It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…
1. My boss won’t stop complaining about my maternity leave
I’m four months pregnant and I had to (chose to) tell my boss when I was eight weeks due to my nausea and sickness. When I told him, his first reaction was, “How much maternity leave are you taking?” I replied, “All of it.” We get FMLA 12 weeks — nothing special.
Since that point, at least once a week/once every other week, he talks in front of others about how we’re going to have to handle my “situation,” to which I say, “It’s only 12 weeks and it’s a standard leave.” He most often rebuts, “It’s a very important 12 weeks for us.” Obviously I’m going to set up my team for success and do everything I can to make sure people have what they need.
But at this point, the constant put down about how I’m leaving for 12 weeks and that will leave the team in a lurch is really getting to me. What do I do about it?
Are you comfortable talking to HR and letting them know that your boss is constantly complaining about your upcoming maternity leave and making you worry you’re going to be professionally penalized for taking it? This doesn’t sound quite bad enough to count as pregnant harrassment, but competent HR still usually prefers that employees not be hassled for taking legally protected leave.
Alternately, an option is to address it with your boss directly: “Do you want to have a conversation about plans for my leave? I’m taking a pretty standard amount of leave, but you’ve sounded so concerned that I’m wondering if there’s something I’m missing.” If he repeats that it’s a very important time for your team, then say, “Is there something you want me to do differently? Obviously I can’t change the timing of the leave, so is there something else you’re looking for?” At some point in that conversation, you might also want to say, “I’d appreciate it if you’d treat this like any other medically necessary leave that’s protected by law.”
2. Communicating with a team that doesn’t read email
I am one of several managers in my building and I manage a team of about a dozen people who all have different schedules, with two people manning the floor at once. They all overlap with me at some point, at different times, throughout the week. All the jobs are part-time and most people have a second job. Because I can’t get everyone into the same room together to have regular meetings, I’ve been trying to use email to communicate. But people don’t read their email, or they skim and forget, because when I ask to make a change it just … doesn’t get made. As an example, I recently sent an email asking everyone to please put out X in the morning and bring it in at night, and it hasn’t been moving.
These are work email addresses, and the staff in question are stationed at computers at service desks; the bulk of their job is helping customers, but there’s downtime that could be spent checking email.
Higher management and I have repeated “can you PLEASE read your email” ad nauseam, and for really important issues have started sending out emails with PLEASE REPLY in the title, insisting that everyone reply with some detail from the email. Nothing has helped and I’m at a point where I feel like I need to accept that email is not going to work here as a way to communicate.
But what will? I can talk to everyone individually about every tiny issue that comes up, but it would be prohibitively hard to remember to do that, and to remember who I’ve already talked to, every time a shift change happens all week, and then it would also take much longer to get information out. I could print out reminders and leave them on counters, but 1) those would also get ignored and 2) there isn’t a lot of counter space. Maybe you have another creative idea?
Since these emails sound mostly like one-way announcements that they just need to read and be aware of (as opposed to something with back-and-forth), you need an announcement binder. Print out announcements, put them in the binder, and ask people to initial them once they’ve read them. Hell, have a standard list of everyone’s names that get pasted onto the bottom of each announcement so that it’s easy to see who’s initialed it and who hasn’t. And then make checking the announcement binder a requirement at the start of every shift.
If they don’t have jobs that use email a lot (and it sounds like they don’t?), it’s easy for people to not even think to check for messages. You’ll probably haven an easier time making “check the announcement binder at the start of every shift” a routine part of people’s work. That said, there will be a learning curve! You should expect to have to remind people a lot at first, you should stick a “check the announcement binder!” sign at the service desks, and you should make a point of quickly following up with people who haven’t initialed things. If you’re diligent about that, it should stick in time. (And as new people are hired, make that part of how they’re trained from the start. It’s easier when it’s part of people’s routine from the beginning.)
To be clear, if these were email-heavy jobs, this wouldn’t be a reasonable solution; in some jobs people just have to be responsive to emails, period. But I think the problem you’re running into here is that email isn’t a central part of their work.
