A reader writes:
I work at a small company with about 10 employees. Because it is such a small team, and most people have been there for a long time (10+ years for most), it is a very relaxed environment — and unfortunately, this has bred some bad habits and toxicity into the culture. Nothing especially groundbreaking, and for the most part it was being ignored since most of the negativity was coming from one source — our main admin, Karen.
This fall, an opportunity opened up for me to work exclusively from home, due to the nature of my particular position, and I jumped on it. I go into into the main office about twice a month, and for the most part, it’s been a dream. I am vastly more productive, work hard to ensure that I maintain good work-from-home habits, and have found that my mental health has improved drastically.
Since the transition, I have done everything I can think of to set clear expectations as far as when I am available. I have specific, set hours when they can expect me to be at my desk. I use Google Hangouts’ away messages to say if I’m up from my desk for a quick break to stretch my legs, use the bathroom, etc. (with a time I’ll be back). I also always have my personal cell on me in case it’s a (rare) emergency.
I do most of my communication with clients and our team via email, but I do have a VOIP phone that dials out with the main office number, and I can be inter-office paged via this phone as well.
Almost the whole team is great with this arrangement, with one exception: Karen cannot seem to respect these boundaries. She’ll page me outside of my work hours, or regardless of whether I have an away message set, and if I don’t get to my phone fast enough (I can hear it elsewhere in the house), she’ll call my cell — usually for a very simple question that could have waited, or could have been an email. If I point out that I set an away message, she’ll say, “Sorry, I didn’t see it.” I have even paged her and told her I’ll be unavailable for an hour, and she’ll agree pleasantly, and then turn around and page me 15 minutes later, followed by the usual call to my cell if I don’t pick up. I will also often come back to see that she’s IM’d me in an effort to get my attention, as well.
When I politely point out that I had set an away message/was away for a short time/this question could have been an email/etc., Karen will often reply with, “Well, I didn’t think it was a big deal since you’re already there!”
My position does have a certain degree of needing to be on-call — if certain things happen with my projects at any time of day, I do need to act — but Karen’s questions are rarely about that so much as spellchecking and nitpicking coworkers’ work, which is another problem she has and one of the chief reasons I leaped at this opportunity to keep my job but not work in that office.
I should note that working from home is a perk offered to everyone as an as-needed thing, and there is one other employee who works from home full-time. I asked him, and he says that he has not experienced this level of intrusion at all, and then when he says he’s busy, Karen leaves him alone — no away messages needed. Meanwhile, when I say I’m busy, Karen says, “Oh, I knowwww, we all are,” and continues with her question/behavior.
What can I do differently to enforce these boundaries? I have stopped running to the phone if I’ve communicated that I’m away and I hear a page or IM, but that doesn’t stop the inevitable tide of calls and texts to my cell phone, or sometimes she’ll just page and page and page until I get sick of hearing it and answer, even though I’m taking a break. I pride myself on being just as available now as if I were in the main office, but at this point, I’m being forced into being much more “available” at home than I ever was when I worked in that building.
How do I keep from turning my work-at-home situation into, “Haha actually I just live at work, now”?
P.S. I had this open as a draft, got up to refill my coffee after setting a “BACK AT 10:30” away message — yes, with the all-caps — and what do I hear from my kitchen but a page and a “Hello? Helloooooooooooooooooooooooo?”
I wrote back and asked, “How does the paging work — can you turn it off or mute it if you want to?”
I don’t know if I can mute it — I can turn it down so I can’t hear it elsewhere in the house, and I have, but then I get bombarded with texts and passive-aggressive comments when I come back to my computer. Right now I have it at a volume where I can hear it if I’m up, but it’s not startlingly loud if I’m sitting at my desk, either.
