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It’s five provide answers to five questions. Here we go…
1. My ex-husband has hired his new girlfriend
I’m in a pickle. My ex-husband left home out of the blue, a little over a year ago. After about six months, he started dating a contractor at his workplace. This didn’t really elevate any red flags for me, because she was in an entirely different department. I told him to tell HR, but he didn’t want to, for fear that they wouldn’t extend her contract because of it.
Fast forward another six months, and she just got hired full-time. As his direct report. And this really concerns me, from an ethical view because( 1) permission can get genuinely icky and( 2) there is a high probability that she was only hired because of this secret relationship.
I’m plainly really biased because all my brain wants to do is” report it! ruin their own lives! he dug this pit himself !” but I’m likewise quite far removed from the situation, as I have very little contact with him or “the organizations activities”. I don’t want to be the “crazy ex” but I am also really uncomfortable about, you are well aware, ethics. To report? Or to pick up the mantra” not my circus , not my monkeys “?
It’s not yours are concerned about or report. You don’t work there! This would be like reporting the same thing to, say, your neighbor’s corporation if “youve learned” your neighbor had hired his girlfriend. The neighbor would be solidly in the wrong, but it would be a very strange overstep for you to contact his corporation about it. It’s the same thing here. But you’re welcome to judge him from afar, which I will join you in doing.
2. My friend is in trouble for tell people I was going to get fired
My friend, who happens to be the COO of the company I work for, was just telling me on Wednesday evening that my manager was going to sack me. I have been at the company for just shy of two years. Our HR manager told her this news from a fulfill she missed on Monday. Everyone in the company knows that the COO and I are close friends.
She then went to a meet about it with the exec squad and they said it was a performance issue and irreversible, and that I would have about an hour to leave the building and hand my laptop back etc.
I am going through shock, as I have just bought a house and the path this has been handled is incredibly upsetting. I was given no written warnings or statements that my concert are unacceptable and feel I have doing well there. Knowing this information, I made a call to resign before they could sack me, as I didn’t want it divulging into our small industry. They accepted my acceptance, removed my be made available to all my accounts and emails, got a courier to come and pick up my work stuff from my flat, and told me not to come in. They told me employment my notice as gardening leave.
I had a lot of friends and patrons there who have reached out to me and asked what happened. I told a close friend at work that my COO friend had said that I might lose my job and so I decided to resign. My COO friend now says the whole building is saying that I have told everyone she told me very confidential info and that she may now lose her job. I was terrible that I leaked this to a mutual friend, but handling also knew how close we were when they informed her this news.
Can my friend lose her job over this? She is deeply concerned and angry with me that I told person what happened.
Yes, she could lose her job over it. As COO, she’s expected to be able to handle confidential information with discretion, regardless of any personal friendships. Sharing that info with you was a serious breach and a violation of the trust people at your company need to have in her. That’s true even though they knew you were close friends! There’s no relationship exception for duties of confidentiality at work.( And she couldn’t do her job if she felt entitled to that exception .)
The reality is, she messed up in a serious way. I can understand why she’s unhappy with you, but it’s the decision she made that caused this.( And actually, even if you hadn’t told your other friend how it happened, it might have been obvious anyway — since presumably your resignation came out of the blue right after she was told they planned to fire you .)
3. Someone filled the agency freezer with 30+ cuts of meat
I work in an office with some big personalities, people prone to behave in slightly odd styles. I’m the office admin, so it’s up to me to cleaning process after people and control shared spaces. Someone has now filled the freezer in the smash room with cuts of meat and now I’m both irritated and a bit baffled.
Literally like, 30 -odd individually wrapped cuts of meat. It’s taking up the whole freezer. If anyone else wanted to threw anything in the freezer today, they wouldn’t be able to. There is no work event coming up that these could be for and there is no oven or barbecue at the role that you could use cook these, so I believe they’re for personal use and are simply being stored here.
I don’t know exactly who did this or which is what their scheme is, but I’m wondering what the best way for me to react to this is. I’m hoping they’ll be gone on Monday, but if they’re not should I take a deep breather and comprise my tongue until it’s gone? Bring my concern to the employee, once I find out who it was? Send out an email to all staff with an ultimatum to take their groceries residence? Go to my administrator?
Ugh, office kitchens.
If there’s any fortune “its for” a work-related event, before you do anything else you should inquire with anyone who might be able to fill you in on that.
But assuming you don’t discover that’s the case, send out an email this morning saying that whoever packed the freezer with meat has built it unusable for anyone else and you will be tossing it all at the end unless you hear from the person responsible.( And even if you do hear from them, you still may need to toss it — but it’s worth hearing what’s up first. If, for example, someone lost influence at home and is desperately trying to avoid losing their 15 -year meat supply … well, they still can’t take up the whole freezer, but you might be willing to give them a grace period rather than tossing it all immediately .)
4. Employer is enforcing our PTO cap and I’m way over the limit
My employer has a paid time off policy where vacation time earned through the year is automatically rolled over to the next year and never expires( we deserve three weeks/ time, accrued in increments each salary interval ).
A new HR director was recently hired and it has come to light that vacation PTO is supposed to have been capped at 160 hours peak( four weeks ). This restriction caught me by surprise, since this is the first time I had is known about it( I envisaged ). We checked the employee handbook and it does determined such limits, so I probably “shouldve been” seen this question coming.
The cap has never been enforced in the 10 times I’ve been with this company. I( and several others) have banked up PTO greatly transcending the cap( in my instance, over 450 hours ). I’m concerned that if the cap starts to be enforced, I will lose the time off I have earned.
Do you have any recommendations for how I should handle this? Can the company retroactively enforce the limit and delete the vacation hours already deserved? Should I just take Mondays off for the foreseeable future( only half joking )?
Unless you’re in a state that considers accrued vacation to be compensation that can’t be later rescinded( e.g ., California) the company could indeed retroactively enforce the limit and cap you at 160 hours. That said, since they haven’t been enforcing their own policies up until now, you have a good case for asking them to give everyone a year’s grace period to use up their accrued time before the cap starts get enforced.
5. What should I say is my reason for wanting to work from dwelling one day a week?
My company has formal telecommuting agreements, and I’m considering submitting one to work from home one day a week. The first issue on the agreement form is, “Please explain why you would like to telecommute.” To be totally honest, my reasons are not doing hair/ makeup, easily putting together lunch, petting my feline while I’m working, scaping a 30 -minute bus commute, and not dealing with the drama of my colleagues. I don’t have kids, family to take care of, or any “real” reason to telecommute besides accessibility. I also feel like if I reference the bus commute, it will create a bad precedent for others in my office who may want to do this but don’t have much of a commute and therefore don’t have a justification. Also, why should my employer have to care if my commute is longer or not? Given all that, what are the best ways to answer this question?
“Spending less period on my commute, and the ability to focus without interruptions.”
You’re not setting a bad precedent for people without similar commutes. They presumably is nevertheless cite the ability to focus as a reason. And not having to commute is a really common reason for telecommuting — you won’t be saying something no one had thought of previously!
You may also like: my new coworker is the contractor who I fired last yearmy coworker wants the company to pay for a week-long sex romp with his burnt lovercan I ask my coworkers why they didn’t hire my daughter ?
my ex-husband hired his new girlfriend, role freezer is packed with personal groceries, and more was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.
Read more: askamanager.org
