“boss refuses to wear hearing aids, putting strengths in your email signature, and more” plus 3 more Ask a Manager

boss refuses to wear hearing aids, putting strengths in your email signature, and more
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boss refuses to wear hearing aids, putting strengths in your email signature, and more

Posted: 30 Oct 2019 09:03 PM PDT

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

1. Putting strengths in your email signature

I work at a relatively small private university. Like many universities, we have a transition-to-college one-credit course for first-semester undergraduate students. I am an instructor for one section of this course, but this is in addition to my actual job.

This year, the university has decided to have first-semester students do StrengthsFinder as part of the course. Since I wanted to know what my students were doing, I asked for a code and took the assessment as well. Now the university has printed up a placard with my name and strengths on it, and someone (not my boss) has asked us to display them on or near our office door. I’ve noticed some employees, mostly who work with first-year programs, have started using their strengths in their email signatures. A few students are also doing this. I wasn’t able to attend the training for employees about how we’re using this assessment, but the powerpoint from the training mentions including your strengths in your email signature.

It might just be that I’m a private person, but I don’t want to post my strengths on my office door. I definitely don’t want to include them in my email signature, especially when I’m sending emails to people outside our university. And I don’t want to encourage my students to use them in their email signatures. (Out of context, the strengths just look like a bunch of random words and aren’t useful. I cringe when I think about students emailing about potential internships or jobs with those signatures.)

Is this as weird as I think it is? Should I push back on it, or just quietly not do it? I don’t think anyone will notice or care if I don’t change my email signature and destroy my placard, and no one has told me to tell my students to change their email signatures. However, it’s pretty likely I will eventually be instructed to encourage my students on this. I feel like I would doing my students a disservice if I don’t tell them I think the strengths email signature is a bad idea.

First, for readers who aren’t familiar with StrengthsFinder, the strengths have names like woo, maximizer, relator, etc.

And yes, putting them in an email signature would be odd, and it's going to strike a lot of email recipients as out-of-place and cheesy. And people who don't know StrengthsFinder (and many people don't!) are going to find it especially strange.

For yourself, I'd just quietly not do it. But you’re right that pushing students to do it would be a disservice to them, and if you see that happening, it’s worth pushing back on it. (And why oh why do schools persist in coming up with new and creative things for students to do that employers Do Not Want?)

2. Our boss refuses to wear hearing aids

Our boss has declining hearing issues and does have hearing aids; however refuses to use them. Her voice and music volume is distracting to the point that it's hard for people to do their jobs. We've gently mentioned it to her before but she refuses to wear them because she can "hear us just fine.” It's becoming an increasing problem.

We know that she won't take the information well. That makes those of us on the management team anxious but we feel it's our responsibility on behalf of the rest of the staff. Can you help give us a framework for a conversation about how to handle this?

Who on the management team has the best rapport with her? That's probably the person who should do this. I'm interested to hear from readers with hearing loss, but my thought is to just be straightforward and matter-of-fact: "I know you've said you don't wear your hearing aids because you can hear fine without them. But over the last year, you've been speaking more and more loudly and turning up your music higher, to the point that it's making it tough for the staff to focus on their own work. Can you think of anything we can try that would help?”

3. I'm having networking regret

I have been working at a company for a few years. It’s basically a dream job; I get to do work I love, I genuinely like most of my coworkers, and the company culture is largely relaxed. However, due to new management, morale is very low, my hiring managers seem inept at doing their jobs currently do to limited resources, and I suspect most of my coworkers are looking to leave.

I’ve been looking casually for jobs for the past few months, but nothing seems as good as what I have despite my company’s problems. I have been reaching out to my network and past work contacts. Recently, I reached out to a manager at a company I might want to work at, but frankly think is beneath me. I’m not 100% sure I’d love doing work there on a daily basis, but I wanted to cover my bases in my job search.

