Arduinna

Posted by Ask a Manager

https://www.askamanager.org/2025/08/coworkers-send-social-messages-late-into-the-night-office-didnt-have-bathrooms-or-water-and-more.html

https://www.askamanager.org/?p=32561

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

1. My coworkers have a group text that gets social messages late into the night

I recently started a new job. I like the job itself but am struggling with the constant group texts/chats. There are eight of us (boss included) and many are using group chats/texts for personal updates, sometimes late into the night. Think ultrasound pictures (at 10 pm), blurry videos of fireworks, and updates on their swimming pools … including pictures of their feet.

I’m up for some casual chat but my phone buzzes with non-urgent personal matters. We’re all remote, not friendly outside of work in any other way, and it doesn’t seem to be a culture thing outside of my team.

I don’t want to seem anti-social, but it’s distracting when I’m trying to work and extremely annoying in my personal time.

How can I approach my boss to curb the personal team chats and especially the personal group texts? Or at least limit my inclusion in them?

I would be deeply annoyed to get photos of my coworker’s feet at 10 pm. (I’m not sure I want them at 3 pm either, for that matter.)

Is there anything work-related sent to this chat, or is it all personal stuff? If it’s all personal, you should feel free to just mute the chat entirely! (On most devices you should be able to mute just that specific chat without muting the entire app.)

If there’s work stuff included, could you tell your boss that you’re worried about missing work info that gets lost amidst after-hours personal chat and suggest creating a separate work-only chat so that doesn’t happen (or better yet, using something like Slack rather than texts)? It’s a little tricky to raise as a new person coming into an existing culture that’s apparently working for them, but “I’m worried about missing work info” is pretty reasonable. Otherwise, though, mute mute mute.

2. Do I have to attend a work party on my maternity leave?

My manager invited me to a close coworker’s retirement party during my maternity leave and say they want to meet the baby. Am I obligated to attend? I’m enjoying this bonding time with my baby, and I still don’t feel comfortable leaving the house with baby in tow. I also feel bad as they threw me a really nice baby shower before I left.

You are absolutely not obligated to attend — not in any way, shape, or form. It’s kind of them to indicate they’d welcome seeing you and the baby, but that’s just a suggestion, not a summons! You can simply say that you’re not taking the baby anywhere yet (or it’s too rough with her nap schedule, or whatever reason you like) but you look forward to seeing everyone when you’re back at work.

3. Our office didn’t have bathrooms or water, but they wouldn’t send us home

How would you navigate this? I work for a Fortune 500 corporation in a satellite office, about 30 minutes away from our regional headquarters. Most of us are hybrid.

Last Wednesday, a required in-office day, we arrived to work and were told there was a water main break and we had no water. We didn’t have access to restrooms, fresh water, etc. The site director would not let us go home to work. We had to use the gas station across the street. Around 11 am, we got portable outhouses and bottled water, and water was back on around 3 pm.

Should they have sent us home? What do I do in the future if it happens again? Should I mention it to HR, which works out in our regional headquarters?

Yes, they should have sent you home. It’s particularly ridiculous that you’re all hybrid and thus obviously set up to work from home and yet they still didn’t do that.

OSHA regulations require workspaces to have potable water and working bathrooms. I suspect they were thinking their emergency measures (the outhouses and bottled water) were going to be in place so quickly that it wouldn’t be enough time for the OSHA regulations to be a serious issue. I have no idea if OSHA would agree, but I’m guessing they wouldn’t — and what would have happened if someone had had an urgent need for a bathroom before then? The gas station across the street isn’t a workable option, given that it could easily be in use at the time someone needed it.

In theory you and your coworkers could have simply said, “We can’t work without bathrooms and potable water, per OSHA regulations, so we’re going to head home and work from there” and then done so … but people aren’t always comfortable doing that. You could contact HR now and ask about how it should be handled if it happens again, framing it as, “If this happens again and we’re out of compliance with OSHA regulations on water and bathrooms, I’d like to know we could work from home without penalty.”

4. At what point can my resume be two pages?

I’ve been really strict with myself about the one-page resume rule, paring down to only accomplishments and removing less relevant jobs and education details. But now that I’ve been working for five-plus years, that’s getting very difficult. I’ve always heard that recent grads should definitely only use one page, and people with decades of experience can use two, but what about the in-between? Have I earned a second page by now?

If the stuff you want to include is substantive and not fluff, go ahead and use a second page. The one-page resume rule is for people who are just out of school, which is no longer you.

Keep in mind you don’t need to use the full second page — a page and a half is fine to do, and the more info you cram in, the less likely the most important stuff will be seen in a quick skim.

5. How can my resume discuss my work on a multimillion dollar gift?

Earlier this year, I left a nonprofit job in fundraising. I was in the department for over five years. A few months before leaving, I was asked to write a proposal for an individual potential donor who was considering a multi-million dollar gift. I submitted the proposal to my supervisor, who planned to make the ask.

When the gift was agreed upon I was never informed about its approval. Later, when I asked about the gift and if I could include the proposal drafting skills in my resume, my supervisor told me, “There were many changes made to the proposal after your submission — so, no, you can’t say you drafted a proposal that was approved for X million dollars.”

Now I’m revising my resume and I’d like to include this skill and the approved amount. What do you think?

