can I steal my coworkers’ screaming monkey toy, telling an employee to remove a political post from her Facebook page, and more
It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…
1. Can I take confiscate my coworkers’ screaming monkey toy?
Today, as has happened multiple times in the last few months, some of my nearby coworkers in our relatively small satellite office decided to play catch with this “screaming monkey toy.”
The noise it makes is outrageously loud, especially in our small space, and I’ve previously indicated (politely) to coworkers that I find the noise not only distracting, but extremely annoying. After the first time, I asked them if they could please make an effort to not set the toy off, because of those reasons. The toy has been used a handful of times since then, each time with me reminding them that it is disruptive and obnoxious and could they please not play with it when other people are trying to work.
And yet today happened anyways. Would it be rude of me to either remove the sound-making device or otherwise dispose of the toy?
Nope. Your need to focus at work trumps their interest in repeatedly playing with an obnoxiously loud toy. They are being rude, you have asked them multiple times to stop, and now you are fully entitled to arrange for the monkey’s release into the wild.
2. My boss wants an employee to remove an anti-abortion post from her personal Facebook page
My boss noticed that one of my direct reports posted an anti-abortion statement on her personal Facebook page. My boss wants me to use this as a coaching opportunity with my direct report to take the post down, because my boss doesn’t think it’s appropriate to post about “controversial” things when others know where you work (i.e., perhaps the employee’s social media “friends” are colleagues and current or prospective customers). To be clear, this employee was not posting on behalf of the company, this was on her personal Facebook page, and there is no company policy prohibiting this. Personally, it seems unrealistic for me to police others’ social media posts and also difficult to decide what is or isn’t “controversial” within the context of normal social discourse (we’re not talking hate speech here). What are your thoughts?
Yeah, your boss is out of line. Would she also take issue with an employee’s personal Facebook posts advocating reproductive choice? How about one calling for citizenship for DREAMers? How about a call for tax reform or health care access? Is she proposing that your employees be prohibited from any sort of political advocacy on social media?
People get to have personal lives outside of work, and they get to use their voices to speak up about issues that matter to them. As long as she’s not posting hate speech, and as long as she’s not in a position where her personal social media is likely to impact her ability to do her job effectively (which some people are), your boss should stay out of it.
3. How do I tell my coworker I’m applying for the same internal job she is?
I work at a 22-person company. I’ve been in the job for 6 months. I’m starting to feel that I’ve learned as much as I can from my current role and that I’m not being used to my full potential.
I learned that a new job is being added that would make better use of the skills I’ve developed over the past few years. The problem: it’s in another department, and a colleague with whom I’ve become pretty good work friends (we’re two of only three millenials at the company) is also planning on applying. She and I hold the same position but in different departments. The new job that’s being added is in her department. She’s been working at the company for about a year and is starting to feel stale in her role as well. She has one or two more years of work experience than I do, but I feel either one of us would really shine in that new role.
We were talking about it casually a few weeks ago, she told me she was planning on applying. At the time, I really wasn’t planning on applying (and told her as much) but after giving it more thought, I decided I should. How do I navigate this without making it awkward? Should I tell her I changed my mind? I don’t want this to be adversarial and will be happy for whoever gets the job.
“I wanted to let you know that I decided to throw my hat in the ring for the X job because it’s so in line with what I want to do. But I also think you’d be great at it, and I hope it won’t be weird that I’m applying too.”
She might be weird about it anyway, because some people get weird about this. But people can’t really call dibs on applying for a job, and you’re entitled to apply too.
4. My peer is my interim manager and can access my private personnel info
I have been in my role at my current organization for 3+ years. Our team includes one director and 13 team members who are all peers. During my time here, we’ve had some leadership changes. In 2017, my direct supervisor left. She was replaced by one of the members of our team, who accepted the role on an interim basis (she was offered the job and declined). When we hired a replacement (it took about eight months), the team member who served in the interim role went back to her old role as one of my colleagues.
