our head of DEI outed me to 800 people, do clients think I’m a nepo baby, and more by Alison Green on February 4, 2025 It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go… 1. My company’s head of DEI outed me to 800 people I’m a nonbinary trans person working in sales for a multinational company. I’m out-ish at work. I’ve told my direct team I’m nonbinary, I have they/them pronouns in my email signature, and I wear a mixed wardrobe. I’ve not told anyone I’m trans directly, but I wouldn’t deny it if it came up. That said, the industry is conservative. Most colleagues assume I’m a man regardless of what I wear and everyone still get my pronouns wrong, even those who’ve asked. I mention this to say that I’m open but cautious about declaring my status at work. Our leadership has spoken up a lot about working on DEI in the last few years. Part of the plan to improve culture has been roundtables between senior leadership, the DEI team, and volunteer employees on their experiences with the company and where there have been struggles (think “improving the work environment for neurodivergent staff,” that sort of thing). I’d taken part in several of these before (as someone with ADHD) and found them a positive experience. Because of this, I didn’t think anything of it when our head of DEI asked if I would be comfortable speaking with the DEI team on my experience as a trans person in the workplace. She knew I was trans as I’d spoken to her previously about problems with our benefit system (a whole other story, but if you’re in charge of benefits, maybe don’t assume all your staff are cis and lock your healthcare options accordingly?). I assumed this invitation was more of the same and accepted. It was not more of the same. Four days later, I get an email invite to an all-staff Zoom panel for Pride Month. I’m named as one of the three speakers about “navigating changes to the industry while trans” and it explicitly outs me in the description. The Zoom panel is scheduled for the next day. The invite has gone out to all 800+ employees across the country. I immediately emailed the head of DEI, said this wasn’t what I expected and I didn’t appreciate being put on the spot this way, and pulled out of the panel. Was this a huge error on her part or just a miscommunication? I was probably at least partly to blame for not checking what exactly she was asking of me, but her original email just said “speaking with the DEI team,” not “speaking with the DEI team in front of all of your colleagues.” But it’s weighed on my mind since and I can’t help but wonder if being outed this way has impacted my career opportunities. It’s definitely made me feel less safe speaking with HR. It was absolutely a huge error on her part. This was different than what she had invited you to participate in previously, and she should have spelled out what she meant — and if the wording in your letter about how she approached you (“asked if I would be comfortable speaking with the DEI team on my experience”) is the wording she used with you, her wording wasn’t at all in sync with what the event actually was. This isn’t on you — it’s on her. I’m curious how she handled it once you pointed out what had happened. Your company sounds like they’ve tried to invest in safety and inclusion, so unless she was profoundly apologetic and has talked to you about what will change as a result, you could consider speaking to someone above her about what happened. Related: a VP wants me to out myself at work and won’t take no for an answer 2. My coworker keeps interfering with my work I am having problems with a coworker who repeatedly oversteps onto my tasks. She and I have the same role, me being three years her senior. We used to be on the same team but after a recent reorganization, she moved to another team under the same department. I have never been very fond of her working style: she is very diligent and proactive but tends to act first and ask later, causing unnecessary friction and sometimes overstepping onto other people’s work. Since she changed teams, she has been “suggesting improvements” or inserting herself in tasks that are under my scope and outside of hers. She tends to bypass me and my team — she goes straight to the client to propose her solutions although I am the person who has to implement them, and I am either not interested or have already identified and documented the same solutions. I am getting more and more upset at this because I feel that, at the very least, she needs to communicate with my team before going to the client. I have explained this to her, her manager, and my manager. She just reacts to my messages with a thumbs-up, her manager promises to work with her to improve the miscommunication, and my manager sides with me. However, the situation is still the same and I am at my wits’ end. Is there anything else I can do to resolve this problem? It sounds like you’ve just been messaging her about it (“she reacts to my messages with a thumbs-up”). Since that hasn’t solved the problem, it’s time to move to an in-person meeting with her about it (or Zoom, if you’re remote), ideally with your manager and her manager there, where you can lay out the pattern, why it’s a problem, and what you need her to do differently. As part of that conversation, ask why this keeps happening when you’ve asked her multiple times to stop — is something getting lost in translation? Is she getting conflicting direction from someone else? Does she think every instance is different and she needs to extrapolate “don’t do X” to a broader variety of situations? Sometimes this kind of meeting will surface that there really was some sort of misunderstanding or miscommunication. Other times, it’ll just drive home to the person that they need to take it more seriously, it’s a big deal if they don’t, and they can’t continue being cavalier about it. If that doesn’t work, you need to escalate it to both your managers each time it happens. Be the squeaky wheel if necessary — but start with a real conversation with her, not just a message. 3. We have to choose between a building with no heat or a building without equipment Where I work, we have two buildings about one mile apart from each other. I have worked out of the original building (#1) most of my time with this company. In 2020, we all transitioned to WFH. Two years ago, we went to one day in the office as a group as mandated from above. However, this entire time we were all coming into the office more often; our group has always done better than most at closing profitable projects, mainly because of our constant contact. This past spring, my group was relocated to a new area in the new building (#2). Both buildings removed our large desks and replaced them with small desks. All these desks were to be used for hot-desking and were supposed to have dual monitors with keyboards and mice at each one. The original space in building #1 did not get set up for a long time, and there are many desks without anything on them because they ran out of monitors and keyboards and are not getting more in, from what we are told. We now have a mandate from above that we must be in the office three days a week and, according to rumors, it can be grounds for termination if not followed. However, the new office area in building #2 is without heat due to a problem with the heating system and it will be for several more weeks (months?). We are in the mid-Atlantic area and it gets below 0 at times. The coldest I saw it in the office was 60 degrees one day (it was below 0 outside). 60 doesn’t sound that cold but it is if all you are doing is sitting at a computer. Our manager has said he will not enforce the mandatory three days a week, but I am worried because our big boss demanded it. Should we continue to go to our new office and freeze, go to the old office and suffer low productivity due to not having a proper computer setup, or continue to work from home and only come in as needed and risk repercussions from upper management? That’s ridiculous. OSHA doesn’t require specific temperatures, but they do recommend temperatures of 68-76° F. Your manager needs to go to his management and explain that until either (a) the heat is fixed or (b) building #1 is given enough equipment, your team can’t come in three days a week — that you’ll be happy to as soon as one of those is remedied, but until then there’s no feasible way to meet the mandate. It’s absurd to expect you to work without heat in the middle of winter or without monitors and keyboards. But your manager needs to spell that out to someone above him (and you should ask him to do that if he hasn’t yet). 4. New employee is billing more time than he works I am a project manager and oversee a team of five. One of my direct reports, “Marty,” was hired in October and has proven to be a quick learner and generally a good employee. However, there’s a recurring issue with his timekeeping. Marty has been routinely not working a full eight hours but is still billing for all eight. He typically arrives around 8:15 am, leaves at 4:30 pm, and takes an hour for lunch, effectively billing about 45 extra minutes each day. While I was deciding how best to address this, another team member, “Hamilton,” who can be a bit nosy but means well, stopped by my office to point out the discrepancy with Marty’s timesheet. I spoke to Marty, explaining that while it’s okay to work outside the standard 8-5 hours, he needs to inform me beforehand. I also asked if this was a workload issue, which he assured me it was not. I thought the conversation went well and he seemed to understand. Cue post holidays and Marty has pinged me every day this week at 4:30 pm, notifying me he is signing off, even though he continues to arrive after 8 am. Given that the job requires billing clients in 15-minute increments, transparency about hours worked is crucial. I am also concerned about potential animosity among team members who might feel that Marty is receiving special treatment. How should I handle this situation to ensure fairness and maintain team morale? It sounds like when you talked to him, you just told him to let you know if he works non-standard hours — but that’s not what the real issue is. The real issue is that he’s billing more hours than he’s working, so you need to go back to him now and clarify that. Since the message somehow got muddled the first time, be very, very clear now: “You have been working less than eight hours a day but billing for eight. We need to make sure your billing matches your hours worked exactly, because ____.” There are some workplaces that tell exempt employees to just bill a straight eight hours per day, regardless of the exact hours they actually worked (typically when it’s for internal purposes and not client billing) and it’s possible he came from one of those. Or maybe he’s sloppy or deliberately deceptive, who knows. But the first step is to tell him clearly what he needs to do differently. If that doesn’t solve it, you’d need a more serious conversation — but so far it doesn’t sound like you’ve clearly told him what needs to change. 5. I’m worried clients think I’m a nepo baby, but I’m not! I have a fairly common last name, and I recently started working at a small company where my boss has the same name as my dad. We are not related at all. I would be less worried if it was a bigger company, but since it’s so small (and if anyone were to look at socials, they would see my dad has the same name), it feels like people might assume a familial connection instead of a coincidence. It’s been fine so far, but I’m starting to shift to a more client-facing role, so I’ve been thinking about how I’m being perceived and how to build my reputation in our field. Is there a chance of my reputation being harmed if people think I got my job through nepotism, or is this something where it’s weirder to address it? Since it’s a common last name, I wouldn’t worry — people will know it’s a common last name, and they’re unlikely to know what your dad’s first name is. That said, if you want to be extra sure, you can always introduce yourself by saying, “Tangerina Murphy (no relation to Percival on our team).” You may also like:my employee shouted "F*** you!" at a coworker -- but he was provokedam I overstepping when I try to be emotionally intelligent?how to tell an employee to stay in their lane { 314 comments }
Ask a Manager* Post authorFebruary 4, 2025 at 12:01 am A reminder: We’ve had a recent increase in trolling here, and you can help me by NOT RESPONDING to it. Instead, please flag the comment for me (to do that, reply with a link, which will send your comment to moderation so I’ll see it) and I’ll take care of it. If you want, you can respond “reported” so people know it’s been dealt with and isn’t just being allowed to stand. But please do not engage. Thank you.
Commentariat* February 4, 2025 at 12:34 am #5: I worked on a team with two people with the same common surname who WERE related, and it literally took me NEARLY A YEAR to realise. I think you’re fine!
allathian* February 4, 2025 at 2:07 am Yeah, it’s happened to me, too. It’s also taken me years to realize some employees were married. They were totally professional at work and didn’t have the same last name. We also had a pair of siblings with the same fairly uncommon last name, she was married but he wasn’t, who had to constantly tell people that no, they weren’t a couple. They also worked in a fairly niche field so they were on the same team, but neither supervised the other. Couples working in the same field isn’t exactly rare, my parents did it until they retired, but siblings doing the same is less common. Sure, there are families of doctors and lawyers, etc. But they’re professions with a wide range of specializations rather than niche fields.
KateM* February 4, 2025 at 2:52 am And when the children of the couples working in the same field get together, you get someone like my kids who have both parents and all four grandparents in the same (wide, not niche) field. Sometimes I feel like we were doing some purposeful breeding of [field] people with my husband.
Sandi* February 4, 2025 at 8:01 am I went to university with someone who was getting their PhD in a very niche and difficult physics topic, which happened to be the same topic in which her father and brother were both experts. Thankfully in her case they were professors at a different university so only a few of us knew about it, though we used to joke that she was the only person in her niche field who could still get homework help from her father.
metadata minion* February 4, 2025 at 8:11 am This sort of thing drives librarians up the wall ;-) My favorite example from a cataloging listserv is “a” chemist who turned out to be a father, son, and nephew, all with the same name and working in the same fairly niche area of chemistry.
Marion Ravenwood* February 4, 2025 at 10:39 am I had the ‘colleagues who are married but don’t have the same surname’ in a previous job. It wasn’t until the pandemic hit and we were all working from home that I finally clocked it because they’d be on team calls at opposite ends of the same room (we all worked in the same division but they weren’t on the same team).
GammaGirl1908* February 4, 2025 at 3:22 am Not only that, but you are allowed to actually BE related to the person. Even if you did get your job through family connections, the way to resolve any related issues is to be excellent at the job and not to lean on the relationship. The quibble about nepotism is when unqualified family members get jobs or opportunities or whatever over people without those advantages, and then manage to keep them despite being mediocre. Being qualified and good at the job shuts people up.
KateM* February 4, 2025 at 3:31 am As AAM has repeatedly pointed out, it is not necessarily about actual advantages but also perceived ones. Will the others know you are not leaning on the relationship at all? Would they dare to tell your boss if you messed up something?
Bear Expert* February 4, 2025 at 10:08 am Working in the same company is tricky but okay, but in a direct management chain is seriously not acceptable. The perception of nepotism, even with competent people, is a distraction and damaging to the reputation of the people involved at best.
Laura* February 4, 2025 at 10:24 am Yup. I went into the same scientific field as my mother and had volunteered at her job (a non-profit) in high school and was familiar with many of the employees as well as her boss and grandboss. They REALLY wanted to hire me when I graduated college – like, they called me up and asked me to come interview – but they had pretty strict nepotism policies and couldn’t figure out a job title/description that made sense and could get me out of her chain of command. Probably better for my overall career trajectory that it didn’t work out!
Cats Ate My Croissant* February 4, 2025 at 3:58 am I see your ‘working with related people’ and raise you ‘obliviously teaching identical twins’! (They were in different classes, even I’m not quite that clueless.) In my tenuous defence, I only taught Twin 2’s class one lesson per week, which I took over partway through the year, but STILL. They had similar cheeky-but-not-really-naughty personalities and it wasn’t until I gave Twin 2 an exasperated “for goodness sake, Twin 1….” that the penny dropped.
Smurfette* February 4, 2025 at 5:12 am LMAO – you thought they were the same person? That’s comedy gold! I had identical twins in my class at school, and we could only tell them apart because one had a fringe (bangs) and the other didn’t.
Susan Calvin* February 4, 2025 at 8:31 am I actually read that as CAMC, never seeing them next to each other, didn’t realize how alike they looked until they accidentally called one the name of the other out of exasperated reflex – which, honestly, is funnier imo!
Cats Ate My Croissant* February 5, 2025 at 4:20 am You’ve got it. I’d taught Twin 1 for 3 periods a week for quite a while before inheriting Twin 2’s single period. Iirc they had a pretty common surname and nothing really stand-out that would make me notice, like “huh, another super tall 12-year-old with bright ginger hair and the surname Beeblebrox, how odd”. It wasn’t until the behaviour moment that I realised. So yeah, I wasn’t under the impression that a preteen was so fascinated by basic algebra that they bunked off another lesson to come to an extra one of mine. I was a pretty good teacher, but I wasn’t THAT good.
Irish Teacher.* February 4, 2025 at 9:33 am A special needs assistant in our school apparently thought the same thing about twins for years – that they were one person. She even knew both names but just…thought he used his middle name sometimes or that some people called him by a nickname.
JustaTech* February 4, 2025 at 11:44 am I went to school with identical twins who always wore the same clothes (as did the rest of us, we wore a uniform) and had the same hairstyle. They were in the class ahead of me, but one of them ended up in my math class and so I knew her, but even then still couldn’t reliably tell her apart from her sister, so only ever said hi if they were both there so I could be sure I’d gotten the right one.
1-800-BrownCow* February 4, 2025 at 12:57 pm I’ve been shopping at this local family-owned grocery store for 10 years, and often recognize one of the cashiers, the young, shy, super-efficient, very short cashier (I’m tall, so the height difference stands out). She never says more than a quiet “Hi” and “Bye,” but she’s fast and friendly in her own introverted way. One evening, about 10 minutes before closing, I saw her walking toward customer service with her cash drawer—clearly done for the night. But when I got to the checkout, there she was again, magically back at the register. I was confused but shrugged it off, thinking I’d just mistaken someone else for her. Then, as I was paying, someone walked up to the register, and I heard a soft “Hi” from the cashier. I looked up—and did a double-take. IDENTICAL. TWINS. I’ve been shopping there for years, thinking it was the same person, when I’ve probably been checked out by both the whole time.
Sir Nose d'Voidoffunk* February 4, 2025 at 3:14 pm I coach my kid’s rec basketball team and have half of a set of identical twins (the other used to play but stopped). The twin I have broke his toe a couple of weeks ago and I (mostly jokingly) told their dad I’d be fine if he sent the other twin in his place.
Carlie* February 4, 2025 at 8:33 am I have a family variant – my brothers are fraternal twins who look nothing alike. They had a class together in high school with a teacher who had no idea they were related until 8 months into the school year. Once she found out, she immediately started frequently mixing up their names and saying she couldn’t help it because they looked so similar to each other. ? Behold the power of suggestion!
Baked Alaska* February 4, 2025 at 9:31 am I’ve got a different family variant. I have two sets of twin cousins (on two different sides of the family, and their birthdays are one day apart). One set is obviously fraternal (different sexes, look nothing alike). We all assumed the other set were fraternal, too, until their recent milestone birthday, when we learned that they’ve been identical all along. They’re just not the ‘pass for each other’ kind of identical. Not relevant, but related: I was also briefly engaged to an identical twin, and while he and his brother had been ‘pass for each other’ twins in their youth, I was greatly relieved that they were no longer that way by the time I met them!
