the fake union organizer, the lemon zest, and other Machiavellian triumphs at work

Last week, I asked about Machiavellian things you’ve seen or done at work. There were so many amazing stories shared that I couldn’t fit my favorites in one post. Here’s part one, and part two is coming later this week.

1. The store credit

I worked in a specialty retail industry for many years. It’s common practice in the industry to include as part of the compensation package a monthly store credit. At another store in our community, a department manager who worked at her store for years never used her store credit, just letting it accrue. When she left, she cashed it all in to basically clean out the department’s stock and used it to start a rival wholesale business.

2. The union

Wasn’t me but a guy I knew. He was a fan of certain “mind altering vegetation,” as was his coworker. He agreed to sell some to his coworker and soon became “the guy” at the auto repair place. One of the managers noticed him always having quick little chats with his coworkers and ran in the complete wrong direction with it and thought my friend was trying to organize a union and he (the manager) was going to stop that.

So my friend was terrified he was going to get fired until he realized that retaliating against him for selling pot was totally legal but retaliating against him for pro-union activity wasn’t. And so, to protect himself from being fired for being mistaken as a union organizer, he organized a union.

3. The salary hero

I was a low-level manager and was offered a promotion, and negotiated for a higher salary than offered. We agreed on the amount, but the company “couldn’t possibly give me that much money all at once” so half the raise had to wait until the start of the new fiscal year, in a few months. I had a commitment that “by the end of the first month of the new year, you’ll be at $X.”

We also did our annual raises company-wide at the start of the fiscal year. I knew that “by the end of the first month” meant they wouldn’t give me my full new salary until the very end of the month, so I hatched a plan. The system automatically included me when calculating the department’s raise budget. I knew, though, that no matter what raise I got at the start of the month, I would end the month with a salary of exactly the agreed-upon $X. So I asked my boss to give me the lowest possible raise she could without triggering a performance investigation and use the entire rest of the money budgeted for my raise, to give my team raises instead.
It worked like an absolute charm, and I have absolutely no regrets. I still have the form letter I got that year, with a bunch of boilerplate about how valuable I am before announcing I was being rewarded with a 0.1% raise.

4. The phone

The team I managed had an A/P and payroll person who loudly talked on the phone (personal calls) ALL THE TIME, while typing studiously, so she could pretend she was working. I had just gotten there, didn’t know my team or anyone well yet, but this was driving me crazy, along with everyone else. I talked to her about it repeatedly, with no change. Finally, I called a different employee into my office and said “break her phone. Don’t make it obvious, but make sure her phone doesn’t work.” He got such a big smile and suddenly she was complaining about her phone. I just said if she needed to make a work call she could use my phone. She never did. She left soon after.

5. The award nominations

I once volunteered for an awards committee with 5-6 other folks who were overcommitted and uninterested in the committee. We were all supposed to advertise the award. I carefully advertised very heavily in my department and wasn’t shy about suggesting 2 people who I thought would be great for the award. I even provided some text and info folks could use in nomination letters. These 2 people also happened to be my mentors. I even mentioned it to some external collaborators.

No one else on the committee ever got around to advertising the award and the two awards went to my mentors who got 6x more nominations than anyone else. The awards were $10,000 each!

I left the org right after the awards came in, but you better believe I got glowing recommendations from those folks! The whole thing left me with a deep appreciation for how much power someone can have when no-one else cares.

6. The lemon zest

When I worked as a baker at a small-ish independent bakery, the owners decided that we would start wholesaling our baked goods to all of the local branches of a prolific chain coffee shop. Our production went through the roof, but we were a shop known for doing everything from scratch, so some processes became absolutely ridiculous. One of these was zesting citrus fruit for flavoring our scones and muffins. Zesting became someone’s full-time (absolutely torturous) job. We went through a case of lemons and half a case of oranges every single day just for their zest. All of our microplanes were as dull as could be after a few short weeks of this, making the job of zesting even more difficult.

Our bakery manager at the time found a fancy French company that produced packages of frozen zest, but she was afraid the owners wouldn’t go for it. So she prepared two batches of lemon scones to compare the fresh zest with the frozen zest… except she didn’t. She actually used the frozen zest in both batches. The owners were amazed that they couldn’t taste the difference and agreed to switch to using the frozen zest. It saved us so much unpleasant physical labor, I think back so fondly on that manager’s actions.

