It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…
1. My boss asked me to create a list of solutions to awful morale
I genuinely like the work that I do. It’s an important service and I feel good about my work. But the company itself and the people I work with are incredibly disorganized, with terrible communication between departments, staff with absolutely no defined duties or roles, pretty obvious favoritism, no consequences for bad behavior, etc. You name it, we got it. Obviously all of that has led to terrible morale in the department where I work, which is made up of about 12 people in our quite small company (20-some folks overall). But the department is largely made up of young people, fresh from school, who have poor understanding of appropriate work boundaries and expectations, and so either a) don’t recognize that these things are atypical for many workplaces or b) feel nervous or unable to speak up about things they’re not happy with. I’m not in any supervisory role so it’s not like I have any authority over the department or my work peers.
We’re deemed “essential” so we’ve been working through the pandemic out of the office and I recently hit the point of no return with the company. I started looking for other work and, on a whim, applied for school. I was accepted to my program, but seeing that I do really like the work itself, I decided to give my boss a heads-up and see what she thought.
The conversation went well, she took the news very graciously (I haven’t resigned but she knows I’ve been accepted to school), but at the end, she asked me to draft up a list of proposed solutions to the problems I’d identified. I understand that’s a normal thing for a manager to ask, but I’m honestly not sure how to draft up a list when, in my mind, the problems are almost foundational and very hard to identify through concrete examples. Is this a case where I should cut my losses and go, or is there any hope for change? I know I’m not the only unhappy person looking to leave and I would happily stay on if the work culture improves, but it’s not the kind of thing where they can just throw out a bowl of fruit in the kitchen and solve the problem. Is there any real chance of constructively framing “everything is terrible and we all feel like garbage”?
Cut your losses and go. Or at least, don’t stay in the hopes that the culture will improve, and don’t spend your time drawing up a list of solutions to deeply rooted management and culture problems. That kind of change needs to come from the top, and it will only happen if top-level management is deeply bought into the need for it.
Your manager asked for a list because it lets her feel she’s being responsive to your concerns, but frankly it’s BS. Coming up with solutions to problems like terrible communication, lack of clearly defined roles, lack of accountability, and favoritism is a higher-level management job, and the solutions you can offer aren’t things they couldn’t come up with on their own if they bothered to try. Believe me, they can come up with “have clear job descriptions” and “hold people accountable to goals” on their own. Asking you to do it is a way to deflect responsibility and keep you feeling like they might do something.
They’re not going to fix this stuff just because you asked. These problems are fundamental in a way that requires deep investment and hard work to fix.
Tell your boss you think the solutions need to be management ones, and stick to your plans to leave.
2. Re-emailing people to correct my own typos
This is very much a low-stakes question, and probably something that I can solve myself by just slowing down and re-reading my emails before I send them. That being said, if I send an email to someone (usually a coworker) with incorrect or missing information, or a typo, or some other mistake, is it okay to immediately reply with a correction? What if the correction has a mistake, too? I obviously need to work on proofreading my emails before I send them, but would like to know what I should do if I do this again.
Oh, I sympathize. I always want to write back and correct typos.
If you send an email with missing or incorrect info, yes, you need to write back and correct it. But if it’s just a typo … I’d let it go unless it truly will confuse the reader. I know that might be painful — those of us who want to correct our typos often find it excruciating not to — but it can get obnoxious to receive repeated corrections from someone. An occasional one is no big deal — but if that person regularly receives typo corrections from you, it’s going to be annoying, and they’re going to wonder why you don’t just proofread in the first place.
Speaking of which … am I right that the way you’re spotting these typos is by reading over your emails after you send them? If so, you need to rearrange the order you’re doing all this in: do the re-reading before you send, not after. (And if you’re finding corrections to your corrections, you are going way too fast and need to slow down. At that point, it’s much more likely to look careless.)
3. Using my personal cell phone for work calls while working from home
I work for a state agency and have been working from home since mid-March. While my position isn’t strictly “customer service,” I do routinely answer questions as part of my job because other agencies have to receive approval from us before they can undergo a certain routine process. I regularly field questions about how to fill out the form, how to list components, etc. Most queries come by email, but a handful come by phone. My work phone’s voicemail connects to my email, so I am still getting those voicemail messages at home.