FuzzBunny* February 4, 2025 at 8:54 am At least you’re not as bad as my 9th grade teacher. I took two classes with him, one in the morning (with wet, longer hair) and one in the afternoon (with hair that had now dried and curled to become significantly shorter). He thought I was twins, despite “us” having the same name :)
Venus* February 4, 2025 at 10:44 am I knew of identical twins where the teacher kept assuming one was perfect and the other was a menace. She didn’t know which was which, and assumed that any bad behavior was always the same child rather than something they did equally. This was when they were young so they didn’t understand what was happening, and it took a little while for the parents to understand. Thankfully it was easily and quickly resolved by moving one of them to another teacher.
Selina Luna* February 4, 2025 at 11:38 am I’ve had identical twins in the same class as each other multiple times. It’s only been a problem once, when their parents gave them SUCH similar names (think: Ginny and Jenny or Mika and Myka) as each other that everyone, even people who had known them for years, mixed up their names. These two also had similar personalities, but I was eventually able to tell them apart because one was sporty and the other was arty… and because I went to the counselor with the other teachers and told them that having the twins in all the same classes together would stunt their development. No idea if it actually would, but we were all struggling to tell them apart, even months in.
1-800-BrownCow* February 4, 2025 at 1:07 pm My neighbors have identical twin daughters. They asked the elementary school to separate them to help them with independence and such. I can’t tell them apart at all, even when they have different haircuts (one sometimes goes short while the other keeps hers long) because I never remember who had the shorter haircut. But my daughter plays with them often and can easily tell them apart, even in pictures. My younger son usually can tell them apart as well as he plays with their older brother so he’s around them. But he usually tells them apart by their personality or the way they talk. He isn’t as sure just by looking at a picture. They do have very different first names though, so I think that will help them as they get older.
Jessastory* February 4, 2025 at 1:44 pm Lol, I did the same thing the one time I had identical twins. In my defense, I’m not great with faces and they had an extremely common last name.
Reluctant Mezzo* February 4, 2025 at 8:28 pm My husband had four Catelyns in the same class, all spelled differently. I believe he used superglue on his seating chart.
Slow Gin Lizz* February 4, 2025 at 8:09 am I played in an orchestra for about a decade with someone who has the same extremely rare last name as a very famous author. I always suspected they were related but was too shy to ask her, but after a year or so finally asked someone else in the group and it turns out they were mother/daughter. To top it off, we both have the same common first name with the same less-common spelling, and my own mother was pleased to know that she coincidentally chose the same name/spelling as this famous writer. I only once talked to her about her mother’s books, only one of which I’d read, but it wasn’t something that came up in conversation very often.
AKchic* February 4, 2025 at 8:58 am I worked with my mother for 5 years. We didn’t share a name, but we did look and sound a lot alike. People wouldn’t have known for sure if my mom wouldn’t have told everyone as soon as they met me. Conversely, I have worked with all of my own kids (improvisational acting non-profit). I let them decide whether or not to disclose our familial relationship. When we’re on site, they’re just volunteers/actors to me. My gov’t name is really common, to the point I have worked with 5 others with the same name so far. My maiden name was just as common (my stepdaughter and I share the same first and last name). Adding a quick “no relation” with a small, kind smile can really go far in situations like this.
Lacey* February 4, 2025 at 8:59 am Yup, I’ve had a similar issue at my company. One of the owners has a very common last name. There are some people who work here who are related to this person. But it took me a long time to figure it out, because a bunch of other people have the same last name and they’re not related at all. It’s just a common name!
airport gemstone* February 4, 2025 at 1:32 pm I had the opposite sort of. I worked at the same place as my step-dad who has a different last name than me. Mine is very common so I’d sometimes get asked if I was related to so and so person I’d never heard of with same last name, but most people didn’t know I was actually related to someone else there.
Resident Catholicville, U.S.A.* February 4, 2025 at 9:05 am But, on the flip side, at a previous job, the president hired a woman to be his underling and they shared the same last name but were not related. IMMEDIATELY everyone assumed they were- either siblings or more commonly, husband and wife. Not just coworkers but outside clients/partners/etc. So, if you’re worried about it, just put in a quick, “No relation to Bob,”and just move on like nothing is amiss. I think this is one of those things you can’t really predict if someone is going to latch onto.
Sneaky Squirrel* February 4, 2025 at 9:15 am I remember once I had assigned a task to have two employees do some work together and was hollered at by a manager because I had asked two siblings to work together. I didn’t make the connection they were siblings. They had the same last name but they were both of an asian descent (being explicitly vague here in which country) and it was one of the most common last names of the specific country they were descended from.
jez chickena* February 4, 2025 at 10:16 am I worked with three guys. They were all Asian and had the same first, middle, and last names. We ended up numbering them like platform releases (1.0, 2.0, 3.0), and they were fine with it. I forget whose idea it was; it may have been theirs.
Not Jane* February 4, 2025 at 1:30 pm I once worked with three brothers. The one we hired first went by his middle name, which was the same as both of the other two’s first name. Thankfully they didn’t look alike, though it took me a while to remember which was which of the two later hires. They went by variations of the name (think Rich, Rick, Ricky, or Sam, Sammy, Samo).
amoeba* February 5, 2025 at 10:22 am We had at one point three Tobys in our group – they did not share the same last name, but we still named them Toby 1-3. Order was determined by when they had joined – so the group dog ended up being Toby 2. Toby 3 (human) was fine with that.
Hush42* February 4, 2025 at 9:42 am My sister is 12 years younger than me and works at the same company. She and I have the same last name and we look distinctly related. People are still surprised when they find out that we’re siblings. Even people who know that I have a sister who works here don’t always put two and two together. Similarly one of my co-workers daughters started working here a few months ago, she looks like her dad and again they have the same last name. It took until she said something about her dad in a company meeting for me to put it together. My point being- unless you give them a reason to care most reasonable people in the company likely won’t think about it or care.
CeeDoo* February 4, 2025 at 9:49 am I taught a pair of siblings one year in the same class period and didn’t realize it. They had a common surname for their home country, so I never thought anything of it. At some point in the spring semester, the sister mentioned her brother, and I asked who her brother was. She pointed at him and the whole class laughed at me.
Aggretsuko* February 4, 2025 at 10:36 am I was in a show with two guys and I didn’t realize until years later that they were father and son. Boy, was there no resemblance, and I thought their last names were slightly different.
One Duck In A Row* February 4, 2025 at 10:45 am I have worked somewhere with not one but two separate mother/daughter pairs (though they were never on the same team/department), each mother and daughter sharing a not very common last name with each other, and it still took me YEARS to connect the dots! Possibly because neither half of each pair ever worked directly with their relative, so I never saw their names at the same time/in the same context? For a long time I thought it was kind of sweet how two of these women, from different generations, seemed to be such good friends. Duh. They were close because they were mother and daughter. (To my credit, I don’t think they look very much alike at all. I can see it now, but it’s not a very obvious resemblance if you’re not looking for it.)
Posilutely* February 4, 2025 at 2:52 pm Not exactly the same, but I worked with a man called Tom and a woman called Cathy in a company of approximately 50 people. They worked different hours and were rarely in together so I hardly ever saw them interact. Cathy’s husband was called Thom and Tom’s wife was called Kathy and it took me THREE YEARS to realise that my colleagues weren’t married to each other and weren’t referring to each other when they talked about their respective partners.
Jonathan MacKay* February 4, 2025 at 4:30 pm On the other side of things, I’m a twin who has occasionally worked with my twin – and we’ve kept a running tally of how long it takes people to realize we’re related. The record currently stands at SIX YEARS.
Rory* February 5, 2025 at 1:35 am Same here. And I didn’t have the common surname excuse, I just never even considered it. It also took me almost three years. I think my only excuse was that I didn’t work with either of them very often. On the flip side, the same company had three guys from different teams with the same last name working on the same project. They did sometimes mention that it was a coincidence because people asked.
Daria grace* February 4, 2025 at 12:43 am #1: you are not to blame at all for what happened. On any topic but ESPECIALLY one as potentially sensitive and personal as this, you shouldn’t have to check if the event has changed to an entirely different format and audience to what you originally agreed to. That kind of thing shouldn’t be changed without very clear communication and informed consent of participants. Even if you knew this was going to be an 800 person all staff event the organiser still should have confirmed with you how you were okay with your identity and experiences being described.
Nat20* February 4, 2025 at 12:45 am About letter #2, I’d just emphasize the part in Alison’s great advice about how this conversation with your coworker should identify the *pattern*, explain why it’s unacceptable on principle, and make it clear it’s not just about particular instances. (It might be that you’ve already done that, but it’s worth mentioning.) Especially since her thumbs-up reaction could indicate that she thinks you’re just talking about individual clients/circumstances and not the broader issue, it’s worth really making it clear that this is not a one-off or occasional problem you have with this. If that ultra-clarity still doesn’t change anything, then like Alison says, you then have even more standing to (continue to) go over her head about it.
Smurfette* February 4, 2025 at 4:23 am Yeah this is awful OP, I’m sorry. And it’s entirely on the head of DEI who – given their role – should have known better. This is a gross dereliction of duty IMO.
MigraineMonth* February 4, 2025 at 10:30 am You have been so generous with the DEI team with your time and expertise before this, OP. You did not cause this “miscommunication”, and *the head of DEI* of all people should have known better than to be so cavalier with such sensitive information. I’m so sorry this was done to you. I hope it has no negative repercussions and you feel secure again soon.
DJ Abbott* February 4, 2025 at 7:22 am It’s good that OP1 was assertive and withdrew right away. Some people might have felt obligated to go through with it.
stratospherica* February 4, 2025 at 12:44 am #1: DEI leader committed a grave error there. First of all, if the plan was to have you in a company-wide panel discussion, the words “company-wide panel discussion” need to be said. Frankly, DEI leader also committed a grave error by not passing questions to you ahead of the advertisement (and certainly sooner than a day before the event!!!), and by not asking you whether you’d be OK making your identity open in this event (or taking steps to anonymise you). This all feels like it’s so obvious for anyone with even a passing knowledge of DEI and ethics that I marvel at her ability to become a leader in DEI while having such a significant lapse of judgement.
XF1013* February 4, 2025 at 5:54 am if the plan was to have you in a company-wide panel discussion, the words “company-wide panel discussion” need to be said Yes, this is what I was thinking. The most innocent interpretation of what happened is that the DEI leader intended “speaking with the DEI team” to mean “public speaking with the DEI team.” But there’s a huge difference between a private conversation and a public speech, and there should have been more clarity. Take DEI out of it for a moment: Say OP1 is a graphic designer, and they agree when the head of marketing asks if they’d be comfortable speaking with the branding team about color schemes, and suddenly they’re announced as participating in a company-wide presentation on the subject. That alone would be really wrong — and when you add in the potentially very serious consequences of outing someone, it gets far worse, which anyone in a DEI leadership role should well know.
HonorBox* February 4, 2025 at 7:58 am Exactly. The DEI leader is the person in the organization who should be the most understanding, most cautious, and most adept at protecting people. I’m also curious how they responded when the LW withdrew from the panel. Even if you take out the very important detail relating to outing someone, there’s a huge difference between speaking with a small group and 800 people! Some people might not be comfortable in that situation, and details should be provided to ensure people know exactly what they’re walking into.
MassMatt* February 4, 2025 at 12:17 pm Head of DEI should resign or be replaced over this, IMO. This was a huge blunder and it will take great effort to overcome it. It’s much harder to win back trust after violating it than to gain it in the first place.
Sloanicota* February 4, 2025 at 8:45 am Yeah, it would have behooved the DEI leader here to think extra carefully and be very clear since this is putting a big burden on OP; I doubt the panel discussion was going to result in a lot of benefit for them personally but it will obviously put them under a big spotlight to a lot of people. The benefit is almost entirely to others in that they get an “interesting panel” or maybe the chance to learn something. But as designed it’s coming a very high cost to OP even if they were out or open about their identity.
CJ* February 4, 2025 at 9:39 am > This all feels like it’s so obvious for anyone with even a passing knowledge of DEI and ethics that I marvel at her ability to become a leader in DEI while having such a significant lapse of judgement. Not to be the cynical jerk in the room, but I’ve met so many C-DEI-O who have the same fallacy as activist spaces in general: everyone should come out and fully identify, regardless of personal risks. “After all, once we all know who we all are, there won’t be risk!” The ones I encountered early in my careers in the mid 00s really kinda poisoned the field for me.
MigraineMonth* February 4, 2025 at 10:37 am Or “We’ll have succeeded in our DEI mission if we show we hired some disabled/trans/neurodivergent/etc. employees!” without considering that it’s not a great sign if you hire those employees but only the ones who didn’t disclose.
CeeDoo* February 4, 2025 at 2:48 pm That reminds me of the episode of Superstore where the company magazine guy wanted a picture of a particular employee because he was 1) a person of color and 2) in a wheelchair. Performative diversity.
The Gollux, Not a Mere Device* February 4, 2025 at 12:01 pm Much earlier, Harvey Milk argued that everyone who came out was making the world a bit easier for the rest of us, as people became more comfortable with the idea that “gay” might mean their cousin, or the letter carrier, people they knew living ordinary lives. He didn’t claim it would be easy, or safe. In this decade, I know people who are out as trans to their friends, but not to their families, because it would be too risky.
MassMatt* February 4, 2025 at 12:26 pm But while he was passionate about the need to come out, he was always clear that it was an individual decision, he most certainly did not argue for outing other people in order to achieve the goal of equality. I favor a very open and ecumenical LGBTQA+ coalition, and believe we must hang together or else be hanged separately. But it needs to be recognized that trans rights are the human rights being most heavily targeted for bigotry at the moment. Even people who regard themselves as fairly gay-friendly (or gay!) often are NOT on board with trans issues. The risk to OP was significantly higher than being outed as gay or lesbian. We have a lot of work to do.
The Gollux, Not a Mere Device* February 4, 2025 at 7:25 pm Too true. I was aiming for brevity in my post, and omitted too much.
JMC* February 4, 2025 at 10:12 am Agreed this was a terrible way to go about this, and I would pull out myself if a similar situation happened to me. But I do want to say you are very lucky that your company is keeping DEI in place considering all that is going on.
Jennifer Juniper* February 4, 2025 at 10:42 am The OP could find themself on the DEI hire list sent to the White House if the org is federal. Please don’t tell the OP they’re privileged here. Especially if you are cis.
JMC* February 4, 2025 at 1:27 pm I never said they were privileged. I’m just glad that some companies are keeping DEI in place, including mine. But yes in general it’s dangerous to be outed in any way.
Pay no attention...* February 4, 2025 at 11:25 am Considering the time lag of when questions are sent to Allison and when she responds, this likely was sent prior to the change in the administration in the U.S.. It is all the more personally and professionally dangerous for the OP at this time to be associated with DEI programs, and not just because the government might want them fired.
Jennifer Juniper* February 4, 2025 at 12:08 pm Thank you for letting me know about the time lag. I appreciate it.
Edwina* February 4, 2025 at 2:31 pm …and by not asking you whether you’d be OK making your identity open in this event This! I’m pretty much out as queer everywhere, but I still get surprised at situations that come up where it very definitely does not feel safe. Non-queer friends could easily think it’s ok to be open about ME in all situations, and I would not be happy about that. You can’t ever assume it’s OK to refer to or attempt to describe someone else’s gender, queerness, etc. without explicitly discussing it with them first and getting THEIR explicit approval, especially if you’re the head of DEI.
Elizabeth West* February 4, 2025 at 3:19 pm Seriously, I have a bruise now from where my jaw hit the desk!
some dude* February 5, 2025 at 12:33 pm My least favorite thing about DEI in the past few years has been this trotting out the handful of staff with marginalized identities in all-staffs to regurgitate their trauma before everyone so we can learn from it. It always feels wrong to me.
CB212* February 4, 2025 at 12:45 am #4: I’ve worked at a ton of places that just had us log a straight 9-6 on timesheets and as long as my work got done it didn’t matter. Nobody would have counted it as time theft if we were casual about the actual clock. There’s a fair probability the employee isn’t thinking of the timesheet as client billing and the suggested conversation will be eye-opening for them.
Daria grace* February 4, 2025 at 12:56 am Yes my workplace is like this. It causes more work for payroll reconciling things if we’re logging more hours some days and less others so as long as our total is correct for the week we just log the standard number of hours ever day
RCB* February 4, 2025 at 1:06 am Same here, I tell my staff to put 8 hours down for each day regardless of what they work, I think this is very common in any organization that isn’t professional services.
Arrietty* February 4, 2025 at 3:38 am Out of interest, what’s the point of logging time if it doesn’t matter if it’s accurate?
