Only Your Boss Can Cure Your Burnout
March 14, 2021 10:14 AM Subscribe
I identify with this a lot.
My workplace did a set of surveys on employee wellbeing, engagement, etc. It showed that generally everyone is positive on the company as a whole, but that work/life balance is way out of whack.
They've tried to address this by having a couple of company-wide shutdown days and setting up optional online meditation classes for people to attend. And I genuinely appreciate that they recognize that this is a problem and are taking steps to try to fix it. They are trying something and I do believe that the higher ups honestly want to make it better.
But now that people have started scheduling customer-facing meetings at 7:00 AM my time because I'm already booked solid from 8:00 AM until 6:00 PM or later ( no lunch, no bathroom breaks unless a meeting happens to end early) every day, every week... seeing that optional meditation class sit in my calendar just feels like rubbing salt in the wound. Like if I would just somehow manage my time better, maybe there'd be less work piling up for everyone.
posted by fader at 10:52 AM on March 14, 2021 [44 favorites]
My workplace did a set of surveys on employee wellbeing, engagement, etc. It showed that generally everyone is positive on the company as a whole, but that work/life balance is way out of whack.
They've tried to address this by having a couple of company-wide shutdown days and setting up optional online meditation classes for people to attend. And I genuinely appreciate that they recognize that this is a problem and are taking steps to try to fix it. They are trying something and I do believe that the higher ups honestly want to make it better.
But now that people have started scheduling customer-facing meetings at 7:00 AM my time because I'm already booked solid from 8:00 AM until 6:00 PM or later ( no lunch, no bathroom breaks unless a meeting happens to end early) every day, every week... seeing that optional meditation class sit in my calendar just feels like rubbing salt in the wound. Like if I would just somehow manage my time better, maybe there'd be less work piling up for everyone.
posted by fader at 10:52 AM on March 14, 2021 [44 favorites]
A lot of people I know make quite a bit more money than I do, but many of them also spend weekends, holidays and evenings working. I work 35 hours a week and not a minute more, so as far as I'm concerned free time is part of my compensation package.
posted by The Card Cheat at 11:13 AM on March 14, 2021 [57 favorites]
posted by The Card Cheat at 11:13 AM on March 14, 2021 [57 favorites]
Recruitment is tight in my industry, and so my midsized company is having to come to grips with the idea that working all the time cannot be a company norm if you want to entice and keep people. And that people we want to recruit want flexible work hours and to take time off.
Too many of our old guard are around right now, though, and they don't like that attitude. Some of them just need to retire and get out of the way.
posted by emjaybee at 11:46 AM on March 14, 2021 [21 favorites]
Too many of our old guard are around right now, though, and they don't like that attitude. Some of them just need to retire and get out of the way.
posted by emjaybee at 11:46 AM on March 14, 2021 [21 favorites]
Our group at work lost about 50% of our positions within a few months 3 or 4 years ago through a combination of layoffs, attrition, and a hiring freeze. Since then the "do more with less" messaging has been the corporate refrain. Meanwhile we're constantly getting more and more customers but aren't matching that with an increase in support staff (or cost-of-living raises for that matter, but that's a topic for another thread). And the customers can tell, too - the longer-term ones often mention how much harder it is these days to get decent support because we're all clearly overwhelmed by a workload that's now nearly twice what it originally was.
My manager is a decent person who's well aware of the difficulties we're facing, but as he's on the bottom management rung his options are limited by the suits above him. He asked me the other day if I had any ideas on how we could help our remaining employees to catch up on the backlog of side-work that goes along with our main task but is still a separate set of tasks (which also happens to be a big part of my own job), and I told him "hire more people". I know he's tired of hearing that, because that's out of his hands; but the hard unavoidable reality is that you can't magically make staff do more than they are already.
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:18 PM on March 14, 2021 [40 favorites]
My manager is a decent person who's well aware of the difficulties we're facing, but as he's on the bottom management rung his options are limited by the suits above him. He asked me the other day if I had any ideas on how we could help our remaining employees to catch up on the backlog of side-work that goes along with our main task but is still a separate set of tasks (which also happens to be a big part of my own job), and I told him "hire more people". I know he's tired of hearing that, because that's out of his hands; but the hard unavoidable reality is that you can't magically make staff do more than they are already.
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:18 PM on March 14, 2021 [40 favorites]
That "do more with less" messaging really sticks in my craw because of the implication that employees have been sandbagging their company for years, that we'd been living high on the corporate hog all this time and we now need to step up and do a "proper" job. In the decades that I've been an employed adult, I've seen maybe a handful of people who were actually slacking; the vast majority were working pretty damn hard. So "do more with less" is fucking insulting.
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:28 PM on March 14, 2021 [90 favorites]
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:28 PM on March 14, 2021 [90 favorites]
There are people who like to say that we live in a democracy. They never mention the N hours a week when you’re at work which is the direct opposite of a democracy.
It’s all bottom line. If I can squeeze the same amount of work with less people than the less the better. I also have the feeling that employees are viewed as equivalent cogs and are easily replaceable. Tech with its libertarian bent views labor unions as anathema.
I have to say that a regular reader of Metafilter would view employment in general as cursed. And they are probably right.
posted by njohnson23 at 1:07 PM on March 14, 2021 [5 favorites]
It’s all bottom line. If I can squeeze the same amount of work with less people than the less the better. I also have the feeling that employees are viewed as equivalent cogs and are easily replaceable. Tech with its libertarian bent views labor unions as anathema.
I have to say that a regular reader of Metafilter would view employment in general as cursed. And they are probably right.
posted by njohnson23 at 1:07 PM on March 14, 2021 [5 favorites]
That "do more with less" messaging really sticks in my craw because of the implication that employees have been sandbagging their company for years, that we'd been living high on the corporate hog all this time and we now need to step up and do a "proper" job.It is 100% projection.
posted by fullerine at 1:14 PM on March 14, 2021 [60 favorites]
The article touches on it briefly, but I think the leaning of organizations, with the concomitant reduction in a management and and flattening of hierarchies plays a bigger role than many people appreciate: this means that it's not just a matter of convincing bosses to reduce workloads because there may not even be any organizational capacity to do so even when a company wants to.
posted by mikek at 1:16 PM on March 14, 2021 [3 favorites]
posted by mikek at 1:16 PM on March 14, 2021 [3 favorites]
Before getting laid off, my department (technical support) had laid off two people and we had to “make up” for the work they had done. That meant more calls, more emails, more chats.
Then I got laid off and so did another person. and I can only imagine the same thing, especially because they have specifically said there won’t be anyone hired to cover.
Then one more person quit (she got her dream opportunity to go to grad school and leapt for it), so that means that, probably, they’re at half staff. Sure, things are different because of a lack of schools being open, but I’m pretty sure it’s ugly there right now and that the burnout is horrific.
posted by mephron at 1:20 PM on March 14, 2021 [3 favorites]
Then I got laid off and so did another person. and I can only imagine the same thing, especially because they have specifically said there won’t be anyone hired to cover.
Then one more person quit (she got her dream opportunity to go to grad school and leapt for it), so that means that, probably, they’re at half staff. Sure, things are different because of a lack of schools being open, but I’m pretty sure it’s ugly there right now and that the burnout is horrific.
posted by mephron at 1:20 PM on March 14, 2021 [3 favorites]
As long as there is a reliable stream of younger, cheaper drones coming up behind you, your employer isn’t really going to care about your burnout.
posted by Thorzdad at 1:29 PM on March 14, 2021 [19 favorites]
posted by Thorzdad at 1:29 PM on March 14, 2021 [19 favorites]
I realize the point I'm going to make applies to perhaps the most privileged 20% of knowledge workers, but IME especially in the context of the pandemic people many people are choosing to stay logged on and reply at random hours, which sets horrible examples for peers regardless of the message senior managers or even supervisors are sending.
My employer has repeatedly said: Be mindful of people's time, don't schedule meetings for outside normal working hours, don't schedule them for lunch, log off when you're done for the day. It has had zero impact. Some of the messaging is lost because of the way direct supervisors set expectations, but a lot is self-driven. People don't even want to face the minor, unvoiced potential disapproval from a peer if you say "Yeah, I turn off the laptop at 5 PM so I can take a walk and then cook a good dinner." And everyone who does that of course encourages everyone else to ignore the lifelines we are supposed to be getting.
Again, there are a lot of people who aren't given a real choice, but people who have it need to exercise it.
(I've sinned a lot in this way in the past, so I'm not judging. I was horrible at this in my 30s and worked a lot of 12+ hour days and set a bad example for other people.)
posted by mark k at 2:06 PM on March 14, 2021 [20 favorites]
My employer has repeatedly said: Be mindful of people's time, don't schedule meetings for outside normal working hours, don't schedule them for lunch, log off when you're done for the day. It has had zero impact. Some of the messaging is lost because of the way direct supervisors set expectations, but a lot is self-driven. People don't even want to face the minor, unvoiced potential disapproval from a peer if you say "Yeah, I turn off the laptop at 5 PM so I can take a walk and then cook a good dinner." And everyone who does that of course encourages everyone else to ignore the lifelines we are supposed to be getting.
Again, there are a lot of people who aren't given a real choice, but people who have it need to exercise it.
(I've sinned a lot in this way in the past, so I'm not judging. I was horrible at this in my 30s and worked a lot of 12+ hour days and set a bad example for other people.)
posted by mark k at 2:06 PM on March 14, 2021 [20 favorites]
At my former employer, it became apparent that at a certain point the company's leadership had adopted a strategy of holding a round of layoffs about every 2 years, after which the remaining employees would be expected to handle the same volume of work that had formerly been done by more people. Eventually I got caught in one of those rounds of layoffs.
At my current employer... well, I should be circumspect. But I can say that unionizing a few years ago made a huge difference. As did getting a new boss.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 2:15 PM on March 14, 2021 [9 favorites]
At my current employer... well, I should be circumspect. But I can say that unionizing a few years ago made a huge difference. As did getting a new boss.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 2:15 PM on March 14, 2021 [9 favorites]
Is being salaried a scam?
