It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…
1. Do I have a right to ask a roommate to NOT take a job right now?
My husband and I moved about five hours from our hometown just over a year ago, and while we’re loving it, we’re really missing our friends and family. About nine weeks ago, a very close friend was laid off from her job, but then found a job in our city and asked if she could live with us for a bit while she got settled. We happily agreed she could stay with us for a couple months while she started the new gig and get back on her feet. She accepted the job, moved in with us, and things have been going great.
Then this crappy virus happened, and her company furloughed everyone the second week in to her new job. Because she found the job so fast, she never filed for unemployment initially. Now she has applied for unemployment, but our state’s backlog is taking a while to process claims and she’s understandably getting worried.
My husband and I have already told her that we’re not worried, and we’ve got her expenses covered until this is over. However, she’s “feeling a bit bored and guilty” and wants to get a job. She’s recently started talking about trying to get a temporary gig at a grocery store or healthcare facility to make some money and pass the time. We are concerned about her bringing the virus in to our house, and told her we weren’t comfortable with this. However, she keeps bringing it up.
She already has a few interviews starting to line up with her specialty, and those jobs would be remote. Her unemployment will start coming soon once the backlog is cleared as well. We both already worked from home, have only gone out a few times for necessities, are taking this quarantine seriously, and do not want someone living here who’s going out and interacting with people daily. Do we have a right to ask her not to work in such a publicly exposed job right now? I promise we’re not monsters, but if she insists on this, it’d be a deal-breaker for her living with us.
You 100% have the right to say it’s a deal-breaker! Without question. It’s your home. The terms of your offer to her are very generous — she’s living with you and you’re covering her expenses. She is not in a desperate situation; she’s “a bit bored and guilty.” You have complete moral standing to say, “We’re happy to have you live with us, but to make it work we need you to follow the same distancing rules we’re following.”
Since you’ve already told her you’re not comfortable with her plan and she keeps bringing it up anyway, it sounds like you need to address it more directly — as in, “We’re so happy to have you here, and we’ll gladly continue to cover your expenses until this is over. But we need you to follow the same precautions we’re taking, which means that if you decide to take one of the temporary jobs you’ve been talking about, you’d need to stay somewhere else. We don’t want that to happen — we love having you here — but we’re not comfortable with that risk, so we want to make sure you’re clear that it means we couldn’t keep living together.”
2. Am I not allowed to quit if my employer receives the new Paycheck Protection Program loan?
My boss at my nonprofit told us on our team call that we got the Paycheck Protection Program loan, which we are so grateful for! But then she disclosed that none of us can quit until after June 30 or the loan will not become a grant.
The way my boss said this to us feels like we are all being held hostage — like if I quit, I’m doing irreparable harm to my colleagues and the organization. Is it true that if I quit the loan cannot become a grant?
I’m going into the second round interview of a promising job opportunity that would pay me at least double what I am making here and would be a better title at an institution I really want to work for, in a town I really want to move to. If I get the job offer, I will not hesitate to take it.
What?! No.
What is true is that loan forgiveness will be based on the company’s costs paid out in the eight weeks following the loan. They’ll need to spend at least 75% of the loan on payroll — so your boss might be concerned that if someone leaves, the company’s payroll won’t meet that threshold. But the law doesn’t say no one can quit! Your company would just need to hire someone to replace you (if that’s what it takes to meet that metric).
The forgiven amount is also reduced if the company has fewer employees compared to their average headcount during the previous 12-months and don’t hire them back by June 30. So again, you can quit; they’d just need to re-hire. (This is because the program is designed to help keep people employed; they don’t want employers laying people off and using most of the loan money for other things. The program ties loan forgiveness to employers continuing to employ people. They don’t care if someone quits; they care about the employer keeping their headcount up, which your boss can do by replacing you.)
3. People are mad they can’t take home the masks our company is buying
I work for a large public utility, so while those of us who can are working from home for the foreseeable future, we have many colleagues who are still going into the office or having to interact with our customers to restore their service or perform maintenance work. My company is doing all the right things to support the entire workforce: instituted WFH early; created a generous COVID-19 specific leave policy to supplement our already generous sick leave; doubled the leave allowance for dependent care since people have their kids at home; paying the fee when people use the tele-doc option available with our healthcare; instituting social distancing at the office for those who have to be there. They are also providing cleaning wipes, hand sanitizer, masks, and other items necessary to protect our colleagues who still have to go to the office.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, there are regular reminders on our intranet that taking those supplies home to your family is theft and it can result in termination. What strikes me as odd is that people are now commenting that if the only supplies in an area to protect your family are the company-provided ones, then the company should let us take them home to our families. These people are ridiculous, right? Those supplies are so that when a service tech has to go into someone’s home to restore their utility, the tech is protected as much as possible!