Turkey Melt* February 4, 2025 at 3:59 am As someone who has to file a timesheet for exactly 7.5-hour M-F days no matter how much I worked — I haven’t the foggiest, and nor does anyone I’ve asked.
WillowSunstar* February 4, 2025 at 10:19 am Same here, I have to log all work on projects and they have to be 7.5 hours. There is no billing involved.
InTheWeeds* February 4, 2025 at 11:06 am For some organizations payroll just needs verification of the days an employee was present and working and it allows that time to be tracked more easily from a bigger picture perspective so it’s easier to note sick days, vacation days, overtime etc.
Nebula* February 4, 2025 at 4:41 am Sometimes it’s because there is a part of the organisation or department where timelogging does matter, and the HR system isn’t set up to only have some people logging time and other people not. Where I used to work, I started out working across a number of projects where we had to log hours quite carefully because the funding was coming from different places, but then I moved on to a different role in the same department and just timelogged eight hours a day to a general code. Not very efficient but there we are.
BethDH* February 4, 2025 at 7:58 am The “some people at the org are paid hourly so salaried people just enter 8” has been the norm at several places I’ve worked. Especially if you’re billing one account or he’s otherwise not the one who has to see changes in which account is billed, I bet he just doesn’t get the reasoning. It’s not that uncommon for “8 hour workday” to be “7 hours plus lunch” either.
Ally McBeal* February 4, 2025 at 10:12 am Yep, I work in an industry that bills in 15-minute increments. Our support staff, who are not client-facing, just put 8-hour blocks in their timesheets while the rest of us are asking ourselves “this meeting went from 8:00-8:37, does that count as 30 minutes or 45 minutes?” (The answer is nearly always 45 minutes.)
InTheWeeds* February 4, 2025 at 11:12 am “this meeting went from 8:00-8:37, does that count as 30 minutes or 45 minutes?” This made me physically recoil, I spent a number of years working in an organization that tracked time in 15 minute increments and it was the absolute worst.
I Have RBF* February 4, 2025 at 1:59 pm LOL. BTDT. I once worked for a consulting company that had federal and state contracts, as well as private ones. We billed in tenths – 6 minute increments. Now, most people would work entire days or weeks on one project. I did not. Sometimes my weekly timesheets (paper) were two pages because the number of different projects I was on. I kept my time tracking in a written log – date, project number, what I did, and start/end times. I would regularly have people coming to me six months later asking me “What did you do on X project on Y date? I could always pull out my log, flip to that date, and tell them.
JLK Esq.* February 4, 2025 at 2:50 pm Exactly. It’s really easy to round up enough times in a day that you’ve accounted for all eight hours even though you were present for only 7. I bill in .1 increments, but certain tasks have a mandatory minimum (e.g. drafting a specific type of document is a mandatory minimum .5). So if 8 tasks take 10 minutes each, and you’re billing to the .25, that’s 120 mins billed vs. 80 mins actually worked. There’s your extra 40 minutes right there. I think #4 needs to look at the timesheets more closely, do some math, and adjust their attitude accordingly.
Grimalkin* February 4, 2025 at 3:12 pm Honestly, this is where I thought the question was going myself. Even without mandatory minimums, and with billing by .1, there have been days where I bill more time than I’ve worked because I happened to have a lot of tasks that only take a minute or two to complete. (Think–sending a quick “here’s a file” or “thanks for the heads-up” email, uploading files to an electronic server, fixing a typo in a document, etc. Actual time maybe a minute or two each, but each one gets .1 billable time in.) And if you’re subdividing by shorter intervals it becomes even more likely–it’s not uncommon that I’ll hop on for the weekend and work for an hour real time but bill 1.2 hours, for instance. This isn’t guaranteed to be what’s happening here, but it’s plausible enough that I’d advise OP to investigate the possibility before assuming that what’s happening must be inaccurate time keeping and time theft instead.
Emmet Dash* February 4, 2025 at 12:29 pm I don’t enter hours directly, but when I submit my timesheet it fills in 8s for all the days I was present. Kind of an automated version of the same thing.
Insert Pun Here* February 4, 2025 at 7:33 am Probably the same system is used to track vacation time, sick time, etc. So really what it is tracking, in practical terms, is “I worked this day” versus “I was on vacation this day” versus “I was sick this day.”
MigraineMonth* February 4, 2025 at 10:45 am Exactly. In my system, you can also say “I used 2 hrs sick time to go to a medical appointment” or “I took a half-day vacation”, so it isn’t always full days either. Technically, my role is salaried *and* our contract specifies we get paid overtime if we’re required to work more than 40 hrs (thank you, union!), so we would log hours over 40 hrs/week if management ever tried to overload us.
TechWorker* February 4, 2025 at 7:33 am Sometimes you care about the split between projects/tasks but not the actual hours. For a while we used time tracking software that defaulted to an 8 hour day even though our schedule is 7.5 hrs, so had to make it clear to ppl that we weren’t suddenly expecting an additional half hour & they should scale accordingly.
AngryOctopus* February 4, 2025 at 8:11 am Tracking vacation and sick time, usually. I worked for a company who also did it because collaborators were paying for FTEs, so we had to have trackable auditable records of what projects people were working on (especially important when supplies were also paid for).
Katie* February 4, 2025 at 8:47 am My company folded bill by the hour to some clients but not for my specific client. Therefore I out 8 hrs regardless of the amount worked (except holidays, PTO and trainings)
Metal Gru* February 4, 2025 at 1:22 am Yes this seems like a situation where “use your words” will be enough to resolve it, because LW has already talked to Marty and Marty has changed his behavior in response (not in the way LW hoped, but I think that is just due to not being clear about time sheets and what they’re used for – especially if this is the first time Marty had worked in a “billable hours” environment). The other issue, not touched on in the answer, is why co-workers have access to each others’ time sheet? This strikes me as quite unusual as they normally just go to the manager, approver etc. Marty’s co-worker pointed this out (are you really sure they were well intentioned?) but why were they looking in there?
KateM* February 4, 2025 at 2:54 am I worked somewhere where the time sheet was just a shared excel file where everyone had their own tab to fill in. I as a new employee did look at other tabs because my manager told me to look how others do it so that I’d know how to fill in my own. Why a non-new would do it, I don’t really know.
AnonForThis* February 4, 2025 at 3:47 am This might not answer why non-new staff members would do this, but it’s an example of it happening. At my workplace we each have our own excel file to track our hours, but they’re in a shared folder along with everyone else’s. You’d be surprised how often someone goes and looks at other peoples hours and then goes to their manager to complain (and not even about people not doing enough hours). It’s always the same people, the site busybodies, and apparently it being a privacy issue isn’t enough to get them to stop.
Archi-detect* February 4, 2025 at 5:23 am That would stop immediately if managers refused to talk about the time issue and just focused on the privacy issue.
AnonForThis* February 4, 2025 at 6:04 am Thankfully my boss sort of has by basically telling us to move our team’s files citing data privacy. Why the busybodies keep getting away with this, I don’t know. I guess because they somehow argue that they’re monitoring time keeping policy and are managerial level? We have sister sites in other countries where I know they’d be out of the door if they even contemplated it.
Christmas Carol* February 4, 2025 at 8:29 am And for the busybodies to make sure they use a special “snooping on my co-workers” code to account for the time that they spend doing this.
Observer* February 4, 2025 at 9:38 am It’s always the same people, the site busybodies Exactly! And your management is to blame here, because they should be shutting it down. Hard.
MigraineMonth* February 4, 2025 at 10:51 am At my job everyone has their own sheet in a single excel file, and the hours are totaled on the front sheet that you have to initial to indicate you’ve entered all your hours. I could see at a glance exactly how many hours all of my coworkers logged in the last two weeks. I can’t be bothered to check. My DGAF about what my coworkers are doing has reached critical levels.
Observer* February 4, 2025 at 9:35 am The other issue, not touched on in the answer, is why co-workers have access to each others’ time sheet? This strikes me as quite unusual as they normally just go to the manager, approver etc. Yeah, that struck me too. Marty’s co-worker pointed this out (are you really sure they were well intentioned?) but why were they looking in there? That, too. Unless people need to pick up his slack, why are they looking and *reporting* this? And why are you signaling that this is acceptable? Even if Hamilton really is well meaning, which I have to wonder about, this is *still* not OK.
fhqwhgads* February 4, 2025 at 10:52 am Since client billing is involved, it’s possible the other employees aren’t so much looking at Marty’s timesheet, as they are able to see what Marty’s billing (depending on their role in the billable work, there are lots of reasons to be permitted to see that). And if they’re seeing the billing, and seeing Marty not-being-at-work, it’s reasonable to have raised it to OP.
Karo* February 4, 2025 at 11:24 am Yep, this. I work at a company that requires billing of hours to clients. In our system, if Marty and I are working on a project together, I’ll be able to see how many hours he’s billing to that project. And if the project has a budget of 16 hours and he is over-billing, that means I have less time to do my work.
GammaGirl1908* February 4, 2025 at 3:30 am A lot of places are less concerned about butt-in-seat time as long as your work is done. I’ve passed by places like law firms that say things like, if you do so much as think about a case while you’re at home, charge the client for 15 minutes. If Marty’s doing anything off the clock, he might be counting that time toward his work time. It’s not clear, just how much Marty is shaving off, but if it’s less than 15 minutes or so, and if he’s doing anything off the clock, this might fall in the nickel-and-diming category.
Myrin* February 4, 2025 at 4:38 am It’s not clear, just how much Marty is shaving off, but if it’s less than 15 minutes or so, and if he’s doing anything off the clock, this might fall in the nickel-and-diming category. OP says Marty is “effectively billing about 45 extra minutes each day”.
6-minute egg timer* February 4, 2025 at 6:08 am Since they are billing to clients, I wonder if Marty comes from a firm with a different billing increment system. Is it possible that this is just a carryover of rounding time under one system to the other? Obviously an issue that needs addressing. The likelihood of this depends on how common this time system is or if it a total industry no-brainer. I know the 15 minute/.25 places are more common in some fields, but my field is almost exclusively .1/6 minutes. converting to a .25 would make my head spin. At least in a .1 system, I feel there is more precision per client, but can optimize billing across clients. No clue how a .25 would work…but in .1 land, it is possible that from 8:00-8:06, someone bills more than .1 (ex. 3 minute task for A, different 3 minute task for B). I can’t speak for other systems, but in mine I can see how billed minutes could definitely exceed clock minutes when considering multiple clients at play.
Hastily Blessed Fritos* February 4, 2025 at 7:24 am As someone who doesn’t do billable hours, that double-dipping really bothers me. Is that three minutes really the only work you do on either client that day, so that you can’t say you spent 3 minutes on Client A (which I’d be fine with rounding up, that’s pretty standard – just like the plumber will charge half an hour labor for ten minutes of work) and a total of 18 on Client B, and bill accordingly? Otherwise this seems to encourage rapid task switching so you’re always billing multiple clients per increment.
Karo* February 4, 2025 at 11:35 am Honestly it depends on the system. Sometimes I do genuinely only have 10 minutes of work for the client for the day. Other times, I have 10 minutes on a single task and 40 minutes on another task, but they have to be billed separately because they’re separate projects.
Sovreignry* February 4, 2025 at 1:43 pm Just from my perspective here, our minimum for a task is 0.1, so if you say, have a 2 minute phone call and then a three minute phone call, those are both 0.1. Also, if I have a phone call and then do work on some other part of the file, I cannot combine those. (We call it block billing and it’s a great way to get your bill bounced by some bean counter in an insurance office in Ohio.) Each individual task has to be blocked off, and if the minimum is 0.1, than that’s what you have to put. (Don’t get me started on how sometimes I review three separate documents that are each ~5 pages and I have to bill 0.1 for each review.)
Karo* February 4, 2025 at 11:27 am I bill in 15-minute increments and yeah, there are definitely times where billed minutes exceeds clock minutes. If I work 10 minutes each on 3 tasks, that’s only 30 minutes IRL but it’s enough that we have to charge for 15 minutes. (Of course on the other end – if I only work 3 minutes on a task, it doesn’t get billed.) That said – it shouldn’t happen so often that you can shave off an hour of work every day.
Coverage Associate* February 4, 2025 at 12:26 pm When I was a paralegal, I was by statute non exempt, but I had a billable expectation of 8 hours per work day, same as the exempt lawyers. The only way to hit that target without overtime was to have and arrange my tasks with rounding up. Looking back, maybe my firm’s expectations were unethical to clients. They were certainly extremely frustrating to me. Since then, most places I’ve worked have lower billable targets for paralegals than for lawyers, to account for administrative time they have to be paid for but can’t bill for.
fhqwhgads* February 4, 2025 at 11:01 am What you just said highlights how Marty misunderstood OP’s original conversation about this. OP told Marty to notify is working non-standard hours – the implication being “you’re not here that many hours, so if you’re working this many hours, but elsewhere or at another time, tell me that”. So Marty started announcing the leaving at 4:30p, which OP already knew was happening, and wasn’t really the point. What Marty has not done is announce any other working, outside the 8:15-4:30 window, which would’ve been the more logical response to the initial conversation. Since the letter says both he’s taking an hour lunch AND says Marty’s shaving 45 minutes a day, every day. So it’s not really nickel-and-diming territory.
Smurfette* February 4, 2025 at 4:37 am If people don’t know what the timesheets are used for, they are less likely to fill them in correctly / appropriately. At my very first consulting job, I used to log the exact time I worked every day, rounded to the nearest 15 minutes. My boss found it amusing and told me it was unnecessary. I said I was more comfortable doing it that way. #adhd #autism 15 years later I just log 8 hours a day, unless I actually took time off. I work more-or-less 40 hours a week, so it all comes out in the wash, and the client is going to billed for 40 hours anyway, as per the contract, so nobody cares if I worked 9h15m one day and 7h45m the next day.
Yankees fans are awesome!* February 4, 2025 at 6:12 pm Intetesting. I’d care primarily for two reasons: if I needed to file a worker’s comp. claim and had to show I was working at the time of injury; and if I was accused of a committing a crime or suspected of committing one, and needed to prove my whereabouts as an air-tight alibi. That’s mainly why I miss time stamps.
Nodramalama* February 4, 2025 at 7:03 am I feel like any job that uses phrases like billables know that it’s not the same as timesheets. When I bill I bill against a specific matter so that we can track it to the amounts clients have agreed to pay. So what matter is the employee billing their time against?
el l* February 4, 2025 at 7:19 am Yeah, people at places like mine with billable hours do need to hear “what counts as a billable hour?” It’s determined by culture. Most important here: Does lunch count? Some places, yes, it does – if you’re having leftovers at your desk, sure, no need to be precious. The time doesn’t count if you’re say heading out to meet outside friends, but a lot of places leave you that room for judgment and he may have worked at one. Other comment: The initial framing of outside hours was really confusing. Not surprised he didn’t get the message.
Falling Diphthong* February 4, 2025 at 7:35 am I feel like OP went so far in the direction of “I don’t want it to sound to Marty like I’m accusing him of deliberate and malicious time theft” that they landed on a position where Marty still has no idea that what he’s doing is getting perceived as deliberate and malicious time theft by his boss and coworkers.
Pastor Petty Labelle* February 4, 2025 at 9:17 am yeah, hours you work and the billing needs to reflect that are two different things. To OP who has been there awhile, the connection is obvious. To someone new, not so much.
MigraineMonth* February 4, 2025 at 11:03 am The OP kind of lost me too! I thought the issue would be that Marty was billing customers for time he wasn’t working, which would get the company in trouble. Except the OP never mentions customers, and the places I’ve worked no one could bill all 8 hours a day–they had significant “overhead” like site meetings, 1:1 management, bathroom breaks, etc. OP also talks about workload and working non-standard hours, so is the bigger problem that Marty isn’t working full 8 hours per day he is supposed to but leaving every day at 4:30pm?
PegS* February 4, 2025 at 2:12 pm Exactly. I also feel like the OP just didn’t make it clear enough that he needed to be accurate.
Lacey* February 4, 2025 at 9:01 am Yup, the place I work for is the same. Now, having plenty of experience with places that aren’t like that, I would never assume it of then next place. But if this guy only has that experience, he probably doesn’t realize he’s causing an issue.
Mockingjay* February 4, 2025 at 9:36 am Professional exempt here. On corporate paper, I’m salaried. But my work is on a federal contract, so the company bills hours back to the government. I have to keep a log of all tasks and work performed and track the hours expended for each thing to account for the billing. And yes, I have a standard 8 hour workday, including unpaid lunch. (We have a fair amount of flex in taking long or short lunches, as long as we can demonstrate 8 billable hours.) It’s surprising how often this kind of billing isn’t explained to most employees. I get the confusion; most offer letters only state job and salary/wage. You onboard with NewCo and your supervisor tells you about the complicated job codes for your timesheet and the weekly task report you have to submit, but they don’t explain the “why” – billing – you have to do all these things.