This manager seems excited I reached out and wants to connect, but I can’t help feeling like working there is not right for me. I wanted to do my due diligence and keep my options open by reaching out to everyone I could think of for future work opportunities, but now I feel like I’ve made a serious misstep. I will surely take the meeting, but is it wrong to reach out to potential contacts about jobs when I’m not 100% sure I’d want to work at their company? If I take the meeting, learn more about the company, and still think I’d dislike working there, have I wasted their time/seem like a terrible person/burn a bridge for reaching out in the first place? When is it appropriate to reach out to a past work contact to inquire about open jobs at their company and how sure should you be about the company?

Reaching out to a contact doesn't imply "I'll definitely take a job if you offer me one." It just says, "I'm interested in exploring opportunites with you because maybe this could be a good match." You're still allowed to turn any offer that results, whether it's because of the salary, the work, the company culture, or any other factor.

That said, you should assume that anyone you contact could respond by wanting to set up a meeting, and if you wouldn't be enthusiastic about taking that next step, it doesn't make sense to send out the feeler. It’s fine not to be 100% sure, but if you feel like the company is beneath you and you wouldn't like working there, it makes more sense to keep those for much later on, rather than putting them in the first tier of people you're contacting in a casual search. Otherwise it's not a super respectful use of their time (even though they may never know that).

4. Do people really wear Halloween costumes to work?

Before I found your blog, I thought dressing up for Halloween to go to work was something only done on TV sitcoms, or maybe by elementary school teachers or other populations primarily working with small children. Maybe people in retail or restaurant work as well. But every year you seem to get multiple questions centered around wearing costumes to work.

I am flummoxed that this is actually happening at workplaces. I’d be so interested to hear from your readers who have worked somewhere where people regularly dress up for Halloween. What kind of workplace is it, what city and country is it located in, etc.? I have spent my working life in legal and policy-oriented workplaces in Massachusetts and New York State, and I have truly never seen one coworker dress up for Halloween, beyond maybe bat earrings or a pumpkin pin on a sweater, or something along those lines. Who and where are these costume-wearing colleagues?

I'm not sure either! It hasn't been a thing anywhere I've worked either, but yeah, judging by my mail, there are plenty of workplaces where it is. My hunch is that you might see it more in workplaces where people feel like their work is more "job" and less "career" and/or where the work is fairly slow-paced (and so there's more time for diversions like dressing up), but that's just a guess and I could be completely off-base. Readers?

5. Coworker keeps asking me to do physical labor

I am in a fairly new job where I work across multiple sites. I am happy to jump in and help in areas that are “other duties as assigned.” A coworker at a site where they're understaffed has a physical job and is currently unable to do some of this very physical work assigned to them, with no end to this in sight. This person has started to expect that I have the time, energy, and physical ability to consistently help with this. I didn’t mind helping a few times, but I’m getting really tired of doing it regularly.

It’s not just that it’s annoying and an interruption to my workflow, but I recently aggravated an old injury. I also didn’t sign up for or take a regular physical labor job because I frankly don’t like to do it. I’m okay with some interruptions or physical work occasionally, e.g. a very occasional delivery arrives and it’s all hands on deck to get it where it needs to go or carrying things to set up for a once a year event. But this work is becoming at least a twice weekly occurrence. I don’t dress for work to do physical labor, my own job duties are picking up quite a bit, and it’s become increasingly frustrating to manage. This is especially true when they call for my help right when it needs to be done and seem aggravated that I need an additional 10-15 minutes to wrap up what I’m working on. Sometimes it’s taken the time that I would otherwise spend on eating my lunch and taking a break.

It’s not that I can’t help sometimes, but I really don’t want to do this all the time. I have asked that they give me warnings when they need my help and an approximate time early in the day so I can plan for it or give them my availability. Success has been so-so. I’ve tried saying I am not available on particularly busy days, but I get pushback, “well, what am I supposed to do?” I don’t want to, especially in a newer role, seem unhelpful , but I can’t keep up with doing this work that isn’t mine to begin with.

You recently aggravated an old injury! That in itself is all you need to explain — "I recently aggravated an old injury so I won't be able to help with this anymore." Period. If your coworker asks what they're supposed to do, say, "You should talk with (manager) about who can help with this. I'm not physically able to do it going forward."