My only option for calling them back is my personal cell phone, and I’m hesitant to do that. Most of my “regulars” are great, but there’s more than a handful who are pushy, disruptive to our processes, and don’t understand that their question is not necessarily a “respond in five minutes or else” priority for me. My colleagues and I are responsible for hundreds of state agencies and countless local agencies, and the Board of Registration for Cat Wranglers calling to circumvent the process can’t always be our priority, especially if there’s a crisis with the Department of Commerce. I am hesitant to give these contacts access to my personal number, since I can easily see them abusing it. “Oh, she hasn’t answered yet the email I sent an hour ago, and her desk phone is busy? Time to try this other number I have!”
I always respond, and suck it up and call when I have no other option. I’m good about responding to inquiries within a couple hours, but as I work from home, I find myself more and more turning to email to communicate things that I KNOW would be more easily accomplished over the phone, and would normally handle over the phone, just because I don’t want Pushy Patty to have my number. Is this reasonable? My coworker says that using your personal phone is just one of the tradeoffs of working from home, and I get (and reluctantly practice) that, but it doesn’t stop this persistent hesitance to offer my personal number.
Yeah, I wouldn’t want people having my personal cell number in that situation either. But you do have options! First, any chance your company would shell out for a work cell? If so, that’s the easiest way to handle this. If that’s not an option, why not get a Google Voice number and set it up to use for outgoing calls? That way, that number will be the one that shows rather than your personal cell number. And if anyone calls you back, you can set it so they’ll go to an electronic voicemail that you can check at your leisure (or where you could even have a message saying the number isn’t monitored for messages).
4. How much notice should I give that I’m moving in a year?
I have worked in the same office for about 15 years. This was my first “real” job out of college, and I have worked my way up to a fairly high level management position. My husband and I have decided to relocate to a different state to be closer to family, and expect to move in about a year. I expect it will take close to 3 months for the office to find a replacement for me. I also know that I will be leaving with a lot of institutional knowledge that others in the office do not have. How much notice should I give? I want to give everyone plenty of time for a smooth transition, but I don’t want to give notice too early in case something happens to change our plans.
You should give two weeks notice, which is the professional convention. Normally I would say that you could give more if (and only if) your boss has a track record of accommodating generous notice periods well and not pushing people out early, but right now — in a climate where so many companies have tight finances and are thinking about cuts — there’s too high a risk to you that you’ll be on a layoff list if they do need to make cuts, because they’ll figure you’re leaving anyway.
Also! The point of a notice period is not so they can find and hire your replacement before you leave. It would be very unusual for a typical notice period to be long enough for that to happen. A notice period is just to allow you to wrap up your work and answer any questions about it. That’s it.
So two weeks is fine. But as you get closer to your moving date, if you sense it would be safe to give three or four weeks, feel free to do that. But longer than that comes with too much risk to you right now, and most places won’t make great use of a longer period than that anyway (a longer period often just means they move more slowly on the transition).
5. Slow internet on video interviews
I’m job hunting and getting interviews, but video call quality is hurting me. My internet connection slows randomly during these interviews and make calls awkward. This in turn may make some people assume I’m not tech savvy or am doing something wrong.
Could you warn employers that video calls are rarely flawless and things may go smoother for interviewees without them? I’m concerned due to some recent glitchy interviews because of this.
They know! They know because they sometimes have the same glitches on their side, and they see other candidates have them too.
That said, you might get some peace of mind from saying at the start of the call, “My internet connection has been slowing down during some video calls, so preemptive apologies if that happens on this call — and I’d be happy to switch to the phone if it interferes too much.”
This is one of the reasons I don’t love video for interviews — it throws everyone’s rhythm off when there’s a slight delay throughout the conversation.
boss asked me for solutions to awful morale, using a personal cell phone for work, and more was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.
from Ask a Manager https://ift.tt/31B3dxj
0 Comments