Coverage Associate* February 4, 2025 at 12:35 pm At least once upon a time in California, you got X hours of sick time for every y hours worked. Typically, as an exempt employee, I could be lax about entering my administrative time (time not billed to a client). There was no difference in the amount billed to the client, and no difference in my pay, so what did it matter if I took 45 minutes for a team lunch or an hour for internal training? Yes, partners like to say they want to track how much administrative time lawyers are putting in, but I have never seen them act on that information, and there’s better ways to track that, like counting up all the required non client meetings in a month. But with the California law, they wanted to keep track of administrative time so they could allot us sick time.
LL* February 4, 2025 at 3:55 pm Yeah, I’m non-exempt, but many jobs at my current company also work like this.
JJ* February 4, 2025 at 12:51 am #1. Clearly the DEI rep mishandled this one. It doesn’t matter if it was about being trans or owning cats, talking to just the DEI team vs the whole company is completely different, and requires a different comfort level. But it sounds like you are upset you were ‘outed’ itself. Given that you felt comfortable enough to have they/them pronouns in your signature and wear a mixed wardrobe, how is one to know that you are only out in the immediate team? Is one supposed to never mention that an acquaintance is out to a third party, unless they give you explicit permission? How would I handle a question from a seemingly well-meaning colleague, asking “is so-and-so trans”? Do I say, “ask them directly”, even if I think it’s pretty clear? And is asking if someone is trans, fundamentally rude?
Ellis Bell* February 4, 2025 at 2:18 am Because they’re the DEI rep? Someone in that position should know that “being out on a personal level with people I’ve vetted” and “being out to my entire company (and therefore industry) on a public platform” are different levels of vulnerability. You can’t really compare something on this scale to mentioning someone being out to an acquaintance, but I would say if someone comes out to you, you should ask if they’re out to everyone generally, or if you need to be discreet, or what they’d want support to look like.
OP#1* February 4, 2025 at 2:45 am I didn’t include this in the letter to keep things short, but we’re fully remote and my team only see each other in person once a month. The nature of my work means I have very little face-to-face contact with people outside my department besides clients (where I can dress more conservatively on Zoom), and the distance has made me more comfortable being out to my immediate coworkers and wearing what I like in our weekly team calls. The DEI leader is (in her own words) a cis woman with she/they in her email signature, so there’s a perception from the wider company that anyone using ‘they’ is signalling their allyship instead of declaring anything about themselves. It’s not always worth using my capital or getting into uncomfortable discussions to correct people like my grand boss who reverted immediately to calling me ‘he’ in the next sentence after I introduce myself as ‘they’ wearing a dress.
Notbot* February 4, 2025 at 3:13 am Ug, goes without saying that a better show of allyship than the pronouns would be to not out you to 800 people. I’m sorry this happened to you, OP.
Great Frogs of Literature* February 4, 2025 at 8:46 am Ooof. I’m not trans, but I am queer, and I’m also “out” at work, in that I don’t hide it, but I’m not broadcasting it to all of my thousand coworkers. I’m comfortable mentioning my wife one-on-on, or to a smaller slack channel, but if someone sent out an all-staff email explicitly listing my labels or relationship, I would feel INCREDIBLY put on the spot, even if I might willingly make the decision to disclose, under the right circumstances. Heck, I was annoyed when there was a change to our HR system that no one announced, so that everyone directly above you in the management chain can now see your emergency contacts and how they’re related to you. While I don’t really care if my boss knows that I have a wife, I wanted to be in control of how he got that information, rather than being outed by the HR system. And I’m very aware that if I had a different boss — or if I suddenly started having different people in my reporting chain — I might be a lot less comfortable with my supervisors knowing. I’m sorry your DEI person is this clueless about something this important.
I should really pick a name* February 4, 2025 at 9:00 am there’s a perception from the wider company that anyone using ‘they’ is signalling their allyship instead of declaring anything about themselves Does that mean that people are using “they” out of solidarity, not because it reflects their actual gender identification? If so, that doesn’t seem helpful.
Anonymoose* February 4, 2025 at 9:42 am I was thinking the same thing, that it isn’t helpful and I’m rather annoyed. I use they/she because I would prefer that people use ‘they’ but I’m still okay with ‘she’. I included an explanation that says this so people are aware, and also because I had a kind yet confused coworker ask if someone using both is transitioning. I’m thankful no one here seems inclined to use the wrong pronouns!
Observer* February 4, 2025 at 9:47 am I also found that confusing. If so, that doesn’t seem helpful. It actually seems counterproductive to me. If someone actually prefers to use “they” that’s one thing. But if that person actually goes by “she” or “he” but just puts “they” in the signature block it kind of actually confuses the issue. Because that creates a situation where people can’t tell what pronouns a person actually uses.
misspiggy* February 4, 2025 at 10:46 am That’s what I’d thought too. Isn’t the point of pronouns in one’s email signature to declare allyship? But like, correct ones.
Starbuck* February 4, 2025 at 1:12 pm Not everyone is rigid about “correct” pronouns, though. I default to she/her but nobody is wrong if they “they” me – it’s a gender neutral pronoun that can refer to anyone, after all.
Onyx* February 4, 2025 at 12:11 pm As a non-binary person who’s not “out,” I see nothing wrong or counterproductive with a binary person having “they” among their pronouns *as long as they’re actually OK with people referring to them in that way.* Listed pronouns are there to tell people how they should refer to you, not to be an announcement of your personal gender identity. That’s why listing pronouns at all as an ally is encouraged–so listing your pronouns isn’t tantamount to announcing that you’re trans. The problem here is that people at this workplace apparently treat “they” in someone’s pronouns as an “I’m am ally” flag rather than actually using those pronouns for the person. Personally, I don’t list pronouns when it’s optional because *my* practical preference is “My pronouns are I/me–pick what you see fit; none of the common ones will bother me, and if you’re *trying* to be nasty about it, it’ll probably come out in more important ways anyway.” Most people assume she/her, and that’s fine. They/them would be great, but it’s not important enough to me to “out” myself. (He/him would be delightful for the novelty if nothing else, but I’m not gonna hold my breath.) Cis people listing they/them as options for themselves, being genuinely open to other people referring to them as such, and correctly using other people’s pronouns (including sometimes they/themming people who invite that), would actually be fantastic for me because I wouldn’t have to pick between “actively label myself ‘she/her’ which people are going to take as a declaration that I am a binary woman” or “out myself as probably not cis” any time I have to provide pronouns.
Observer* February 4, 2025 at 1:30 pm I see nothing wrong or counterproductive with a binary person having “they” among their pronouns *as long as they’re actually OK with people referring to them in that way.* ~~snip~~ Cis people listing they/them as options for themselves, being genuinely open to other people referring to them as such, and correctly using other people’s pronouns (including sometimes they/themming people who invite that), That’s the key to my confusion. I could be misreading what the LW wrote, but that does not sound like what the DEI chief is actually doing. The LW says that they have been mis-gendered despite being clear about using “they”. And the DEI chief’s “they” in her signature is being taken as a declaration of allyship, rather than a declaration that she is as open to being referred to as “they” as “she”. The latter is either a sign of cluelessness – she doesn’t realize what is happening here – or she’s being deliberately obnoxious.
Starbuck* February 4, 2025 at 1:09 pm Pronouns aren’t the same as your gender identity, though. It’s just whatever you’re willing to accept. It’s not necessarily declaring any particular thing. Most people default to she/her pronouns for me, but I also get they/them in certain crowds. I don’t really care, either is fine. Being referred to with a gender-neutral option is always ok with me though I wouldn’t necessarily label myself as trans or nb. I assume people putting ‘they’ in an email signature are willing to accept it, even if it’s not their “default” and they aren’t nb. Which is fine, right?
Observer* February 4, 2025 at 1:32 pm I assume people putting ‘they’ in an email signature are willing to accept it, even if it’s not their “default” and they aren’t nb. Which is fine, right? Yes. That’s totally good. But my question is whether that’s actually the case with the DEI chief. LW, what’s your sense of how she would react if someone referred to her as “they” in real life?
Notbot* February 4, 2025 at 7:22 pm The thing that my autistic brain has difficulty with on the she/they thing when you are cis is that she/her conveys the same thing because, despite what transphobes would have you believe, being fine with the singular they is the default because it’s grammatically correct and used colloquially all the time. Transphobes only react badly to it because they’ve politicised it, they will probably have been referred to by the singular they and used the singular they millions of times before they decided it was wrong and they were unable to do it or be referred to that way. I find it really unhelpful now to know what the person’s preferences actually are, particularly as my understanding was originally it was used by gender fluid people to indicate that they would like you to consciously try to not use just one all the time. Now it signifies nothing about how I should approach that person’s pronouns. But at the end of the day, it is the same issue around the use of the word “partner” for heterosexual couples. The argument of co-opting queer coded language vs the normalisation of non-gendered language. I know of a few queer people who have felt disappointed to find out that someone is not queer when they previously thought they were and had found someone they related to because the heterosexual person was using the word “partner”. People on both sides have good reasons for why they are on the sides that they are.
Elsajeni* February 5, 2025 at 12:14 pm Well… being fine with the singular they as applied to you, specifically, by a person who knows your gender/pronouns, is not the default actually! I think you’re conflating the day-to-day use of singular they as in “oh, someone left their wallet, I hope they come back for it” with using it for a known person as in “oh, Evelyn left their wallet” — lots of people are NOT cool with the second one, and if Evelyn lists her pronouns as she/her, I would not advise phrasing a sentence that way. (It’s worth noting that this is specifically a way that binary trans people are often misgendered, also sometimes called degendering — if Evelyn is a trans woman, some people who aren’t comfortable using her correct pronouns will say things like “oh, this person named Evelyn at my work dropped their wallet today and…” and then take refuge in “but gender-neutral language is universal! I’m not misgendering Evelyn!” if called out on it.)
MigraineMonth* February 4, 2025 at 11:15 am I’m a cis woman who puts “she/they” in my signature, because I use either she/her/hers or they/their/theirs pronouns. Pronouns are frequently related to gender identity, but they don’t always map perfectly. Some masc nonbinary people only use he. Some cis people use nonbinary pronouns. Some people don’t want any pronouns used for them at all.
Judge Judy and Executioner* February 4, 2025 at 9:22 am I just wanted to say I’m sorry this happened to you, OP. I’ve been burned by the DEI leader’s ineptitude before, and it is always much more hurtful than if it came from a random colleague. When someone takes on DEI, either by profession or by delegation, there is an expectation they will at least do some training or learning to shore up their education in DEI. This rarely happens in my experience, and well-meaning employees try to help but end up over-extending themselves, thrown under the bus if something goes wrong, or ignored/pushed aside when they point out easy, free things the company could already be doing. I wish this weren’t the case, but I’ve seen it firsthand, and I wanted to let you know that you are not alone. This was genuinely crappy behavior from your DEI leader, it wasn’t right, and I’m sorry this happened.
nonbinary and tired* February 4, 2025 at 12:14 pm I agree that someone should not be signed up for a public speaking gig when they agreed only to a conversation, but I don’t see how OP #1 was “outed.” Putting “they” pronouns in your email signature identifies you to the world as falling somewhere within the trans* spectrum. I am nonbinary myself, and if I see “they” pronouns below someone’s signature, or hear them identify themselves as “they” in a business meeting, then I know that they are openly nonbinary and proceed to speak of them accordingly. We have enough real problems in the world, what with the head of state declaring that we don’t exist. Let’s not claim that somebody injured us by outing us when all they did was act in accordance with our own clearly stated preferences. Again, public panel: Not cool, but only because OP hadn’t signed up for public speaking.
Judge Judy and Executioner* February 4, 2025 at 1:44 pm I disagree; it is quite different for an individual to use pronouns in an email signature vs. telling 800 people someone is transgender. When pronouns are in an email signature, the audience is much smaller. Even if the email is forwarded to more people, it is not reaching everyone in the company. There is also a chance people won’t even read the signature. When it’s broadcast to the entire company that someone is speaking about their transgender experience without their permission, that is outing someone. It could create real problems for OP1 when they may have been able to fly under the radar, even with their pronouns. I’ve witnessed some extremely rude comments to transgender employees, and I could see where OP would want to avoid that.
Notbot* February 4, 2025 at 3:02 am There’s a big difference between confirming something when directly asked by one person and emailing it to 800 people.
Smurfette* February 4, 2025 at 4:31 am > How would I handle a question from a seemingly well-meaning colleague, asking “is so-and-so trans”? Do I say, “ask them directly”, even if I think it’s pretty clear? Yes, you do say that. Or you say “why are you asking me, shouldn’t you be asking them?” It’s not for you to disclose someone else’s personal information or speculate on your colleague’s private lives. Is Andy pregnant? Why doesn’t Kim bring a partner to the office party? Is Mike in rehab again? Does James have a prosthetic leg? Does Martha have breast implants? None of those are your questions to answer. Nobody should be asking them either.
Ess Ess* February 4, 2025 at 9:52 am Personally, my response would be “why does it matter?” I would not tell them to go ask directly because that is just encouraging someone to ask for information that isn’t their business and has nothing to do with the job.
MigraineMonth* February 4, 2025 at 11:25 am I’m involved in collecting health data from a vulnerable population, and have been extremely frustrated with state guidelines on collecting gender information. (Our current categories are “male”, “female” and “unknown”, to give you an idea of the depth of the issue.) I did find a lovely guide for sensitively asking for gender information. The very first question in the guide, which I hope to take forward into my life and interactions with my fellow human beings, was, “Do you actually need to know?”
Nonsense pt2* February 4, 2025 at 6:20 am Yes, you do say “ask them directly.” Same as you would if someone asked you if Alice was pregnant or if Dylan had dyed his hair. And you obviously know that, because you spelled it out in your rhetorical.
TechWorker* February 4, 2025 at 7:58 am Personally I wouldn’t even ask directly, if they want to volunteer the info that’s up to them. (I also wouldn’t ask a colleague if they were pregnant directly).
MigraineMonth* February 4, 2025 at 11:26 am I’d go with, “Wow, that’s a really personal question.” Same as you would if someone asked you if Alice was pregnant or if Dylan had dyed his hair.
rebelwithmouseyhair* February 4, 2025 at 1:27 pm But it’s rude to ask if someone is pregnant! I would never ask about someone’s gender or marital status or anything. You get it wrong, you apologise and try very hard to remember for next time.
bamcheeks* February 4, 2025 at 7:13 am I actually don’t think this is quite as straight-forward as some of the other commenters. I think if I got a question like, “is so-and-so trans?” I’d probably say something like, “Err– I don’t know exactly how they identify”, because I don’t like assigning identities to people unless I’m absolutely, 100% sure that’s how they identify and someone they would want it shared with, and I don’t think there are many colleagues I’d have that confidence about (same for ethnic and neurodiverse/disabled identities.) But if I was talking about someone with they/them pronouns in their signature or social media, that is how I’d refer to them when talking to a third party, which is outing them as some flavour of trans/non-binary/not-cis. But it is important to recognise that being in / out isn’t a binary state, the way it used to be talked about back in the 70s, when the concept of “coming out” was first gaining currency. “Coming out” tended to mean firstly admitting to yourself you were queer or trans, and then telling other people, and it was generally talked about as a single event. Even back then, people’s lives were generally much more complicated than that, and privacy and discretion are much more useful ways of thinking about it! It should be quite easy to understand that someone doesn’t necessarily want, “Congrats to Fergus on the birth of Xavier Fergusson on the 26th November” blasted out on an 800-person email list, but that, “Yeah, I heard Fergus had a son around the end of November” is usually going to be OK in a two-person conversation. That’s not about someone being unusually sensitive about their identity: it’s just normal privacy and discretion, and having some level of control over the mass broadcast of personal information. I don’t think you need to make it more complicated than that.
MigraineMonth* February 4, 2025 at 11:33 am Yeah, being “out” usually has a modifier. =>”I’m out with my friends, but not to my parents.” =>”I’m out socially, but not at work.” =>”I’m out except for officially once a year when I work for this really socially conservative organization. It’s weird to go back in the closet, especially when so many of my colleagues know the truth, but I think working there is something I have to do to bring about change from within.” [real example]
Jenesis* February 4, 2025 at 2:03 pm But if I was talking about someone with they/them pronouns in their signature or social media, that is how I’d refer to them when talking to a third party, which is outing them Eh, not necessarily! “They/them” is delightfully ambiguous in this regard. If I refer to someone as “they” it could mean they have specifically stated they use they/them pronouns. Or it could mean that they have a gender-neutral user/name, haven’t stated their pronouns, and I’ve never met them in person, so therefore I don’t have any basis on which to assume a binary gender. Where it becomes tricky is using neopronouns like fae/faer, but I assume if someone is willing to state neopronouns in their email signature they are not so afraid of being “outed” in social conversation that they expect their coworkers to only use those pronouns at work and nowhere else.
