These are five answers to five questions. Here it is…
1. My coworker is charging our team for personal purchases
I work in higher education in a small team. We are all able to make purchases up to a certain amount without any monitoring.
I suspect that my co-worker has bought things for herself. There seemed to be little things here and there, $30 hand creams, essential oils, things that had no commercial purpose.
Recently I purchased an expensive item for the office (with permission). He said someone asked him where it was from and asked if he could send him the link. A week later, a box arrives with the same item. I looked at his purchase order, which said it was a replacement for a broken item. The original is clearly not broken. I placed the package near his desk and the items disappeared from the office.
It seems clear to me that he bought it for himself. While other items were smaller, this is a $300 device. I’m not sure if I should report this to my boss or not. If I report this and he is not fired, it will become clear that it was me and it will make my work life difficult. I’ve been here for less than a year and I feel like it wouldn’t do me any good to get involved, but I also don’t want to have nothing to get back to me if she eventually gets caught.
You should report her because she is stealing! The $300 device isn’t the same as taking the pen home; This is serious theft. And you risk looking like you knew and didn’t say anything. It also risks hurting your department in other ways, such as reducing the amount of money available to your team for actual work needs.
You can tell your boss that you are concerned about your relationship with a co-worker deteriorating, and request that your name not be disclosed. This should be easy to do, as it is entirely plausible that your boss or someone else was reviewing the purchase orders and raised questions about it. It doesn’t look like she’s trying to cover her tracks very well.
2. Our next work meeting is being held in a church
I work for a non-profit organization in the healthcare field. Until last year, my leadership generally made their business decisions with the best intentions for staff and patients. Then the election happened, and suddenly all the leadership was talking about our federal funding – or lack thereof, given that we serve a large immigrant/undocumented and LGBTQ+ population.
My department has small (4-5 person) teams spread across 20 satellite sites. Together we are one big group, and no site is big enough to gather us all in person for meetings. For this reason we usually hold one in-person meeting annually in a rented space and manage the rest of our meetings via Zoom or small groups. Before budget tightening, leadership’s idea was to increase the frequency of in-person meetings to quarterly. As budgets tightened, the idea became to hold quarterly in-person meetings in a free space.
That’s why my next staff meeting is going to be at a church in a few weeks.
Our company has no religious affiliation, and I am extremely uncomfortable with this because I am agnostic myself. I have coworkers who identify as gay and are not welcome in churches, and I have coworkers of other religions (Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Methodists, etc.) who feel conflicted on grounds that are not “theirs.” We’re given the option to just take PTO instead of attending (there’s no option to take it without pay, so anyone who doesn’t have PTO is SOL), but I’m a little nervous that I have to do this. Am I wrong to be so worried?
Churches often provide space to outside groups as part of a service to the community (or, in some cases, as a way of raising funds) for a whole range of activities that are not religious in nature.
This objection is just “it’s a church”, I don’t think it will get you anywhere. But if it’s “this is a place that is actively harmful to people like me and my loved ones”… well, it still might get you nowhere, but you’ll have a better chance of trying. And surely there are other meeting places in your community – and if none of them are free, it’s probably not time to expand these meetings from annual to quarterly.
3. Why would my interviewer reject me like this?
Years ago, I worked in a home communications role. My company was in bad shape and I was semi-recruited by a higher-level employee of an agency in the same subspecialty I worked for. I had worked with this group a lot before and knew most of the (small, less than 10-person) team well. After an interview on site, the owner called me and his first words were, “So, what did you think of the team?” I talked about how much I liked him and thought we’d work well together, getting that warm feeling of “I get it!” shine.
The next words out of his mouth were basically, “You didn’t get the job.”
I found this bizarre, insulting, and cruel (not to mention embarrassing). I never got an explanation as to why he would message it this way. Obviously, I dodged the bullet, but can you give any reason why he did so? Have you ever heard of something like this happening to other people?
It’s obnoxious and it’s because he’s inconsiderate, weird, or a jerk, or possibly all three.
This is actually a terrible way to reject someone – he asked a question that would raise anyone’s expectations and which made no sense to ask because he wasn’t hiring you. The most generous explanations are that he felt awkward about rejecting people and he didn’t plan what he was going to say and started the conversation without knowing what he was saying to you, or even that he thought it would be rude to jump straight into messaging and he thought it was a soft way to reach out to her (it wasn’t!). Any of these are more than likely just a sadist who enjoys toying with people – but since you know this team well, you’ll probably have a good sense of which explanation is the most likely.
4. Should I avoid giving rewards to employees because of favoritism?
I work at a public university and supervise four people. We have some university-wide employee awards, some with monetary rewards, others with just positive, public recognition. As a supervisor, I have employees I think about nominating but I worry about showing favoritism. Am I overthinking it? Do I have the right to try to recognize my employees in other ways and not nominate them in these more public ways?
Honoring people who have done excellent work is not partisanship; This is appreciation based on merit and contribution, that’s how it should work. If you are only nominating people you like personally or have had lunch with, this would be bias. But using your employer’s official praise system is not favoritism. I would be more concerned that your employees will be frustrated that you are preventing them from receiving the type of recognition that your employer has set up specifically for them!
If the concern is that some people will be nominated and some people won’t, you’ll definitely want to make sure that you can justify your decisions about who gets nominated for what (and who doesn’t) and that you’re giving people enough regular, ongoing feedback that your recognition decisions will be clearly aligned with that.
One more thing: Make sure you’re not overlooking people who do excellent work but rather those in areas that are inherently less attractive; Good work is good work, no matter how glamorous or non-glamorous it is (and if anything, there may be more need to ensure that the less glamorous get recognition).
5. When can I ask about health insurance details during the interview process?
I am currently in the second round of interviews for a new job. In my introductory call they told me a bit about the perks (health insurance provider, PTO, 401k, etc.), but I didn’t want to know too much about them and didn’t want to seem overly curious. When would be a good time to ask more specific questions? If offered a job, may I be asked to review their insurance options/tiers before saying yes? Is this a crazy question?
Wait until you have an offer, but it’s in no way strange to ask for details about their insurance coverage at that time (including drug formularies if you want to see how specific drugs are covered).
That said, it is always true that the company may change its insurance in the near future, or the insurance company may change its drug formulary, etc. The whole system is worse than it should be.
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