not by the number of values. Always by 2. Thus the average of 100, 200, and 300 would be 300.
– To increase a value by 10% he would add +0.10. So if you have an item that costs 200 and increase its price by 10%, the result would be 200.10.
When I pointed out that, respectfully, the numbers were a mess, he told me that mathematics is a very complex subject and I shouldn’t feel bad if I didn’t understand it. I am of course a woman and also my degree is in mathematics. People didn’t like me at that job. They said that since I started all the KPIs had gotten worse (they were just getting the correct numbers instead of marketing guy’s). I think everyone was happy when I got another job a few months later and I quit.
12. The cyberattack
My job suffered a cyberattack. An external email (the sender had a “valid” email) with an attachment and instructions to open said attachment was forwarded from the email account of a coworker – this is the point of infiltration, I think. This forwarded email was sent to approximately half the employees. The coworker with the valid email sent a company-wide email stating, “Don’t open the email with the attachment. It is not from me.”
Another third coworker took the opportunity to email the scammer directly asking, “Is it okay to open the attachment?” Scammer responded, ‘YES!!” The third coworker proceeded to tell the entire agency we could open the attachment. (He has no authority to do so.) Most of the employees who received the forwarded email opened it. The entire company was locked down. The IT department had to reconfigure ALL our computers. I’ve heard the IT department thinks the third employee should be disciplined, but we shall see if they are.
The post the website redesign with pizazz, the explosive gas, and other stories of people overstepping their expertise appeared first on Ask a Manager.
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innitmarvelous_og | Hodge Podgemetafilter_feedaskamanager_feed“You’re not leaving yet, are you? Team karaoke starts in 10 minutes!”
Welcome to today’s workplace, where meetings aren’t the only thing getting scheduled: fun — or rather, “fun” — is, too. The occasional happy hour has always been an office staple, but these days, you also might be expected to participate in escape rooms, team skits, themed potlucks, and myriad other activities organized in the name of bonding and camaraderie.
At Slate today, I wrote about how, for many employees, these enforced festivities can feel more like an obligation than a perk. You can read it here.
The post offices are mandating that we all have “fun” appeared first on Ask a Manager.
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