Oof, flashbacks to the one salaried job I ever had, where for various reasons (new role, clueless boss, etc.) we didn't have enough to do most of the time. And yet we were scolded for not being at our desks at 4:50 pm. Not to mention the trouble we got in if we were seen helping the co-workers who were routinely staying until 8.
posted by doift at 2:20 PM on March 14, 2021
Oof, flashbacks to the one salaried job I ever had, where for various reasons (new role, clueless boss, etc.) we didn't have enough to do most of the time. And yet we were scolded for not being at our desks at 4:50 pm. Not to mention the trouble we got in if we were seen helping the co-workers who were routinely staying until 8.
posted by doift at 2:20 PM on March 14, 2021
(due to the way the company has been intentionally designed and structured by management in order to maximise profitability)
the company has a problem of being under staffed
(you signed on to work here, this problem is now your problem)
therefore
in order to help the company hit its quarterly targets
(of enriching the company's investors and executives)
you are obliged to help the team
(by working unpaid overtime)
(or else)
posted by are-coral-made at 2:23 PM on March 14, 2021 [7 favorites]
the company has a problem of being under staffed
(you signed on to work here, this problem is now your problem)
therefore
in order to help the company hit its quarterly targets
(of enriching the company's investors and executives)
you are obliged to help the team
(by working unpaid overtime)
(or else)
posted by are-coral-made at 2:23 PM on March 14, 2021 [7 favorites]
As long as there is a reliable stream of younger, cheaper drones coming up behind you, your employer isn’t really going to care about your burnout.
We're working on that, but it hasn't done much for Japan's working culture. So who knows.
I feel like a broken record, but unions folks. We don't live in a socialist society, let alone a communist or anarcho-syndicalist one. They're not perfect, but they're better than being an individual in the labor market, and the best current option most folks have access to. I'll be the first to admit, there are lame parts to being in a union (it is harder to fire bad workers, people get away with more stuff like that, and it is frustrating for sure), but it's still miles better than just going solo into the market.
More than half my coworkers are currently remote. The remote connections straight up shut off after you've clocked your 8. You can't check your mail on weekends. You need manager's approval to work more than that (some folks pull 4/10s, stuff like that). Remote work happened fast, and the union pushed back HARD, immediately when it did. There were certain missteps on both the union and employers part, but it's been a net good, with both sides giving a little.
It doesn't have to be this way, and unionization is one of the levers we can currently pull to keep that from happening.
posted by furnace.heart at 2:24 PM on March 14, 2021 [47 favorites]
We're working on that, but it hasn't done much for Japan's working culture. So who knows.
I feel like a broken record, but unions folks. We don't live in a socialist society, let alone a communist or anarcho-syndicalist one. They're not perfect, but they're better than being an individual in the labor market, and the best current option most folks have access to. I'll be the first to admit, there are lame parts to being in a union (it is harder to fire bad workers, people get away with more stuff like that, and it is frustrating for sure), but it's still miles better than just going solo into the market.
More than half my coworkers are currently remote. The remote connections straight up shut off after you've clocked your 8. You can't check your mail on weekends. You need manager's approval to work more than that (some folks pull 4/10s, stuff like that). Remote work happened fast, and the union pushed back HARD, immediately when it did. There were certain missteps on both the union and employers part, but it's been a net good, with both sides giving a little.
It doesn't have to be this way, and unionization is one of the levers we can currently pull to keep that from happening.
posted by furnace.heart at 2:24 PM on March 14, 2021 [47 favorites]
A few years ago, there were massive layoffs at my brother's workplace (a multinational corporation). The company told the remaining people that there would be more layoffs coming in the next year, and the remaining employees would be evaluated on how well they could work with fewer people around to handle the workload; the people who "couldn't handle it" would be the next to get cut.
My brother was angry because he knew he and his remaining colleagues were being pitted against each other, Hunger Games-style, but at the same time he was terrified of losing his job since he and his wife had just had a new baby in addition to their toddler. So he started pulling absurdly long hours at work to try and get everything done. Obviously it was impossible, and he got laid off anyway after he and his family unit suffered terribly from him basically never being at home for six months. His mental health suffered, his wife's mental health suffered, and they ended up getting divorced. Now, maybe it's not fair to blame the divorce ENTIRELY on the work situation, but it sure as hell didn't help.
After my brother's experience, I have no respect for that company, but obviously they are not the only ones pulling this kind of bullshit.
I am so, so grateful to work in a unionized environment. Even so, management tries to push reasonable limits, but at least we have a mechanism for pushing back.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 2:25 PM on March 14, 2021 [24 favorites]
My brother was angry because he knew he and his remaining colleagues were being pitted against each other, Hunger Games-style, but at the same time he was terrified of losing his job since he and his wife had just had a new baby in addition to their toddler. So he started pulling absurdly long hours at work to try and get everything done. Obviously it was impossible, and he got laid off anyway after he and his family unit suffered terribly from him basically never being at home for six months. His mental health suffered, his wife's mental health suffered, and they ended up getting divorced. Now, maybe it's not fair to blame the divorce ENTIRELY on the work situation, but it sure as hell didn't help.
After my brother's experience, I have no respect for that company, but obviously they are not the only ones pulling this kind of bullshit.
I am so, so grateful to work in a unionized environment. Even so, management tries to push reasonable limits, but at least we have a mechanism for pushing back.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 2:25 PM on March 14, 2021 [24 favorites]
I'm fortunate to have a good manager, which makes me a better manager. Which means I clock out at 5 every day I work from home, partly so my people will see me doing so.
posted by emjaybee at 2:52 PM on March 14, 2021 [6 favorites]
posted by emjaybee at 2:52 PM on March 14, 2021 [6 favorites]
They've tried to address this by having a couple of company-wide shutdown days and setting up optional online meditation classes for people to attend. And I genuinely appreciate that they recognize that this is a problem and are taking steps to try to fix it. They are trying something and I do believe that the higher ups honestly want to make it better.
Not that I don't believe you when you say your employers genuinely want to improve things...but it's amazing to me the complicated hoops management will jump through to "reduce burnout" as long as none of those hoops is "hire some more people".
posted by mstokes650 at 3:13 PM on March 14, 2021 [38 favorites]
Not that I don't believe you when you say your employers genuinely want to improve things...but it's amazing to me the complicated hoops management will jump through to "reduce burnout" as long as none of those hoops is "hire some more people".
posted by mstokes650 at 3:13 PM on March 14, 2021 [38 favorites]
Burnout is influenced by "environmental" factors such as work cultures and work pressures, but it is also heavily influenced by what is going on inside the head of the individual experiencing burnout.
Jennifer Senior's 2006 article "Can’t Get No Satisfaction - where work is a religion, work burnout is its crisis of faith" explores this.
Here's an anecdote from my personal experience: I was working hard trying to deliver a project in a bureaucratic environment, where I had little control over the outcome. I found the lack of control coupled with responsibility over the outcome highly frustrating.
Maslach's six elements of burnout are: high workload, results-oriented culture, lack of autonomy/control, lack of reward, absence of prosocial culture, lack of fairness in process/policies, and lack of meaning/value for workers in work. If you'd asked me at the time to characterise the situation in terms of these six elements, I might have said yes to high workload, result-oriented culture, a massive yes to lack of control, lack of reward, and lack of meaning/value.
However, a number of these elements were largely self-inflicted: I had internalised that I would be responsible for the successful delivery of the project -- not merely that it was the task I was assigned to do by management. It's not like I would have gotten fired if I didn't work overtime. This results-oriented way of thinking was driving me to work unpaid overtime. The work environment was bureaucratic and I had little control over the outcome. This situation was highly frustrating. Another key element was lack of reward: while I was paid very well by the company for my time, there was no explicit bonus or reward tied to successful project delivery, and I perceived the project itself as having no value to the company or society generally. Burnout really started kicking in once my pattern of thinking flipped from "let's do what needs to be done to get this project over the line" to "I am pouring heaps of effort beating my head against a wall trying to produce an outcome that will not be rewarding for me or for anyone else, and this is impacting my mental health outside of work".
A different way of thinking about the situation could have been to mentally re-frame things as something like "yes, delivery of the task has been assigned to me, but I cannot guarantee success as most of the outcome is outside of my control" and "the bureaucracy will take as long as it will take, instead of pushing to try to expedite, instead I could do something more productive with my time while waiting for the wheels to turn".
I was able to reset my brain out of negative ways of thinking and repair the burnout by taking some time off work and then switching to a role with less responsibility. But this only helps in combination with a change in how I was thinking about the situation. I was responsible for changing my mind, not my boss. The new way of thinking - avoiding responsibility - is not something to be proud of or aspire to, but does seem to be a coping strategy that preserves mental health while operating in a bureaucratic work environment. I was lucky in that my workplace is relatively non-toxic, I could talk to managers who were receptive and willing to offer flexibility and help me improve my situation. So in that regard, the boss helped. But the boss didn't help me change how I was thinking about things, I did that unassisted. If the boss didn't help, there's a fair chance I would have quit, so there were still ways I could have improved my situation (at cost) without management being cooperative.
posted by are-coral-made at 3:14 PM on March 14, 2021 [7 favorites]
Jennifer Senior's 2006 article "Can’t Get No Satisfaction - where work is a religion, work burnout is its crisis of faith" explores this.
Here's an anecdote from my personal experience: I was working hard trying to deliver a project in a bureaucratic environment, where I had little control over the outcome. I found the lack of control coupled with responsibility over the outcome highly frustrating.
Maslach's six elements of burnout are: high workload, results-oriented culture, lack of autonomy/control, lack of reward, absence of prosocial culture, lack of fairness in process/policies, and lack of meaning/value for workers in work. If you'd asked me at the time to characterise the situation in terms of these six elements, I might have said yes to high workload, result-oriented culture, a massive yes to lack of control, lack of reward, and lack of meaning/value.