7. The email

My first full-time job after high-school was in a small business where I was bullied by a much older colleague for months. One incident involved an email in which she said some awful (and brazen) things about me and another colleague in an email to our manager. Management did nothing and I jumped at the first opportunity to leave. In my exit interview, I said the boss needed to fire her (I was the fifth person to leave because of her) but he was unreceptive.

So in my final week I pulled the email up on my computer and purposefully left it for a colleague to see. Specifically, the biggest gossip in the office. When she asked me about it I asked her to not tell the others, but said it was why I was leaving. As predicted, the whole team learned of the bullying and was outraged, and my bully was made redundant within three months.

8. The height difference

I (woman, 5’10” tall) had a client (man, about 5’6″ tall) who seemed to have two completely different and opposite attitudes toward me. Sometimes, he thought my ideas were great and that I was the best thing to come along since sliced bread. Other times, he hated my ideas and looked at me as if I were moldy bread. I assumed for a while that his reaction was based on the specific thing I was telling him, but after seeing him react both ways to the SAME idea, I realized that his positive reactions always came about when we were sitting down and his negative reactions always came when we were standing up. After that, I made sure we never had another hallway conversation. I had all kinds of excuses to sit down, from needing to sit to find a piece of paper I had to show him to a bad knee that no one had known I had. It worked like a charm!

9. The recycling bandit

Early in my career, I worked in a department that recycled a lot of paper daily; as such, we had a large recycle bin near the door. People from other departments on the floor would also dump their office recycling there. One of these departments had an admin assistant who was absolutely terrible at her job and a bit odd to boot. I came back from lunch one day to find her rummaging through our recycle bin and assumed that she was looking for something she accidentally tossed. A few days later, she did it again. A few days after that, she did it AGAIN. It got to the point that she was going through our recycling a couple of times a week and spending a good 10-15 minutes digging through the bin every time. I asked her once what she was looking for and she said “nothing – I’m just looking!”

Finally, one of my coworkers and I had had enough of her snooping. My coworker wrote a note to me on the office’s official memo paper (this was back in the days before email) that said “I caught the admin assistant going through the recycling again – should we tell her boss?” I crumpled it up and stuck it a few layers down in the bin. The recycle bin diving stopped immediately, but the dirty looks continued for months.

10. The credit-stealer

I had a boss who really liked to take credit for anything she possibly could. She didn’t care if you were right there in the room, she would proudly boast about how *she* put so much time into *her* (your) work, even when she literally just learned about it an hour before.

Well, one time, I had researched, purchased, and learned some highly technical equipment over a period of about 3 months. This was equipment I spent years learning, and she barely knew what it even did. Her and I were in my workroom one day, when our director came by with an unexpected guest: a close friend of hers, the Mayor of our city. My boss immediately started trying to impress the Mayor with my new equipment. He was intrigued, and started asking questions. I happily stepped out of the way to allow her to stumble through completely incoherent answers, clearly demonstrating just how little she knew about my machines. As I watched the director’s disapproving face, the Mayor asked a final question: “What does this button do?” My boss stumbled something about it being an important part of the machine, started rambling about the many purposes the machine serves, clearly trying to come up with an answer, before she looked at me and said “Can you remind me what this button does? I haven’t used it this week!”

I smiled and said, “That’s the power button.”

my coworker doesn’t take the hint that she’s interrupting me

A reader writes:

My company is generally pretty casual, collegial, and “open-door.” An employee on my team (not a direct report, but I review a lot of her work and am senior to her) who seems to lack a lot of common sense about professional norms has a tendency to walk right into my office when I’m working and begin a long-winded question without waiting for me to acknowledge her, make eye contact, or otherwise indicate that I’m available in any way.