People are scared and desperate right now, and I can understand someone thinking, “We haven’t been able to find these supplies to keep us safer at home and here are a bunch — why can’t we use them too?”
But yes, if those supplies are for your service techs who have to enter high-risk situations for their jobs, it’s reasonable of your company to limit their supplies to that, thus decreasing the chances that at some point they’ll run out or have to ration them. It sounds, though, like your company might need to do a better job of messaging around this — any reminder that people can be fired for taking the supplies home should be accompanied by an explanation that these supplies are crucial for your service techs’ safety and that current shortages mean taking them for other uses could end up risking your techs’ lives.
4. Starting a new job in a pandemic
I’ve been looking to leave my current position for a while, and recently landed an offer from a great organization. It’s a step up in responsibility, is work that I’m really passionate about, there’s a pay increase, and overall seems like a fantastic opportunity. I accepted and am due to start in just over two weeks.
The city we live in has been particularly hard-hit by COVID-19, and my new team has been working remotely for over a month. Both of my interviews were via Zoom, and through those I’ve “met” four of the six people I’ll be working closely with already. How should I set myself up for a good working relationship with everyone when my start date is in such an upside-down time?
I’ll be the most junior person on a pretty senior team, and while my job function is valuable, I can’t say I’d be thrilled to have to train a new employee in a time like this. It’s a nonprofit, so my manager definitely has more pressing matters to attend to right now (like making sure our funding is uninterrupted!) and I don’t want to be a burden. That said, I still want to do well and contribute to the work my team does, as they should obviously expect me to.
Right now, I’m planning to be patient with the training process if it takes a bit longer than it normally would due to the remote and hectic circumstances, ask my manager early on how she’d like me to ask questions as I learn the ropes (save them up for an end-of-the-day email? once-weekly Zoom meetings to address them?), and generally aim to make my presence on the team an asset rather than a thorn in people’s sides. Is there anything else I should be doing? I likely won’t meet any of these people for months, and don’t want them to feel like they’re forced to pick up my slack in a time of crisis. That said, ending every email with “I know things are hectic, so just get back to me when you can” seems almost … patronizing? I’m just not sure how to best straddle being a new employee with inevitable questions while also working alongside people in a time when they have much bigger worries every day than work.
You’re being very considerate of your new colleagues, but you also might be over-thinking it a bit! Everything you named is great to do — be patient, know things will probably take longer right now, and proactively talk with your manager about how best to communicate. You could also ask about any altered systems the team is using right now and anything you should particularly prioritize/de-prioritize in these weird times (like normally it might be obviously important that you prioritize X, but right now they’ve back-burnered that because of Y).
But don’t lean too hard into assumptions that people will feel inconvenienced by having to train you or that you’re a burden. They might be thrilled to have the role filled and excited to have you there. Some of your coworkers might have dramatically diminished workloads and be happy to spend time answering your questions. Or not — but you can’t know until you’re there, and so you shouldn’t come in assuming either way. Mostly, come in prepared to be patient, pay lots of attention to the cues around you, and let them show you what they need.
Also, you don’t need to end every email with an acknowledgement of how busy people are! “Get back to me when you can” usually goes without saying, as long as the email tone isn’t excessively demanding. It’s helpful to indicate whether something is time-sensitive or more “whenever you have time for this,” but otherwise you shouldn’t need to do a ton of caveating in every email.
5. When I turn down a job, can I recommend someone else?
Several of my coworkers and I are all job hunting. They’re all great people and I’d definitely work with them again. I also know for a fact that they have the capabilities a lot of the jobs that I’m applying to want from a candidate. I know a couple of them have been looking/interviewing longer than I have been, as well.
I’ve been lucky enough to get to the final interview stage for four different jobs, two of which have sent me an offer so far. When declining whichever jobs I end up not taking, is it okay to suggest some other people I’ve worked with who I know are looking? These are all rolling basis jobs, and I think these coworkers would be a good fit, but I don’t know if that is an okay thing to do at all or if it’d be considered really weird.
You can do that! It won’t necessarily go anywhere (they may have several runners-up already interviewed and waiting in the wings if you turn them down, or they may be looking for a slightly different profile than you realize, even as a top candidate, or they might just not be at a stage where they can start from scratch with new candidates), but it’s a gracious gesture, both to the company and the person you’re recommending. It’s not weird to offer to connect them with someone who might be what they’re looking for.
can we ask our roommate not to take a job, my boss says I can’t quit if she gets a federal loan, and more was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.
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