I suppose I’m also worried about drawing the boundary too firmly, and seeming unavailable to my colleagues who aren’t Karen, you know? I can definitely see the value in being able to communicate within the office quickly, and it definitely does make working from home easier. But there have been plenty of times when I’ve tried to page a colleague, can’t get ahold of them in that moment, and either make a note to try back later or write an email if it’s urgent, and move on. That’s the overall staff’s approach (regardless of whether working remote or in the brick-and-mortar building.) It’s just Karen who seems to think that since I literally live at my office, I should be able to respond instantaneously to the pages and IMs.
Karen needs to be helicoptered to an island with no communication devices and left there for the duration of 2019.
It sounds like you’ve tried addressing this with Karen on a case-by-case basis, but haven’t had a bigger-picture conversation with her about it, so that’s what I’d try next. The next time you’re in the office, sit down with her and say something like this: “We need to change the system you’re using for reaching me when I’m working from home. You’ve been paging me outside my work hours for things that aren’t urgent, like X or Y, which means that I hear the page all over my house when I’m not working. And during the day, if I don’t immediately answer your call, you’ll often call my cell, even though it’s not urgent. I need to be able to focus on other projects and I need to be able to eat lunch or stop working at the end of the day without being chased down by the pager or texts. Of course if something is urgent, that’s different — but when something is not urgent, I need you to wait for me to get back to you, rather than trying to track me down in the moment when I may be dealing with something else. Can we agree that except in the rare cases where something is truly urgent, you’ll email me and wait for me to get back to you rather than expecting an instant response and trying to track me down?”
(Alternately, instead of waiting until the next time you’re in the office, you could just call her the next time this happens and say it then, which might have the benefit of conveying “I am at the end of my rope with this and we need to talk about it now.”)
If she balks at this, then say, “It’s affecting my ability to focus on other work, and it’s interfering with my off hours as well. I do need you to agree to this system going forward.”
If she says anything that sounds like no, you should say, “Okay, let me talk with (Karen’s manager) about this and see what we can figure out.”
And Karen’s manager should indeed be your next stop unless this conversation fixes the problem entirely — because what she’s doing is incredibly disruptive, incredibly rude, and incredibly weird.
You did note that your company has traditionally ignored problems, and has ignored Karen in particular. But unless you know that people have specifically complained about Karen to her manager about similar issues (in a clear, direct way, not dancing around the issue) and been ignored, I wouldn’t assume that this won’t bear fruit. Sometimes “my small company ignores problems” means “no one at my small company brings up problems, so it’s easy to ignore them” — which is different from “no one will act on anything, no matter how clearly the problem is pointed out.”
But if that doesn’t work, then you’ll need to move to solutions that change the type of access Karen has to you. Set her calls to your cell to go straight to voicemail. Mute her texts and IMs, so they’re there when you look for them but not annoying you with alerts popping up. And I’d seriously consider lowering the volume of your pager to a level where you can’t hear it outside of your office, and letting other people know that if they need to reach you urgently, they should call your cell instead of paging you.
Frankly, you could even tell her that you’re doing this! As in, “Karen, I’ve asked you not to bombard with me calls, texts, and pages for non-urgent items, but since it’s still happening, I’m going to mute your texts and pages for a while so that I’m not being constantly interrupted. I will still see them and get back to you, but they won’t be constantly popping up when I’m in the middle of something else. If there’s something that comes up that’s truly urgent and you can’t reach me, we can revisit this then, but so far none of these instances have been time-sensitive so I think this will work fine.”
As for your other working-from-home coworker who Karen leaves alone: It could be sexism, or it could be that he has a different type of job, or it could be that she’s not as comfortable with him, or who knows what. (If he does have a similar job to yours, though, I’m guessing that on some level it’s sexism. She sees his time as important and worthy of respect, while yours isn’t.) Regardless, she’s obnoxious and you have every right to create and enforce boundaries with her.
As for your worry that you’ll draw the boundary too firmly and seem unavailable to other coworkers: I don’t think you will. You’re only going to cut off Karen’s access, not everyone else’s, aside from the pager — and frankly I’m not convinced you should ever need to be paged in your own house when you’re not at your desk, when your cell could be used instead.
I work from home and my coworker wants me available 24/7 was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.
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