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“I branched out at work and was criticized for it, boss wants me to follow up on everything with emails, and more” plus 3 more Ask a Manager

“I branched out at work and was criticized for it, boss wants me to follow up on everything with emails, and more” plus 3 more Ask a Manager


I branched out at work and was criticized for it, boss wants me to follow up on everything with emails, and more

Posted: 18 Apr 2018 09:03 PM PDT

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

1. I branched out at work and was criticized for it

I’m with a small company of about 25, and work in software development. Luckily, my company is very open minded and flexible about participating in the work you’re interested in. Last fall, we decided to hire three summer interns through the local university, and when the resumes and cover letters came in, I jumped at the opportunity to participate. I was involved in the entire process from culling the stack of applications, to interviews, to call backs, and was very interested in being on the other side of the table for once! I learned a lot and was able to put a lot of what I’ve read here to use. I think my colleagues who were also involved were surprised to see me so energetic about it, I genuinely found it fun!

Fast forward several months, and it’s time for my performance review. The feedback I received was spun to be negative! “It was great that you were so involved in the hiring process, and we loved seeing you become so flared up and passionate about it! How can we make you feel that passion for software development?”

I was thrown for a loop! I thought I’d done good work and added value to my role and it was only used to contextualize a lack of energy in my day to day! For context, in those between months I had been through a pretty awful breakup which impacted my performance, so this was layered on some unpleasant (but fair) feedback. Even with that aside, I absolutely do not dislike the work that I do, though my energy level IS lower there.

I would like to continue participating in these decisions in the future but I’m worried that it’s impacting me negatively. Should I tone down my involvement or try to put forward a more tonally appropriate level of enthusiasm? I can’t help but feel a little cheated!

It's hard to say without knowing exactly how visibly enthusiastic you were about the hiring work, and how engaged you seem with your day-to-day work. The latter in particular is really key in being able to answer this. If you've seemed a bit checked out / not invested, it's understandable that your boss would note the contrast and ask about it.

That said, unless there was more to it than you've described here, I wouldn't take her feedback as criticism of your involvement in the hiring work. I'd take it at face value: She liked seeing you get so engaged with that work, she’s observing that it was markedly different from how enthusiastic you seem about your normal work, and she’s wondering if there's a way for you to be as invested and engaged in the latter. That's actually useful feedback for you. Even if you disagree with it (because you think, for example, that it's natural to get more excited about a short-term, more novel project and you can't see sustaining that for your long-term day-to-day work, no matter how much you like it), it's still useful to know that people around you might note the enthusiasm gap. Maybe there's a legitimate point there — maybe you do need to reflect on whether you should bring more energy to your work. Or maybe it's just a perception thing, and so it's an opportunity to say to your boss, "No, I actually really love my day-to-day work. What you saw in my enthusiasm on the intern hiring was just my excitement about learning a new area. I don't think I could sustain that level of visible enthusiasm day-to-day, but I do want you know that I feel deeply invested in my regular work here."

2. My manager makes me follow up on internal conversations with emails

My manager makes me follow up on conversations I have with other members of the business with an email. Is this odd? If I have a conversation about the way something is done with a colleague, this must be followed up in writing via an email. It’s a small office and people tend to get along, although most people do not like my boss as she is a micromanager. It just feels like my boss does not trust anyone and wants everything in writing after the simplest of conversations. I find this hard to deal with, as I trust people at their word most of the time, especially if I have an established working relationship. Any suggestions on how to deal with this or is it normal?

It depends on the issue in question. If your manager wants you to follow up in email to say things like "so to confirm, you'll be a few minutes late to the staff meeting today," that's overkill and weird. But if it's about more substantive things — deadlines, project plans, processes, and other key details — that's actually both normal and a good practice. It's not about not trusting the people you work with. It's about the reality that people are usually juggling lots of things and sometimes details fall through the cracks or get misremembered, and summarizing it in email makes that less likely to happen. (It also creates a record that people can consult later if there are questions.)