However, a number of these elements were largely self-inflicted: I had internalised that I would be responsible for the successful delivery of the project -- not merely that it was the task I was assigned to do by management. It's not like I would have gotten fired if I didn't work overtime. This results-oriented way of thinking was driving me to work unpaid overtime. The work environment was bureaucratic and I had little control over the outcome. This situation was highly frustrating. Another key element was lack of reward: while I was paid very well by the company for my time, there was no explicit bonus or reward tied to successful project delivery, and I perceived the project itself as having no value to the company or society generally. Burnout really started kicking in once my pattern of thinking flipped from "let's do what needs to be done to get this project over the line" to "I am pouring heaps of effort beating my head against a wall trying to produce an outcome that will not be rewarding for me or for anyone else, and this is impacting my mental health outside of work".
A different way of thinking about the situation could have been to mentally re-frame things as something like "yes, delivery of the task has been assigned to me, but I cannot guarantee success as most of the outcome is outside of my control" and "the bureaucracy will take as long as it will take, instead of pushing to try to expedite, instead I could do something more productive with my time while waiting for the wheels to turn".
I was able to reset my brain out of negative ways of thinking and repair the burnout by taking some time off work and then switching to a role with less responsibility. But this only helps in combination with a change in how I was thinking about the situation. I was responsible for changing my mind, not my boss. The new way of thinking - avoiding responsibility - is not something to be proud of or aspire to, but does seem to be a coping strategy that preserves mental health while operating in a bureaucratic work environment. I was lucky in that my workplace is relatively non-toxic, I could talk to managers who were receptive and willing to offer flexibility and help me improve my situation. So in that regard, the boss helped. But the boss didn't help me change how I was thinking about things, I did that unassisted. If the boss didn't help, there's a fair chance I would have quit, so there were still ways I could have improved my situation (at cost) without management being cooperative.
posted by are-coral-made at 3:14 PM on March 14, 2021 [7 favorites]
My entire team at work is severely burned out. Our stress leaves have sky rocketed.
I wish my company would just be honest with us, because the lies make people feel worse. Telling us they care about our mental health and know we're overloaded with work, and then the next minute telling us they've slashed bonuses, have no intention of hiring more people, and that this is the "new normal." We're all working massive amounts of overtime, and also fielding constant bullshit "wellness" meetings and happy hours that do nothing except make upper management feel better about themselves, while the rest of us panic because we really needed that time to get something done.
They really think we don't all know that they're using the pandemic as an excuse to siphon even more money upwards. The high-performers have already started to jump ship, and as soon as the economy recovers somewhat more of us will follow.
posted by Stoof at 3:36 PM on March 14, 2021 [11 favorites]
I wish my company would just be honest with us, because the lies make people feel worse. Telling us they care about our mental health and know we're overloaded with work, and then the next minute telling us they've slashed bonuses, have no intention of hiring more people, and that this is the "new normal." We're all working massive amounts of overtime, and also fielding constant bullshit "wellness" meetings and happy hours that do nothing except make upper management feel better about themselves, while the rest of us panic because we really needed that time to get something done.
They really think we don't all know that they're using the pandemic as an excuse to siphon even more money upwards. The high-performers have already started to jump ship, and as soon as the economy recovers somewhat more of us will follow.
posted by Stoof at 3:36 PM on March 14, 2021 [11 favorites]
> They are trying something and I do believe that the higher ups honestly want to make it better.
> people have started scheduling customer-facing meetings at 7:00 AM my time because I'm already booked solid from 8:00 AM until 6:00 PM or later ( no lunch, no bathroom breaks unless a meeting happens to end early) every day, every week
Unless you get paid overtime, the company is unlikely to be feeling the pain of overloading you with meetings. If you don't push back and set your boundaries and start making this overloading someone else's problem, not your problem that you silently compensate for, the overloading will continue. It would be easier to push back in concert with other employees, (e.g. through a union - or failing that - figuring out if it is a shared problem and lobbying for it together), but in many situations you can also push back as an individual to improve your situation.
E.g. there's the tactic of scheduling fake recurring meetings with yourself so your calendar more accurately reflects when you are willing to be available for meetings. Can you block in parts of your calendar with fake recurring meetings that communicate you will be unavailable before 8AM, after 5PM and also unavailable for a 1 hour lunch break between 12:00 and 13:00 each day? Fake recurring meetings can also be a great way to reserve time for non-meeting forms of work (if your role requires any of that).
Do your meetings typically get assigned by one coordinator / one team? If so, have a chat with them to inform them of your availability constraints. (Going forward, I am only available to do meetings between the hours of X and Y, and no more than Z meetings per week).
If your meetings are assigned by 10 different people who don't coordinate with each other or have any visibility of how overloaded you are, that's another problem that your manager probably needs to fix. E.g. setting up some kind of work queuing/prioritisation system to throttle workload. But you may need to set boundaries and push back so that your manager starts to feel the impact of what is problematic with the status quo -- e.g. if you clock on at 8am every day and clock off at 5pm, take a regular lunch break, and any meetings that people schedule outside of those times get declined and dropped on the floor. Route requests for additional meetings to your manager "apologies, I do not have capacity to pick up this work, please discuss with $bossname to prioritise this work against competing work from other teams".
posted by are-coral-made at 3:40 PM on March 14, 2021 [8 favorites]
> people have started scheduling customer-facing meetings at 7:00 AM my time because I'm already booked solid from 8:00 AM until 6:00 PM or later ( no lunch, no bathroom breaks unless a meeting happens to end early) every day, every week
Unless you get paid overtime, the company is unlikely to be feeling the pain of overloading you with meetings. If you don't push back and set your boundaries and start making this overloading someone else's problem, not your problem that you silently compensate for, the overloading will continue. It would be easier to push back in concert with other employees, (e.g. through a union - or failing that - figuring out if it is a shared problem and lobbying for it together), but in many situations you can also push back as an individual to improve your situation.
E.g. there's the tactic of scheduling fake recurring meetings with yourself so your calendar more accurately reflects when you are willing to be available for meetings. Can you block in parts of your calendar with fake recurring meetings that communicate you will be unavailable before 8AM, after 5PM and also unavailable for a 1 hour lunch break between 12:00 and 13:00 each day? Fake recurring meetings can also be a great way to reserve time for non-meeting forms of work (if your role requires any of that).
Do your meetings typically get assigned by one coordinator / one team? If so, have a chat with them to inform them of your availability constraints. (Going forward, I am only available to do meetings between the hours of X and Y, and no more than Z meetings per week).
If your meetings are assigned by 10 different people who don't coordinate with each other or have any visibility of how overloaded you are, that's another problem that your manager probably needs to fix. E.g. setting up some kind of work queuing/prioritisation system to throttle workload. But you may need to set boundaries and push back so that your manager starts to feel the impact of what is problematic with the status quo -- e.g. if you clock on at 8am every day and clock off at 5pm, take a regular lunch break, and any meetings that people schedule outside of those times get declined and dropped on the floor. Route requests for additional meetings to your manager "apologies, I do not have capacity to pick up this work, please discuss with $bossname to prioritise this work against competing work from other teams".
posted by are-coral-made at 3:40 PM on March 14, 2021 [8 favorites]
Nth-ing unions, unions, unions. Capital has put in decades of effort into ensuring that workers think of workload as a personal problem rather than an organizational problem. That's not even counting the legal barriers they have erected to prevent workers from addressing problems collectively. It's amazing that we don't have widespread child labor in the U.S. given how dramatically worker rights have been stripped away since Reagan.
Luckily, there is light at the end of the tunnel: the PRO Act. It passed the House and now we need to get it passed in the Senate to finally get back to where we were 80 years ago with workers' rights.
posted by tofu_crouton at 5:47 PM on March 14, 2021 [9 favorites]
Luckily, there is light at the end of the tunnel: the PRO Act. It passed the House and now we need to get it passed in the Senate to finally get back to where we were 80 years ago with workers' rights.
posted by tofu_crouton at 5:47 PM on March 14, 2021 [9 favorites]
Hopefully Joe Manchin and the Parliamentarian will be ok with it.
posted by Reyturner at 5:51 PM on March 14, 2021 [5 favorites]
posted by Reyturner at 5:51 PM on March 14, 2021 [5 favorites]
I've kept my job and our company hasn't really missed a beat during the plague year, but we recently found out that we're not ever going back the company we left. We're dropping the leases on 180k sq ft of office space this year and, starting in July, it's going to be largely remote with varying levels of hoteling for maybe a third of the employees. I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth by complaining too loudly, but for those of us who really miss the community of the office this is not good news. Target HQ just announced it's dropping nearly a million sq ft of space in downtown Mpls this year (though no job losses) so we're hardly alone, but it sort of paints a picture that for many, this is the new American office life. Yuck.
posted by Cris E at 6:19 PM on March 14, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by Cris E at 6:19 PM on March 14, 2021 [1 favorite]
"My manager is a decent person who's well aware of the difficulties we're facing, but as he's on the bottom management rung his options are limited by the suits above him. He asked me the other day if I had any ideas on how we could help our remaining employees to catch up on the backlog of side-work that goes along with our main task but is still a separate set of tasks (which also happens to be a big part of my own job), and I told him "hire more people". I know he's tired of hearing that, because that's out of his hands; but the hard unavoidable reality is that you can't magically make staff do more than they are already.
Yeah, this. My (middle) managers have always been sympathetic, and after something like four-ish years we are finally "fully staffed," but that wasn't anything that could be helped except by higher and higher authorities, eventually.
but it's amazing to me the complicated hoops management will jump through to "reduce burnout" as long as none of those hoops is "hire some more people".
And we're always told that almost all of the money goes to salaries, so not rehiring people is the only way to save money. This is why we have a "wellness committee" and a lot of meditation classes and blah blah self-care, because others aren't going to care for you.