3. People keep commenting on my rosacea
I have rosacea, and my face is red most of the time. I am currently exploring treatments with a dermatologist. The cream I’m using makes it so I can’t really wear foundation to cover it. On an almost daily basis, someone I work with makes a comment about it. I get asked if I’ve been out in the sun or they just comment on how red I am. What would be a way to politely tell them it’s a medical condition and to stop commenting? I feel unattractive and embarrassed when people point it out so often.
“It’s rosacea.”
“It’s rosacea, you don’t need to let me know.”
“That’s just my skin.”
“Yes.”
Most people will understand the subtext is “stop commenting.” But if anyone continues: “It’s a medical condition and I’d rather not get into it.”
4. Telling a rejected candidate I wish they had been hired
I’m a consultant working part-time for a global nonprofit with a very small staff (three in total). As the workload is increasing and I can’t do more than part-time, we just made an offer to a more junior person who will take on part of my workload so I can focus on specific projects. I think they were the weakest candidate by far and I supported another candidate. I was overruled by the two other members of the hiring committee, both more senior than me but with no direct experience in my field. We’re very transparent as a team; I know their reasons for choosing that person and they know I strongly disagree.
Anyway, I know this battle is lost so I’ll obviously make the new hire feel welcome and I’ll work with them as well as possible. However, I’m really disappointed for my favorite candidate who ticked all the boxes – experience, technical skills, soft skills, background, work culture, you name it.
I know I can’t email them to say, “Hey, I’m so sorry, you should have gotten the job because you were the best.” But is there a professional way to let them know, directly or indirectly, that they’re awesome and that I wish they had been hired? The standard rejection emails have been sent and they replied very courteously and professionally. I’ve been on the receiving end of rejection emails as many of us have and I know how disheartening it can be when you know you were a good candidate.
You definitely shouldn’t imply they were the best and should have been hired (that could cause problems for your organization, as well as just being out of sync with the kind of united front you’re generally expect to put on once a decision is made). But you could say something like, “I wanted to contact you personally to let you know how much I enjoyed talking with you and how impressed I was by (details).” You can include specifics about why you thought they were great, as long as you do it without comparing them to the person who was ultimately hired. And you could conclude by saying you’d love to stay in touch and hope there might be opportunities to work together in the future. (I’m slightly torn on that last part because I don’t want to raise false hopes that your org might hire them in the future, given how small it is, but you could finesse the wording to whatever makes sense.)
5. Deescalation techniques for poll workers
After hearing about the nationwide poll worker shortage, I volunteered as a poll worker for the spring presidential primary and will be working again for a state level primary next month and then the November election. I just attended a more in-depth training, which had very specific instructions for how to handle ballots when various issues arise. The early voting process was brand new in the spring and is more convoluted compared to the traditional election day process (mostly boils down to early voting requiring a voter to be marked off in a physical binder along with a digital check-in) so the majority of the training was spent making sure everyone was clear on what to do. The town registrar emphasized how important it was to get every process right because tensions are expected to be high in November. However, there was no advice or real discussion on de-escalation when a voter gets angry with a poll worker, beyond flagging the person who administers that location’s election.
In the spring election, there was some grumbling about “what was the point of early voting” by voters, which I felt was difficult to redirect without crossing a line into something that could be considered a political statement (by law, we’re not allowed to discuss politics). I didn’t run into any true anger in the spring, even when we had a slowdown in processing people, but in the past as a voter, I’ve definitely seen poll workers get yelled at for things out of their control (like a voter didn’t realize their assigned location had changed and were told they needed to go elsewhere to vote after standing in a long line). The registrar also glossed over questions about more serious security concerns, so they don’t seem to be the best resource on getting a script to direct people to the moderator’s station. The moderator for my location has been doing this for 40+ years and said they’ve seen everything so while we should expect it to be hectic in November, we shouldn’t worry. The only work experience I have with dealing with members of the public who might get angry was limited to phone interactions, so I’m still a bit nervous about getting yelled at in person. Do you have any advice or know of free resources on de-escalation and redirection techniques?
Mostly, I just want to build more confidence, especially as the moderator for my location is hoping that the summer election will be enough additional experience so they can move me into an assistant position in November. While that seems quick to me, the moderators seem very eager to give the younger crowd experience and more responsibility because most of the town’s poll workers are retirees and they’re having issues with retention between elections.
I don’t but I will bet a lot of money that some readers do. Commenters? (I also found a lot when I googled that could be helpful.)
