It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…
1. My coworker is a Covid denier
I work for a large company (500,000+ employees) in an office job that can be done entirely remotely, and often has full-time remote positions. Our company went exclusively to remote work when Covid-19 hit, and they expect to let us continue to work from home through the end of 2020, for which I’m supremely grateful. In an effort to encourage team bonding, my managers stood up an optional daily Zoom call explicitly without a work-related agenda, so we can chat and continue to connect as a team. This has been especially helpful to help me get to know people because I have changed teams within my company since we went to remote work, so I have not met many of my team members in person, and I enjoy the chit chat.
I have one coworker who is very outspoken about his view that the Covid-19 crisis is overblown, that the virus isn’t as deadly as everyone is saying, and the numbers don’t support the hospitals being out of beds so the hospitals must be lying. I don’t agree, and it makes me angry. My spouse works in the ER of our local hospital, and they are getting absolutely slammed because we are in a part of the country whose Covid rates are highest right now. This coworker is very outspoken about other views on these calls (that I also don’t agree with – think politics and social issues), and I mostly stay silent and ignore him when he goes on these tangents.
Now that the conversation is repeatedly turning to Covid, I don’t know how to handle it. I only reply to him calmly (I can stay on mute and yell if I’m angry), but now twice this week I was reduced to tears and had to leave the call because I just couldn’t listen to him anymore. I understand that my stress about things outside of work are hindering my ability to ignore this guy, but I just can’t sit there and listen to him tell me Covid isn’t real, when after work, I’m looking for somewhere else for my husband to live so he doesn’t get me or my toddler son sick after his 12th day in a row of treating Covid patients. My new coping mechanism is just to leave the call as soon as Covid comes up, but I’m really missing the connection to my other coworkers. I don’t know many of them well enough yet to just call and chat, and this was my main outlet to do so. Do you have any suggestions for how I can get these calls back?
Good lord, why is your manager allowing this? Aside from your coworker’s claims being so wrong, what he’s doing is also disruptive and inflammatory and not in aligned with the purpose of the calls.
Two options: One is to talk to your manager and say, “I’m finding Cecil’s proselytizing about Covid-19 really disruptive and upsetting, especially considering my husband works in the ER, where they’re absolutely slammed with Covid cases. It’s making me drop off the calls when he starts, even though I’d been finding them so helpful and enjoyable before this started. Could we ask people to keep the calls free of this kind of thing? Maybe keep politics out of them entirely?” (I’m incredibly annoyed not to have a better categorization than politics here; this shouldn’t be seen as politics any more than flat-earther’ism should be seen as a legit political stance, but here we are.) Also, if you can get any coworkers to add their voices to yours, all the better.
The second is to speak up in the moment. You might be hesitant to do this because you’re new to the team, but I bet some of your coworkers would be thankful if you spoke up during one of Cecil’s rants and said, “Could we keep politics off these calls? It’s adding a lot of stress to an already stressful time.” Or even, “My husband works in an ER that’s slammed with Covid cases, and this doesn’t line up at all with what he’s seeing. Can we stick to less divisive topics on these calls?”
2. We have to critique the work of other job candidates
I have been a teacher for 15+ years and I’m looking to move up into administration. Within my own district, the process is very simple and streamlined. However, a job I would be a good fit for appeared in a nearby district and I applied before COVID struck. I made it through the first round, which consisted of some tasks to complete and then deliver by a deadline. Yesterday, I got a call from a director interested in me from Other District and he explained that the second round would consist of me and the other candidates (who made the cut) being given a prompt, and then we would present our solution to the issue to … the other candidates! In addition, we were expected to critique the work of the other candidates while a group of “observers” made notes on us. He stated normally he would have us do this in-person but given the COVID situation, we will be doing this Zoom.
I know education (especially K-12) is a odd duck in the world of work, but have you heard from any other educators about something like this?
I can’t speak to whether it’s more common in education, but it’s a terrible practice. Asking you to do present to a group of current staff who then critique you is fine. Asking you to critique a staff member’s presentation is fine. (Assuming both of these relate to the work you’d be doing on the job.) But having you do these things with other candidates is bad for the same reasons that candidate group activities are generally bad: It’s demeaning and the dynamics can get really weird, with people jockeying to stand out, quieter people getting marked down or fearing they’ll be marked down, and the competitive element in general throwing people off — and that’s before we get into how race and gender can play out in this context. And they’re not good simulations of real on-the-job activities anyway. Groups of strangers competing with each other for a job just don’t have the same dynamics as you would with real colleagues.