I’m trying to be available to answer questions because she’s having a lot of performance issues and has tried to blame me for not “helping her” enough, but the constant interruption is driving me crazy. I’ve tried putting on a show of not looking up from my computer until she’s a few sentences in and acting confused and saying she needs to start over because I was focusing on my work, but this doesn’t seem to faze her at all. I’ve tried wearing headphones and pretending I don’t notice that she’s there (same result) and I’ve tried setting daily meetings with her and encouraging her to bring all of her questions then, but that doesn’t seem to discourage her from coming in 5-10 times per day with one off questions.

I answer this question — and two others — over at Inc. today, where I’m revisiting letters that have been buried in the archives here from years ago (and sometimes updating/expanding my answers to them). You can read it here.

Other questions I’m answering there today include:

  • CEO assigns work to my staff without talking to me
  • People ask me for favors and then never thank me

my kind, caring colleague wants to heal my MS

A reader writes:

I was recently diagnosed with multiple sclerosis after a long period of treatment for increasing pain, joint deformation, and immobility.

After the diagnosis, I told my boss, HR, and the team of four that I manage. Since I don’t want this to be seen as weird or embarrassing or something to tiptoe around, I made clear that the diagnosis is not a secret — and when it was evident that I couldn’t move around very well and my cognitive functioning is deteriorating, it couldn’t really be hidden anyway.

HR has been supportive and proactive in searching out coping techniques for me, including my not traveling to gatherings (I work remotely) and looking for processes that will help ameliorate my memory and understanding glitches.

I’m also trying to help manage this through diet, physical therapy, working with my doctor, changing my home layout, etc. The prognosis is scary and I do my best to not let my fear and grief creep into my work interactions. I’m upbeat and matter-of-fact about it as much as possible.

Meanwhile, I have the kindest, most caring friend and co-worker imaginable. She’s on the other side of the country and not part of my team or even my work entity (we are under the umbrella of a much larger organization). She has added me to her prayer chain, which makes me cringe but I know is coming from a place of love so I just ignore it. But now she’s pushing an online naturopath who she says will absolutely heal me, and says that even though he’s really expensive, all my problems will be solved. She even names what she (and he) think the real problem is, and it’s not MS. The guardian angel emails, prayers, etc. are bad enough but don’t cost me anything and makes her feel helpful and heard. This is now in uncomfortable territory.

I am not interested in her suggestions, even though I have an open mind toward naturopaths in general. But I’m broke, don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to work or even be mobile, have no family to support me, and basically have to be super judicious about where I spend any money I have on treatments.

I don’t know what to say. I don’t want to hurt her or make her think I don’t appreciate her concern. A flat “no” would feel so hurtful and dismissive, and my biggest worry is that I might insult the genuine love and compassion that’s behind this. Any advice you can give would be most appreciated!

I’m going to take your word for it that she’s kind and caring because you know her and I don’t … but this behavior is not kind!

It’s hard to believe there are people who still haven’t gotten the memo that it’s rude to push unsolicited medical advice — particularly when it’s contrary to an active treatment plan that person has formed with their doctor. And telling you that what you haven’t isn’t really MS?!? You are a better person than I am for worrying about sounding dismissive after that.

Your coworker can be a generally good person while still having a huge blind spot that’s leading her to behave wildly inappropriately here. You’re being extremely generous about it … but one day she’s going to do this to someone who isn’t going to give her as much grace and it is not going to go well.

In any case, please remember: if she genuinely wants to show you love and compassion, then you will be doing her a favor by letting her know the best way she can show it for you.

The scripts I’d normally suggest for a situation like this are more blunt than it sounds like you want to use. So here are some softer ones:

 “I am handling this with my doctor and feel confident about our plan. The best thing you can do for me is to just be my colleague so work can be a place I don’t need to discuss this.”

 “You’re kind to be concerned, but the best way to support me is to let me manage it privately. I’ve got it covered with my doctor, and it adds to my stress when people outside my treatment team offer advice.”

 “I know you’re worried and I thank you for that, but what I most want is for my work relationships to be a place where I’m not thinking or talking about it.  Thank you in advance for understanding.”

If she is coming from a place of genuine caring, as you believe her to be, then she should respect this. If she doesn’t respect it — if she blows by your clear request and pushes her own agenda anyway — then this isn’t about love and compassion, and you should feel freer to set a firm boundary.

we’re supposed to send compliments for Women’s History Month, Glassdoor can un-anonymize you, and more

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

1. We’re supposed to send compliments for Women’s History Month

I wanted your take on this because for reasons I can’t entirely explain, it feels “icky” to me.

