It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…
1. An employee we fired keeps making “inspirational” posts about it on LinkedIn
About four months ago, I had to fire an employee due to performance issues. She was a generally nice person, but unfortunately fell short of expectations so we had to let her go. We gave her severance and allowed her three months to quietly transition out of her role. We allowed her to announce her departure to the rest of the team as if it were a normal resignation.
However, a couple weeks after she left, I was shocked to see a post of hers on LinkedIn. She publicly announced that she had been let go from our organization and that she was looking for work. I was baffled as to why someone would announce that so publicly. However, I decided to ignore it, because what could I do? Unfortunately, the posts continued, documenting her job search journey, and how every day was about exercising “resilience” and “dealing with challenges.”
My concern is that this will affect morale among my staff. I don’t want them to think that they will be affected by mass layoffs, but I also don’t want to compromise my former employee’s privacy. What is the best way to address this issue with my team? And is it a possibility to ask my former employee to no longer mention the organization in her posts?
Leave it alone. Your team isn’t going to worry about mass layoffs just because they learn one person was fired. It’s going to be clear to them that you allowed her an exit with dignity, which if anything they’re likely to appreciate.
Let your former employee do whatever she’s going to do. Definitely don’t ask her to stop mentioning your organization; that will come across as heavy-handed and will cause more drama if she starts telling people that.
If most of your employees know you to be a generally reasonable person who doesn’t fire people punitively, this won’t be a big deal. But get involved, and it will start looking weirder.
2. Coworker escalated a problem with how I use my Outlook calendar to our VP
My colleague and I are both licensed engineers who have to alternate weeks where we work overnight on a large project (9pm-4am). On weeks where we are not working overnight, we schedule daytime site visits and catch up with our respective project management teams. Site visits generally last 2-4 hours. We each work with two teams almost exclusively. Two junior level engineers also work with two teams, but they have us check their work before finalizing anything.
Last week, Ann, a project manager from one of the teams that work with a junior engineer decided to bypass her by putting a morning site visit on my calendar for a week that I would be working overnight. She then sent me a message about it, citing budget reasons for cutting out the project engineer. I informed her that I would not be able to make it because I work nights that week, but the project engineer could attend and review with me in the afternoon.
She became frustrated and said that wouldn’t be possible because her budget won’t allow for two engineers to be duplicating work. She went on to tell me that my colleague and I should have put our rotating night shifts in our Outlook calendars so she could coordinate with us. I ignored this message because it didn’t seem productive.
Today, my colleague and I received a message from our company’s executive VP, telling us that we had to update our calendars and specifically stated that Ann was trying to schedule a site visit with one of us but our calendars don’t accurately reflect our availability. I asked my colleague if Ann had reached out to him and he said she had not. We both told the VP that we would update our calendars and left it at that.
However, I am not happy with Ann or how the VP handled this escalation. When my colleague and I originally took on these shifts, we had a discussion with the VP and other managers about the project duration (over a year) and everyone acknowledged that this would impose greatly on our regular work, as well as our personal lives. We worked out an arrangement where we have a standing notification of our modified availability for the project duration on our messaging platform, as well as a change to our working hours on Outlook. In addition to this, we have an open line of communication with the teams we work with and are very responsive to them. They don’t really use the calendar as a communication tool and also prefer direct messages, calls, and texts. They know what weeks we are on or off and schedule things accordingly, so we never felt the need to input our alternating shifts on our calendar. I understand that coworkers outside of these groups may need me, but in those cases they always chose to send me a message asking when I had time.
I feel that it’s disrespectful for someone on a team that is not connected to us can dictate how we organize our calendars, but I feel unable to draw and enforce a boundary if the VP has been made aware of the situation and ultimately sided with Ann.
It’s not unreasonable to say that your calendar should accurately reflect your availability.
I think you’re frustrated because Ann could have avoided all of this by just communicating with you directly, and you feel like you have a system that works for you and the people who work with most often — and you’re already carrying the burden of having these overnight shifts for a year! But “please make sure your calendar accurately reflects your availability so people you don’t work with as frequently are in the loop too” is really pretty reasonable. It’s not so much someone outside your team (Ann) dictating your work habits as it is a VP in your management chain saying, “Hey, this isn’t working as broadly as it needs to so please change it.”
