It’s four answers to four questions. Here we go…
1. I’m supposed to live with my boss and her husband for months
I have been working at my company for two years, and I get along well with my boss, who is a woman in her early thirties. Her husband also works for the same startup and we are all on a work trip together for a few months in a foreign country. The company is providing community housing (with private beds and bathrooms) for commuting workers that holds about 10 people, and a few two-bedroom condos.
Before we arrived, my boss, her husband, my coworker, and I were under the impression that we would be the four people filling the two condos — me and my coworker in one, my boss and her husband in the other. When my coworker arrived, she was taken to the community housing and given a room, and when we arrived, my boss and her husband were moved into one bedroom of an apartment and I was moved into the other bedroom of the same apartment. When I asked if my coworker and I were going to move into the other condo once it became available in a few days, I was told no.
I brought up the problem to my boss’ boss and said that I am concerned about living with my boss and her husband for the next three months, but for the short term it is not a problem. He said that it’s a valid concern, and that he would work on it and that I should suck it up for about a week.
About a week has passed, and my coworker who I originally was going to live with has expressed her preference for staying where she is because she is already settled in, and I was informed by my boss that I am to keep living with her and her husband for the foreseeable future. This is so my boss’ boss and another male coworker can live in the other apartment and my coworker can stay where she is.
I am quite uncomfortable with this situation and have expressed this to my boss, my boss’ boss, and the person in charge of housing, and I am not sure what to do next. I am excited about this job and really enjoy working with my team, but working 72 hours a week with my boss and her husband and then going home with them is just a bit too weird for me. Any advice?
How firmly have you told your boss’s boss and the person in charge of housing that this won’t work for you? This isn’t less-than-ideal housing for a couple of nights in an emergency; this is three months of your life outside of work, and they almost certainly have other solutions available if you make it clear that the current plan is a no-go for you. If, out of a desire to be flexible and not demanding or to seem like a team player, you’ve been anything less than than crystal clear that this is a no for you, it’s time now to get much more emphatic.
Talk to your boss’s boss again, state firmly that you’re not on board with this, and say you need to make arrangements to move, whether to the community housing where your coworker is or somewhere else. For example: “I was willing to do it for a week like you asked, but I’m not comfortable with this for longer than that. I’d like to move to the community housing where Jane is or, if that’s not possible, to a hotel or other solution.” If you get any pushback: “Given the length of the trip, it’s really not feasible and I wouldn’t have signed on for it under these conditions. I can take the lead on finding a place to move if that’s the fastest way to handle it.”
2. My bad coworker is finally leaving … should I stay?
I’ve had issues with my underperforming coworker, Sanford, as long as I’ve been with my small nonprofit. From missing agreed-upon deadlines 90% of the time, to saying misogynistic things to coworkers in meetings (he singles out our foreign-born female coworkers — never the males — to repeat things back to him, to make sure they understood it, despite them being fluent in English and just being one of the people listening in a group meeting), he has been a “missing stair” in our organization for years. Despite this, our CEO saw it fit to create a completely new director-level position for him, promoting him by two levels and firmly setting a ceiling on my career path within the organization, as his new role took parts of what I would do at that level.
Despite all the flexibility, raises, and promotions he’s received despite his skills and work ethic (or lack thereof), Sanford has landed another role outside of the organization and is leaving. Many of us are celebrating, but I’m left in a tricky situation. I’d also planned on leaving, in large part due to being tired of cleaning up after Sanford, but now my path for growth seems to have opened up.
Do I stick around and see if Sanford’s absence helps make my job easier and clears the way for my career growth, or do I continue to pursue other opportunities? I am in the final stages of interviewing at several other companies that would pay me substantially more than what I make in my current role.
Keep pursuing those other opportunities. Sanford is leaving because he got another job, not because your organization decided to deal with him (in fact, the opposite — they promoted him) so if you stay, you’re staying at an organization that not only accommodates Sanfords, but rewards and tries to retain them. They didn’t suddenly see the light and become a better place to work, and if another Sanford comes on the scene tomorrow, you’d have no reason to believe they’d do anything differently with the new one. Their handling of Sanford says something about who they are as an organization; you shouldn’t change your plans just because this one manifestation of those problems is gone.
3. New manager is changing things for the worse
I work in a grocery store bakery. My teammates and I all have things organized in a way that is best for our efficiency. This new assistant manager has rearranged things into a mess. I have allowed this to go on out of respect. It’s just not working. I have gone to my bakery manager as well as store management bout it. What do I do now? I have changed things around since no one has helped me. And she just changes it back. She has not been receptive to speaking about it. She struggles with a power struggle.
The thing about being in a power struggle with your manager is that the manager is nearly always going to win because of their power and authority relative to yours — or at least that’s the case if you’ve talked to levels of management above you and no one cares enough to intervene. You and your teammates can certainly try talking to your manager as a group and explaining why you want to switch things back — and that’s worth doing if you haven’t yet — but ultimately if you can’t convince her, you don’t have much recourse.
In that situation, your best bet is probably to roll with the changes for a while. If a month or two from now they’re still causing problems, raise it again at that point; sometimes when you’ve made a good-faith effort to roll with changes but can still point to problems, that’s an easier sell than when you resist them from the start.
4. Is it illegal to hire someone just to fire people?
I’m writing a novel and I have a character who is hired solely to make people redundant before moving on. I heard from someone recently that it is illegal to hire someone for the sole purpose of making people redundant/firing them, only to get rid of them after they’ve completed this job. Is that true?
You mean hiring someone specifically to conduct layoffs/firing but not keeping them on after that? Like George Clooney’s character in Up in the Air? It’s not illegal to do that. Typically, though, if a company brings in someone from the outside to do it, they’d go with a firm or contractor (also like Up in the Air), not hire a full employee to do it — but it wouldn’t be illegal to have them be an actual employee if for some reason they wanted to. (That said, your use of “make people redundant” makes me think you might be in the UK rather than the U.S., and I can only speak to U.S. laws.)
