open toe shoes at work, my friend let her teenager do her work, and more Ask a Manager

open toe shoes at work, my friend let her teenager do her work, and more

Posted: 11 Nov 2018 09:03 PM PST

It's five answers to five questions. Here we go…

1. Can I wear open toe shoes to work?

So what is the rule about open toe shoes at work? I know you should not wear them in a job interview. I wore a suit and closed toe shoes.

Now that I got the job, I have been having fun trying different things with my work outfits. Since I go to church, I have a lot of dresses, pencil skirts, dressy pants, dressy shirts, and (my favorite) many heels. For work I do dress much more simply (solid color shirts, pants, skirts, and dresses), no flowers, nothing too busy — but I do love my heels. My heels are also solid colors (not patterns) and all are neutral colors, but I do mostly own open toe heels and I take pride in keeping my toes nice.

Today a coworker mentioned my shoes and how they were "pretty slutty" with a lot of "showing toes" or "toe cleavage." I had never thought of showing my toes as inappropriate. I would consider myself pretty young, and I don't see anything wrong or "too sexy" in wearing heels. At my last personal review with work, I asked my bosses if I have been dressing appropriately for work and they said I was doing well and following the rules. But my coworker's comments still keep me thinking. So what is the rule about open toe shoes at work?

If your office is business casual, they're usually fine. If your office is more formal business wear (meaning suits), generally not — but even then, I'd say to look around and see if others are wearing them before writing them off.

What they aren't is "slutty" (a gross and offensive term, as well as concept) and your coworker is working from a weird and offensive set of standards. Not only is her assessment wrong, but her willingness to say something like to a coworker indicates that she has really terrible judgment, so don't give her any credibility here.

2. My friend let her teenager fill in on a volunteer job and it didn't go well

I am the volunteer parent coordinator for a large youth community organization. Every year, we do a large fundraiser that directly benefits the kids. This fundraiser is not directly my job; it involves vendor coordination, paperwork, and financial stuff. My best friend coordinates this fundraiser. Her child has aged out of the program but she has run it for the last few years — it’s a complicated fundraiser. We’re grateful for that.

This year I received the parent-bound paperwork from my friend only hours before it had to be distributed. I asked for it days before that. I didn’t have time to check it, much less revise it in any way, and it’s always been fine in the past. When I did open it (one went to my own child), it was very slap-dash, grammatically incorrect, and uninformative for new parents as to what exactly this fundraiser is. My friend has various health problems, and this is a busy time of year for her small business. She has a lot on her plate, and I always try to remember/help her with that. However, I had to write a more comprehensive explanation of the fundraiser for parents and not only does that make us look a bit disorganized, it has taken time and energy from two people (me and the director) to write/print/distribute it.

My friend told me that she let her 15-year-old daughter write/coordinate this paperwork (said child is not in the organization). Child is slightly disabled, and Friend is always looking for something productive for her to do. Friend was too busy to oversee it, and her daughter stuffed the envelopes. They weren’t technically awful or incorrect, just unprofessional and different from our usual OK-ish standards.

How do I address this so it doesn’t happen next time? I hate to be critical of my wonderful, overburdened friend, and her kid is awesome — we just can’t have teens coordinating this info. For the record, parents usually turn over their volunteer duties once their kids age out, but my friend feels indebted because her older child received scholarship money (there is no reason for her to feel indebted, but she’s a nice person). How can I tell her tell her that if she’s going to do it, SHE must do it? Maybe she should pass on her responsibilities so other parents can learn it? Should I suggest she go back to the previous templates, and include my info letter? I can’t bear to hurt her feelings.

"Friend, it was so nice of Daughter to want to help with this. Unfortunately I think in the future it's got to be an adult task — it didn't have all the info we needed and Director and I ended up needing to write up and send a new flyer with more explanation. That's not Daughter's fault; it's just a complicated job for a teen! But we need you to be the one to do if it it continues to live with you. That said, I know you're swamped, so if you don't have time to do this next time, we can definitely enlist another parent to take this on." You could add, "And if Daughter wants to help, I know we can find some ways a teenager could volunteer. She'd be wonderful to have."

3. Mixing formal employee awards with more fun ones

I work in a large government ministry and we have a new(ish) director for our unit of about 100 employees. I should also note that our director is very well-liked and respected, our managers are terrific too, and we are as flat an organization as is possible under the circumstances.

I’m writing because, as a fairly new branch of our department, our new director has asked for volunteers to help her form a social committee. I jumped in right away, because that’s just the way I roll. In our first planning meeting, we agreed that the period between Christmas and Easter is long and kind of gloomy (we have serious winter around here), and there are no “official” reasons to have a celebration, so we decided to hold an employee recognition event.