Jane* February 4, 2025 at 10:59 pm I mean, I think you can refer to anyone in the third person as “they,” maybe unless you know the person to have a really strong preference for a gendered pronoun? I occasionally use “they” for people I know are cis – sometimes it fits better in a sentence or sometimes I just want to convey the idea without any reference to the person’s gender. But maybe there are folks who, as a rule, assume that if someone refers to a person as “they,” it means that that person goes by they/them pronouns. And maybe there are folks who would be really bothered to be referred to as “they” instead of “she” or “he”? Lots of room for variation. For my own view, I feel that using “they” in a more general way helps standardize its usage as a gender neutral pronoun. As a feminist, I am also in favor of de-emphasizing gender in any occasions where it’s genuinely irrelevant to the message being conveyed. So I think “they” is a useful pronoun in multiple ways not just for those for whom it’s their preferred pronoun.
TPS reporter* February 4, 2025 at 7:57 am I don’t think asking the person directly if they’re trans is a good option. why not say- they use they/them pronouns which is all they have directly communicated to the team. please respect that choice. I would say the same if co workers were pressing for other sensitive details about a team member, like ethnicity, religion, medical status. or even non sensitive details- it’s okay to ask but don’t push to get those details. encourage them to respect personal boundaries, this is work and we don’t want to create an uncomfortable if not outright hostile environment
Daughter of Ada and Grace* February 4, 2025 at 8:44 am I was in a similar situation – the coworker had they/them pronouns in their signature, but hadn’t made any other references. I did ask my coworker, but I didn’t ask if they were trans/non-binary. I asked if they wanted me to remind other people to use the correct pronouns, and based my behavior on their answer. (This conversation was also face-to-face, when very few people were in the office.)
Daughter of Ada and Grace* February 4, 2025 at 10:24 am (And for a little extra clarity – I have no idea if this coworker considers themself trans. They mentioned being non-binary during our conversation, but we did not discuss what that meant to them in terms of a cis/trans distinction. It wasn’t relevant to our work then, and it remains irrelevant now.)
metadata minion* February 4, 2025 at 8:17 am As someone else who slowly came out at work in a similar manner, I can tell you that almost nobody except other trans people notices pronouns in signatures. It’s a great way to essentially come out to just the people who are going to be cool about it. I can’t speak for the LW, but when I was at a similar point in coming-out-ness, I would have been fine with pretty much any individual person at work learning I was nonbinary, but having the entire staff be told all at once — including people who might not even have met me yet — is a very different thing.
Nebula* February 4, 2025 at 8:53 am 100% – people rarely read pronouns in email signatures, in my experience. I was loathe to put my pronouns on my Zoom account, just because I don’t like it aesthetically, but I have to say that’s been way more effective in terms of getting people to clock the pronouns.
I should really pick a name* February 4, 2025 at 9:28 am How would I handle a question from a seemingly well-meaning colleague, asking “is so-and-so trans”? My suggested response is “why do you ask? Would that affect anything for you?” I can think of very few reasons a co-worker would need an answer to that question. “What pronouns do they use” is reasonable. “Are they trans” isn’t.
Wendy T* February 4, 2025 at 2:21 pm This is a pretty hostile and unhelpful response to a well-meaning question.
iglwif* February 4, 2025 at 11:38 am How would I handle a question from a seemingly well-meaning colleague, asking “is so-and-so trans”? Do I say, “ask them directly”, even if I think it’s pretty clear? There are a lot of very personal questions that I wouldn’t answer about someone else, and yeah, this is one of ’em. I also wouldn’t confirm or deny that someone is a citizen or PR of my country, their sexual orientation, their home address, whether their kids were conceived via assisted reproduction, or how they spend their weekends. Some of those would be rude questions to ask the person directly, some wouldn’t, but none of the answers are mine to share about someone else! And is asking if someone is trans, fundamentally rude? I’m not trans so I’m not the person to answer this question. I will say that when people ask me about my own labels — which they sometimes do, because I am out as a bi woman and also have been married to a man for almost 30 years, and some folks (especially older folks IME) just cannot get their heads around that on their own — my perception of whether the question is rude isn’t just about the question itself but about the tone in which it’s ask, the reason they’re asking, my existing relationship with the person, and the general vibe.
Viette* February 4, 2025 at 12:54 am LW#4 – this is a great letter because I can absolutely see how the LW thought they were straightforwardly addressing the issue, but then, when written up to send to AAM, it is quite clear that they did not actually mention the thing that they wanted to see change. The advice is correct: you must go and have a conversation in which you state the problem clearly, but you may even want to state that you meant to be talking about this before, too. “At our previous discussion about billing your time, I asked that you inform me if you work outside of normal hours, and asked after your workload. That was prompted by my concern that you are regularly in the office for fewer hours than you bill each day. Can you tell me more about that?” It depends on your relationship and management style, but it may be a natural lead-in to connect the dots. It also establishes that you’ve noticed this for a while, and have not just now changed your mind about what’s okay.
Metal Gru* February 4, 2025 at 1:32 am Letter 2 – co-worker keeps interfering in LW’s work. I think there are 2 problems here. The first one is that she keeps doing this and her manager isn’t doing anything about it (which means that the manager is OK with it happening; why is that? Is there a lack of trust in your team that the “correct” solution will be proposed to clients?) The second is that the organizational structure seems a mess. There are multiple teams of people, with the same roles on them and different management, but sermingly no clear direction from upper management about who is “allocated” to which clients (not stated but I’ve inferred from how I’ve seen this kind of situation happen many times!). Even if it is just something simple like the client likes working with her as they worked with her before she moved team – this probably needs solving at higher levels. Does she do it across the board or is there a pattern with specific types of work or specific clients- that may give a clue.
Weegie* February 4, 2025 at 4:03 am I had a problem colleague exactly like the one LW 2 describes and, as you suggest, management and organisational structure weren’t helping. Overall, colleague routinely overstepped mightily and created a huge mess that the rest of us with the same job title and our own client groups were continually having to sort out without making it look as though we were all incompetent. Management was ineffective, and no amount of patiently explaining why interfering in our work was undermining us and causing confusion had any effect on this colleague. I agree with Alison that speaking in person and very directly to your coworker is necessary. I had a certain amount of success by abandoning diplomacy and collegiality and telling my colleague bluntly that they were not to contact any of my clients, ever, that it wasn’t ‘helpful’, and that they were stepping on my toes. The same behaviour would start to creep back in, though, and ultimately I had to freeze the person out entirely – fortunately we didn’t share an office, which made it easier. Essentially, we had to silo our clients and make them off-limits. It didn’t make for a pleasant atmosphere, and we had to be constantly on the lookout for the next round of interference, but it was the only thing that got the message across.
Observer* February 4, 2025 at 9:59 am The first one is that she keeps doing this and her manager isn’t doing anything about it (which means that the manager is OK with it happening; While I agree that this is a problem, it’s quite possible that the manager is not *ok* per se, but is just a poor manager – too wimpy, not clear on how to exert authority, etc. We see lots of examples of this all the time. I mean, look at the letter #4. That LW is a manager who is *not* OK with what their employee is doing, but still has not figured out how to make it stop. To their credit they have reached out for help, but in the meantime it’s still happening. The second is that the organizational structure seems a mess. Totally agree. Which is why I would add to Alison’s advice to say that if escalating your both managers doesn’t do the trick, it may be time to escalate it further up the chain.
OP#2* February 4, 2025 at 10:30 am Yes, we are a bit of a mess because we had several reorgs in just 2 years. Some people were transferred to other teams, sometimes within the same department but in many cases they were assigned a totally different team. The clients are internal teams in our company. I do not think her manager thinks we are going to propose incorrect solutions. It feels more that they are trying to “score” points to show their impact. They have been asked in several occasions to loop us with overlapping tasks – or to drop those tasks entirely – but they have gone ahead and complete them even after being told to stop.
AD* February 4, 2025 at 10:46 am It feels more that they are trying to “score” points to show their impact. They have been asked in several occasions to loop us with overlapping tasks – or to drop those tasks entirely – but they have gone ahead and complete them even after being told to stop. Then this does sound like a higher-level problem that your manager (and the other manager) need to iron out.
Momma Bear* February 4, 2025 at 4:26 pm I also think LW2 needs to document the impact of this behavior, especially if they were billing to a particular contract.
In A Green Shade* February 4, 2025 at 1:36 am Not outing someone as trans isn’t just a matter of politeness, it’s a matter of safety. Now more than ever, if LW1 is in the US. To answer your questions: No, don’t mention that someone is trans to a third party. If someone asks you if someone else is trans, you should direct them to ask that person directly or, better still, to NOT ask unless they have a good reason for needing to know. And in most workplace situations, asking if someone is trans is excessively personal and could come across, in these times, as threatening. You can ask someone’s pronouns if you genuinely don’t know, but anything beyond that isn’t your business. Caveat that while I am trans, I don’t speak for every trans person. But I think what I’ve said is a good basic guideline.
epicdemiologist* February 4, 2025 at 10:22 am I liken this to someone asking me for my colleague’s (or relative’s, or friend’s) home address and phone number. I don’t give out other people’s personal info without their explicit consent ahead of time.
whatchamacallit* February 4, 2025 at 11:56 am I am cis, so my perspective is not that important here, but I would NEVER ask if someone is trans, and I would be very uncomfortable if someone else asked me if someone in our workplace was trans. I don’t see how there’s a reason for someone to know that information, except, I don’t know, MAYBE a medical emergency where medical history is relevant? I would likely just say “I don’t think that’s an appropriate question” or something along those lines. I would also never ask someone I worked with if they were trans directly unless we had a very close relationship or something – even then, probably not, if someone wants to share that information with you, they will. There are very few situations I can think of where that is relevant or appropriate information I need in the workplace. I have managed a trans person once and I just made sure people knew the appropriate pronouns. (People were defaulting to they/them despite those not being the pronouns this person went by, which was irritating, as this person had been clear on how they wanted to be addressed. However, this just involved going ‘hey, so and so goes by this, please be mindful,’ not announcing ‘so and so is trans.’)
Dahlia* February 4, 2025 at 3:07 pm What medical emergency would someone being trans be relevant for? Because them being trans doesn’t actually tell you their medical history. I’m honestly confused by that idea.
amoeba* February 5, 2025 at 10:35 am I guess something like a trans man suffering an (early) miscarriage/other gynecological problem? Not sure who’d be the one asking though – the medical personnel though, sure, that would be pretty relevant for them.
In A Green Shade* February 4, 2025 at 3:39 pm Thank you for standing firm on the pronouns issue for your report. I had a delightful experience early in my transition when a coworker kept they/them-ing me (my pronouns are he/him and coworker knew it) or avoided using any pronouns at all. When, in the midst of an already difficult conversation about something unrelated, I rather testily asked her to stop misgendering me, she started to cry and demanded that HR be brought in because she “felt attacked.” It all turned out fine–I have a very supportive workplace–but it was still scary. It’s nice when people recognize incorrect they/them-ing for the micro-aggression it is.
I Have RBF* February 4, 2025 at 2:27 pm I’m non-binary, but I always default to “I have no idea, ask them.” if someone asks me if someone is trans. Why? It’s a) not my business, and b) not my job to know what someone else has in their pants.
In A Green Shade* February 4, 2025 at 3:25 pm This was meant as a reply to JJ’s comment above, but obviously I threadfailed, sorry!
Keymaster of Gozer (She/Her)* February 4, 2025 at 3:34 am 1. Goddess I’m horrified but also not surprised. The people who think there’s no difference between being open in day to day life and being broadcast to the world are legion. And it’s really hard to explain why it’s so horrific. Hmm. Guess it’s like being open to colleagues and then having your status shoved on a corporate website front page to advertise a seminar. Ultimately it boils down to consent. Which I’d hope any DEI person would have a grounding on! I sincerely hope you get an apology. A real one, not a ‘I’m sorry you feel this way’ type.
a trans person* February 4, 2025 at 2:11 pm I’m with you on the horror but I’m also so far past accepting even “real” apologies. This HR person committed actual violence, given the world today.
Wendy T* February 4, 2025 at 4:04 pm Conflict is not Abuse and I would not say any physical violence occurred in this particular situation.
Smurfette* February 4, 2025 at 5:10 am OP2 – this is so frustrating. >Since she changed teams, she has been “suggesting improvements” or inserting herself in tasks that are under my scope and outside of hers Is there a way to keep her out of the loop about what you are working on? It’s not a long-term solution but might at least give you some breathing room while you get this resolved. >She tends to bypass me and my team — she goes straight to the client to propose her solutions although I am the person who has to implement them I assume this has consequences for the company – she’s communicating with someone else’s clients (yours), proposing solutions that aren’t feasible, and leaving you to clean up the mess. Have you tried framing it this way to your manager? And if you are the client’s primary contact, are they not confused about why she’s contacting them with solutions? Can you raise this in internal status meetings? “We are busy with requirements gathering for Bob’s Biscuits, but had a slight hiccup when Gwenda sent the client a proposal directly without consulting me. I had to spend some time clarifying things with them and this caused a week’s delay”. >She just reacts to my messages with a thumbs-up She has zero intention of changing her behavior, the thumbs-up is basically a middle finger. > her manager promises to work with her to improve the miscommunication, and my manager sides with me Is your manager actually doing anything about it though? Siding with you is not very helpful in getting the issue resolved. And her manager is clearly doing nothing about it.
OP#2* February 4, 2025 at 8:34 am Thanks for the reply, I am indeed frustrated. When I say “client” I mean internal teams that I work with – we basically work all the time internally. She does not know what I am working on, she just decides that she wants to work in X and then goes ahead with the approval of her manager. Long story short, their team is kind of trying to find their place after the reorg and they want to be seen as “look, we are doing impactful things!” without respecting any boundaries. We have had conversations already (my manager+her manager+her+me together) and we have been crystal clear on our requests: collaboration has to be a coordinated effort, not an imposition. Definitely her “thumbs up” read as “I do not care” – I keep flagging these instances to my manager so he is aware of the poor communication and her unwillingness to work with us. My manager is, overall, doing a good work in defending me and my work, and I know he is also unpleased by the situation. I will address it one last time with the four of us, and if it does not change I will have to go one step above in the reporting chain, but I am dreading it because I do not want to be perceived as aggressive or combative, if it makes any sense.
Trek* February 4, 2025 at 8:54 am I agree with your plan but I wanted to add one thing that worked for me. I had a similar person in a different reporting structure who kept promising things to different people and clients and then would loop me in to take care of the work. At first i addressed internally and tried to get them to stop, they wouldn’t because they were being helpful. Finally, the next time they promised something I responded back with all internal parties directing them to complete whatever is necessary as me/my department were never looped in and didnt know anything about this request. Of course they objected and asked tried to tell me to do the work. But I made them explain in an email a few times why they couldn’t complete what they promised i.e their system access was different. When they finally acknowledged they couldn’t do it I simply stated going forward please do not handle these requests, just forward them. I also had a few conversations with other departments and let them know if they worked with Anna and not me chances are they wouldn’t get what they wanted or at least there would be delays. This helped so much long term.
Ama* February 4, 2025 at 10:39 am This is basically what I came here to suggest. I worked with someone for a while who kept assigning my direct report work without telling either me or her own manager that she was doing so – we had a complicated internal structure so she and my report did work together on some projects but she was dumping far more work on my report than was agreed (and also was letting her manager think that she was doing it herself by just never saying she’d delegated something). Coworker was told to go to me or her own manager if she needed additional help so we could see if my report would have time but she had adopted a big sister role to my report and knew if she went straight to her she would always say yes. In the end I had to tell my report that if coworker asked her to do something new to confirm with me first because what coworker considered a priority was not always the actual priority for our team. Report admitted she was relieved to have a way to push back because coworker could be hard to argue with when she was convinced she was in the right.
spiriferida* February 4, 2025 at 2:07 pm This sounds like a great time for a meeting with the clients and this person to “get on the same page” and very politely indicate that she’s overstepping in front of an audience that’s not her manager.
Great Frogs of Literature* February 4, 2025 at 8:58 am You buried the lede here: she just decides that she wants to work in X and then goes ahead with the approval of her manager That’s not just a her problem, that’s a her manager problem, too. It may also somewhat be a your manager problem, even though you say he’s doing good work — this is exactly the sort of thing where I think that a good manager should be shielding their team from organizational nonsense, including talking to their manager about how the “pitch in and help” team is causing problems for their employees by wading in and taking over other peoples’ work, without stopping to assess what work has already happened. That said, if you do wind up personally having to go to your grand-boss or someone else above your manager, I think your angle is, “We’ve been having a lot of inefficiencies due to poor communication with Team X, where they’ll see something they perceive as a need and jump in and start working on it, without realizing that I’ve been working on that for the past three weeks and am 3/4ths of the way through implementing a solution. How can we fix this and stop duplicating work and stepping on each others’ toes?” Or whatever details apply. You aren’t being aggressive, you aren’t trying to get Annoying Team in trouble, you’re trying to solve a work problem, same as if the copier kept getting jammed.