I've been burned out for most of nine years now, but there isn't a whole lot that can be done about my issues. At least the workload isn't as bad now that I have a full team again.
posted by jenfullmoon at 6:37 PM on March 14, 2021 [5 favorites]
Yeah, this. My (middle) managers have always been sympathetic, and after something like four-ish years we are finally "fully staffed," but that wasn't anything that could be helped except by higher and higher authorities, eventually.
but it's amazing to me the complicated hoops management will jump through to "reduce burnout" as long as none of those hoops is "hire some more people".
And we're always told that almost all of the money goes to salaries, so not rehiring people is the only way to save money. This is why we have a "wellness committee" and a lot of meditation classes and blah blah self-care, because others aren't going to care for you.
I've been burned out for most of nine years now, but there isn't a whole lot that can be done about my issues. At least the workload isn't as bad now that I have a full team again.
posted by jenfullmoon at 6:37 PM on March 14, 2021 [5 favorites]
I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth by complaining too loudly, but for those of us who really miss the community of the office this is not good news.
Not only the community but the costs.
I would not be ok with my employer essentially outsourcing their office infrastructure onto me.
If you want me to use a spare bedroom for an office on a permanent basis, I'm going to need to be compensated for that.
If you want to use my internet for all day video conferences, we're going to need to talk about what happens when I get an overage charge.
Having people home all day, especially if you live in an environment that needs heating or cooling, is going to be a noticeable expense.
I don't mind doing it, but I'm not doing it for free.
posted by madajb at 6:40 PM on March 14, 2021 [20 favorites]
Not only the community but the costs.
I would not be ok with my employer essentially outsourcing their office infrastructure onto me.
If you want me to use a spare bedroom for an office on a permanent basis, I'm going to need to be compensated for that.
If you want to use my internet for all day video conferences, we're going to need to talk about what happens when I get an overage charge.
Having people home all day, especially if you live in an environment that needs heating or cooling, is going to be a noticeable expense.
I don't mind doing it, but I'm not doing it for free.
posted by madajb at 6:40 PM on March 14, 2021 [20 favorites]
I don't mind doing it, but I'm not doing it for free.
My company recently updated their office policies and it explicitly said 'we're not paying for Internet/power/etc when you work remote'
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 6:59 PM on March 14, 2021 [3 favorites]
My company recently updated their office policies and it explicitly said 'we're not paying for Internet/power/etc when you work remote'
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 6:59 PM on March 14, 2021 [3 favorites]
but it's amazing to me the complicated hoops management will jump through to "reduce burnout" as long as none of those hoops is "hire some more people".
Hm. I guess I have it pretty good where I work. I'm expected to respond to rare emergencies after hours, and it does indeed stay rare. I sometimes stay an hour late of my own accord, just to finish something when it's quiet or avoid task interruption. But I don't tell anyone, I turn off my phone, and pretend to be "not here". And when I decide I'm done for the day a bit early sometimes, or I'm a few minutes late for whatever reason, nobody says anything. It all evens out.
But I've got to say, the "hire some more people" refrain has gotten like nails on a chalkboard. In that, when it's the right answer, it is, but ALSO people have learned to say it always, for every situation in which they don't want to do the thing. I literally have people complaining in the anonymous feedback boxes that they're bored and under-utilized so why can't they telework just as easily, while supervisors are crying for more people, always more people.
Granted, this is a management failure, not a worker one. The workers have done all they can do to distribute the workload, un-fuck stupid time-wasting processes, etc. They need help to do any more. But supervisors who cry for more people, but then I solve their problem another way in 5 minutes of asking questions they didn't seem to even consider, are wearing that particular excuse away to joke status.
Currently I am, in fact, hiring more people. It still will not make those supervisors happy.
I'm sure we're not talking about the same thing. I totally believe this is a problem in other places. Just saying, maybe combating this manager mind-set is the most effective attack vector.
posted by ctmf at 7:06 PM on March 14, 2021 [4 favorites]
Hm. I guess I have it pretty good where I work. I'm expected to respond to rare emergencies after hours, and it does indeed stay rare. I sometimes stay an hour late of my own accord, just to finish something when it's quiet or avoid task interruption. But I don't tell anyone, I turn off my phone, and pretend to be "not here". And when I decide I'm done for the day a bit early sometimes, or I'm a few minutes late for whatever reason, nobody says anything. It all evens out.
But I've got to say, the "hire some more people" refrain has gotten like nails on a chalkboard. In that, when it's the right answer, it is, but ALSO people have learned to say it always, for every situation in which they don't want to do the thing. I literally have people complaining in the anonymous feedback boxes that they're bored and under-utilized so why can't they telework just as easily, while supervisors are crying for more people, always more people.
Granted, this is a management failure, not a worker one. The workers have done all they can do to distribute the workload, un-fuck stupid time-wasting processes, etc. They need help to do any more. But supervisors who cry for more people, but then I solve their problem another way in 5 minutes of asking questions they didn't seem to even consider, are wearing that particular excuse away to joke status.
Currently I am, in fact, hiring more people. It still will not make those supervisors happy.
I'm sure we're not talking about the same thing. I totally believe this is a problem in other places. Just saying, maybe combating this manager mind-set is the most effective attack vector.
posted by ctmf at 7:06 PM on March 14, 2021 [4 favorites]
My company recently updated their office policies and it explicitly said 'we're not paying for Internet/power/etc when you work remote'
That's my employer's policy too, but to be fair, they still hate the idea of remote work and would be 10x happier if everyone was on site every minute of the work day. Telework isn't mandatory, and if it was, I'd expect to be paid for it.
posted by ctmf at 7:10 PM on March 14, 2021 [1 favorite]
That's my employer's policy too, but to be fair, they still hate the idea of remote work and would be 10x happier if everyone was on site every minute of the work day. Telework isn't mandatory, and if it was, I'd expect to be paid for it.
posted by ctmf at 7:10 PM on March 14, 2021 [1 favorite]
I don't mind doing it, but I'm not doing it for free.
I agree with you, but sadly, in many organizations, the implied threat is that you actually will do it if you want to keep your job.
I'm very lucky to be in one of those highly privileged knowledge worker jobs that can be done one hundred percent from home, and we are even subsidizing upgrades to our staff's home internet. However, there is an undercurrent of tension as we wait for government spending to buffer the economy to end and and the full impact of the pandemic to be known.
Many people are afraid to rock the boat right now, and you can be sure there are workplaces that will take full advantage of that.
posted by rpfields at 8:29 PM on March 14, 2021 [5 favorites]
I agree with you, but sadly, in many organizations, the implied threat is that you actually will do it if you want to keep your job.
I'm very lucky to be in one of those highly privileged knowledge worker jobs that can be done one hundred percent from home, and we are even subsidizing upgrades to our staff's home internet. However, there is an undercurrent of tension as we wait for government spending to buffer the economy to end and and the full impact of the pandemic to be known.
Many people are afraid to rock the boat right now, and you can be sure there are workplaces that will take full advantage of that.
posted by rpfields at 8:29 PM on March 14, 2021 [5 favorites]
My company recently updated their office policies and it explicitly said 'we're not paying for Internet/power/etc when you work remote'
That's some straight BS if they're making you do it.
posted by madajb at 9:10 PM on March 14, 2021 [2 favorites]
That's some straight BS if they're making you do it.
posted by madajb at 9:10 PM on March 14, 2021 [2 favorites]
I'm in social work, which historically is an understaffed, underpaid venture in the best of times and also full of people who like helping people. It seems filled with people with poorer work life boundaries than one would expect, so lots of people put in free labor to help out in various ways.
I've pretty much only worked in unionized workplaces, and it is kind of interesting how that plays out in social work. While unions have been great for establishing work days and overtime (which isn't authorized in most cases) one of the things unions historically haven't dictated is case load maxiums and staffing minimiums for the populations that we serve. Ultimately the answer is simply stuff just doesn't get done. Sometimes these things cost the agency money.
We can run cost calculations all day long about the value of a 3 dollar bus card (3 dollars! A minute of social work time) OR spending 2 hours sitting with a person trying to call family members, friends , insurance companies, shelters, what have you based on a persons needs, situation etc, and all of that costs. But the 3 dollar bus card is expensive. So are my wages and effort to try to do without that resource that could be better spent elsewhere. And the cascading human costs (no bus card, didn't make appointment, no refill on medicine, leads to ER visit is an example) there are hundreds of thousands of these examples which could be their own FPP.
We are about half what the full time staffing used to be for reasons and management and there is all this talk about how we need to be able to see more people and justify what we are doing. But unfortunately the work really can't be done any faster. And any time spent justifying what we are doing is work not going towards the people who we should be helping. Some of this is job specific, we've had a real lack of management and it shows, we are using paper logs to track service delivery in 2021, there isn't quite an understanding of what's even happening, work assignments and distribution can get skewed when cases are designated by 1 family unit (that could be 2 people OR 10+ people), or by other metric that isn't actually the service that's being provided. In my case it's generally complexity of health conditions.
Moving from social work, I feel like there is this huge part of companies that are itemizing the things that are really human interaction tasks (meetings, phone calls, customer service work) into numbers and charts, and then upset when those numbers aren't consistent and workers can't fit more. You can't run two meetings on two different topics with the same humans at the same time. You can't have two phone calls with two different people at the same time . Human attention is limited. It's not possible. And these things add up when staffing is crunched. When you have 10 people all having 2 one hour meetings a day, with 30 minute prep in total. that's 25 hours a week for a staff meetings which doesnt look awful. But when you consolidate that to 5 people having 4 one hour meetings a day with an hour of prep for them, suddenly there's no flexibility for other tasks, or running late , or last minute schedule changes or an unexpected deadline on another project and then there's burnout. That of course doesn't include whatever other tasks these hypothetical people are doing. And people in this thread are discussing how they are having meetings literally all day long with no breaks!
posted by AlexiaSky at 10:08 PM on March 14, 2021 [12 favorites]
I've pretty much only worked in unionized workplaces, and it is kind of interesting how that plays out in social work. While unions have been great for establishing work days and overtime (which isn't authorized in most cases) one of the things unions historically haven't dictated is case load maxiums and staffing minimiums for the populations that we serve. Ultimately the answer is simply stuff just doesn't get done. Sometimes these things cost the agency money.
