These are five answers to five questions. Here it is…
1. Coworker sends email with deadline, then tells everyone to respond immediately
I work in an office and I have a co-worker who is one of the few people on the admin team with me. We are colleagues; Neither of us manages the other. She has a habit that I find frustrating: She’ll send an email giving instructions and a deadline, then immediately start following through.
As the latest example, today, she was wanting to know shirt sizes so she can purchase company merchandise for employees and our event attendees if they’re bringing family members or significant others. He wrote in the email that we should send the reply by the deadline of 12 days from now.
She sent this email at 8:03 this morning and at 8:11 one of the other admin staff walked by her desk to go somewhere else and said, “Hey, did you get my email? Do you know when you can tell me your shirt size?” Then he asked me and another administrator the same question around 10:00. (I understand that it’s just a matter of shirt size here and that the answer should be responsive for most people, but some people don’t want to answer right away for various reasons. For example, I’m losing weight and I want to try on a shirt at home that I had from last year’s event to see how big/small it is on me.)
This is today’s example, but this issue has come up many times. If he needs to know immediately, that’s fine. If there is a time limit, that’s okay. And I could understand if it was, let’s say, two days before the deadline and he reminded people. But this is very disappointing.
How do I respond? I don’t think it’s any of her business, so I don’t want to say it right away, but I also don’t want to be rude and give her my own deadlines.
“Oh, do you need to know now? I thought the email said March 20.”
Or: “I’m not sure yet, but I will contact you before the deadline.”
Or: “Haven’t had a chance to think about it yet, but I’ll let you know before the deadline.”
Connected:
My coworker follows projects too much
2. Do I really have to mention my divorce at work?
I work in a profession where a great, professional appearance is important to maintain the momentum of your career advancement. The basic ethos is that if you can’t keep your home life in order, you can’t be expected to manage high-profile “cases” (though I’m not a lawyer, I’m in a legal-adjacent field). Getting a divorce brings up questions about the distractions and bandwidth to handle a moderately heavy workload (i.e. 50-60 hours per week in a typical week, 70+ in a quarter leading up to a big case), where there are often last minute changes to the schedule (i.e., a request comes in at 3 pm with a legally mandated response time of 24 hours later). I’ve seen this happen before with friends who have been divorced, so I’m not thinking too much about it.
None of this was an issue for me until I recently realized that I would likely get a divorce and be a single mother. I have great support, but I will owe significant alimony and child support to my ex-husband, so I can’t give up a career I love and have a graduate degree in, even if I wanted to.
I plan not to mention the divorce at work; I am senior enough to take time out during the day to deal with the lawyer’s calls and any issues. At work, I find I can get away with calling my ex-husband by his first name and/or “the father of the kids.”
My problem is that I have mentioned this to several friends who are not in my area and each of them believe this is a terrible lie made by mistake. Especially one who is beside himself; She was also the one who was very upset when I didn’t tell my office that I was engaged because she felt it was essential information for them. I didn’t tell the office because I didn’t have a traditional proposal or engagement ring; We decided after a series of discussions to get legally married and set a date after living together. When I told them about the wedding and starting to wear the wedding ring set, people expressed mild surprise, but it didn’t seem like a scam.
Since I’m not some kind of monarch or public figure, disclosing this information doesn’t seem important to the company or have any financial impact on it, so why would they care? But am I wrong in this matter?
You are not off-base. Your friends are being really weird, especially that friend who thought it was a terrible crime to not share your engagement at work! Your coworkers are not entitled to the details of your personal life; Yes, most people share at least the basics like marital status as it comes up in the course of general gossip and getting to know people, but when you have a specific reason for not sharing any changes, you are not morally obligated to!
This may come up when you need to remove your ex-spouse’s name from specific benefits like health insurance, but you’re allowed to keep it private if you want. And it sounds like you have more reasons than most to like it; It’s strange that your field passes professional judgment on divorced people! (What about people who started out and are left alone? What if you become a widow? That’s so absurd.)
3. When should you raise issues to HR?
I work for a company with a fully staffed employee relations/EEO (equal employment opportunity) team. The team I work on is a dysfunctional nightmare and I’m actively interviewing to get out of it.
Over the past year, the EEO team has been inundated with complaints. Our organization now uses the EEO team either as an arbitrator for every small problem or as a tool to retaliate over perceived slights.