3. I started a new job and accidentally found my interview ratings

I started a new job about two months ago, and it’s been mostly wonderful. One of my side projects is reorganizing a shared folder that my department uses to store documents. My boss asked me to familiarize myself with it and make suggestions next week of how to organize it better, i.e. find any redundancies, declutter, etc. I’m also supposed to be putting together some documents to help onboard our next team member in a few months, using my own feedback from my hiring process.

While browsing through the various folders in the shared drive, I came across one folder named "job.” Inside are two separate folders full of scanned documents from my interview. These include dozens of pages of individual feedback and scoring from my four-panel interview, including matrices of comments and numerical ratings for both myself and another interviewee! Now I’m torn about whether I should let my boss know that this folder is sitting in the drive for all to see. Should I just wait to bring it up later once I’ve built some more rapport with my boss? Or mention it now so that the same doesn’t happen with future hires? Is it common for these sorts of documents to be made public within a department?

Side note: I couldn’t help but read every word, and overall I received really good comments, especially from my direct manager! I had been deeply curious about who else they interviewed, and it turns out the other interviewee was much more qualified but lacked energy and passion for the industry, which I scored highest in. This solidified my confidence in my interviewing skills, and gave me a bit of a confidence boost!

Yes, bring it up. It's not a big deal, so you don't need to wait until you have more rapport. It might actually be weirder if you do wait, since you were assigned to organize that folder and so at some point your boss may realize that you saw it.

Just say something like, "While I was reorganizing the shared folder, I found a folder of interview assessments and scoring. I wasn't sure if you'd want those to be accessible to everyone, so I'm flagging it in case you want to move it or restrict access to it."

(Some teams do make that stuff available to everyone, especially if they're small, and who knows, maybe yours does. But it's more typical to restrict access to that kind of thing to people involved in the hiring.)

4. Our salary grades are going down because of a department reorg

My brand new manager is reorganizing the department to make it “flat.” She has zero experience with the type of work my department does. In order to make our department flat, a number of employees are having their manager titles stripped and while we are keeping our current salaries, our salary grades will be dropping by one or two grades, which affects our future earning potential and cuts our bonus eligibility percentage by 5%.

Is this legal? None of the managers have had bad performance reviews. They’ve all met or exceeded expectations.

Yes, it's legal. Employers are allowed to lower your pay or, in this case, your salary grade. They just can't lower your pay retroactively (meaning that you can't be told, for example, that the last few weeks of work you just did are going to be paid out at a lower amount than what you agreed to).

You and your coworkers can certainly try pushing back, perhaps by showing her data on competitive salary ranges for the work you do and explaining that your team won't be able to attract or retain good people under these new policies. And if you have an HR department, you can attempt to enlist their help. But it's possible that your employer is actually okay with these consequences — they may be happy to lose people who are getting paid more than what they'll pay when they rehire for the roles, if it's convinced that the reorg actually makes sense for the organization. If that's the case, you'll have to decide if you're willing to stay under this new structure or if you'd rather go elsewhere.

5. Did this HR person lie when she said my emails went to her spam folder?

I applied for a job at a local, growing small company. The position seemed well-suited to me and my experience, and I even knew a former colleague who took a position there in recent months. After applying, I reached out to the colleague and told him that I had applied and he said he would personally send my resume to the hiring manager.

Within a week, I was emailed by HR (on a Thursday afternoon) asking me if I was available to speak about the position over the phone on either the following day (Friday) or the following Monday. I emailed back a few hours later on the Thursday night and said I could make myself available on either day at her convenience. Friday passed. Monday passed. I took your advice and emailed Tuesday apologizing for missing the times she suggested and let her know that I was available Wednesday-Friday to speak about the position.

Two weeks pass, and on a Thursday I receive a voice message from her saying that she had lost my emails in her spam box and would like to set up time that day or the next day to chat. I decided to call her back instead of emailing, and we set up a phone interview for the following morning. That interview went well and she immediately set up an on-site interview for the following Monday, where I met with her, the hiring manager, and his team. During the interview, the HR person said she would know next steps by "Wednesday.”

I guess my question is, she made up the spam box thing, right? If I was responding to her initial emails, why would my emails be flagged as spam? She probably doesn’t want the organization to seem disorganized. And I am still interested in the job, especially after meeting the team. But it is now Friday. What was the point of her telling me I’d hear back by Wednesday? Is this normal? Or a red flag for the job?