I was put in charge of it, and I want to make sure everyone who attends feels valued and part of the team. It would include a potluck lunch.

Some employees will no doubt be recognized for specific achievements or perhaps for a body of achievement over a period of time. But with the number of employees we have, not everyone will be recognized this way. What would you think about having some “fun” awards, such as cleanest cubicle (or messiest), or best attitude, or even largest collection of shoes? I don’t want to insult people who don’t get an award for a work-related accomplishment, but I do want to make it fun and inclusive, and not just a bunch of people applauding a small number of “real” award recipients.

Some people will be fine with this and find it fun, but it’s pretty likely that at least a few people are going to feel slighted if they get the "largest collection of shoes" award while lots of other colleagues are being recognized for their work. You're better off finding something work-related to praise everyone for — even if it's just like "Jane did an amazing job of putting together this year's annual report, and it's no easy task to corral the 52 different people she needed to chase down to do it." There should be something each person on your staff has done well.

Alternately, you could make all the awards the "fun" kind. But I wouldn't want someone to walk away feeling their good work had gone unnoticed while others got recognized for it. The exception to that is if you're only doing a small number of awards — but it sounds like you want to do an award for everyone.

4. I just found out I'm interviewing for a job with my coworker's wife

I'm a corporate communications professional working for a start-up in the tech industry. The company I currently work for is not the best fit for me, and I'm currently interviewing for a new job.

A very exciting opportunity has come up at one of the major tech companies and I've been asked to come on site to interview with one of their communications teams. It turns out that the head of the department is the wife of a vice president at my current company. The last thing I would want is for anyone at our company to find out, especially this vice president (he's a good person and we work well together). Should I remove my candidacy from consideration before the interview? Will she keep the interview confidential? What's the best way to handle this situation?

Ooooh, that's tricky. If she weren't his wife but just someone he knew, I'd say that you could try explaining that you need to keep your job search confidential for now and ask for her discretion. But if she's married to him, I just wouldn't be comfortable trusting that she wouldn't say anything. Maybe she wouldn't — but a lot of people share things with a spouse that they wouldn't otherwise share. And even if it she doesn't share it at this stage, it's really likely that she'd ask him about you at some point before hiring you; it's hard to imagine someone hiring a spouse's colleague without ever asking the spouse about the person.

I think you'll have to decide if you're willing to take the risk of him finding out or not. If you're absolutely opposed to risking it, then you may need to withdraw — which really sucks.

(To be clear, she shouldn't tell him. Interviewers should always keep people's job searches confidential, and it's tremendously unfair that you even have to worry about this. But people do sometimes violate that confidentiality, especially when they have a much closer relationship with the person they tell than with the candidate. It's not okay, but it happens.)

5. How to make sure less assertive coworkers are happy with our division of work

I am in a role that will never have a neat division of responsibilities with my coworker. Let’s say we both make teapots for our company, and we use the Management Center’s MOCHA method to make sure there’s only one Owner for each teapot. We try to divide the work in a way that is equal but also makes sense (e.g., if I own both blue and red teapots, it makes sense that I also own the purple teapots). The split is always going to be messy whichever way you cut it (if I own blue and he owns yellow, then who should own green?).

I really get along with my coworker and manager, but neither are great at speaking up for themselves (peacekeepers to the point where it can be a problem), whereas I can be so enthusiastic about teapots that I have to actively stop myself sometimes in meetings to give them the space to contribute.

I am very, very happy with the colors I currently own (to the point that I would be disappointed if I lost any of them), but I also don’t want to be the person who hogs all the best colors for themselves. How can I trust that he and my manager are happy with the current division of responsibilities when I know they struggle to speak up?

In catch-ups with them, I regularly check in to make sure they still feel the workload is fairly distributed, as the demand for different colors has fluctuated in the past. I make a point in big-picture planning meetings to say that the split is not set in stone and can always be revisited if circumstances change, and that I’m open to that. Am I doing enough? Because my strong preference is to keep the colors that I have (and they know I love those colors), I’m a little paranoid I’m steamrolling them so that I get what I want.

I think you're doing enough. You're regularly checking in to make sure they still feel the split is fair, and you've made a point of offering to revisit it. From there, you've got to trust that they're responsible for speaking up if it's important to them. I know that you're saying that your concern here is that they won't, even if they should — but you can only do so much hand-holding and at some point people need to speak up if they want to do something differently.

Think of it this way: What else could you do at this point, short of proposing a re-distribution of the work that you don't actually want? It wouldn't make sense to do that, especially since there aren't any signs that they'd want that either.

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