We can run cost calculations all day long about the value of a 3 dollar bus card (3 dollars! A minute of social work time) OR spending 2 hours sitting with a person trying to call family members, friends , insurance companies, shelters, what have you based on a persons needs, situation etc, and all of that costs. But the 3 dollar bus card is expensive. So are my wages and effort to try to do without that resource that could be better spent elsewhere. And the cascading human costs (no bus card, didn't make appointment, no refill on medicine, leads to ER visit is an example) there are hundreds of thousands of these examples which could be their own FPP.
We are about half what the full time staffing used to be for reasons and management and there is all this talk about how we need to be able to see more people and justify what we are doing. But unfortunately the work really can't be done any faster. And any time spent justifying what we are doing is work not going towards the people who we should be helping. Some of this is job specific, we've had a real lack of management and it shows, we are using paper logs to track service delivery in 2021, there isn't quite an understanding of what's even happening, work assignments and distribution can get skewed when cases are designated by 1 family unit (that could be 2 people OR 10+ people), or by other metric that isn't actually the service that's being provided. In my case it's generally complexity of health conditions.
Moving from social work, I feel like there is this huge part of companies that are itemizing the things that are really human interaction tasks (meetings, phone calls, customer service work) into numbers and charts, and then upset when those numbers aren't consistent and workers can't fit more. You can't run two meetings on two different topics with the same humans at the same time. You can't have two phone calls with two different people at the same time . Human attention is limited. It's not possible. And these things add up when staffing is crunched. When you have 10 people all having 2 one hour meetings a day, with 30 minute prep in total. that's 25 hours a week for a staff meetings which doesnt look awful. But when you consolidate that to 5 people having 4 one hour meetings a day with an hour of prep for them, suddenly there's no flexibility for other tasks, or running late , or last minute schedule changes or an unexpected deadline on another project and then there's burnout. That of course doesn't include whatever other tasks these hypothetical people are doing. And people in this thread are discussing how they are having meetings literally all day long with no breaks!
posted by AlexiaSky at 10:08 PM on March 14, 2021 [12 favorites]
I think working remotely is not great--I don't personally like doing it, and I think it messes with the skill development of younger workers. It was popular in before then pandemic. And then early on after lockdown there were a million voices saying how this would finally prove to employers that working remotely was the best thing ever and they couldn't stop "us" anymore. I felt like the rare person who hated it.
Honest question: Has the attitude changed and have people soured on it, or is it just this is a thread where we haters are venting?
posted by mark k at 11:04 PM on March 14, 2021 [1 favorite]
Honest question: Has the attitude changed and have people soured on it, or is it just this is a thread where we haters are venting?
posted by mark k at 11:04 PM on March 14, 2021 [1 favorite]
Has the attitude changed and have people soured on it, or is it just this is a thread where we haters are venting?I'm still broadly a fan, and in the "I am remote now" mindset but I don't think I would be 100% remote. My company still have an office here, and I fully expect I'll be in it at least some of the time. I am glad it challenged the assumption of being in the office every day however, and could probably continue this way essentially indefinitely if required.
I hadn't considered the skill development angle though, but it's definitely something to keep an eye on. I'm a software developer and I don't think the power of being able to just lean over and ask something should be overstated.
posted by lewiseason at 1:54 AM on March 15, 2021 [2 favorites]
Periodic sabbaticals would go a long ways towards curing burnout. Something on the order of 4-6 weeks.
Of course this is a yearly holiday for the French, but I digress.
posted by drstrangelove at 3:19 AM on March 15, 2021 [10 favorites]
Of course this is a yearly holiday for the French, but I digress.
posted by drstrangelove at 3:19 AM on March 15, 2021 [10 favorites]
A colleague of mine has taken several sabbaticals in his career, usually around 3-6 months each. And always between jobs. He'd quit, travel for a bit then find a job in another place, usually when the money he saved up was gone.
And that was part of the deal--- living like a pauper, usually unhappily, for years to save up enough for his sabbaticals which leads me to wonder if that wasn't contributing to the burnout from which he was trying to escape. One thing that should be mentioned is that he's a Canadian so the fear of a major health catastrophe bankrupting him during these sabbaticals was never a major concern as it would be in the US.
posted by drstrangelove at 3:22 AM on March 15, 2021 [4 favorites]
And that was part of the deal--- living like a pauper, usually unhappily, for years to save up enough for his sabbaticals which leads me to wonder if that wasn't contributing to the burnout from which he was trying to escape. One thing that should be mentioned is that he's a Canadian so the fear of a major health catastrophe bankrupting him during these sabbaticals was never a major concern as it would be in the US.
posted by drstrangelove at 3:22 AM on March 15, 2021 [4 favorites]
Not only the community but the costs.
I would not be ok with my employer essentially outsourcing their office infrastructure onto me.
If you want me to use a spare bedroom for an office on a permanent basis, I'm going to need to be compensated for that.
If you want to use my internet for all day video conferences, we're going to need to talk about what happens when I get an overage charge.
Having people home all day, especially if you live in an environment that needs heating or cooling, is going to be a noticeable expense.
I don't mind doing it, but I'm not doing it for free.
Won't you though? I mean that seriously. Ultimately we mostly put up with what is established as "normal" by a mix of cultural, legal, and contractual standards. So we all accept that of course we pay for our own commutes and we don't get paid during them, they're not part of the "working day". In the UK1, workers who travel to non-fixed work sites from their homes are sometimes paid for part of their commuting time. The rules for this appear quite complicated but isn't this ultimately arbitrary? Couldn't we say collectively that if we are required by an employer to be somewhere, we should always be paid for that travel? Of course we could, but we don't because... that's just not how we've done it historically.
If we were all used to working from home, and coming in to an office was the new development, we would probably expect that this would be paid for, right? Whether it actually was would depend on our individual and collective labour market and political power. The same thing will be true for home working probably. Countries with strong labour movements and employment laws will compensate employees for homeworking requirements and in countries like the US without those things, whether you get these paid for will depend on your individual labour market power. That's already happening now, civil servants and the highly paid throughout the UK and The Netherlands (those just happen to be the countries I know best) are getting allowances for home working and lower-paid & less unionised home workers are not.
I don't doubt that you're the best judge of your own labour market power and the degree of political and other power that labour generally has where you live and if you say that you won't do that without getting compensated for it, I'm sure you're right, but will people in the aggregate have that power? I imagine that most American office workers will get a mix of: nothing, told to be grateful that they're "allowed" to work from home, and a de minimis amount for buying a monitor or upgrading internet. Are millions of Americans going to get extra money to compensate them for needing dedicated work space in their homes? (by far the biggest expense). No.
Has the attitude changed and have people soured on it, or is it just this is a thread where we haters are venting?
I think we can probably distinguish between hybrid models and completely remote. Where I work we already had a hybrid model before lockdown, although junior people and their mid-level supervisors were expected to spend more time physically present precisely because of mentoring, networking, and training they still mostly did 1-2 days a week from home. There is cumulatively a big difference between that and where we are now which is that I've not been in a physical office since March 2020.
I think most workplaces will be some kind of hybrid in the future.
(1) It was an ECJ ruling but not sure whether those are automatically applied across all countries for which that is or has been the highest court.
posted by atrazine at 5:43 AM on March 15, 2021 [3 favorites]
I would not be ok with my employer essentially outsourcing their office infrastructure onto me.
If you want me to use a spare bedroom for an office on a permanent basis, I'm going to need to be compensated for that.
If you want to use my internet for all day video conferences, we're going to need to talk about what happens when I get an overage charge.
Having people home all day, especially if you live in an environment that needs heating or cooling, is going to be a noticeable expense.
I don't mind doing it, but I'm not doing it for free.
Won't you though? I mean that seriously. Ultimately we mostly put up with what is established as "normal" by a mix of cultural, legal, and contractual standards. So we all accept that of course we pay for our own commutes and we don't get paid during them, they're not part of the "working day". In the UK1, workers who travel to non-fixed work sites from their homes are sometimes paid for part of their commuting time. The rules for this appear quite complicated but isn't this ultimately arbitrary? Couldn't we say collectively that if we are required by an employer to be somewhere, we should always be paid for that travel? Of course we could, but we don't because... that's just not how we've done it historically.
If we were all used to working from home, and coming in to an office was the new development, we would probably expect that this would be paid for, right? Whether it actually was would depend on our individual and collective labour market and political power. The same thing will be true for home working probably. Countries with strong labour movements and employment laws will compensate employees for homeworking requirements and in countries like the US without those things, whether you get these paid for will depend on your individual labour market power. That's already happening now, civil servants and the highly paid throughout the UK and The Netherlands (those just happen to be the countries I know best) are getting allowances for home working and lower-paid & less unionised home workers are not.
I don't doubt that you're the best judge of your own labour market power and the degree of political and other power that labour generally has where you live and if you say that you won't do that without getting compensated for it, I'm sure you're right, but will people in the aggregate have that power? I imagine that most American office workers will get a mix of: nothing, told to be grateful that they're "allowed" to work from home, and a de minimis amount for buying a monitor or upgrading internet. Are millions of Americans going to get extra money to compensate them for needing dedicated work space in their homes? (by far the biggest expense). No.
Has the attitude changed and have people soured on it, or is it just this is a thread where we haters are venting?
I think we can probably distinguish between hybrid models and completely remote. Where I work we already had a hybrid model before lockdown, although junior people and their mid-level supervisors were expected to spend more time physically present precisely because of mentoring, networking, and training they still mostly did 1-2 days a week from home. There is cumulatively a big difference between that and where we are now which is that I've not been in a physical office since March 2020.