It’s hard to say without knowing how significantly the proposal changed. If it was still largely your work, then absolutely. If it was heavily rewritten, there’s less of an argument for it — but even then, if you’re confident your work still helped move the process along in a meaningful way (as opposed to the manager essentially starting from scratch on their own), you could say, “Wrote initial draft of fundraising proposal that was ultimately successful in securing a $X million gift.”

The post coworkers send social messages late into the night, office didn’t have bathrooms or water, and more appeared first on Ask a Manager.

https://www.askamanager.org/2025/08/coworkers-send-social-messages-late-into-the-night-office-didnt-have-bathrooms-or-water-and-more.html

https://www.askamanager.org/?p=32561

Posted by Ask a Manager

https://www.askamanager.org/2025/08/my-senior-colleague-keeps-acting-like-were-all-children.html

https://www.askamanager.org/?p=31652

A reader writes:

I’ve been at my workplace for five years; I like the work, I like my coworkers, and I like my direct manager.

The problem is the top of the pyramid. My organization’s leaders have never been the most effective. But recently, disparaging off-hand comments have reached a level where I’m having trouble ignoring how disparaging the upper management is. Specifically, one person in particular repeatedly refers to everyone at my level in the org as though we’re children.

Examples include references in passing to how we are all Gen Z — almost no one is, actually, but when people gently corrected her, she snapped about how it doesn’t really matter because we’re all so young anyway. (It is perhaps relevant that her kids are, in fact, Gen Z; they’re still in high school. I’m in my mid-30s.)

Relatedly, she also recently opined that we don’t know how to be professional about adhering to workplace policies because it’s most people’s first job out of college. This is also not true for almost anyone, and the person it is technically true of has been at the org for almost 10 years. The real problem, in my humble and childish opinion, is that we have no workplace policies, so everyone is trying to make it up as they go.

These condescending comments would be bad enough on their own. But it seems to inform other, more tangible issues like pay, promotion, and general trust in our choices at work. I’m in my 30s, I have a graduate degree, I am talking about buying a house with my partner, and this is not my first job. Yet when our upper management talks about how we’re all just wee wittle babies with no idea what we’re doing, it’s hard to feel as though my work is meaningful or respected. I’ve grown a lot at this job — I’ve won awards! — but I don’t think she’s noticed; to her, I seem to be at the exact same stage, in both work and life more generally, as I was five years ago.

I know I’m not the only one to feel extremely disrespected and beaten down by these comments. We’re unionized, and I know everyone else in the shop feels the same way about these comments, but we’re all kind of stymied; being spoken down to is not really a contractual issue.

For context, we are a small org. We don’t really have HR, and it’s difficult to navigate some of the workplace personnel issues because there aren’t any policies or ways to file complaints. It’s not possible to be anonymous. And this manager, while not technically my direct supervisor, is still someone I see and interface with regularly. We chitchat about life, and she also gives feedback on my work. Her desires and opinion of me impact what I’m doing daily. She also, clearly, does not take criticism constructively.

My direct supervisor gives me a lot of freedom and trust, which is a real saving grace; other people are dealing with this even more. But since we’re so small, he can only insulate me so much.

The obvious answer is to find new work; if my work doesn’t respect me, find a place that does! But I work in an industry with vanishingly few job openings. Also, unlike most other options in my field, my job is stable — even if underpaid compared with industry standard — so I don’t really feel as though I should leave, even if I could find another job, which is also unlikely.

So given that I’m staying here for at least the immediate foreseeable future, I’m wondering how to navigate this issue in a productive way.

Honestly, I don’t think you’re going to solve it, so the best thing you can do is to find ways to let it roll off of you.

That’s not to say that it’s not ridiculous and offensive; it is.

But in a small organization with no HR and this is a senior leader who doesn’t take feedback well … it’s not likely to change.

That doesn’t mean you can’t try! At a minimum, there might be responses you can try in the moment to try to highlight how absurd her comments are, or at least to push back on them. When she remarks on how young you are, you could say, “I’m in my mid-career with a master’s and X years of experience. I’m really concerned if you don’t think I have professional experience or judgment.”

When she says this is most employees’ first job out of college, say, “Wait, what? Most of us are mid-career and have been working for years.”

You could also try addressing it more head-on if you want to: “Can I ask you about something? You’ve made a lot of comments about how inexperienced I am, and I’m really taken aback by it since I’ve been working for X years. Do you have concerns about my work or my judgment that we should talk about?” … and then, depending on her response, possibly followed by, “I know you would want to know if something you were saying was landing the wrong way, so I want to be up-front that it’s demoralizing to hear my work dismissed like that.”

You might also talk to your own boss about the effect this person’s comments are having and ask if he has any insight into where on earth she’s coming from and whether he might consider having a conversation of his own with her (or, for that matter, with other management above him, who might be better positioned to tell her to cut it out).

But if none of that works, your best bet is to find ways not to care. That’s easier said than done, I realize! But this woman’s perspective is so absurd — insisting that you’re all right out of college when you’re not and talking about people in their mid-30s as wee babies — that seeing her very clearly as the jackwagon she appears to be might be the most powerful thing you can do for your own peace of mind.

The post my senior colleague keeps acting like we’re all children appeared first on Ask a Manager.

https://www.askamanager.org/2025/08/my-senior-colleague-keeps-acting-like-were-all-children.html

https://www.askamanager.org/?p=31652