Pastor Petty Labelle* February 4, 2025 at 9:22 am exactly. this isn’t a coworker problem, this is a manger problem. Your manager defending your work isn’t going to solve it. Your manager needs to flat out tell other manage that this cannot continue. It needs to stop now. If they want to be involved, her manager needs to ask your manager first. Otherwise, it is a flat no and not to be done. Continued behavior and your manager needs to take it to her manager.
Mockingjay* February 4, 2025 at 9:58 am Kindly, you need to stop worrying about perceptions of “aggression.” This person is actively undermining your performance, which WILL and is affecting your career. You can and should be firm. Focus on the process, not the personality. Address Cost Schedule Performance. This is the ‘love language’ of management. Be clear and blunt, first to Coworker, then to Management. “Coworker, you are not assigned to the spout design for Project Teapot. You gave incorrect information to the spout team, causing errors which had to be reworked and setting us back two weeks in the schedule. Please leave all spout communications to me.” Same for management: “Coworker is impeding Project Teapot, specifically the spout design. They provided inaccurate info which cause rework and delayed the production schedule, costing $X.” Use email; you can edit emotional verbiage out and stick to the facts. Your manager can use this kind of info as leverage when discussing the problems with other managers and Coworker. Overall though, I’d look long and hard at this company. This reorg seems to have caused more problems than it has solved. Set yourself a private due date; if things don’t improve by then, consider looking elsewhere, internally or externally.
MigraineMonth* February 4, 2025 at 11:44 am Not everyone can afford to be seen as aggressive, unfortunately. I’ve had a reputation for overly brusque and frustrated communication follow me through 3 jobs, even though I learned my lesson and stopped after the first one.
Observer* February 4, 2025 at 10:04 am but I am dreading it because I do not want to be perceived as aggressive or combative, if it makes any sense. So the question is why do you think that going up the chain would be perceived that way? I mean, I assume that you are not going to barrel into Grand-Boss’ office and insist that she needs to be fired! Or at least penalized! And her manager is an inept idiot who needs to be better managed! Setting up a meeting where you highlight this pattern, with some examples, and the problems it causes, again with some examples, doesn’t sound aggressive at all.
Momma Bear* February 4, 2025 at 4:28 pm You want to be *assertive*. There’s a difference in flagging a problem and backing yourself up with data and yelling that so and so is WRONG.
Ellis Bell* February 4, 2025 at 11:08 am So, sometimes when I get a thumbs up in situations where I need a detailed response (obviously sometimes it’s fine!) I just ask for clarification. “Thanks for responding, but I also need to know how you’ll change the process on this one and how it happened that we got sidelined initially?” One way to avoid brief acknowledgements, is to phrase things as questions rather than instructions. (This is also a canny language softener that enables you to just say the thing). Another way is to say what you want them to do, rather than what you don’t want them to do.(The phrase that helps me remember this is: “Why would you say ‘don’t speak Greek’ when you simply want me to speak Latin”). So things like”How did this happen and do you need us to create a process going forward to avoid this?” “How could we have communicated better to prevent this?” I hear you that you don’t want to perceived as aggressive or combative, but this is not an attack on anyone: it’s about the work, and the structure of the business post re-org. Clearly this colleague and her boss are failing to find their position and need intervention.
Bookworm* February 4, 2025 at 5:51 am #1: No thoughts beyond what Allison said, just that I’m sorry that happened to you and hope you’re okay.
Anony* February 4, 2025 at 5:51 am There can be an element of time travel in jobs that involve billable time. OP says they bill in 15-minute increments. If the employee does six tasks at the beginning of the day that each take only 5 minutes to complete, such as answering an email, but he’s supposed to bill a different project for each of these tasks, he’s now billed on paper 1.5 hours for thirty minutes of actual work. Often, the non-billable time that it takes to switch between tasks and do necessary non-billable work fills in those gaps. Some employers with billing requirements tell employees to take care that this type of time travel isn’t noticeable when it’s recorded in the billing software. Is the employee spending a lot of their day on these smaller tasks? Are larger projects that require larger chunks of time not being done, and is that a problem? Is the employee supposed to bill the 15-minute minimum for every small task, or is time only billed if it hits the 15-minute mark? It definitely sounds like OP needs to have a conversation with his employee about the company’s billing policies. But as someone who bills my day in 6-minute increments, I can also easily see how you can end up with time for a long lunch everyday if you’re billing smaller tasks in 15-minute increments.
A Pocket Lawyer* February 4, 2025 at 1:47 pm I came here to say exactly this. If your minimum billable increment is .25 and you spend a lot of time on small tasks, it’s entirely feasible to bill more hours than you actually worked in a day.
Nonbinary Pal* February 4, 2025 at 6:20 am OP#1 you are being remarkably restrained here. You didn’t just get bait-and-switched from a small group to the whole company, the entire purpose of the event is totally different. A gathering with just the DEI group would be an opportunity for you to advocate for material improvements for yourself and others. Being one person on a panel of three on a zoom with 800 people is your clueless DEI head checking off the “trans representation” box on her Pride Month to-do list. Times being what they are it’s completely understandable for you to prioritize your own wellbeing and continued employment when deciding if you should talk to someone about this, just know that she did you incredibly dirty, her motives are irrelevant, and you were right to pull out of the panel. I’m sorry to say this but especially as a trans person HR is not your friend and you should keep the information you disclose to them to the absolute minimum. That goes double for DEI folks; unless they have a track record of making lasting material improvements for employees across multiple demographics they’re probably going to get more out of your involvement than you do. Take good care of yourself, it’s tough times out there. All solidarity from a nonbinary pal.
Anon for this one* February 4, 2025 at 6:47 am OP #3, if the heating in building 2 isn’t working & is likely to continue not-working for weeks or months, can you ask your boss/a relevant facilities manager if the company are able to deploy portable heaters as a temporary solution to keep workspaces at a sensible temperature? That’s what my past employer did when our own heating was out of action long term. …That said, my past employer only deployed *enough* heaters after multiple incident reports of employee illnesses caused by working in cold temperatures (before this, I thought chilblains were the province of Dickens novels), and after someone who saw these reports decided to whistleblow to our country’s national regulator for workplace health & safety (it’s me, the someone was me). So if more diplomatic solutions fail & you find yourselves ordered to work in the cold or risk your jobs, please consider escalating to a relevant external body: a similar regulator in your own locale might help, as might a union if you’re a member of one.
JMC* February 4, 2025 at 10:18 am For one, cold can affect people in really bad ways, just like heat can affect people badly. That needs to be fixed. and who in their right minds think that hot desking is a good idea ever? Especially when we are in the throes of our current pandemic and on the verge of another one with bird flu?
Bonkers* February 4, 2025 at 7:00 am Can someone help me understand the combination of trans and non-binary? I get trans male/female, but nom-binary seems like it assumes the transition part (from whatever gender they previously were presenting as). Honest question – educate me!
Jennifer Juniper* February 4, 2025 at 7:13 am Trans means your gender is different from the gender the doctor said you were at birth. Non-binary means your gender identity is outside the gender binary of male or female. It is under the trans umbrella.
Alldogsarepuppies* February 4, 2025 at 7:36 am I think Bonkers is asking that if OP1 is NB openly, isn’t trans implied/explicit.
nonbinary person* February 4, 2025 at 8:29 am I am nonbinary at work and I have been running under the assumption that means I am implied to be trans by others. But I think there’s also the fact that a lot of people don’t really understand what it means being nonbinary, and also nonbinary people have different opinions on if they are trans. It is very individual in my experience
LaurCha* February 4, 2025 at 9:44 am I get the impression that in general, bigots are far more triggered by the word “trans” than the word “nonbinary.” So I can see wanting to keep the former word out of your workplace if possible.
MCMonkeybean* February 4, 2025 at 10:29 am I didn’t read the letter as “I’m out as nonbinary but not as trans.” I read it as “I’m somewhat out as NB/trans to some people that I interact with regularly but was not prepared to announce that to the entire company and discuss it in front of almost a thousand people.”
Aggretsuko* February 4, 2025 at 2:25 pm Per my cousin who’s NB, yes, cousin says they are trans even if they aren’t getting medical interventions. I admit that if someone is using they, I assume they are NB and trans and it does kind of seem to me like they’re out about it if they do that in public. This thread has now kind of confused me on this topic.
OP#1* February 4, 2025 at 7:48 am It’s one of those “ask 10 people, get 10 answers” things, but some NB folks might not identify as trans because they don’t want any kind of medical transition, or have neutral/complex feeling about their gender at birth that don’t “reach the level” of wanting to transition (even socially). They may like their body and presentation just fine and feel their ‘nonbinary-ness’ as more of an internal, sense-of-self thing. For example, I have an older friend who presents like a typical bro, uses he/him pronouns, is for all other intents and purposes a cis guy, but will correct you if you explicitly call him a man. He says if he were 25 years younger he’d identify as agender, but at this point he doesn’t care. Is he non-binary? Maybe. He wouldn’t call himself trans. Identifying as NB + trans can also be a matter of community solidarity. I medically transitioned, so I share the same political struggles and difficulties with access to medical care that binary trans people do. We’re not really any different in that regard.
I Have RBF* February 4, 2025 at 2:58 pm This. I’m non-binary, but haven’t done any medical stuff (I had a hist for medical reasons years ago. I don’t miss my uterus at all.) For me it’s my way of saying “Don’t expect femme behavior from me even though I have boobs. I’m not a woman, but I’m not a man. I don’t subscribe to someone else’s gender roles.” For me it’s a rejection of the binary. Sure, I’d love to get rid of the boobs. But that takes money I don’t have, or a whole round of psych gatekeeping, etc. plus money. Am I trans? My gender is not what I was assigned at birth. If that is the definition of trans, then yes, I’m trans.
Hlao-roo* February 4, 2025 at 7:52 am Identities can be overlapping. Some non-binary people consider themselves trans and other do not. Jennifer Juniper covered the overlap between trans and non-binary perfectly. For an explanation of how one can be non-binary and cis (not trans), there’s a good comment by Student on the post “getting people to use the right pronouns, finding trans-friendly workplaces, and trans-inclusive hiring” from January 18, 2023. I’ll link directly to that comment in a reply.
Hlao-roo* February 4, 2025 at 7:53 am Comment is here (timestamp January 19, 2023 at 12:33 pm if the link doesn’t work for anyone): https://www.askamanager.org/2023/01/getting-people-to-use-the-right-pronouns-finding-trans-friendly-workplaces-and-trans-inclusive-hiring.html#comment-4149436
Jenesis* February 4, 2025 at 2:10 pm Thank you for the link! This is a profound comment that pretty accurately captures how I feel about my own gender and sexual identity (I don’t completely identify as cishet, but I strongly don’t identify as queer).
Bonkers* February 4, 2025 at 9:15 am I think this captures my main question – I’ll make sure to read that comment when the link gets approved. Thanks!
nonbinary person* February 4, 2025 at 8:24 am I am nonbinary and consider myself trans because my gender assigned at birth is not what my gender is. I have not had any medical procedures. Some nonbinary people do not identify as trans for whatever reason. There are some people who think that you have to have medical procedures to be trans and will exclude nonbinary people, but they are often considered fringe. Ultimately, trans identification comes down to the individual.
Thinking* February 4, 2025 at 9:56 am Thank you for this. I am old and live in a country where I speak the language a little bit, and badly. I very much want to learn and I don’t expect others to bear the burden of educating me. Your explanation is a generous gift.
Labracadabrador* February 4, 2025 at 8:28 pm If you’re interested in learning, there’s a group on Reddit called asktransgender where you can, well, ask transgender people questions! It’s pretty active (just be aware that a lot of users are from the USA and the political climate here is increasingly hostile right now towards us). The website genderdysphoria.fyi is also a good resource that comes in a few different languages.
metadata minion* February 4, 2025 at 11:09 am And just as an addendum because a lot of people don’t know this — plenty of nonbinary people do choose to transition medically, with hormones and/or surgery.
Grimalkin* February 4, 2025 at 4:14 pm Yes–and as a related aside, “nonbinary” doesn’t just mean “androgynous” or “genderless” either. I’ve got a long-time friend who would on paper seem to be a binary trans man (using he/him pronouns, on T, surgeries, etc.) but actually is nonbinary.
MigraineMonth* February 4, 2025 at 12:00 pm Just to note, “trans” in this case means “across”, not transition. Most trans people are happier when they are treated corresponding to their gender identity rather than their gender assigned at birth, but a social (or legal) transition is not required to be trans. Some trans people take medical steps such as hormones, puberty blockers or top surgery, but a medical transition is not required to be trans (and can be difficult to access and prohibitively expensive). Only a small percentage of trans people–and practically no minors–have genital surgery, which also is not required to be trans.
Dahlia* February 4, 2025 at 3:11 pm Oh, nerd moment. “Trans” in “transgender” has the same roots as the “trans” in “transalpine gaul”. That is why you also have “cisgender” and “cisalpine gaul”.
r..* February 4, 2025 at 7:01 am LW4, I think we need to start out by acknowledging that (assuming Marty is an employee and not a contractor) there are two separate contractual and commercial relations at play here: i) Between Marty and Employer. You pay Marty for his work and/or time based on some modalities. ii) Between Employer and Client. Employer gets paid by client on a hourly basis. I think the problem primarily comes from a misunderstanding of the nature of how Marty is paid based in i) from your side, Marty’s side, or both. There are two options, both with advantages and disadvantages: a) Marty is being paid for completing an amount of work both you and Marty agree is a reasonable amount for the salary he is paid for. If he can do this work in less time than 8 hours, he gets to do that and it is fine. In this case and in the US he will most likely be salaried. You negotiate monthly salary, not hourly rate. The advantage here is that you *usually* get better, more capable and happier employees if you treat them like this, and that you as a company can better arbitrage the difference between what you pay Marty and what you get paid for by the client for the same amount of work, without crossing from value exchange to value extraction. The disadvantage is that it can be hard to fit this in a hourly billing model with a client. However, if you go with this, you need to recognize that sorting out this impedance mismatch is the employer’s job, not Marty’s. b) Marty is being paid for time to work. There are certain performance expectations of what should happen in that time, but at the end of the time he gets paid for hours worked, not work completed. The advantage is that it is simple in billing. No mismatch in billing models. The big disadvantage is in how to handle that more capable employees get more things done per hour than others. This means that you will negotiate hourly rate with your employees, not monthly salary. If you accept a wide variance of hourly rates you can still retain good employees, but your economic model with the client will be more difficult, because you still bill the same rate for the client. If you don’t then you need to accept that above average employees will either leave, because they’re not seeing their extra value reflected in their pay cheque, or they will start to level their output downwards to average because there’s no value reflected in their pay cheque to do anything else. Unless you have a very good personal development program and promotion opportunities in place where putting in more effort per hour worked can still pay off, this model tends to find an equilibrium in that the workers will put in just enough effort to make the economics of what you’re getting paid for by the clients roughly a wash; any additional profit will only be possible by value extraction instead of value exchange. Of course companies sometimes will want the advantages from both models with the disadvantages from neither; this is where posts like ‘is being salaried always a scam?’ come from, and you can guess what it’ll do to team morale if they find out.
HB* February 4, 2025 at 10:47 am I’m going to add one bit to this: “Given that the job requires billing clients in 15-minute increments, transparency about hours worked is crucial.” I also work in a field where we track our billable hours and when I first started, 15 minutes was the minimum. So I had a phone call with a client that lasted 10 minutes, it would go in the WIP tracking software as 15. If another phone call took 20 minutes, it would go in as 15. Now, importantly: we used the software to track time and it informed billing but ultimately it wasn’t a situation where you billed exactly what the time sheet said. I’m at the point now where I tend to work on a lot more projects in shorter time periods so I’ve gone down to posting in smaller increments, and that’s largely because I ran into some days where using the 15 minute increment ended up exceeding the amount of time I was actually in the office if I’d also posted a generic hour to non-charge time to account for non-client time. So I suspect a similar thing is happening. If you can only bill in 15 minute increments, and the employee is rounding up and never down, he can easily get to 8 hours while only being in the office for a little more than 7 hours. I’d tell him to start using smaller increments (if that’s possible) or to just look at the time posted at the end of the day and edit to counteract the rounding.
r..* February 4, 2025 at 11:28 am In this case your company separated out billed hours and worked hours, and this is an important part of making this work out, though it may or may not sort out the productivity angle. I’m not really a fan of smaller increments than 10 minutes. You often end up paying more on accounting/billing/sampling/qa’ing-the-timesheets than either you make extra or the client pays less. The one exception to this may be low-hourly-rate/high-client-frequency jobs like call centers or generic tech support. When we do billable hours we tend to go with a “billed in 15 minute increments, per started 15 minutes”, but because most of our services have at least 30 minutes en bloc for a client/employee combination per day a quick three minute phonecall or email with a client in good standing is going to a ‘non-chargeable/good will’ account. We’re also very upfront with that we will bill at different rates if a job needs to be shunted to a more senior rating. Not giving yourselves the tools to handle that your employees might have significantly different productivity is making it needlessly hard on oneself.
fhqwhgads* February 4, 2025 at 12:08 pm Or it could be as simple as telling Marty “the rounding should happen in both directions; if you’re only ever rounding up, that’s a problem.”