Unless there’s a specific job-related reason to use other candidates in these exercises rather than existing staff (which I strongly doubt — and “we don’t want to use our staff’s time that way” doesn’t qualify), it’s bad hiring.
3. Should I ask for more vacation time or more money?
Which do you think is the better ask during salary/new job negotiations — more vacation or more money?
I’m anticipating a job offer in the next week or so and know that the salary midrange is within dollars of what I’m making now. At the job I’m leaving, I have 19 days off a year (sick and personal are all in the same bucket), and rarely carry any over.
I mentioned to my partner that I was going to ask for additional vacation time beyond the two standard weeks as part of the new job negotiations. He was taken aback (putting it mildly) and asked why I wouldn’t, instead, ask for more money. His reasoning is that additional vacation is a guaranteed, scheduled increase, but raises are not. i.e. I’ll get an extra week of vacation regardless of performance or the state of the company’s finances, but I”m not guaranteed to get a raise.
Am I looking at this all wrong? Is the better play to ask for more money and wait a year (or three) for more vacation time?
It depends on the amount of money and the amount of vacation time you’re being offered. If one is generous and the other isn’t, it makes sense to want more of the other one. It also depends on which you value more — some people care more about leisure time than they do about earning more money, especially after they’ve hit a certain income level.
I see your partner’s point that in a system where you get X weeks of vacation per year, you can rely on those increases more solidly than you might be able to rely on future raises, but that doesn’t change the fact that you still might value the time off more.
All that said, if you’re in a strong position, I’d think about negotiating for both.
4. Form letter rejections for internal applications
I’ve been with my current organization for close to a decade. Two years ago, I was a manager at Office A, which is a 10-minute drive from my home. I realized I’m not well suited to management and asked if I could be transferred to a non-supervisory position. I was reassigned to Office B, which is a 40-minute commute when there’s no traffic, closer to an hour when traffic is heavy.
There is now an opening for my same position in Office A and I would love to go back to having a short commute, so I applied. I knew it might be awkward for the current manager to have me there so I was fully prepared not to be chosen, but I thought it couldn’t hurt to try.
Today I got a form letter rejection telling me I had not been selected to be interviewed. As I said, I think it’s completely reasonable for the current manager to decide it would be too weird to manage his predecessor. But as a long-time employee of the organization who is otherwise perfectly qualified for the position, I feel really upset that I was rejected with a form email. I’m not mad that I didn’t get the job, but I am angry about the completely impersonal manner of the rejection. Am I being unreasonable? All I expected was a phone call, or even an email that was personalized, acknowledging the unusualness of the situation.
You’re not being unreasonable. Current employees should not be rejected with form letters. That’s especially true of current employees applying to work in the same office they used to work in. It’s weirdly impersonal and the kind of thing that makes people feel bitter and like their company doesn’t really care about them.
That said, it can happen for all kinds of reasons — someone meant to contact you personally and then got sick/went on vacation and someone else handled the rejections, or the person just made a mistake, or they just haven’t had occasion to think through why this rankles. Or they have a badly designed system or, yes, have crappy practices.
To the extent that you can not take it personally, I’d try not to take it personally. It’s annoying but there’s probably much less of a message in there than it feels like.
5. References who can no longer be contacted
I’ve been casually job hunting and today as I was doing the online application, I was asked to list my current/former manager for the positions on my resume. Current job? No problem. Last two jobs before that? Problem. One boss has died and the other is no longer with that organization. I was asked to list a phone number and email, so for both, I just gave the main switchboard numbers. I doubt calls will be made, but in the future, how do you recommend handling this?
Giving the main switchboard numbers is fine. If a reference checker contacts them, they’ll presumably hear an explanation at that point. But it’s also useful to write “(deceased)” after the name of your manager who died, so they have that info going in.
With the person who’s no longer with the organization where you worked with them, ideally you’d track them down (LinkedIn is often good for this). References don’t stop being usable just because they’ve moved to a new job, and it’s very normal to provide reference-checkers with people’s new contact info after they leave the company where you worked with them. If you don’t have it and can’t find it, then so be it. But definitely try, if they would give you a good reference.
my coworker is a Covid denier, we have to critique the work of other job candidates, and more was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.
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