We received an email today through our D&I committee about a new Praise function in Teams that the committee is encouraging employees to use to send appreciation and thanks to female colleagues in celebration of Women’s History Month. On its surface, it’s got good intentions, but it also feels vaguely like one of those Administrative Professionals Day celebrations.

It feels icky because equity for women isn’t about sending female coworkers praise; it’s about equal pay, more parental leave and other support for working parents, having more women in leadership, and other actions that would require your company to do something of actual substance.

What your employer is doing is patronizing. We don’t need compliments from our coworkers; we need real equity.

2. I’m aggravated by the reminders my boss sends our team

I am a GenX/Boomer working at a very large university system. I am staff in a student support department, not faculty. I’ve been in my job for 14 years, in the same role but with increasing autonomy due to frequent restructuring. I’m a remote worker now. (I only go into the office one day a month and no longer have a desk/workstation, I just park my laptop wherever to get through the day.) Anyway, I’m on my eighth manager since taking this job. I’m the person who has been in the department the longest, and have seen the entire structure and staff overturned multiple times. My new boss is 27, has moved up the ranks quickly over three years, from entry-level to assistant director, and has been my supervisor now for four weeks.

Recently, we had a snow day, and our campus has a really good notification system wherein emergency operations blasts a text message to everyone related to campus as soon as they’ve made the decision to close or do a late start. If there is anything I need to know, it will come from emergency ops. An hour after getting the notification from emergency ops, I get a mass text from an unknown number, reiterating that campus will be closed and that we need to log in and put up an out-of-office message. More than half the people on that mass text either replied to it, or “liked” it, and my phone was going off every few minutes.

I found this to be really intrusive and unnecessary, since I’d already received the emergency ops message, and we’ve had at least one snow day a year since I’ve been there, and I’m a grey-haired two-years-from-retirement employee who knows how to read text messages and understand what they mean. We are also being similarly hounded when it is time to turn in timesheets (we are monthly and salaried). We get a calendar popup, an email, a Teams group message, and a text on my phone. I’ve never, in my 45+ years of working, ever forgot to turn in a timesheet. So I’m sitting here today, on my second snow day (which is following the same chain of events from yesterday’s snow day text message stream) wondering if I am justified in being angry about being treated like a child. Is this a generational thing? Our department is 15 people, I’m the oldest, there are three in their early 40s, and the rest are 33 and under, several in their mid-20s. My previous boss, a millennial just over 30, did not send me reminder texts after campus emergency ops texts, nor has she ever sent me a message reminding me to turn in my timesheet. These heavy-handed reminders have appeared recently. To be clear, if there were truly some emergency that I needed to be informed about regarding our department, I would be fine with getting those texts. But reiterating what I already know (and received)? It is over the top.

Should I bring this up with my boss, or just keep my mouth shut and be aggravated on the regular until I retire in a couple years? If I’m off-base, I’m happy to accept that.

Your reaction is a lot more over-the-top than the provocation is!

These are very minor things. Maybe there’s been an issue with people not putting on their out-of-office messages on snow days, who knows. But also, who cares? It’s a small blip in a day that it sounds like you’re getting paid for. As for timesheets, if you’ve never forgotten to turn one in, you’re in the minority; it is very, very common for people to need to be reminded about them. Instead of feeling like you’re being treated like a child, consider that you’re being treated like someone on a team with varied needs that might not all be identical to your needs. You can just ignore the things that don’t apply to you.

I don’t see anything generational here except that you’re connecting things to age that aren’t really about age, and you seem very age-focused in your letter.

3. How should Rachel have handled the restaurant interview on Friends?

I was wondering the other day about the infamous scene from friends when Rachel Green gets an opportunity to interview for a prestigious new position at Gucci and turns up to the interview to find her current boss sitting at the table next to her. She panics, tells him that she’s on a date, makes a complete fool of herself in front of the interviewer, and gets fired anyway.

