It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…
1. Was this networking or a date request?
It’s too late to act on anything now, but I’m hoping that you can provide some clarity regarding a professional incident that I encountered about a year ago.
I am a young twenty-something female engineer and was working at a small company that was expanding and looking to hire a consultant part-time. As part of the engineering team, I was invited to sit in on the interviews of the candidates. One of my team members was close friends with one of the candidates who ended up not being hired. The consultant who didn’t receive a job offer connected with me on LinkedIn about a month or so later. I have the goal of being in the same industry as him and was flattered that he remembered me because we had limited interaction during his interview.
After my internship ended (although he had no affiliation since he wasn’t hired), he messaged me on LinkedIn later in the evening on a Friday night (we live and work in the same time zone) saying that he wanted to catch up sometime. I thought this wording was strange since we had nothing to “catch up” on, being that we were essentially strangers. Despite this, I recognize that wording is tricky, and I expressed that I hoped he was well and asked what he had in mind. I had a gut feeling that this wasn’t a super professional request. He responded that he was away on business but would be back in time for Saturday night and suggested drinks.
After consulting other peers, both male and female engineers, I responded that I was looking to keep things professional so I would have to decline. He said that Saturday was the first day he was available that week and that he had the intention of keeping things professional. I declined to respond.
Based on his reaction, I sometimes question my response, my gut feeling, and the advice I received from my peers. Was this a normal request/suggestion that he made? Do other people network in this way? How can I gracefully navigate situations like this in the future?
Nah, this guy was coming on to you. Your response was good. His claim afterward that he was just proposing a professional meeting is the classic way sleazy dudes handle this — they are very, very fond of pretending they were never hitting on you and you misunderstood. And they’ll often make the initial overture in a way that gives them just enough plausible deniability if you turn them down.
But he was asking you out. If his only interest was professional networking, he would have done it all differently. He would have been clear about his intentions by sharing his proposed reasons for meeting up (like to learn more about your work on project X because he’s working on something where it could be helpful, or so forth), he wouldn’t have proposed “catching up” with someone he barely knows, he probably wouldn’t have messaged you on a Friday night (although that part is mostly damning in the context of the rest of it), and he definitely wouldn’t have proposed Saturday night drinks. Men are not stupid about this stuff — they’re aware that Saturday night drinks have a very different connotation than Tuesday afternoon coffee or Thursday morning breakfast. He suggested drinks because he wanted it to be a date — and then because he’s shady, he tried to pretend that’s not what he meant.
You’re fine, he sucks.
2. My coworker is secretly traveling
My coworker has been traveling and trying to keep it secret because they would have to work from home for 14 days upon return, and they would prefer to be working in the office. My partner is high-risk, and the coworker knows that.
I can just sacrifice productivity and sanity and work from home, which was my supervisor’s suggestion, and is of course what I will be doing as my partner’s safety is paramount. But shouldn’t this employee be reprimanded at least for breaking the Covid office contract and potentially exposing their office mates? Shouldn’t the rest of the office be warned that the 14-day work-at-home period is not going to be enforced? It seems so wrong to put people at risk without them being aware by keeping leisure travel secret, and then returning to the office simply because you prefer not to work from home.
I’m getting the feeling that I ruffled feathers by notifying my supervisor about this, and I just want to know if I should have just kept quiet.
No, you should not have kept quiet! Of course you wanted to alert your manager to a violation of office policy that COULD KILL PEOPLE. It’s entirely reasonable to assume your company would want to know and would enforce their own damn policy.
This is very much an HR type thing, so I would stop dealing with your manager on it and go to HR instead. You should feel free to talk openly with your coworkers about it too, so they can take steps to protect themselves and their families if they want to.
3. I’ve started collecting my coworkers’ salaries in anonymous survey — am I good?
I (late 20s white woman) work as a software engineer at a large-ish U.S.-based tech company. Recently, there’s been a lot of discussion about minorities in tech and how we and our company can better support our BIPOC, female, and LGBTQ coworkers. As a result of some of this conversation, I (with the support of other like-minded coworkers doing similar things, but I’m the one who actually made the Google form) have started a survey asking people about their compensation. (Our company has repeatedly shot down requests for more transparency around salary/salary bands.) We’d like to use this information to better advocate for ourselves in terms of raises/promotions and to pressure our leadership into being more equitable and open. (Already, with about 20 people having responded, there are some, um, questionable trends emerging).
I know we’re allowed to discuss salary with our coworkers, but is it okay to be collecting it like this? Along with salary, we’re also collecting things like level, role, years of experience, and demographic information. The responses are anonymous and people can go back in and edit/remove any and all information if they want (no questions are required). Obviously this might piss off leadership and put a target on my back, but I’m willing to take that heat — my question is more about whether I’m in the clear legally here.
Legally, you’re fine. No law prevents you from organizing employees to share this kind of salary info. In fact, the law specifically protects your right to do it as long as you’re not in a management role and as long as you’re only sharing it with coworkers and not outside the company. (The federal law that protects you — the National Labor Relations Act — only protects non-supervisory employees.)
In reality, whether this could put a target on your back anyway is a different question — retaliation can be subtle (or it can be flagrant, for that matter, even if illegal). But there’s increasing support for this kind of collective work toward salary transparency, and that will probably give you some additional protection on top of the law. That said, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to include a statement at the top of your spreadsheet like, “The National Labor Relations Act protects the right of non-management employees to discuss wages and working conditions with each other, and employers are explicitly forbidden from retaliating against workers for exercising this protected right” … so if your company’s management ever happens to see it, the law is right there in their faces.
4. Who does HR serve?
I am hoping you can give me a definitive answer as to who or what Human Resources protects. I feel like the internet is awash with many different “takes” on the role of HR. I usually read one of these three descriptions of HR:
1. HR exists to protect the company
2. HR exists to protect management
3. HR exists to protect employees
But the other day I read a tweet saying “HR exists to protect the company from its employees.” I felt like this was a bit overly negative and not entirely true. So who does HR protect?
It’s less about protecting and more about serving. Protecting is part of it, but not the whole thing.
HR is there to serve the company; their loyalty and responsibilities are to the employer. Part of that work includes protecting the company from legal liability (ideally by advising managers on how to avoid breaking the law). But they do lots of other things too — from benefits administration to employee counseling.
Much of what HR does serves the interests of employees too, because it’s in employees’ interests to work in a well-managed company that isn’t breaking the law. They also do things that serve the interest of employees more directly, like working on retention or morale or advocating for employees with a bad manager — but they’re doing that work because it’s in the employer’s interests to retain good employees, promote morale, hear about and address bad managers, stop legal problems before they explode, and so forth.
But in cases where what’s best for the employer conflicts with what’s best for the employee, the best interests of the employer will usually win out — because that’s who HR works for. (But note that in companies with bad HR or toxic cultures, this can break down and HR can end up serving the interests of a single bad manager rather than the employer as a whole.)
5. Listing management experience on a resume when you only managed one person
How do you list management experience on your resume when you only manage one other person? We’re a small company so the two of us are the entire department. “Managed a team of one” sounds kind of silly, but I’m not sure how else to put it.
Well, technically you were a team of two, no? (You and the other person.)
But list it with the person’s title — i.e., “managed llama groomer.”
You could also include details about that, like “hired and managed llama groomer responsible for bathing and fur styling.” You can also include results your team achieved with you at the helm, since you get some credit for that — so, like, “oversaw work that led to Congress passing landmark new federal llama grooming regulations” or so forth.
was this networking or a date request, coworker is secretly traveling, and more was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.
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