I think most workplaces will be some kind of hybrid in the future.
(1) It was an ECJ ruling but not sure whether those are automatically applied across all countries for which that is or has been the highest court.
posted by atrazine at 5:43 AM on March 15, 2021 [3 favorites]
Ultimately we mostly put up with what is established as "normal" by a mix of cultural, legal, and contractual standards.
Yes, and as an example in the opposite direction I don't think that most people would expect their employer to cover a clothing expense in cases where there's an office dress code.
One of the interesting things I've noticed recently in my work email is that Outlook sometimes tells me we're currently outside a particular recipient's normal work hours and asks whether I want to hold the email until that's no longer the case.
posted by Slothrup at 6:30 AM on March 15, 2021 [3 favorites]
Yes, and as an example in the opposite direction I don't think that most people would expect their employer to cover a clothing expense in cases where there's an office dress code.
One of the interesting things I've noticed recently in my work email is that Outlook sometimes tells me we're currently outside a particular recipient's normal work hours and asks whether I want to hold the email until that's no longer the case.
posted by Slothrup at 6:30 AM on March 15, 2021 [3 favorites]
During quarantine, my employer has tried to improve the work-life balance situation by blocking lunch hours and suggesting no scheduling of meetings from 2-5 on Fridays. While I appreciate that gesture as recognition that working from home all the time erodes the barrier between work and home, it just results in duplicate "no meetings!" events on my calendar (seriously, I am triple-booked from 2-5 every Friday.) Plus, I absolutely resent the idea that eating lunch away from my office desk is something my employer is "enabling" me to do. I should feel empowered to go downstairs for a while.
I will eat lunch where and when I want, regardless of whether or not I have someone's blessing to do it, and I will still get all my work done, how about that?
posted by emelenjr at 7:18 AM on March 15, 2021 [3 favorites]
I will eat lunch where and when I want, regardless of whether or not I have someone's blessing to do it, and I will still get all my work done, how about that?
posted by emelenjr at 7:18 AM on March 15, 2021 [3 favorites]
Is being salaried a scam?
In a former job, my responsibilities grew gradually from my entry-level hourly position to the point where my boss made me a salaried employee with benefits. I saw a nominal raise but in fact, as I no longer received overtime pay, my take-home pay actually dropped.
I brought this up with my boss after a few weeks and he agreed that it was not a fair deal, so when I submitted everyone’s timesheets for his signature, he asked me to keep track of my own hours as well, and everything above the 37.5 hours per week I was contracted to would be banked and could be used later as paid time off.
This worked fine until there was a regime change some five years later, and the new boss was very much not the same as the old boss. We all got told in early March to use up any outstanding vacation hours and such by the end of the month when the fiscal year rolled over. I mentioned I could not as I had something like nine weeks banked. I was told I’d have to take this in the fall (summer was our busiest time).
Come the autumn, the new regime decided it would be easier not to let me take this time off so they announced they weren’t going to honour this — it had grown to about twelve weeks at that point — but they decided they would give me one week off. Not even the four weeks or whatever I was up to with my seniority; just one.
I took it then came back and gave my notice.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 7:25 AM on March 15, 2021 [13 favorites]
In a former job, my responsibilities grew gradually from my entry-level hourly position to the point where my boss made me a salaried employee with benefits. I saw a nominal raise but in fact, as I no longer received overtime pay, my take-home pay actually dropped.
I brought this up with my boss after a few weeks and he agreed that it was not a fair deal, so when I submitted everyone’s timesheets for his signature, he asked me to keep track of my own hours as well, and everything above the 37.5 hours per week I was contracted to would be banked and could be used later as paid time off.
This worked fine until there was a regime change some five years later, and the new boss was very much not the same as the old boss. We all got told in early March to use up any outstanding vacation hours and such by the end of the month when the fiscal year rolled over. I mentioned I could not as I had something like nine weeks banked. I was told I’d have to take this in the fall (summer was our busiest time).
Come the autumn, the new regime decided it would be easier not to let me take this time off so they announced they weren’t going to honour this — it had grown to about twelve weeks at that point — but they decided they would give me one week off. Not even the four weeks or whatever I was up to with my seniority; just one.
I took it then came back and gave my notice.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 7:25 AM on March 15, 2021 [13 favorites]
Working from home has been a boon for a lot of people with attention problems in the pre-pandemic 21st century in which corporate offices have been converting wholesale into open spaces, packing more people per square foot and preventing the sort of isolation needed for focusing. At the same time, working 100% offsite can be counterproductive for some people who (whether they realize it or not) feel cut adrift from their responsibilities when they can't interact with others face-to-face.
I like the concept of smaller offices where people are expected to be on-site a minimum of one day a week, sharing desks with colleagues who also primarily work from home. This way, those who need an office environment get one, those who are more productive elsewhere get their isolation, and the corporate overlords save a bundle on commercial real estate (which, in most of the US, make the worst housing prices look like absolute bargains -- I don't feel sympathy for the corporate overlords often but I'll concede them this).
posted by at by at 7:50 AM on March 15, 2021 [7 favorites]
I like the concept of smaller offices where people are expected to be on-site a minimum of one day a week, sharing desks with colleagues who also primarily work from home. This way, those who need an office environment get one, those who are more productive elsewhere get their isolation, and the corporate overlords save a bundle on commercial real estate (which, in most of the US, make the worst housing prices look like absolute bargains -- I don't feel sympathy for the corporate overlords often but I'll concede them this).
posted by at by at 7:50 AM on March 15, 2021 [7 favorites]
That "do more with less" messaging really sticks in my craw because of the implication that employees have been sandbagging their company for years, that we'd been living high on the corporate hog all this time and we now need to step up and do a "proper" job.
It's pretty revealing about how hard the upper management types who impose these conditions actually have to work, though.
posted by Gelatin at 7:50 AM on March 15, 2021 [1 favorite]
It's pretty revealing about how hard the upper management types who impose these conditions actually have to work, though.
posted by Gelatin at 7:50 AM on March 15, 2021 [1 favorite]
In our morning meeting:
Colleague: “…and my computer kept installing updates all weekend and of course I was working, so it was a struggle.”
Me: *drowning in guilt and shame that I don’t work weekends as a matter of course*
It’s so normalized in my field (science) to work all evenings and weekends that I actually believe I’m a lazy slacker and am ashamed of myself… but despite that, I still take weekends off, which probably proves that I am a lazy slacker after all.
posted by snowmentality at 7:53 AM on March 15, 2021 [5 favorites]
Colleague: “…and my computer kept installing updates all weekend and of course I was working, so it was a struggle.”
Me: *drowning in guilt and shame that I don’t work weekends as a matter of course*
It’s so normalized in my field (science) to work all evenings and weekends that I actually believe I’m a lazy slacker and am ashamed of myself… but despite that, I still take weekends off, which probably proves that I am a lazy slacker after all.
posted by snowmentality at 7:53 AM on March 15, 2021 [5 favorites]
On a related note: today's Captain Awkward/Ask A Manager crossover.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:38 AM on March 15, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:38 AM on March 15, 2021 [1 favorite]
@at-by I can't favorite your comment about those awful open plan offices hard enough. They are so awful that I was WFH long before COVID but I was one of the few so my (extrovert) boss wanted me to come in 1d/week just to watch me work/see my fave/whatever and by far those were my least productive days and I'd have to work extra hours the following day to catch up.
posted by esoteric things at 11:03 AM on March 15, 2021 [4 favorites]
posted by esoteric things at 11:03 AM on March 15, 2021 [4 favorites]
I 100% believe that there is a general problem with workloads and expectations, etc.
I also think, though, that lots of people fail at setting boundaries/being honest/speaking up in work settings. I provide a service that supports a lot of other areas. Those areas have no idea what I'm doing for other areas. If I don't speak up and say "I have a lot going on; it'll be at least next week before I get to it", they have no way to know that. And if I say that often enough and operations isn't getting what they need, then that is how we end up with more people on the payroll to do this function. If I just keep working harder and longer and never say anything, then there's not only no incentive to staff up, there's also no way for them to even know we need to.
In my old jobs I was expected to have 24 hour turn around times on client interactions; in this job my boss has been very clear that there is no such expectation. It's hard for me not to set that expectation of myself and act accordingly; my internal clients already clearly like coming to me more than my colleagues because I am quicker to respond - but I am new at this job and don't have a full plate. I'm attempting to take my boss at her word and push out things that are on internal made-up deadlines.
So it's a combination of how the workers behave and how the managers behave - my boss never works on weekends, and she gives each one of her direct reports one long weekend a quarter as "mental health breaks" that don't come out of our PTO, and where we are strictly forbidden from working, because she does recognize that we often work more than 40 hours and that we need to disconnect to be able to do our best work. She's trying to get that adopted for all the salaried employees; the CEO had a call a few weeks ago where he said that every one of his direct reports needed to send him a list of all their employees and when their next and last PTO is scheduled, and that it's on the managers to make sure employees are getting a break, because no one got a break during the pandemic. And THEN they gave everyone in Texas extra PTO to deal with the storms and literally said "nothing you do is more important than taking care of yourself and your families. All work done by our Texas colleagues is either being covered by other offices or being paused."
Which is all to say that there are companies out there who really are trying, and "trying" requires that the focus start at the very top.
posted by dpx.mfx at 11:38 AM on March 15, 2021 [7 favorites]
I also think, though, that lots of people fail at setting boundaries/being honest/speaking up in work settings. I provide a service that supports a lot of other areas. Those areas have no idea what I'm doing for other areas. If I don't speak up and say "I have a lot going on; it'll be at least next week before I get to it", they have no way to know that. And if I say that often enough and operations isn't getting what they need, then that is how we end up with more people on the payroll to do this function. If I just keep working harder and longer and never say anything, then there's not only no incentive to staff up, there's also no way for them to even know we need to.