Jennifer Juniper* February 4, 2025 at 7:10 am OP1, I am so sorry you were outed to the whole company. I hope you’re not a federal employee or contractor.
Cabbagepants* February 4, 2025 at 7:17 am #3 your manager needs to be a much squeakier wheel about this!! Dollars to doughnuts, the corporate decision makers aren’t paying much attention to your branch and haven’t connected the two tickets in their giant facilities to-do list with the fact that your branch doesn’t have anywhere reasonable to work. I’ve worked in such remote branches of larger companies all my life and it is very very very easy for issues to be overlooked, even glaring ones and even ones that corporate *should* pay more attention to. Alison’s script is good and your boss needs to freely spend their social capital bringing up the issue.
Ama* February 4, 2025 at 10:50 am As a former manager I am always astonished when people write in with managers who just shrug off things like this. This is not “the coffee maker breaks a lot” level of inconvenience this is literally lacking the proper equipment and/or environment to get work done. I would be raising a big fuss with my own manager if this was my team until I got both an assurance that my team would be able to WFH until it was fixed and a timeline for when it would be fixed. Then again part of the reason I went freelance is I burned out on management in part because of constantly having to fight for appropriate resources for my team and getting the bare minimum back (nothing on this OP’s level, though).
Jezebel* February 4, 2025 at 7:24 am Totally unrelated to the actual question, but my brain is just stuck on the “recommends temperatures between 68-76 degrees” comment. I would be so uncomfortable if expected to work in an office that was 76 degrees! And my coworkers would sure not appreciate the sweaty, smelly mess I would be by the end of every day.
TPS reporter* February 4, 2025 at 7:36 am my office is sometimes around 74 when the sun is really bright and it’s miserable. I would also be miserable at 60F!
metadata minion* February 4, 2025 at 8:20 am On the other hand, I’d be miserable at 68, and 75 is about my ideal working temperature. People vary a lot, and I think the recommended settings cover a range where most people can work without it impacting their health.
Phony Genius* February 4, 2025 at 9:07 am There may be no national OSHA rule, but some states do have requirements. My state has a 65 degree minimum indoor temperature for workplaces. (Exceptions for work that requires refrigeration, of course.) A legislator introduced a bill to require a range of 68-75 degrees a couple of years ago, but it didn’t pass.
MCMonkeybean* February 4, 2025 at 10:33 am Office thermostat wars can get pretty crazy. I was honestly considering quitting once because my office was so hot. Supposedly the floor I was on was not well related and the other side of thy floor got too cold so they brought in giant heaters which resulted in my side of the floor being heated to over 80 degrees every day. I had to go buy more button down tank tops in the middle of winter. I bought a thermometer so I could send more accurate complaints to facilities lol. It was so bad! Thankfully we eventually moved to a different and newly renovated building with better temperature control. The woman in the cube behind me still always complained it was too cold though.
MigraineMonth* February 4, 2025 at 12:09 pm I worked at a software company where each cluster of offices had access to its own thermostat. You could go to a website and set the temperature for your cluster. I think you can see where this is going. Person in office A wanted the thermostat set at 76F. Person in office B wanted the thermostat set at 72F. The two spent so much time changing the temperature setting back and forth that someone changed the website to only allow the temperature to be increased/decreased by 1 degree every 5 minutes. Fortunately, the two people realized how ridiculous they were being and came to a compromise of 74F. Just kidding. They each wrote a script to access the website exactly every 5 minutes to raise/lower the temperature by 1 degree.
Tongue Cluckin' Grammarian* February 4, 2025 at 11:26 am My cube has consistently been about 78-80 F and I have a fan and a mini swamp cooler to just make it through the day. I get extra headaches/migraines due to the heat and I can’t wear any fewer clothing than I currently am without getting extremely unprofessional. Everybody else is using space heaters and sweaters because they’re all lined up near the windows (and are prone to be cold already), so the temps stay stupidly high. It’s pretty miserable, for sure.
iglwif* February 4, 2025 at 11:28 am I looked up what those Fahrenheit temperatures actually mean and yeah, 76F (24C) is way too warm. I would have to come to work in a tank top and shorts, and even then I’d be sweaty by 10:00 and smelly by lunchtime.
Emmy Noether* February 4, 2025 at 2:43 pm 24C seems ok to me in the summer when it’s hot outside. 20C seems ok to me in the winter. The reverse would not work for me at all. I hate both overheated stuffy rooms in winter and icy aircon blasts in summer.
iglwif* February 5, 2025 at 9:41 am I don’t enjoy 24C even in the summer lol, but yeah, I would never set the AC lower than that because increasing contrast between indoors and outdoors is also not helpful to my general overheatedness. Spouse and I have an ongoing low-level debate about the thermostat in winter; the current compromise is that when he’s at the office, I turn the heat off entirely, but then I turn it back on a little while before he gets home. That way I am only uncomfortably warm for a small part of the day and he doesn’t feel uncomfortably cold when he gets home.
tabloidtainted* February 4, 2025 at 12:37 pm A thermostat at 76F is not necessarily going to give a room temperature of 76F.
The Unspeakable Queen Lisa* February 4, 2025 at 12:50 pm Remember, OSHA can’t require anything. They don’t have regulatory power, so they use the word “recommend”. They are not saying any office should be 76 degrees, but that these are the outlier acceptable temperatures for offices. Also, the range is for the whole year, so in the winter, no colder than 68 and in the summer no hotter than 76.
Jane* February 4, 2025 at 11:11 pm Yeah I’m wondering if this temperature range is based on AIR CONDITIONING as opposed to heat. Cooling the office to 68-76 degrees if it’s 80+ outside seems about right. If it’s 30 outside, 76 is INSANELY warm for the office. I’m a heat lover who prefers to wear shorts at home and I still never set the thermostat above 70 in the winter.
sagewhiz* February 4, 2025 at 7:31 am LW 5 says “has the same name as my dad.” To me, that indicates the same first and last names. If so, if anyone asks, I’d blithely reply something along the lines of “oh, my dad and my boss are among the gazillion members of the Bob Jones Club, but I’m related only to the one who doesn’t work here.”
MCMonkeybean* February 4, 2025 at 10:35 am I feel like the same name is just making OP get in their head about it though. There is not a single person in my office that knows my dad’s name! Why would they? No one will know the boss shares a name with their dad unless OP tells them!
fhqwhgads* February 4, 2025 at 12:12 pm I’m not saying this is a reasonable concern, but my takeaway was OP is not thinking people know their dad’s name, but rather they’re concerned someone might google them, encounter their dad’s name, see it as the same as the boss’s and then assume the dad and boss are the same person. Or possibly, google the boss and stumble upon the dad, and not realize it’s two different people. I don’t think it’s especially likely, but I think that’s the “what if” they’re worried about. “Yes I work for the The Alan Brady Show; yes my dad’s name is Rob Petrie, but not that head writer Rob Petrie. Just a coincidence.”
Nerdgal* February 4, 2025 at 7:59 am could the employer in #3 move some monitors, etc from building 2 to building 1?
HonorBox* February 4, 2025 at 8:11 am I think that’s a good point. But that’s something the employer probably has to at least approve, if not have done. I would make this suggestion, though.
Slow Gin Lizz* February 4, 2025 at 8:22 am Yeah, that might be a pain, but seems like a perfectly valid solution. I hope OP and their coworkers are comfortable pushing back on this. If nothing else, one would hope that the higher ups would realize that the worker bees’ productivity will suffer greatly with the setup as it currently is and would give them all a pass until one or both of the offices can be brought up to appropriate workability.
Falling Diphthong* February 4, 2025 at 8:33 am This is so sensible, directly solving the problem, that I predict there is no way it will be implemented.
Hlao-roo* February 4, 2025 at 8:38 am Exactly what I was thinking! This is a company that (1) did not order enough monitors/keyboards/mice for building 1 and refuses to order more and (2) thinks it’s OK to have people working in a building without heat for several weeks in the winter. This is not a company that will implement the simple, sensible solution of moving monitors etc. from the unheated building to the heated building.
MassMatt* February 4, 2025 at 2:05 pm Given the stupidity of so many companies around RTO I shouldn’t be surprised at this. Though I actually wonder whether it isn’t intentional. Many speculate that RTO mandates are designed to get people to quit rather than have to lay them off. Requiring them to work in a building without heat or without computers could be ratcheting up the pressure. In general I assume something is done out of incompetence vs malice unless proven otherwise.
Silver Robin* February 4, 2025 at 9:21 am I assumed that there were no extra money monitors to move. And I know lots of places do not want random employees moving stuff; they prefer that IT handle it. But if folks feel like solving management’s problems for them, this certainly works. It is a rather straightforward solution.
cosmicgorilla* February 4, 2025 at 10:01 am Ok, I’m wondering why monitors and keyboards are a necessity. Certainly preferred, certainly more comfortable and potentially ergonomic but if we’re talking hotdesking, we’re not talking an office full of old school towers, are we? I imagine we’re talking laptops, which come with screens and keyboards built in. When I go to the office, I don’t tend to connect to the monitors provided. I don’t see a lot of other hotdeskers connecting to the monitors either. Keyboards aren’t provided at the hotdesk stations we have. Even at home, I’m using the keyboard on my laptop.
Hlao-roo* February 4, 2025 at 10:20 am It depends on the work being done (and also individual preferences) how “necessary” vs just “nice to have” monitors/keyboards/mice are. I do work that involves checking several sources against one another, so having multiple monitors makes that work much faster and easier than constantly switching through windows on just the laptop screen. I also make edits that are much easier to do with a mouse than with a laptop track pad. And if work involves inputting a lot of numbers, that’s often easier to do with a number pad (more common on external keyboards than on built-in laptop keyboards). All of the above isn’t strictly necessary as I have worked on just my laptop alone (no monitor, external keyboard, or mouse) but I only get about half as much work done in any given amount of time as I do when I have all the peripherals.
Emmy Noether* February 4, 2025 at 2:57 pm Agreed. I’m very spoiled because my home office setup has three screens and a wireless mouse and keyboard. When I only have my laptop screen, I feel like I’m spending half my time switching between windows. And it’s so tiny! When I’m visiting another site I absolutely always connect to whatever setup there is on the random absent colleagues’ desk I’m squatting. Everyone has two monitors and a keyboard and mouse at a minimum.
Angry socialist* February 4, 2025 at 1:03 pm Fun story, I recently spent most of a work day without my external monitor, using only my laptop. It destroyed my neck for the next 2 days. Fortunately my boss is reasonable and has ordered extra monitors, but I won’t be going to the office again until they arrive.
MCMonkeybean* February 4, 2025 at 10:38 am Certainly seems like something the company should pay for if they feel strongly about having people in the office. In the meantime it sounds like this was a company wide mandate, not aimed specifically at OP’s team–so I think it’s fair to operate under the assumption that they would make an exception for people who’s offices are essentially physically unavailable and let your boss be the one to handle it.
HonorBox* February 4, 2025 at 8:10 am OP3 – This seems like something that could have come up in comments yesterday related to rules that are implemented just for the sake of implementing. Setting aside the need or “need” for RTO, expecting people to be in the office makes no sense if the offices aren’t set up for people to actually be there. If there isn’t equipment that people need, they really can’t be in the office. And if you’re not able to work in an environment that is safe and reasonably comfortable (I say reasonably because someone might be a bit chilly at 70 degrees while others might be OK) you can’t expect people to be in the office. If you don’t have heat, if you don’t have AC in the summer, if you don’t have running water, you’re not providing a workplace that is suitable for workers. OP, point out to your manager that neither office space adequately provides what you and your coworkers need. It sounds like you are all open to the idea since you’re seeing better productivity when you’re together, so you might point that out too. I get that your boss said they wouldn’t enforce it, but you want them to provide you some sort of documentation that it won’t be something that is enforced from above them, either, until there is resolution to adequate heat and equipment. This might get things moving faster. I get that HVAC can take some time, but the last time my office was without heat, we had someone on site within an hour…
D.C. Paralegal* February 4, 2025 at 8:18 am “While I was deciding how best to address this, another team member, Hamilton, who can be a bit nosy but means well, stopped by my office to point out the discrepancy with Marty’s timesheet.” You say nosy, I say smart. Hamilton realizes that Marty’s sloppy billing practices, if exposed, could cause the institution of more draconian timekeeping policies for others at the company, including him. Look, everyone who has to deal with the billable hour knows it’s something of a scam. I’ve worked at firms where it’s encouraged to bill, say, 15 minutes a day to “admin time” that covers getting coffee, using the restroom, casual chats with coworkers, etc. I’ve also worked places where all of that gets rolled into the time you bill to a project. But there does need to be a baseline of honesty when it comes to billing. If it was just a matter of occasional rounding, like if he finished a project at 4:44 and then billed the last quarter-hour of his day to that client…whatever. But what’s described in OP4’s letter is intentional fraud. I’m assuming this isn’t happening at a law firm, because law firms would freak out if something like this was uncovered. But I would still encourage OP4 to treat this more seriously. If for no other reason than because it’s apparently driving poor Hamilton crazy.
HonorBox* February 4, 2025 at 8:40 am I don’t think the LW needs to do anything to appease Hamilton. We’ve seen far too many letters in which a coworker is tracking movements of coworkers and generally the advice is to mind your business. But, getting to the bottom of Marty’s billing is important. There are several reasons why this might be happening, and maybe Marty is doing excellent work all in all. But if there is time that is actually billed to clients in error, that’s going to cause issues. My wife worked for a firm years ago and that firm did work for a number of clients. There was one in particular that had a very large contract with the firm. It was basically a “not to exceed” amount. The owner of the firm told employees to bill time to that client to ensure they met that cap every year. So if you had a quick call with client representative, you could and should bill them an hour. Even if the call was to confirm the meeting location for tomorrow’s meeting. That was an hour. It frustrated my wife because she felt it was disingenuous, but owner wanted to maximize the amount the firm was bringing in from that client.
D.C. Paralegal* February 4, 2025 at 10:22 am “generally the advice is to mind your business” Right. And this is very much Hamilton’s business. There’s a HUGE difference between “Hey, boss, I think you should know that Marty came in three minutes late yesterday” and reporting a new employee’s billing discrepancy that has apparently been going on for months. Just so we’re on the same page, here: billing 45 minutes *every day* to clients for work that is not being done is significant theft. This likely represents thousands of dollars in fraudulent charges to clients. The fact that OP needed to write into AAM to ask if this is a problem is frankly mind boggling. There’s also a CYA component here. If Marty gets fired for falsifying time entries and Hamilton is asked about it, he needs to be able to say that he brought it to his supervisor’s attention.
HonorBox* February 4, 2025 at 11:30 am I don’t disagree with most of what you’ve said. I read the letter with the idea that LW has the knowledge of what’s occurring and didn’t necessarily need to be alerted by Hamilton. There’s discrepancy, and it may be fraud/theft or it may be a simple misunderstanding. It needs to be addressed either way, regardless of the reason for the discrepancy. I just don’t think appeasing Hamilton is the key reason to fix the issue.
I Have RBF* February 4, 2025 at 3:26 pm Just so we’re on the same page, here: billing 45 minutes *every day* to clients for work that is not being done is significant theft. This likely represents thousands of dollars in fraudulent charges to clients. This! I worked for a consulting company that had federal contracts. If we’d been audited and they found out that one employee was “overbilling” (working 7.25, billing 8) we could have been fined and removed from the federal and state contractors list, meaning we would lose all of those jobs, and not be able to get any more. Plus private client would be loathe to hire us. Yes, it is somewhat your coworkers business if you are billing your hours fraudulently. It’s literally a legal requirement for honest billing and timekeeping in some fields. It’s immaterial whether the company bills in quarters or tenths. You don’t get 45 minutes extra per day from rounding. If his hours are billed to a client as 8 hours for 7.25 hours of work, he is committing fraud.
Observer* February 4, 2025 at 10:12 am If for no other reason than because it’s apparently driving poor Hamilton crazy. That is the *worst* reason to do anything. In my experience, people like that are trouble. And they are trouble *even* when they bring up something fact based. If Marty is actually billing a client for more time than he’s working on the client work, that’s one thing and Hamilton is right to bring it to the LW. But it sounds like internal “billing”, which certainly needs to stop, but is totally not Hamilton’s business.