Obviously this scenario is wildly unlikely, but it isn’t beyond the realms of possibility that you could run into a coworker or manager whilst in a public place for an interview. How do you think she should have handled it? I can’t see any situation where that doesn’t jeopardize her chances at the interview and risk her employment.

Agggh! Nightmare. (Although most people wouldn’t mess it up as much as Rachel did.)

One option would be to quickly introduce your boss with a pointed “this is my manager at X Company,” figuring that your interviewer would realize what was happening and help you finesse the situation. But enough people are oblivious to those dynamics that I’d worry your interviewer might out you with some horribly unsmooth comment like “your loss might be our gain, haha” or similar. Another option would be to quietly say, “I’m so sorry, but my current manager just sat down at the next table and doesn’t know I’m interviewing.” But then where do you go from there? Switch tables? That’s going to be obvious. Reschedule? It’s a clusterfudge of epic proportions and possibly the only action would be to fake a choking incident and leave immediately.

4. I did horribly at an internal interview

Ugh I’m still cringing about my terrible performance at an internal interview.

I work in info sec and I have been on the policy and compliance side for some time, but went back to school for a technical degree and have been studying to break into a more technical role. An opportunity at work opened up for a development program for a technical role that was likely over my head, but I went for it. It would be a seven-week program where you would then be placed with a mentor who would help you get situated in your new role.

They scheduled the interview, a panel interview, for 7 am the day I got back from vacation. I was a nervous wreck trying to be present visiting a family member and her new baby and trying to prepare for this interview by working on labs and going through my old school work which was most applicable to the role. My mistake was not looking over the program description again to look at some of the technical terms they’d be asking me and not refreshing on some of my basic learning.

On the morning of the interview, I was ready — I thought. I felt good and was excited to talk about this opportunity — and I totally blacked out and panicked. There were no behavioral questions. I had an opportunity to briefly introduce myself and give a description of my current role, but after that it was a rapid-fire technical panel and my mind completely went blank. I couldn’t answer nearly a single question, and by the time it came to talk about some of the labs I HAD done, I was so overwhelmed I couldn’t explain myself. It was utterly embarrassing.

So now I feel like I’m going to be seen as a fraud — like, why did we hire her again? The self-doubt and doom-talking are also telling me I won’t be considered for other roles. Even worse, I have an interview for a similar full-time role in the same department coming up (different teams, but they work closely together). I feel more prepared for this interview and am using this experience to learn, but now I am so frazzled and embarrassed that I don’t want to go. I’m actively fighting the urge to withdraw. I’m so worried that they have been talking to each other or others on their team who I happily work with in my office.

How can I forgive myself for this awful experience? How do I allow myself to move forward and gain some self confidence back so that I can put my best foot forward for the next interview? I haven’t lost the motivation to learn. My ego is just bruised!

This happens! Most people have a bad interview at one point. And it doesn’t sound like the circumstances really set you up for success with this one (although there’s also a lesson in there about how you prep for future interviews).

Are you up for talking to the person in charge of hiring for that role — not to ask to be reconsidered, but to try to reset their impressions? You could say something like, “I realize I didn’t perform well in my interview; my mind went blank in a way I was not expecting, and I’m hoping that if another role ever comes up, you’ll be able to see it wasn’t representative of how I normally perform.” That way, if it was as bad as you fear, you’ll be cluing them in that something else was going on, and they’re more likely to give you another chance in the future (and less likely to express any opinion that you’re not a strong candidate for that other role, or at least to temper it if they do).

5. Glassdoor can un-anonymize you

It appears that Glassdoor not only requires a name and other personal information with an account, they will actively add that information to accounts that don’t have it against the wishes of the people involved. You mention Glassdoor a fair amount and seem to understand needs of anonymity with this kind of feedback so I thought you’d want to be aware of it. The extremely cavalier attitude to user privacy here is alarming.

Source: https://cellio.dreamwidth.org/2024/03/12/glassdoor-violates-privacy.html

Well, this is alarming AF.

weekend open thread – March 16-17, 2024

This comment section is open for any non-work-related discussion you’d like to have with other readers, by popular demand.

Here are the rules for the weekend posts.