Of course, employees should have a mechanism to address harassment and misconduct. But I have been a witness in more than 10 investigations and have been the target of one myself. False allegations were made against me and I was acquitted of any wrongdoing.
Obviously I’m angry that someone lied and tried to damage my reputation and career. But I’m also tired of getting caught up in investigations that seem small and trivial. (Think: disagreements about work processes.) These issues can be resolved in a conversation by people communicating like adults. I can’t trust a large portion of my coworkers or my own supervisor because any small glitch triggers another investigation.
I’m pretty much in the mud here so I need an outside perspective. When is it really appropriate to raise issues with EEO?
When there are good faith concerns about harassment or discrimination or managerial misconduct. Differences of opinion regarding work processes and things of that nature should be discussed directly with the other person and then, if they cannot be resolved that way and should not be left undone, they should be escalated to the relevant managers.
Employee Relations/EEO staff are not there to referee small disputes. They are there to address potential legal issues or other significant inequities.
Connected:
When should you go to HR?
4. Do my multiple layoffs make me look like a quitter?
Like many other professionals over the years, I have experienced layoffs – three times in the last three years. I stayed at these jobs for anywhere from five months to almost three years, and my intervals between employment ranged from one to nine months. I’ve seen a lot of posts on your site about alleged job loss on a resume, and how you should stick with a role for a few years to prove you can’t just up and walk away… but how do you do that if leaving the job is out of your control?
For the past six months, I’ve worked in a role that is giving me great experience but not ideal in many other respects (travel, salary, chance to advance in the company) and I’m starting to look for other roles again, and I’d really like to clean up the disaster on my resume before doing so.
Employers understand that layoffs are different from you deciding to leave all your jobs (or being fired for performing too many of them) after a very short stay.
It’s also true that if a job is short (when not intended to be short-term from the start), it can be hard to have the kind of impressive accomplishments that will help you get hired for the job you really want. But if two of those three jobs were near the three-year end of the spectrum, I’m less concerned than if two of them were near the five-month end of it.
if this Is One issue, the only real way to clear it is to hold on to jobs longer when you get the chance. So, ideally, you’ll stick with your current one for at least a few years before you start looking again. But whether it really makes sense to do so must be balanced with other factors, such as how significant the difference is between what is paid and what you could earn elsewhere (if it’s a small difference, it may be worth holding off for a while so that your resume is more attractive the next time you’re looking), how terrible the commute is, etc. You can still start looking, but only accept a job that you’re confident you’ll be able to stay there for at least a few years – but you also have to keep in mind that this isn’t always under your control, and if you get fired from the next one, you’ll have added two more short stays to your resume, which is already very unstable, and at some point it’ll become harder for you to get hired by a good job like that. want To persist for a long time and hence it can become a self-perpetuating problem.
Warning: There are some fields where this kind of resume is no big deal! However, you probably know if you’re in one of them.
Connected:
Is it still a bad thing to quit your job?
5. Rejecting a job because of a health insurance provider
I’m working with a recruiter I really like in my job search. Recently they sent me a role which I was initially excited about. They also sent me a link to their benefits package and I saw that the healthcare provider was UnitedHealthcare.
They are extremely difficult to work with and I know it would be a nightmare considering my health condition. I did not approve of their business practices before their CEO was murdered, but my desire not to deal with them is due to my own health, not primarily for ethical reasons (although that counts too).
I sent a response to the recruiter saying that although the role otherwise looked great, I couldn’t take a role where UnitedHealthcare was the provider. My goal was to be intentionally vague so as not to disclose private health information, but also so that I could provide feedback to my client if needed, and so that he or she knew this was a requirement for me.
My question is that if such a case comes up in future, how can it be dealt with in a better way. I want to be vague about my health status, but also make it clear that it is a deal-breaker at a job.
In the future, I’ll add a little more to the description you sent so it’s clear where you’re coming from – something like, “Unfortunately in the past I have found UnitedHealthcare difficult to work with to the extent that it would be prohibitive for me to seek insurance with them again. I understand that the company I work for is always a risk going to them, but I cannot knowingly come to terms with them as an insurance provider.”
That last part feels important to say because the reality is that you can take a job somewhere and then decide to switch to it – but that’s different from knowingly signing up for them when you can already opt out.