D.C. Paralegal* February 4, 2025 at 10:24 am “That is the *worst* reason to do anything.” It was a joke.
SunnyShine* February 4, 2025 at 8:48 am OP2 – I’ve dealt with this multiple times. I suggest getting professional “rude”. Ignore her messages if she has no say in what you are working on. If someone comes to you about one of her suggested changes, brush it off and tell them that isn’t a change you’re making and you are unsure where that came from. Tell them that she no longer works with the group and that it’s odd for her to make suggestions. Don’t send her messages anymore. Send e-mails with both of your bosses. If she questioned things, tell her that “Things have changed since you left” and don’t elaborate. Find ways to remove her reaction and lessen the power she has in this situation. She clearly understands what you are saying and is choosing to ignore your requests. She is refusing to be practical. Even if she is getting different direction from her boss, the Bosses need to figure that out, not you.
ecnaseener* February 4, 2025 at 9:01 am LW4, I would’ve interpreted your instruction largely the same way Marty did. I had to reread it to figure out the connection between what you said and what you intended. You told Marty it’s fine to work outside of the 8-5 hours, as long as he told you beforehand. You didn’t tell him to change anything about how often he worked nonstandard hours or how he should bill for them, so he didn’t. The only piece where I see a potential disconnect between what you said and what Marty did is the part about informing you *beforehand,* which he’s not doing. But even that, I can understand if you only talked to him about working “outside” the standard 8-5 hours – I would interpret “outside” as before 8 or after 5, not as encompassing all deviations from that schedule.
Dek* February 4, 2025 at 9:22 am Our office’s thermostat gets wild sometimes. As a joke, I hung up a thermometer by my cube, and it’s seriously dipped below 60 sometimes. It’s bonkers that on days when it’s 90+ outside, we’re wearing sweaters and using hot pads inside. But shoot, at least it’s *on.* And they try. It really is much too cold to operate if you can’t feel your dang hands.
doreen* February 4, 2025 at 9:29 am #5 – unless it’s an extremely rare name, I don’t think you need to worry. And I mean extremely rare in that particular town/city/country. I have an unusual last name . I have never met anyone not related to me with this name. There is a famous actor with the same last name, spelled differently. I am often asked if I am related to him – but not by people in the neighborhood where I grew up. Because in that neighborhood a name like “Schwarzenegger” (not my actual name) doesn’t stand out – it was full of people who emigrated from a particular settlement of Austrians.
Cupcakes are awesome* February 4, 2025 at 9:47 am Me too! All the people with my last name have ancestors from the exact same town in Italy- so when I meet someone with my name, I automatically ask them if they are related to my grandfather or great grandfather. Most of the time they are children of my father’s cousins, or grandchildren of my great aunt or uncle. And my name also has an actor with the same last name, only spelled differently (and I’ve actually never seen his spelling anywhere else- his is kind of the plural of mine).
Grimalkin* February 4, 2025 at 4:40 pm I’m in much the same boat, except that the town in question is in Germany, and the connections are a bit farther out. A little genealogy research taught me that the one time I’d come across the name without already knowing the family connection, the branches could still be traced to the same little town in Germany, but it split off around my great-great-great-grandfather’s time. (Give or take a “great” perhaps.) Though there is one minor political figure I’ve come across with the same surname whose connection I haven’t tracked down yet… As it happens, my position is sort of the opposite of OP’s in the working world. It’s a fairly rare surname, and the person who shares it in my niche field is indeed a close relative of mine. But it doesn’t actually come up all that often even then.
Dido* February 4, 2025 at 9:41 am It doesn’t sound like LW5 actually has the same last name as her boss and dad? She just thinks people are going to look her up on social media and find out what her dad’s last name is and assume he’s a cousin to her boss or something? She’s way overthinking this
ecnaseener* February 4, 2025 at 10:36 am I don’t see any reason to think LW has a different last name. Like, no, they didn’t explicitly say “I have the same last name as my dad,” but they didn’t say anything to the contrary either. LW (and their dad) have a common last name, and their boss has that same last name plus the same first name as their dad.
ecnaseener* February 4, 2025 at 10:37 am ETA: and they’re not worried about people thinking their dad is the boss’s cousin, but that the dad is the boss. Dad and Boss have the same name, first and last.
Who knows* February 4, 2025 at 9:42 am #4: I fail to see the problem so long as he’s getting 8 hours of work done. Employees shouldn’t be punished for being productive. If it only takes him 7 hours to do what it would take another employee 8, then he should be allowed to work only 7 hours. You still got 8 hours worth of work, so bill 8 hours.
Parenthesis Guy* February 4, 2025 at 9:57 am Because that’s fraud. You can’t bill a client 8 hours if your employee only worked 7.
Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est* February 4, 2025 at 10:02 am I’ve never worked anywhere that worked like that. If someone got 8 hours’ worth of work done in 7 hours, the reward was usually another 2 hours’ work and the expectation that the worker could aspire to 10 hours’ output for 8 hours’ pay.
Mid* February 4, 2025 at 10:04 am That’s not typically how billable work works. If you can get done in 4 hours what takes someone else 8 hours, you don’t bill 8 hours, you bill 4 at a rate that’s twice what the 8 hour person bills. If you’re more efficient, you bill at a higher rate, you don’t lie about your hours.
r..* February 4, 2025 at 11:03 am Doesn’t work like that if you can’t adjust hourly rate, like most employees can’t. The problem set imposed by the constraints “we want employees who can do above-average work feel rewarded so they will continue to do so”, “clients pay us per hour, not for work completed/services rendered”, “no ability to adjust hourly rate”, and “hours worked by employee = hours billed to client” does not have a good solution. You can either work to make one of those four constraints less binding, or your workforce will over time tend to converge to a hourly productivity that is barely sustaining your billable hourly rate. People who can do what takes others 8 hours of work in only 6, but neither can go home 2 hours earlier (because of billing model constraints) nor get a higher hourly rate (because the client billing rate has already been agreed to) or a bonus for their more productive hours see their extra effort not rewarded, and will hence leave to places that do. Almost every professional services company who does this type of billable hours either fudges this somewhat, has a performance problem, or found a way to bridge this gap. Most of the successful ones are, however, sophisticated enough to not have this sort of billing dispute through various means. Incidentally this is why partnerships are so attractive a structure for certain high-level services: Key talent is offered a partnership, which will allow them to participate in the value of their above-average hourly productivity through participation in corporate profit instead of salary.
Coverage Associate* February 4, 2025 at 12:58 pm What r said. There can be some informal work arounds like managers who suffer if their reports are inefficient, and theoretically employee compensation can be based on factors in addition to hours billed to clients, but, yes, generally the billable hour encourages employees to be as inefficient as possible without raising problems with the client, then management.
Cupcakes are awesome* February 4, 2025 at 9:42 am Maybe the first thing you should discuss during this panel is how you were outed to 800 people without permission, and the insensitivity and ignorance that decision showed.
Thin Mints didn't make me thin* February 4, 2025 at 10:05 am This experience will definitely give you a story to tell in future speaking situations!
Observer* February 4, 2025 at 9:53 am #1 – So called DEI After reading both the letter, and your comment, I have to wonder if your DEI chief is just completely inept or seriously malicious. Because I can’t see anyone even reasonably competent doing this without bad intent. The mess with the panel is bad enough. But the signature thing? I simply cannot see how someone decides that subverting the purpose of the pronouns line of the signature is actually a good thing otherwise.
CatDude* February 4, 2025 at 10:05 am LW1 – it may have been a miscommunication but it was still a massive failure on the DEI head’s part. They should know that they needed to be clear about every detail of what they were asking, and have had your clear and unambiguous consent for every step of the process. It may not have been intentional on her part, but it was extremely careless and you are right to be upset with her.
ashie* February 4, 2025 at 10:09 am #5, I have a total of 2 employees on my team. They both have the same uncommon last name, no relation whatsoever and had never even met before working here. Coincidence! Life is a tapestry.
Parenthesis Guy* February 4, 2025 at 10:18 am #3: The problem is that if this is coming from above the manager, there may not be much he can do about it. He can have a conversation with his boss and say this is crazy, but that doesn’t mean his boss has any power to do anything about it. They should be trying to push this up the chain, but it’s not something the LW has any power over. Makes more sense for the LW to think about bringing in sweaters and stuff and asking about heaters.
Ann O'Nemity* February 4, 2025 at 10:19 am #1 – The senior leader should have provided specific event details upfront, including logistics, purpose, audience, and expectations. That way, the LW could make an informed decision rather than walking in blind. This is so, so basic. Still, the LW should have asked more clarifying questions before agreeing. Even a simple “Is this the same format as before?” or “Who will be in the room?” could have helped set clearer expectations. It’s always a good idea to confirm the setup.
Slinky* February 4, 2025 at 11:00 am In this case, the phrasing of “speaking with the DEI team” suggested just speaking with the team, not a public speaking event. If someone asked me that, it wouldn’t even occur to me to ask if it would be the same format or who would be in the room, as the answer would presumably be “the DEI team.” I can’t fault the LW for missing that, if this is how the leader phrased the question.
bamcheeks* February 4, 2025 at 11:10 am Yeah, I agree. It should be reasonable to treat what seems like a casual enquiry as a first expression of interest, subject to details being confirmed. You shouldn’t need to treat it as “let me get every possible detail nailed down before I assent, in case you have something wildly different in mind”.
iglwif* February 4, 2025 at 11:20 am Agreed. “Speaking with the DEI team” does not, by any reasonable interpretation, mean “speaking on a panel that also includes members of the DEI team on an all-company call with 800 people”. Especially if you have been invited to “speak with the DEI team” before and it was in fact speaking with the DEI team.
Georgia Carolyn Mason* February 4, 2025 at 12:00 pm I figured OP read “speak with the DEI team” as “come talk to our team,” which is how I read it. But, the DEI person meant “speak alongside the DEI team,” which should of course have been explained up-front. But the DEI person checked off “get a trans person on the panel” and went about her day — lazy and ignorant, happy with her she/they signature and secure in her misguided allyship.
Lexi Vipond* February 4, 2025 at 12:03 pm It’s an odd linguistic twist, because ‘make a presentation with the DEI team’ would definitely suggest to me that the DEI team and I were making the presentation to some other people. But if that was the ‘with’ they meant, they could have been a LOT clearer.
Observer* February 4, 2025 at 1:36 pm Agreed. “Speaking with the DEI team” does not, by any reasonable interpretation, mean “speaking on a panel that also includes members of the DEI team on an all-company call with 800 people”. I agree with this completely. If this is the language that was used, it really is describing something completely different than what was actually done.
fhqwhgads* February 4, 2025 at 10:19 am I agree the colleague in #1 pulled a bait and switch by asking OP to talk to the DEI team and not making it clear it was to the entire company, but I don’t really think it’s fair to say they “outed” OP1. If your pronouns are in your signature, you’re out to anyone in the company you email or who might be fwded an email you wrote. That doesn’t make the bait-and-switch on the audience you were agreeing to speak to OK – it’s still not. But this person had reasons to believe you were already out at work. It sort of sounds like the DEI team at your work is a hot mess anyway, but it seems like there’s confusing communication in both directions.
Nonbinary Pal* February 4, 2025 at 12:14 pm This is kind of a semantic quibble, we don’t really have a word for “someone whose job it is to know better thrusting an employee with a marginalized identity into the spotlight without warning in front of a massive audience containing a nonzero number of coworkers who believe that identity is sinful/dangerous/gross and may also be in a position to harm that person’s livelihood.” You don’t have to both-sides this!
dude, who moved my cheese?* February 4, 2025 at 1:38 pm Not everyone who uses they/them pronouns is trans! Ignoring this fundamental logical error in your argument for a minute, Nonbinary Pal hit the nail on the head. It *is* unnecessary semantic quibbling to respond to “I felt unsafe as a direct result of this person’s actions, where they *objectively* did not accurately communicate the situation to me to get my informed consent” with “well…..that’s not really ‘outing’ you, now is it?”
Ginger Cat Lady* February 4, 2025 at 4:05 pm Oh it’s absolutely fair to say that. OP says she “Has not told anyone (they) are trans” – and the DEI leader identified them BY THAT TERM they were not openly using to every single company employee. I don’t know how you can think that’s not “outing” and and honestly, people who pull shit like this DEI lead did do not deserve people coming to their defense over “you were not fair to her” claims.
Pam Schrute-Beesley* February 4, 2025 at 10:21 am Number 3 could be my coworker! You could be in my building right now! I’m the girl with the nagging cough sitting on the 9th floor in the corner? We were told “go in 3 days a week, if you don’t have equipment or a cubicle or heat – deal with it or quit.” Union says “yeah that’s how it is.”
womp* February 4, 2025 at 10:51 am Someone once asked me if my boss was my dad. We do not have the same last name and do not look alike, other than us both being white. Age-wise it is *theoretically* possible but would be quite unusual. (I am in my mid 30s and he is in his late 40s.) My boss and my dad do have the same common first name but there is no way the person who asked would have known that.
iglwif* February 4, 2025 at 11:19 am OP1: The DEI person was WAY out of line. Like, so far outside the line as to be on a different continent. This was a full-on bait-and-switch — you said yes to speaking to the DEI team and suddenly found yourself signed up to speak to the entire company, and that’s just the beginning of the problem. I really hope you are able to speak to someone higher up who can and will make sure this doesn’t happen to anyone else in future, but primarily I (as a queer person and a friend to various people who are not fully out as themselves at work because it’s not necessarily safe) am VERY MAD AND SORRY that this happened to you.
Hey Ms!* February 4, 2025 at 12:01 pm Speaking “to” the DEI team and speaking “with” the DEI team can be interpreted as very much the same thing and very much a different thing. LW indicates that they asked that they were asked to speak “with” the DEI team. It’s easy to see this misinterpreted, but I don’t think the LW is wrong in feeling like there was a bait and switch, and I don’t think the boss pulled a bait and switch. Language, amirite?
Nat20* February 4, 2025 at 12:20 pm (At first I accidentally commented this as a reply to someone else in a thread about a different letter, so just putting it here too.) About letter #2, I’d just emphasize the part in Alison’s great advice about how this conversation with your coworker should identify the *pattern*, explain why it’s unacceptable on principle, and make it clear it’s not just about particular instances. (It might be that you’ve already done that, but it’s worth mentioning.) Especially since her thumbs-up reaction could indicate that she thinks you’re just talking about individual clients/circumstances and not the broader issue, it’s worth really making it clear that this is not a one-off or occasional problem you have with this. If that ultra-clarity still doesn’t change anything, then like Alison says, you then have even more standing to (continue to) go over her head about it.
I'm just here for the cats!!* February 4, 2025 at 12:57 pm #1 I hope you are well and that you can update us with what happens with the head of DEI. Is there anyone else that you feel comfortable talking with about this. If she overstepped with you who else has she overstepped with who just went with it because they didn’t feel comfortable pushing back. #3. I hope they don’t just bring in space heaters. Those can often overload the electrical if a lot are being used and are a fire risk (even the new ones). If your boss is unable or unwilling to push back I think you should talk to your coworkers about pushing back as a group. #4 does he think that his lunch is paid so that’s why he is putting 8 hours? Has anyone told him specifically that the hours are 8-5? #5 I wouldn’t address the name, especially if its a really common name in your area. If you get a feeling from a client that there’s an issue then you could casually mention the name. But for the most part I think people will be ok.
Banana Pyjamas* February 4, 2025 at 2:18 pm LW #3 in some places building codes require buildings for human occupancy to be heated to a minimum temperature in the winter, I believe winter is defined by outdoor temperature. Check your local building codes. If the building doesn’t meet code, you can report it and they will rescind the certificate of occupancy or similarly issue a tag that the building cannot be occupied until the issue is resolved. Your employer will not be able to use the office until they resolve the heating issue.
Banana Pyjamas* February 4, 2025 at 2:21 pm That is report it to the correct department which will probably be “Planning and Zoning”, “Building Department”, or “Code Enforcement”. Your local jurisdiction then rescinds or issues the documentation.
cncx* February 4, 2025 at 3:18 pm Re #4, i worked in two places (a law firm and a msp) where certain tasks were always billed x minutes for consistency’s sake. It made it much easier with clients who fought every bill if every user account creation was x minutes or letter drafted was y minutes. That meant that sometimes we could be in negative hours. Now when this happened to me, I liked having the gimme time to go slower on a task that would take me longer than I could bill, or just not feel the sword of being nickel and dimed on me and I would stay until my hours were positive. Being in negative hours was something that needed justification. All this to say it is possible to have less butt in chair time than billed time even if that isn’t what is going on here apparently.
Bill and Heather's Excellent Adventure* February 5, 2025 at 8:34 am LW1, so sorry that happened to you. LW5, I also have a very common surname. If I encounter someone with the same last name and someone asks if we’re related, one of us jokes “maybe a few centuries back ” and we all move on. I don’t think you need to worry.