Book recommendation of the week: The Wife App, by Carolyn Mackler. Three friends create an app to monetize the mental load women typically carry for men.

* I make a commission if you use that Amazon link.

open thread – March 15-16, 2024

It’s the Friday open thread!

The comment section on this post is open for discussion with other readers on any work-related questions that you want to talk about (that includes school). If you want an answer from me, emailing me is still your best bet*, but this is a chance to take your questions to other readers.

* If you submitted a question to me recently, please do not repost it here, as it may be in my queue to answer.

boss edits emails before forwarding them to his wife, manager wants to pull an offer over traffic tickets, and more

It’s four answers to four questions. Here we go…

1. My boss edits emails before forwarding them to his wife

My boss always forwards every convo in an email chain. However, when he forwards anything to his wife (who is the accountant), he deletes certain threads I have written. Specifically, one recent example was one where he mentioned looking forward to me attending an event that requires overnight accommodations. I responded that I’m looking forward to seeing him and the other employees and confirmed that I would be staying overnight. I then followed up with a second email asking about company shirts. When he forwarded the email about the shirts, he left in his initial email to me but would have had to manually delete my response. Why would he do that?

I’m guessing there’s something up with his relationship with his wife where either (a) she’s overly reactionary when he exchanges normal pleasantries with female employees or (b) he thinks she will be. Who knows why, but I can imagine it feels a little icky on your end to be caught up in that when you’re just offering routine niceties.

2. Hiring manager wants to pull a pregnant candidate’s offer over traffic tickets

We offered a candidate a job, contingent on passing the background check, and submitted her info to our third party right away. The background report has been pending for a very long time, like 10 days. Usually that is because of a California jurisdiction (they take forever!) or a remote rural area where I always picture someone’s grandma searching the basement for records to provide in a dusty old courthouse. This time it wasn’t that, it was a large metropolitan area that is all electronic reporting and usually comes back same day. So I went to our state Bureau of Public Safety website and put in the candidate’s name to see if I could find anything out, and she has two outstanding warrants for her arrest! They are for traffic tickets, but one of them is over five years old.

Our normal procedure would be to wait for the background to go through, then send the notice of adverse action, etc. However the candidate has been checking every day to see the progress and is eager to start, so I sent an email telling her what I found and that it may jeopardize the offer. She apparently went directly to the website and paid the fine on one of the warrants and made arrangements to go to court to deal with the other.

I am really torn. This is for a managerial position (head of a department) and it definitely could cause complications with our insurance carrier if the person has to travel or drive company vehicles, not to mention showing a lack of judgement that is concerning. Then again, these things happen. The hiring manager wants to rescind the offer, even though we have been looking to fill this position since last year.

Further complicating matters, the candidate disclosed that she was pregnant after she accepted the offer, so we don’t want to make it look like we are retaliating due to the pregnancy, but the manager was definitely not happy when he found out. I have a call in to our attorney to get his take but I thought maybe I would throw this at you as well.

I mean, they’re traffic tickets. It doesn’t make sense to pull an offer over traffic tickets, unless they were for something like reckless driving and driving is a key element of the role.

If you’re concerned it will cause problems if the person needs to travel or drive company vehicles, look into that and find out for sure. Right now it sounds like you’re speculating, and if you’re considering pulling an offer over it, you should find out with more certainty.

The bigger issue is that you have a hiring manager who’s unhappy that a new hire is pregnant, and just happens to want to rescind the offer the first time he gets a way to do it. It’s worth questioning whether his concern over the traffic tickets is actually credible (after you’ve been searching for a year?!) or whether it’s actually about the pregnancy … and I’d be having a serious talk with him about why the company is committed to following the law when it comes to pregnancy discrimination, as well as spelling out what that needs to look like in his management of her.

3. Head of HR accidentally sent an all-staff email calling employees “whiny”

I work at a 200-person company. Our head of HR intended to send an email to a department head but accidentally sent an all-staff email. In it, he called the staff “whiny” and said we are exaggerating complaints about a major new change in the company.

Staff are alternately laughing and furious, of course. This person has a history of foot-in-mouth behavior and is generally not well liked or trusted by staff. I’ve talked to fellow managers both within the company and out about what appropriate follow-up action looks like as a result. One said an apology email. Another said he should be fired, as this is quite the error since he leads HR. Just curious what your take is.

