Ask a Manager

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go… 1. My coworker is obsessed with my video set-up I work as a creative in a small team in a large enterprise organization. Since we have been working from home, my group has been meeting weekly over Zoom. I am married to a film creative and […]

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go… 1. A manager who wants to hire me keeps buying me gifts A manager in a different department who I believe I have a great working relationship with can’t keep staff in her department. She wants me to leave my department and work in her department […]

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go… 1. My coworker got angry at my minor prank I am a man and I had a strange incident with a female coworker. We both have had a very playful, joking relationship. We constantly make jokes, playful insults, and talk about a variety of topics, especially […]

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go… 1. My voice sounds so young that callers think I’m a kid I have to answer external phone calls in my job, but I have a really young-sounding voice and often customers ask if they can speak to my mum. When I say I’m an employee […]

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go… 1. My boss commented on my work with a puke emoji I work in a PR agency and we are planning a webinar for our most important client. These recent weeks have been kind of a nightmare, because everyone is working remotely for the first time […]

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go… 1. I don’t want to work at a Hogwarts event I work in a public library, and every year we do a Hogwarts-related event. Since the author has revealed herself as a transphobic bigot, I am not comfortable participating this year, not least because I’m genderqueer […]

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go… 1. Correcting my boss’s grammar One of my pet peeves is grammar errors because in a past life, I taught English composition for many years. The problem is that my supervisor asks me to give feedback on documents she’s put together. Nearly all have had grammar […]

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go… 1. Should I talk to my managers before I ask out a coworker? I’ve recently been working in person with a colleague again after a long period of only having phone and video interactions while we were working from home due to Covid. I’ve always found […]

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go… 1. Firing someone during a pandemic I have an employee who was placed on a PIP starting in mid-October 2019 for, among other things, being argumentative with feedback and missing deadlines. A decision was made to terminate her from the company, with a date set in […]

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go… 1. My job’s travel conflicts with my husband’s job’s Covid policies My work is requiring me to resume my monthly trips to the home office, which involves flying to a high COVID infection rate state. They are starting to require these trips again because my state […]