3. I’ve been called for grand jury duty — and it would eat up 15% of my pay for the year
I have been in my job as an executive assistant for almost 2.5 years. I work for the president of the division and am happy. But I just received a jury summons, not for regular jury duty, but for grand jury duty. It’s scheduled for 1-3 days per month for the next 18 months and the summons lists the specific days per month. And it’s not even my local county court, it’s federal district court in a city 80 miles away. I have no issue in general with serving jury duty, and would have no problem with serving a regular jury summons, but the time commitment on this summons is egregious. Not to mention the time and costs of driving 80 miles one way three days per month. (The court would pay mileage and parking, plus $50 per day.) It’s potentially 54 days over the next year and a half. The jury duty policy at my job covers five paid days and I assume I’d be expected to take the remaining 49 days unpaid or use vacation to cover it. Not to mention the fact that my work would suffer and I would not be able to take a real vacation for the next 18 months, as I would be using all of my vacation days for the jury duty.
I submitted a hardship request to the court online and was told that having a job isn’t an excuse and I need to come to court the first day and plead my case to the judge. If I am unable to get out of this duty, and I am stuck missing 54 days of work, what recourse do I have to fight against the five-day paid policy in place at my job? Not being paid for 54 or even 49 days equals around 15% of my salary — it’s not a small amount that I can just forgo. Is there language I can use to ask my HR to rewrite the policy?
My boss told me he would have the head of HR write me a letter to assist when I go to court to try to get me out of it, but the head of HR offered no other assistance, other than pointing me to the policy. In a very brief conversation with one of the lower ranking HR members, she said she didn’t think anyone at the company had ever been summoned for grand jury duty and she imagined they’d have to rewrite the policy if I ended up having to serve. So what can I do? My summons date is August 20 and I’m not sure if I should force a conversation with HR before that day, especially since I am hoping to get out of it. But in case I am unlucky enough to not get out of it, I don’t want to be stuck losing part of my salary through no fault of my own.
In most states, you’ll be able to appeal to the judge to be excused based on financial hardship; explaining the situation (that your job won’t pay you for more than five days off, this will be 15% of your salary for the year, and you’d have to drive 80 miles each way every day) should give you a good shot at being excused. However, be careful about what your company puts in that letter; it being inconvenient for them will be much less compelling than documenting the fact that they will only pay you for five of the days off. (In fact, some states won’t even accept letters from employers pleading hardship at all; they’re focused on the hardship to prospective jurors, not to their employers.)
If for some reason you’re not excused, you — and ideally some of your coworkers, who could also be affected by this if they’re summoned in the future — should lobby your company for a change to their policy. Many companies pay the difference between the jury pay and your normal pay; it’s not an outlandish thing to request, particularly in a situation like yours.
Some potentially helpful legal info: Some states require employers to pay you for all or part of jury duty. To find out if yours does, search the name of your state and “jury duty employer pay” (no quotes). Also, if you are exempt, you must receive your full salary for the workweek if you work any part of it (although they could still require you to use paid vacation time for it, which isn’t really what you want).
4. My boss’s boss’s boss saw me wearing shorts to work
I tried to circumvent the cardinal rule of men’s dresswear: don’t wear shorts. I figured that it was the summer, hot, and I was walking to work.
However, this is the day that my great-grandboss happened to be in. Do I excuse myself when I next seem him?
Eh. Is he someone you talk to regularly? And someone who’s likely to care? If so, sure, when you next see him you could mention it. But if you don’t talk to him regularly and/or don’t have a specific reason to think he’d even remember, it would be overkill.
The better move is just not to wear things to work that you’ll feel uncomfortable being seen in by a higher-up. I’m sympathetic to walking to work in the heat, but you could change when you arrive, a la generations of women and footwear.
Related:
why can’t I wear shorts to work?
5. Why do people say “longer hours”?
Why do people say “longer hours” as in “we have to work longer hours”? Shouldn’t they say “more hours”? Unless we’re redefining an hour to be, say, 63 minutes and now you get your hourly rate every 63 minutes you work, which seems very illegal, you’re not working longer hours. You’re working more hours.
Because they’re using “hours” to mean “the totality of my work week” and language evolves to includes lots of shorthand that doesn’t strictly make sense.