If I were managing him, the big questions on my mind would be: What does this say about the way he sees his role and the people he needs to work with, particularly in light of the history with him? And can he still be effective in his job or is this a last straw in what sounds like an already very problematic history? Having an untrusted head of HR is a problem already; having one who’s openly antagonizing the staff who need to have some degree of trust in his impartiality makes that problem even bigger. And last, what does he think he needs to do to repair his credibility with employees? Talking that through with him might tell you all you need to know about whether it’s salvageable.

4. Should we say more about salary in our job postings?

A few years ago, my organization finally started posting salary ranges in our job descriptions (hooray!) and I’m thrilled that that’s becoming more the norm. It’s good for equity and, at least in theory, it saves everyone the time and effort of going through a whole interview process and having it all fall apart in the end because of salary. But somehow we’re still running into that problem.

We set a fairly wide salary range (say, $110K-140K), because people with a wide range of experience and skills can fit into the same position. We reserve the very top of the range for those who tick nearly every box and have, say, 15 years of experience rather than the minimum five. Ultimately, we base the salary offer on skills, experience, and internal equity (i.e., what other staff with the same title and qualifications are earning).

A few times recently, we’ve had excellent candidates who are earlier in their careers than many of our current staff, and/or who don’t have direct experience in our field but show a lot of promise to learn on the job. To my mind, it’s obvious that they’d be at the lower end of the salary range, but once we reach the offer stage, they’ll counter with the number at the very top. We may be able to come up a little but not a ton, and then they walk away.

Since it’s now becoming a pattern, I think the real solution is to increase all of our staff salaries because clearly we’re not competitive at the lower end of the range, but while I work on pushing for that change (a whole other letter), is there any language you’d suggest including in our job postings that might mitigate the problem in the near term? Right now we just say the range is X-Y, depending on experience and qualifications. Should we include the equity rationale? Should we say explicitly that the top of the range is reserved for candidates who tick every box? Should we introduce a more specific salary discussion earlier in the interview process? (When I’ve been recruited for jobs with a wide salary range, I’ve said up-front if I’d only consider the top of the range, but most of our candidates don’t do that, especially if it’s a direct hire, not through a recruiter.) Or is it just human nature to assume you’ll be at the top of the range, so it won’t really make a difference?

It’ll help to be more explicit about it in the job posting. Use language like, “The top of the range is reserved for candidates with XYZ qualifications and experience. Candidates earlier in their careers or without XYZ experience will typically be offered the lower part of the range.”

Ideally, you’d also bring up salary early on in your interview process, using similar language — so that if people aren’t happy with where they’d fall in your range, they can opt out early rather than going through your whole process.

my coworker is working alone overnight despite explicit instructions not to

A reader writes:

I work in a small research lab (less than 10 people total, including our CEO) as a scientist. I’m in charge of OSHA compliance and ensuring that we’re following local and federal safety standards. We work with hazardous materials, including biohazardous materials, compressed gasses, and chemicals.

One of my coworkers, who I have no authority over, has been staying at work overnight, working a total of up to 36 hours at a time. He sometimes takes naps in between, but not always. He doesn’t record this time in order to avoid getting in trouble with our boss. He has been told multiple times that he isn’t allowed to do this, so he he tries to keep it a secret. However, sometimes he tells me in a cheeky way, even though he knows I don’t approve.

He started doing this during a crunch period when we were trying to collect a large amount of data in a short period of time, so he was staying to run experiments. When we pointed out that the risk of screwing up is higher when you don’t sleep, he got extremely defensive and would say that unless we found fault with his data, there was no problem. I figured the behavior would stop once we were done with the project, but he has continued to do it. I broached the topic once since then and he got angry, claiming that people are trying to micromanage him. So I don’t know why he’s still doing it, or even what he’s doing.

He is otherwise a really good coworker and I like working with him a lot, so I don’t want to get him fired.

I can’t find any specific laws that say he isn’t allowed to be at work overnight, so maybe it’s fine? I guess my questions are:

1) Do I have a legal responsibility here? What about a moral one?