I suppose it's possible that she made up the spam thing, but that's not the most likely explanation. The most likely explanation is that your emails actually went to her spam folder and she found them there later. That's a thing that happens even if earlier emails went through, and it's not always clear why. I've definitely found emails from job candidates in my spam folder before and they've found mine in their spam folders too (which was the topic of my very first blog post here 11 years ago!). People who are hiring and people who are job searching should regularly check their spam folders for that reason, but not everyone thinks to do it regularly.

As for her saying you'd hear back by Wednesday and then missing that deadline, that's very, very common. Hiring frequently takes far longer than people expect it to, and employers regularly blow their own timelines. It's so normal that I tell people to take whatever timeline an employer gives you and mentally add two weeks to it. It's annoying, but it's a reality of how it works.

If you otherwise like this job and the people you met with, I wouldn't consider any of this red-flaggy.

I branched out at work and was criticized for it, boss wants me to follow up on everything with emails, and more was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.

my employee helped a fired coworker get a job with her fiance and lied to me about it

Posted: 18 Apr 2018 10:59 AM PDT

A reader writes:

I own a small business and a year ago hired a foreign employee on a work-holiday visa, "Meg.” While at my company, she met another employee, "Jane," who I ended up firing a few months later due to numerous work-related issues.

Knowing that the two remained friends, I did not discuss with Meg my reasons for firing Jane, and asked her to keep sensitive information about the company confidential. She agreed and said she would "remain professional.”

A few months later, I had dinner with my current employee and her fiance, as friends. Her fiance manages a luxury retail store for an international brand, and at that time gave me what I thought was good advice on employee management, asking me why I thought Jane did not perform anymore, and reassuring me that I did everything I could before firing her. I stayed as vague as possible, knowing that they were also friends with her.

After another few months, Meg announced that she was going back to her country for at least six months, while her fiance was staying here. At the time I was thinking to re-hire her when she came back, but shortly after I found out Jane had been working for months at the luxury retail store managed by this Meg’s fiance!

When I confronted Meg, she became nervous and admitted that her fiance was the person who hired Jane, and that he did not check her references, which would have been otherwise mandatory for this luxury corporation. I then realized that the "friendly advice" he gave me a couple of months prior was in fact a disguised reference interview … and also remembered that he gets paid a substantial bonus (around $1,500) for every person he recommends who gets hired. Altogether, the couple stayed mum for at least five months about my former employee's whereabouts, at one point telling me that she found a new job in an independent boutique.

My employment contracts have a non-competition clause asking employees not to hire other current or former employees within four months of their departure, nor to work with a competitor located close by. Technically, both Meg and Jane have not breached these conditions, since Jane was hired by my employee's fiance, and the company she now works at is not close by. But I cannot help to feel deeply betrayed, and having been used by this couple under the pretense of friendship.

I do not want to re-hire Meg when she comes back, and I don't understand why her loyalty laid more with a colleague whom she met through my company, rather than me. This is making me question if she shared confidential information with her fiance or Jane, given that she lied about my former employee's new job for months and I did not suspect a thing…

Am I right to feel this way, or did she do nothing wrong?

She didn't really do anything wrong.

I get it feels weird that she didn't mention it — like it's something that she deliberately kept from you — but it wasn't really information that you had a stake in or a right to know about. And Meg may have thought it would cause weirdness if she told you … which it seems like it might have, based on how you're feeling right now!

Meg's fiance is allowed to hire Jane. And even if he circumvented his company's reference-check process or even if he did it just for the referral bonus, it's pretty solidly in the category of Not Your Business.

You say that you're feeling used … but they didn't really use you. They just chose not to divulge something that they weren't obligated to divulge in the first place. They haven't gained any particular benefit at your expense.

I just don't see a betrayal here. I see an employee who thought it might be awkward to mention to her boss that her fiance hired someone who said boss had fired. That's it. And while it's the sort of moment that can make you pause and understand some of your past conversations with the person differently, it's really not anything more than that.