That's such an easy and clear explanation for why you're not helping more that you should use it. But if you didn't have that, it would still be reasonable to say, "I can help out on occasion when you're in a pinch, like maybe once every few weeks, but I can't do this regularly. Can you talk with (manager) about how to handle it from here?" Also, when they ask for your help, it's okay to just say, "I'm sorry, I can't help with that today because of other work I need to take care of."

I get that you don’t want to seem unhelpful, but it's actually unhelpful to your employer if you keep doing this and grow increasingly frustrated and enable them in not finding a real solution to the problem (which they can certainly find — they'd find one if you weren't stepping in).

At least, it was fun until she started using the corporate messenger tool to track my comings and goings. She’ll send me emails and text messages if I’m away from my desk for too long (in her judgement), and this is compounded by a culture gap. She’s always worked in frontline face-to-face client service, while I have a back-office job. If I’m offline or away, I’m probably in a meeting, or on a call, or someone’s dropped by my desk for a chat — but she sees me away and just assumes I’m slacking off. I’ve tried to explain this to her, and I’ve gotten absolutely nowhere.

Things came to a head recently when, during a week when my whole team was having technical difficulties with the messenger tool, she got so frustrated at seeing me offline that she used the corporate directory to call a coworker of mine and have her check in on me. (I was fine! We were all fine! Nothing was happening!)

We had A Talk about that encounter, and the behavior stopped for awhile, but it’s back, and I have no clue where to go next.

The tool does have a Block function, but I’m worried that this would make things worse. And I’m afraid of reporting her, because I have to sit across from her at Thanksgiving.

This is highly unusual behaviour from her. She’s never been this controlling or this invested. And I just really wish she’d stop.

Oh noooooo.

I wrote and asked, “When you had The Talk with her, how did that go? Did she seem to understand your point? Say she wouldn’t do it again? Or was your sense that she thought you were overreacting?"

Reflecting upon it, she probably got it at the level of “I caused a problem in this specific instance” instead of “what I’m doing is inappropriate.” (Which also means you may have talked me around to an answer to my own letter!) Like when someone gets The Talk about making inappropriate jokes, and their response is “I made one (1) bad joke and hurt this one (1) person’s feelings” instead of “this pattern of behavior is inappropriate.”

Yep, I think that's your answer! And interestingly, this exact same thing happens with managers trying to address employee problems — they have The Talk, think the message was received, and then the problem continues and they're left thinking, "What the hell? We just had a big talk about this." Almost always when that happens, they either (a) weren't clear enough in the original conversation or (b) need to address the pattern rather than an individual incident.

And to be fair, it's understandable to think that addressing a specific incident would be enough. It's not unreasonable to expect someone to extrapolate beyond the immediate situation. Lots of people would understand that when you say "please don't check up on me when you don't see me online," that doesn't just mean "don't call my coworkers to track me down" but also covers "don't freak out and send me 10 texts about where I am" and "don't send me increasingly frantic emails about my work ethic during a routine workday."

But since the message clearly didn't get through, it's time to address it as a pattern. In this case, that probably means asking her to act as if you're not related at work — maybe as if you don’t know each other at all. She's shown she's not going to do well if you try to build in nuance, so I would go for a blanket rule along the lines of "since our jobs don't require us to talk at work, let's not interact at work at all, at least for a while." (That might seem draconian, but I think you'll do better to keep this black and white — at least for now. Maybe at some point you'll feel enough time has gone by that you can relax that and see what happens.)

Also, blocking her would be a good idea. Tell her you're doing it, of course, so she doesn't drawn her own conclusions (especially since otherwise you risk police being called when she hasn't seen you online for days), and frame it as, "I can tell it's just hard for you to see my comings and goings on Messenger and not know what's going on, and I don't want technology causing problems in our relationship like this. Since we don't need to talk on Messenger during the day anyway, I'm going to set mine so you don't have that window into my work day anymore. We'll talk after work instead."

And then make sure you're talking with her outside of work, of course! Seeing you freely give her your time in a more appropriate setting may help reinforce your message, and it can help smooth over any bad feelings about the blocking that could otherwise result.

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