2) Should I just keep the secret and pretend not to know? Am I an asshole if I tell our boss, potentially getting him fired?

3) Am I overreacting by thinking it’s dangerous for someone to be in a lab alone at night?

I can’t speak to hazardous materials laws at all, but what you’ve described sure sounds like a safety risk and a legal liability to me. You’d have standing to speak up about that regardless, but you have even more standing to speak up because you’re charged with ensuring lab safety. Given the safety implications, I’d say yes, you do have a moral obligation to say something.

If something happens while your coworker is there alone overnight and it comes out that you — the person in charge of safety — knew and didn’t say anything … that’s not good.

And no, you wouldn’t be an asshole for telling your boss. If it were something more minor, I’d suggest first giving your coworker a warning that you weren’t willing to keep his secret anymore: “Dude, you know you can’t sleep here and it’s a safety issue. If you keep doing it, I’m obligated to tell (boss). Please don’t put me in that position.” But with this level of seriousness and because your coworker has already shown he’s willing to hide what he’s doing (and might just deliberately hide it from you if you warn him) and because he’s gotten angry when you’ve raised it before, just talk to your boss. Your coworker probably isn’t going to get fired over this (unless your boss told him the last time that he’d be fired if he didn’t stop, in which case that’s on your coworker anyway) but your boss needs to know.

update: my boss keeps asking me to do things that aggravate our community partners

Remember the letter-writer whose boss kept asking them to do things that aggravated their community partners? Here’s the update.

I wanted to wait to offer my update after I was settled in my new job.

As you and the commenters predicted, this was a bad situation. Fergus was a bully, but one thing I realized is that he was also someone who over-promised and then expected to bully (or have someone else bully) others to do what he wanted. So telling Org A he could get Org B to do something but not asking Org B, things like that.

He was the same way with staff, because all of the staff were part-time workers (25 or 30 hours a week) with no PTO or benefits, but everyone was hired with the promise that he would turn the job into a full-time job if we could prove ourselves.

I liked the part-time hours (for me, 25 hours a week) because of family obligations, but other staff did not. However, my job did not work well at all in 25 hours a week. Not just the quantity of the work but also because I was dealing with a lot of outside partners, scheduling meetings, calls, and so forth, and that’s hard to do when you work part-time and everyone else is working full-time. So I was already interviewing by the time “The Project” happened.

Fergus was contacted by an outside partner who wanted to find a contractor who could help them create a new program for their nonprofit. He convinced them that they could pay us to do it for them (quite a bit of money — I saw the documentation). He decided I should handle The Project, even though it was completely out of my area of expertise. I pushed back because of my workload, but he said he would move some of my tasks to others so I could do The Project.

The Project involved me spending one day a week at the partner organization’s office for eight weeks, plus followup emails, phone calls, and zoom meetings. He refused to increase my hours and only transferred some small easy tasks, so I was trying to cram the rest of my job into 20 hours a week. I was stressed out, pushing things ahead, and generally frustrated, but I did enjoy The Project and the people there and thought it would look good on my resume (it did, eventually) so I made it all work.

When The Project was over, Fergus called me in for a meeting where he was very complimentary — he, like a lot of manipulative people, could lay on the compliments when he wanted — until he said that the most impressive part was how I was able to do the rest of my job in only 20 hours a week which made him realize I didn’t need to work 25 hours unless I was working on a special project! So he was cutting my hours to 20, effective immediately.

Somehow he managed to act shocked and offended when I got a new job and gave my notice six weeks later.

what’s the most Machiavellian thing you’ve seen or done at work?

A few years back, we talked about Machiavellian things we’ve seen done at work — self-serving schemes or manipulation that you watched being carried out (or carried out yourself!).

The stories were amazing, including someone who pretended to be Canadian for months in order to get a day off for Canadian Thanksgiving, someone who submitted his awful boss’s resume to a bunch of recruiters (it worked and the boss left for a new job), and someone who learned that if she occasionally showed up to work without makeup , her boss would insist she must be sick and make her take the day off (paid).

Let’s do it again. We’re looking for stories of underhanded machinations, double-dealing, and conniving in the workplace.