A reader writes:
I’ve been working for a small firm for the past two years. The atmosphere is very friendly and casual and the hours are flexible. My boss (let’s call her Diane) has said in the past that it’s fine to come in earlier or later as long as the work gets done. Most people work 9-5, but for the past several months I have been doing 9:30-5:30 most days.
A couple of days ago, I received a message from Diane on our internal messaging platform that said (paraphrased): “Don’t you think Alice should try to arrive on time in the morning? Even if they don’t have set times, Jane is always at her desk by 9.”
I’m Alice and Jane is my colleague who always works 9-5. I believe this message was meant for the firm’s other boss, whom I do not directly report to, but Diane typed it in a hurry and sent it to me by mistake. It would not be out of character for her.
Aside from the embarrassment of receiving a message meant for someone else, and a message reprimanding me to boot, I am very upset and annoyed by the implication that I have been slacking off when for the past week I’ve been staying late (usually until 6 or 6:30) sometimes even locking up after everyone else is gone. I work alone most of the time (so it’s not a matter of being on a team where everyone needs to be present). I am not late if there are morning meetings, and my projects are on track.
At first I didn’t know how to respond to the message, so I just ignored it. Diane hasn’t said anything about it to me. For the past two days, I have arrived at 9 and left at 5. I should talk to Diane but I hate confrontation and I hate the idea of comparing my schedule to my coworkers’. Up until two days ago, I really wasn’t thinking about office hours and I didn’t think I was “staying late” or “arriving late.” I was simply putting in the hours I needed to complete my tasks. Now my productivity is down the drain and I’m feeling demoralized.
I thought I could say something like, “I was under the impression that you were okay with me arriving later because I always made up for it, but if you prefer I will arrive at 9 like the others. Of course that means I will leave at 5 like the others instead of staying late.” But I don’t want to sound passive-aggressive or like I’m bragging that I worked more hours than Jane and the others who are all great coworkers.
Should I mention the message or not? The longer I wait, the more awkward it would be to bring it up. Should I stress the fact that I have worked (unpaid, willing) overtime last week, in case Diane somehow forgot? Have I crossed some invisible boundary by taking too much advantage of our “flexible” hours? Am I making too big a deal out of this? Some perspective would be really appreciated.
It’s weird that Diane has said in the past that it’s fine to come in earlier or later as long as the work gets done, but now is criticizing you for moving your schedule forward by half an hour. So who knows, maybe she didn’t mean it when she said it. Maybe she thought it sounded good but she doesn’t actually believe it, and now that’s coming out. Or maybe she meant something far more limited — like that she doesn’t care if you’re a few minutes late, or that it’s fine to come in at 9:30 occasionally but not to make it your regular schedule. Or maybe she’s changed her mind and doesn’t realize she didn’t tell people that. Who knows!
On the other hand, she acknowledged in the message that you and your coworkers don’t have a set time of arrival! Saying “don’t you think Alice should try to arrive on time” while in the very next sentence saying “even though they don’t have set times” is … a particularly impressive failure of logic.
In any case, there’s a real benefit to getting her unvarnished thoughts on the matter, even though they weren’t intended for you, since now you have a window into how she really thinks. She’s obviously not the clearest communicator (or even thinker?), at least not on this matter, so in a twisted way it might be good that it happened — since even if she’s being unfair and unclear, it’s useful to you to know how she really sees your schedule, so that you can decide if you want to do anything differently.
As for how to handle it with her … The best thing would have been to address it with her the day you received the message. You could have gone to her office and said, “I’m not sure if you meant to send that message about my time of arrival to me or to someone else, but I wanted to ask you about it because my understanding was that we don’t actually have set times of arrival, and that it was fine for us to come in earlier or later as long as our work is getting done. That’s why I’ve been working 9:30-5:30 much of the time. Should I not be doing that? This is the first indication I’m getting that it might be a problem, and I wanted to check with you directly to clear it up.”
(Frankly, you also could have pretended that you missed that the message wasn’t for you — perhaps you thought she was addressing you in the third person, like a small child — and just replied to it with, “Oh! I had thought we had flexibility with our hours and it was okay to shift our schedules forward or back a bit. Did I get that totally wrong?”)
Of course, you don’t have a time machine so that doesn’t help you now. But you can still do a version of the first approach; you just need to change the lead-in to something like, “You sent me a message a few days ago that I think might not have been intended for me, but where you expressed concern about my time of arrival.”
There’s a pretty good chance that Diane has already figured out that she misdirected the message, because if at some point she wondered why the intended recipient hadn’t responded to her, she might have gone back to look at it, realized what happened, and then felt the Burning Shame of Misdirected Messages. If so, it’s ridiculous that she hasn’t addressed it with you (and it’s also further evidence that she’s not a great communicator), but ignoring something uncomfortable isn’t an uncommon way of dealing with embarrassing events.
Anyway, the guiding principles I’d use here are (a) appreciation that you got an unfiltered look at what she really thinks, annoying as it is and (b) a willingness to push through the awkwardness and just address it head-on now that you know, and see what you can work out.
my boss accidentally sent me a message complaining about me was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.
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