It's true that they shouldn't have lied and told you that Jane had found a job in an independent boutique if she hadn't … but who knows, maybe Jane specifically asked them not to mention she was working for Meg's fiance, and maybe they felt put on the spot if you what she was up to. But they weren't harming you with that lie or denying you information you were entitled to. And so if anything, I'd take this as a flag to think about why Meg was determined not to share this with you. It could just be basic awkwardness (which is very common), but it's worth reflecting on whether she might rightly have figured that you would have taken it badly — like burdening her with strong disapproval of her fiance's decision, implying that she'd been disloyal to you, or otherwise making it A Thing when it shouldn't be.

If you don't want to re-hire Meg when she returns, you don’t have to (and it would do her no favors to work for a boss who mistrusts her). But she didn't really do anything all that terribly wrong here.

my employee helped a fired coworker get a job with her fiance and lied to me about it was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.

what should a salary negotiation sound like?

Posted: 18 Apr 2018 09:30 AM PDT

This week on the Ask a Manager podcast, I talk to a guest who’s wondering about salary negotiation — how to do it, what to say, and what kind of tone to use.

You can listen to our discussion on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, Volumes, or Anchor (or here's the direct RSS feed).

This episode is 18 minutes long, and here's the letter:

I would really appreciate a good in-depth lesson on negotiating salaries. I see a lot of basic advice but I’ve never personally done it. There’s such conflicting advice about if women should or shouldn’t, how they should do it, and to top off, a mix of horror stories of offers being pulled because of negotiation.

The things I’d like to know most are:
* What kind of tone should you be using?
* How do you know if you’re being reasonable?
* How to get more confident and not feel so nervous about pushing for a little bit more?

If you want to ask your own question on the show, email it to podcast@askamanager.org.

And a transcript of last week's show is here.

what should a salary negotiation sound like? was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.

can I show armpit hair at work?

Posted: 18 Apr 2018 07:59 AM PDT

A reader writes:

I have a strange question for you and your readers: how appropriate is body hair in professional offices?

I’m a woman in my 20s who prefers to keep my underarms unshaved, though they’re tidy and unobtrusive. (I have light hair, which makes it less noticeable.) In general, I think sleeveless blouses can be fine at many offices, but I’ve found myself balking at airing out my underarms in professional contexts and am not sure whether to avoid sleeveless tops forever or just get over it.

This isn’t an issue that often — I’m a freelance writer and work at home/in casual-dress environments 95% of the time. But every now and then I need to dress more professionally, and I’m wondering if I need to make it policy to keep my pits to myself?

(For the record, I wouldn’t spare it a second thought if a female coworker happened to have underarm hair that showed — but if a man at a nearby desk wore a shirt that showed his armpits, I’d find it unpleasant. Not sure what to do with that distinction. Surely there’s a difference between tidy office pits that are normally fine to wear to work — unlike sleeveless men’s shirts — and “dude at beach” hair??? Or am I doomed to cardigans anytime I’m in a business casual workspace?)

I have to confess that I’m squicked out by armpits in general — men's and women's — and if it were up to me, no armpits would ever be on display anywhere and sleeveless tops would be abolished. I am strongly pro-sleeve for all, and so I'm not a reliable source for an answer to this.

But I will try to put my bias aside and answer this.

We do have different standards for men and women's armpits at work. Men generally can't wear sleeveless tops to work in most office environments at all, so their armpit hair never really comes up as a question. But in many/most offices, it’s fine for women to wear sleeveless tops, and you could argue that if sleeveless tops are okay, then any resulting visible armpit hair is no one's business.

On the other hand, while there are big regional and cultural differences on this, there are certainly office environments where wearing a skirt that exposed obviously hairy legs would be Not Done. It’s not necessarily that it would result in a formal talking-to, but in some places it would be a thing that was noticed and made people think you were less than professionally groomed. Which is stupid and unfair, but would definitely be a thing in some — not all — offices. (I think this is changing though!)

My guess is that armpit hair falls along the same lines: fine in some offices, not fine in others. And so you'd have to know the culture you're working in, and how much you care about complying with that culture's norms and expectations.

can I show armpit hair at work? was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.

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