In my old jobs I was expected to have 24 hour turn around times on client interactions; in this job my boss has been very clear that there is no such expectation. It's hard for me not to set that expectation of myself and act accordingly; my internal clients already clearly like coming to me more than my colleagues because I am quicker to respond - but I am new at this job and don't have a full plate. I'm attempting to take my boss at her word and push out things that are on internal made-up deadlines.
So it's a combination of how the workers behave and how the managers behave - my boss never works on weekends, and she gives each one of her direct reports one long weekend a quarter as "mental health breaks" that don't come out of our PTO, and where we are strictly forbidden from working, because she does recognize that we often work more than 40 hours and that we need to disconnect to be able to do our best work. She's trying to get that adopted for all the salaried employees; the CEO had a call a few weeks ago where he said that every one of his direct reports needed to send him a list of all their employees and when their next and last PTO is scheduled, and that it's on the managers to make sure employees are getting a break, because no one got a break during the pandemic. And THEN they gave everyone in Texas extra PTO to deal with the storms and literally said "nothing you do is more important than taking care of yourself and your families. All work done by our Texas colleagues is either being covered by other offices or being paused."
Which is all to say that there are companies out there who really are trying, and "trying" requires that the focus start at the very top.
posted by dpx.mfx at 11:38 AM on March 15, 2021 [7 favorites]
Honest question: Has the attitude changed and have people soured on it, or is it just this is a thread where we haters are venting?
Like atrazine, I work a hybrid schedule. I run a bunch of educational programs for an academic hospital and manage the lives of 3 oncologists. I was 100% in the office prior to COVID and wasn't allowed to work from home. The feeling from management seemed to be that if they didn't have their eyes on us (not that they or anybody typically has their eyes on me when I'm at work) then we'd slack off or whatever. When COVID hit we went to 100% WFH for everybody who didn't intersect with patient care. I mostly liked it, and then my liking for it degraded over time as I felt more and more isolated.
Now that we are all vaccinated, we're back in the office two days each week, and that seems like the best of both worlds: I get to see my co-workers (who I really like) and can corner my boss-doctors for signatures, but I also get to avoid the commute and the expense associated with coming in to work, and wear yoga pants, three days/week.
posted by joannemerriam at 11:43 AM on March 15, 2021 [6 favorites]
Like atrazine, I work a hybrid schedule. I run a bunch of educational programs for an academic hospital and manage the lives of 3 oncologists. I was 100% in the office prior to COVID and wasn't allowed to work from home. The feeling from management seemed to be that if they didn't have their eyes on us (not that they or anybody typically has their eyes on me when I'm at work) then we'd slack off or whatever. When COVID hit we went to 100% WFH for everybody who didn't intersect with patient care. I mostly liked it, and then my liking for it degraded over time as I felt more and more isolated.
Now that we are all vaccinated, we're back in the office two days each week, and that seems like the best of both worlds: I get to see my co-workers (who I really like) and can corner my boss-doctors for signatures, but I also get to avoid the commute and the expense associated with coming in to work, and wear yoga pants, three days/week.
posted by joannemerriam at 11:43 AM on March 15, 2021 [6 favorites]
I'm on the working group developing a new telework policy for the post-covid office. It will allow for a LOT more flexibility for teleworking staff, although supervisors won't be able to go to 100% telework. This will be a big change for us, in part driven by and supported by the way the org had to upgrade its IT infrastructure after last March. Now we know that we can produce while WFH, and that our system can support it -- which was absolutely not true a year ago.
I did push hard against hot-desking/hoteling, because the studies I looked at indicated that office morale really suffered if people didn't have their own dedicated workspaces, no matter how small. So I don't know how much cash we'll save...
posted by suelac at 1:43 PM on March 15, 2021 [2 favorites]
I did push hard against hot-desking/hoteling, because the studies I looked at indicated that office morale really suffered if people didn't have their own dedicated workspaces, no matter how small. So I don't know how much cash we'll save...
posted by suelac at 1:43 PM on March 15, 2021 [2 favorites]
I worked a few years doing maintenance for a company that was chronically understaffed by design. Management would routinely ask for 60+ hours of tasks in a 40 hour work week. Turnover was over 100% annually and mostly minimum wage so there wasn't the cultural drive to work for free (though some people would and I'd annoy them about it).
I managed to get into a "work my hours and not worry about the growing list of tasks left undone" mindset but it was hard. I hated that people external to the company would possibly judge my work by the state of disrepair that was obvious to anyone with the right background.
And then by accident I got an apprentice. He was hired for other reasons but was also an everything but qualifying exam journeyman. Suddenly I had a person who I could offload some tasks and my to do list actually shrunk for a few months. It was glorious and it really highlighted that I actually hadn't managed to get into a 40 hour a week attitude internally. I pushed him to sit for his exam and he diid and then quit for greener pastures :(. Still it was fun while it lasted.
My company recently updated their office policies and it explicitly said 'we're not paying for Internet/power/etc when you work remote'
The flip side is one isn't paying for a work wardrobe, transportation expenses or donating the time spent commuting to the corp's shitty choice of office location. A lot of time a WFH situation will allow, as an example, a two car family to cut down to one car which is a huge benefit.
posted by Mitheral at 3:15 PM on March 15, 2021 [12 favorites]
I managed to get into a "work my hours and not worry about the growing list of tasks left undone" mindset but it was hard. I hated that people external to the company would possibly judge my work by the state of disrepair that was obvious to anyone with the right background.
And then by accident I got an apprentice. He was hired for other reasons but was also an everything but qualifying exam journeyman. Suddenly I had a person who I could offload some tasks and my to do list actually shrunk for a few months. It was glorious and it really highlighted that I actually hadn't managed to get into a 40 hour a week attitude internally. I pushed him to sit for his exam and he diid and then quit for greener pastures :(. Still it was fun while it lasted.
My company recently updated their office policies and it explicitly said 'we're not paying for Internet/power/etc when you work remote'
The flip side is one isn't paying for a work wardrobe, transportation expenses or donating the time spent commuting to the corp's shitty choice of office location. A lot of time a WFH situation will allow, as an example, a two car family to cut down to one car which is a huge benefit.
posted by Mitheral at 3:15 PM on March 15, 2021 [12 favorites]
Is being salaried a scam?Absolutely it is. Salaried positions were originally created as exempt from labor protections under the reasoning that, while they did have employers on paper, they were autonomous professional positions like lawyers and doctors, responsible for bringing in business and servicing those clients. This was fine because at the time professional occupations were considered prestigious and their practitioners were very well compensated. There was a direct material reward for a professional who chose to put in the extra hours. That was the logic by which “exempt” status was sold.
But, naturally, this motivated businesses to classify as many positions as they could as “salaried/exempt,” which was essentially every non-minimum-wage position that didn’t have union representation. Most office workers and eventually practically every information worker were put on salary, even though their work in no way resembles the sort of independent operator the exemption was intended to apply to. They’re not putting in extra hours because they get rewarded for their effort, but according to the age-old calculus that they do it or their boss will find someone who will.
The “exempt” employees of fifty years ago were what “independent contractors” are today: a transparent attempt to dance around humane labor rights under a regime that makes it easy to misclassify employees, except with the “independent contractors” they have fully dispensed with the pretense of any prestige or social advantage. When I was getting my first career job there was still this idea that being salaried was a better position than being on wage. With today’s “contractors” everybody knows they are taking a rotten deal because they’re desperate and it’s either take the deal on the table or starve (and then the “libertarian” crowd says the shittiness of the deal deserves no attention because the desperate people agreed to take it). In a way, salaried status was a trial run for the sorts of labor “innovations” employers have come up with recently.
posted by gelfin at 8:31 PM on March 15, 2021 [12 favorites]
Absolutely it is. Salaried positions were originally created as exempt from labor protections under the reasoning that, while they did have employers on paper, they were autonomous professional positions like lawyers and doctors, responsible for bringing in business and servicing those clients.
Is that correct? I think salaried compensation predates most labour regulations by quite some time and historically clerking type jobs would have been salaried, much as their successors are now. Doctors and lawyers have mostly worked in partnerships in recent centuries which is yet another model.
Not to mention the fact that salary/wage distinctions don't just exist in the US so cannot have been driven by "exempt" status. Most European countries have this distinction and most European labour laws also apply working time maxima to salaried workers, at least in theory.
posted by atrazine at 5:20 AM on March 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
Is that correct? I think salaried compensation predates most labour regulations by quite some time and historically clerking type jobs would have been salaried, much as their successors are now. Doctors and lawyers have mostly worked in partnerships in recent centuries which is yet another model.
Not to mention the fact that salary/wage distinctions don't just exist in the US so cannot have been driven by "exempt" status. Most European countries have this distinction and most European labour laws also apply working time maxima to salaried workers, at least in theory.
posted by atrazine at 5:20 AM on March 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
dpx.mfx,
Companies like yours are rare and the kind of place that encourage people to put in a greater effort and do more. Meanwhile the places that find any means possible to discourage people from taking time off and being nitpicky over TPS reports are the kind of place where the employees call in sick for "mental health holidays" and where the least amount of effort is expended for a given task because they know there will always be more work waiting for them.
My brother-in-law is an engineer and in the aughties his company started having him and the other engineers in his department work 50-hour weeks. My BIL is very much a man who values his time and other quality-of-life issues (spending time with family and outdoors is paramount) so he found a way to cram those 50 hours of work into a 40-hour week. The net result was his employer expecting this and then giving him even more work so he still ended up putting in 50 hours. As a surprise to no one people were burning out and leaving but management was clueless, clearly confused why their turnover was so high. (Naturally management worked their usual 40 and nothing more.)
posted by drstrangelove at 5:43 AM on March 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
Companies like yours are rare and the kind of place that encourage people to put in a greater effort and do more. Meanwhile the places that find any means possible to discourage people from taking time off and being nitpicky over TPS reports are the kind of place where the employees call in sick for "mental health holidays" and where the least amount of effort is expended for a given task because they know there will always be more work waiting for them.