Fast forward and now we’re in the same situation again. The replacement we hired lasted about seven months in the job before leaving for greener pastures. Again, the supervisor was replaced by another member of our team (different from the first colleague) who has accepted the role on an interim basis. She will not be considered for the permanent role because she doesn’t have the required qualifications.
I’m growing increasingly uncomfortable with colleagues having access to my personnel information while they serve in temporary supervisory roles. I have a documented (invisible) disability that I have workplace accommodations for, and which I keep private. There are now two colleagues who know about my accommodations because they have served in supervisory roles before going back to being regular colleagues. In addition, both individuals have access to my performance evaluations and other items in my personnel file, which I feel should be kept as private as possible. This whole situation of naming a team member as an interim supervisor and giving them the full range of supervisory responsibilities, and then having them just re-slot back into their old roles later, strikes me as very strange. Am I overreacting about this? Does this kind of thing happen all the time? Should I just get over it?
Yes, it’s pretty common. It often makes a lot of sense to hire an interim manager from among the existing team than to bring someone in from outside of it, and you can’t have some act as manager for months without having access to this type of personnel information. That’s especially true for information about accommodations — since they can’t accommodate you if they don’t know about those arrangements. (In most cases, at least. If it’s something like you having special equipment to do your job, they may never need to know about it. But if it’s something like a schedule adjustment or being exempted from a certain type of work, they’d need to know about it in order to ensure that accommodation is preserved.)
And while I totally get that it can feel weird to have someone potentially read all your performance evaluations and then go back to being your peer, there are cases where it’s really helpful for a new manager to have that info. For example, if they notice that Bob is chronically missing deadlines, it’s helpful to be able to see if that’s been an ongoing issue and/or one he’s been talked to about before.
I agree with you that personnel info should be kept “as private as possible.” But this type of access in this situation is warranted, and is pretty normal.
5. My manager calls and just reads my emails back to me
I am working on a time-sensitive project. My manager has asked me to keep him updated on the project. Once or twice a day, I email him a list of the test cases and their status. He will then call me, and read the email back to me. There are no actions that I need to take after the phone call. There is little to no clarification needed about the statuses of the test cases. He is literally just reading me an email that I just sent him. Sadly, he is asking for multiple tracking spreadsheets. Between creating the tracking spreadsheets, and then having them read back to me, I am losing up to two hours a day! I then get asked why I am not being more productive.
Is there a polite way to tell my boss that his phone calls are taking up a lot of time, are not productive, and it part of the reason that I am not getting more actual work done? I have been wracking my brain as to why this is his new way of managing, as this is not how it has always been. The tone of the emails is fine, as they are literally lists. They are not full of errors that he is pointing out, nor are actionable items being created as a result of the conversations. The best option that I can come with is that he doesn’t absorb information by reading, and needs to hear things. I acknowledge that, as my manager, he gets to tell me which tasks to complete, even if that task is “listen to me read stuff that you just sent me.” I am just super frustrated because this is wasting my time, and slowing down actual, productive work that needs to be done ASAP. I tried working when he was reading, and apparently wasn’t responsive enough to the conversation, so he asked me to stop.
Yeah, my bet is that he either processes by reading out loud and feels he needs someone there for that because otherwise he’s just talking to himself, or that he thinks he may have questions for you as he goes through the email and hasn’t put together yet that he never does.
Try saying this: “I’m spending up to two hours a day — about a quarter of my time — creating the tracking spreadsheets and then on the phone with you as you read through them. You don’t typically have questions for me as you read them, so I wanted to propose that we skip the phone call part and I can use that time to move through this more quickly. Of course, if you ran into a question when you report the status report, you’d still call me — but since it’s rare that you do end up asking me anything on those calls, it would be a way for me to get more of this done more quickly.”
can I steal my coworkers’ screaming monkey toy, telling an employee to remove a political post from her Facebook page, and more was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.
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