My brother-in-law is an engineer and in the aughties his company started having him and the other engineers in his department work 50-hour weeks. My BIL is very much a man who values his time and other quality-of-life issues (spending time with family and outdoors is paramount) so he found a way to cram those 50 hours of work into a 40-hour week. The net result was his employer expecting this and then giving him even more work so he still ended up putting in 50 hours. As a surprise to no one people were burning out and leaving but management was clueless, clearly confused why their turnover was so high. (Naturally management worked their usual 40 and nothing more.)
posted by drstrangelove at 5:43 AM on March 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
I think salaried compensation predates most labour regulations“Created” was a poor choice of words here, and I apologize. I meant something more like that this was the context in which the “exempt” status (specifically, “exempt” from overtime pay) was introduced into US labor law, by characterizing them as the “professional” classes, even though in practice it applied from the start to people doing paid labor (even mental labor) as opposed to managing a practice. These are very different kinds of labor circumstances, in that one is more directly entrepreneurial, even when operating under the umbrella of another company, and the other is working simply at the direction of a manager who may be motivated to demand unreasonable hours at no benefit to the employee. It was a massive bait-and-switch that enabled transparently abusive practices like the notorious “crunch times” of the video game industry. Workers not seeing their families for months on end as they go slowly mad is pretty clearly exactly the sort of thing the forty hour work week was intended to prevent.
posted by gelfin at 6:38 AM on March 16, 2021 [4 favorites]
I should note something else about my previous job: I was doing support for 3D printers, and when Life In The Age Of COVID started and we all went work from home, one thing we didn’t get was loaner machines. So instead of being able to test things on actual physical machines or to look at them to try to figure out what the hell someone was talking about, we had to try to visualize them or look at pictures (my bank of photos I had taken turned out to be very helpful).
If someone was having a weird problem with a print, we would have to get the file, then send it to a manager (who did have loaners in their homes) who would try to print it and see what happened. One of the managers was an artiste who used his for making art and would get annoyed that we were interrupting his making a sculpture for someone’s prototype.
And our director was nice enough, but not terribly technical, so we would half the time need to put notes in the case like “Still waiting for this to get responded to by management”. It put a huge cramp in our troubleshooting.
We were salaried, but we’d also sell supplies and parts so we would get a commission for that, which helped our money situation a little bit,
But the understaffing didn’t help make us happier life forms at all.
posted by mephron at 6:59 AM on March 16, 2021
If someone was having a weird problem with a print, we would have to get the file, then send it to a manager (who did have loaners in their homes) who would try to print it and see what happened. One of the managers was an artiste who used his for making art and would get annoyed that we were interrupting his making a sculpture for someone’s prototype.
And our director was nice enough, but not terribly technical, so we would half the time need to put notes in the case like “Still waiting for this to get responded to by management”. It put a huge cramp in our troubleshooting.
We were salaried, but we’d also sell supplies and parts so we would get a commission for that, which helped our money situation a little bit,
But the understaffing didn’t help make us happier life forms at all.
posted by mephron at 6:59 AM on March 16, 2021
I have a coworker who has never gotten out from behind the eight-ball at this company because when they were hired, they could not start for two weeks. They had given notice at their previous job and had a pre-scheduled vacation planned.
When I pointed out that two weeks' notice was like, universally standard, and wouldn't my boss want two weeks' notice if someone here were to quit...it was made clear that while they HAD to accept this, they were NEVER going to be happy about it. And to this day even though that employee is far and away the best one we have they are treated like garbage, never given the credit/raises/promotions they deserve. All for the original sin of refusing to torpedo all the rest of their life For The Benefit Of The Company.
No surprise then that no matter how much lip service our manager gives to taking our PTO and not working evenings, we never quite believe her. (Doesn't help that she never approves any PTO requests anyway....)
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 8:37 AM on March 16, 2021 [5 favorites]
When I pointed out that two weeks' notice was like, universally standard, and wouldn't my boss want two weeks' notice if someone here were to quit...it was made clear that while they HAD to accept this, they were NEVER going to be happy about it. And to this day even though that employee is far and away the best one we have they are treated like garbage, never given the credit/raises/promotions they deserve. All for the original sin of refusing to torpedo all the rest of their life For The Benefit Of The Company.
No surprise then that no matter how much lip service our manager gives to taking our PTO and not working evenings, we never quite believe her. (Doesn't help that she never approves any PTO requests anyway....)
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 8:37 AM on March 16, 2021 [5 favorites]
I have a coworker who has never gotten out from behind the eight-ball at this company because when they were hired, they could not start for two weeks. They had given notice at their previous job and had a pre-scheduled vacation planned.
When I pointed out that two weeks' notice was like, universally standard, and wouldn't my boss want two weeks' notice if someone here were to quit...it was made clear that while they HAD to accept this, they were NEVER going to be happy about it.
Management types often have a curious grasp of standard practices. After close to a decade at my old job, I moved across the country and started with the organization a rung down (i.e. I went back to an hourly position). After six months my boss there canned me for a hilariously bullshit reason which I won't go into here and stressed that out of the goodness of his heart, he was giving me a week's notice and then a week's pay in lieu of the second week. He didn't have to do this, y'unnerstan', but he fought the board to do this for me. I pointed out that under local labour law, he was obliged to give some combination of two weeks' notice and pay but he insisted he wasn't; he was doing this because he was a nice guy. Whatever, buddy.
Incidentally, he told literally no one -- the board, his assistant, other staff -- that I was leaving. I was still on the schedule when I told his assistant on my final day that I had been dismissed a week earlier and I wouldn't be in tomorrow. She was shocked and called him for clarification, at which time he admitted it. I am pretty sure his plan was to "fire" me because of absenteeism. Of course, he had put nothing on paper. If the situation were less toxic, I could have pulled a Variant George Costanza and just kept coming to work.
I returned to the organization for a third stint six months later; the guy who had fired me now reported to me. Glorious.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 8:33 PM on March 16, 2021 [15 favorites]
When I pointed out that two weeks' notice was like, universally standard, and wouldn't my boss want two weeks' notice if someone here were to quit...it was made clear that while they HAD to accept this, they were NEVER going to be happy about it.
Management types often have a curious grasp of standard practices. After close to a decade at my old job, I moved across the country and started with the organization a rung down (i.e. I went back to an hourly position). After six months my boss there canned me for a hilariously bullshit reason which I won't go into here and stressed that out of the goodness of his heart, he was giving me a week's notice and then a week's pay in lieu of the second week. He didn't have to do this, y'unnerstan', but he fought the board to do this for me. I pointed out that under local labour law, he was obliged to give some combination of two weeks' notice and pay but he insisted he wasn't; he was doing this because he was a nice guy. Whatever, buddy.
Incidentally, he told literally no one -- the board, his assistant, other staff -- that I was leaving. I was still on the schedule when I told his assistant on my final day that I had been dismissed a week earlier and I wouldn't be in tomorrow. She was shocked and called him for clarification, at which time he admitted it. I am pretty sure his plan was to "fire" me because of absenteeism. Of course, he had put nothing on paper. If the situation were less toxic, I could have pulled a Variant George Costanza and just kept coming to work.
I returned to the organization for a third stint six months later; the guy who had fired me now reported to me. Glorious.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 8:33 PM on March 16, 2021 [15 favorites]
A friend said that at her previous employer anyone who gave their two weeks notice was fired on the spot.
posted by drstrangelove at 3:49 AM on March 17, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by drstrangelove at 3:49 AM on March 17, 2021 [2 favorites]
Sort of the reverse of the “You can’t fire me — I quit!” approach, then.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 8:32 AM on March 17, 2021
posted by ricochet biscuit at 8:32 AM on March 17, 2021
Probably not at all the same thing, but I've worked places where, due to the presence of confidential information, the day one gave notice was one's last day. They'd acknowledge one did the right thing and gave notice and pay for two weeks without quibble, but one was off the premises immediately.
posted by Gelatin at 8:37 AM on March 17, 2021 [3 favorites]
posted by Gelatin at 8:37 AM on March 17, 2021 [3 favorites]
This is basic security for many employers. I've worked IT positions where the former employee's accounts were closed within minutes of them giving notice. IE: I was the third person to know.
posted by Mitheral at 9:23 AM on March 17, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by Mitheral at 9:23 AM on March 17, 2021 [2 favorites]
When I pointed out that two weeks' notice was like, universally standard, and wouldn't my boss want two weeks' notice if someone here were to quit, they were NEVER going to be happy about it.
I've seen so many employers get pissy about people leaving without notice even though they routinely layoff whole crews with less than a days notice that I have a well worn rant about how slave labour is illegal even if you are paying for it.
posted by Mitheral at 9:29 AM on March 17, 2021 [2 favorites]
I've seen so many employers get pissy about people leaving without notice even though they routinely layoff whole crews with less than a days notice that I have a well worn rant about how slave labour is illegal even if you are paying for it.
posted by Mitheral at 9:29 AM on March 17, 2021 [2 favorites]
the guy who had fired me now reported to me. Glorious.
Haha that must have been an excruciatingly awkward (for him) standard "new boss here, so let's talk about my expectations and your performance goals" meeting.
posted by ctmf at 4:48 PM on March 17, 2021 [1 favorite]
Haha that must have been an excruciatingly awkward (for him) standard "new boss here, so let's talk about my expectations and your performance goals" meeting.
posted by ctmf at 4:48 PM on March 17, 2021 [1 favorite]
Tell me about your daily routine. Does it include monster.com? Hm. Do you think maybe it should?
posted by ctmf at 4:51 PM on March 17, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by ctmf at 4:51 PM on March 17, 2021 [1 favorite]
(For what it's worth, our industry does not generally observe the "quit and out the door" method. In general, people quit with notice, and indeed are often, but not always, notified of layoffs well in advance. It's not even unheard of for someone to work fully 6 months after being told they would not be retained, in fact.)
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 10:35 AM on March 22, 2021
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 10:35 AM on March 22, 2021
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