1. My company makes summer interns wear bikinis
I work at a car dealership, and recently we hired two college interns to work here for six months. Every summer we have an event at the dealership themed around the summer, and usually it’s just marketed as some sort of summer blowout sale. This summer, since hiring the two interns, it has been re-marketed as “summer beach days” by our male dealership manager (the dealership is 80% male employees and managers). Our interns are women ages 21 and 19 and were brought into the manager’s office and I believe pressured to agree to a new “uniform” for the rest of summer. You guessed it … bikinis. Then, as if that wasn’t enough, two weeks later they changed the “uniform” and handed the girls THONG bikinis. So now we have two young ladies selling cars all day walking around with their bare bums on display for all the customers and staff to see. The male customers certainly love this, it seems, and many times the manger has asked the young women to hold a sign out on the street, wearing their bikinis. The dealership manager even had them pose for photographs and post them on social media for marketing purposes. A couple of the pictures were from the front but one was from behind, so now the dealership is posting this photo of our interns’ asses on social media on a weekly basis.
The young women seemed a bit uncomfortable at first, but I’m not sure how they feel now. I am sure that they were pressured into this and that this was not in the plan when they signed up to work here. I have gotten to know them both a bit, and they are both so smart. I imagine in their minds they just have to deal with this on a temporary basis but it’s hard to watch. Maybe there is nothing that can be done but should I at least ask them how they feel about their bums frequently being posted to social media and try to get the pictures removed?
Please talk to them and tell them if they don’t want to wear bikinis at work, you will support them in pushing back — that this isn’t something they’re obligated to do and they have the right to refuse to do it. Ideally you’d also tell them that you’ll enlist other coworkers in supporting their stance if that helps make them more comfortable refusing (assuming you have decent colleagues who would in fact stand up for them once asked to). Let them know they can also say no to the photos and can ask to have the ones that were already posted removed if they want to.
I suppose it’s possible that you’ll find out that they’re enthusiastically consenting to all of this, but have the conversation since they may not realize their options. And even if they end up not pushing back on it, you’ll very likely be planting a seed in their thinking for the future.
You might also tell whoever in charge of hiring that if they’re going to ask this of future interns, they need to make it very clear it’s part of the job before anyone signs on.
2. Should managers expect apologies?
I’ve been in my current job for under a year, and my relationship with one of my direct reports has been challenging from the beginning. We have had a lot of communication issues, and they seem to have a strong tendency toward defensiveness, being territorial with their work, and assuming bad intentions of others. We recently had things come to a head, and their reaction to a mistake in their work being pointed out was unprofessional and unacceptable. I was able to address this with them later in the day. They seemed to somewhat know what they did was not okay, but mostly responded with defensiveness and deflection. They never apologized for the unacceptable reaction.
I have always made it a point to apologize personally and professionally when I have made mistakes and talk about what I would do differently going forward, so it definitely rubbed me the wrong way when they did not. Should managers expect an apology when something like this happens?
Eh. If I were advising the employee, I’d suggest they apologize if they flew off the handle or behaved inappropriately, but there’s no value in managers getting hung up on whether the person apologizes or not. The thing that you very much should be hung up on is whether they understand that what happened was a problem and can’t happen again and that they’re taking steps to ensure it doesn’t. It doesn’t sound like that was the case here, and that part is a big deal. I’d take it as a sign that it’s time to get very assertive about addressing the pattern of issues and either seeing quick and sustained improvement or considering whether you need to move the person out of the job.
3. Manager won’t keep any complaints anonymous
I need a sanity check over whether a manager’s idea around managing complaints is as bad as my team and I think it is.
I’m the senior of a small team and we work rotating shifts in a 24/7 control room environment. Our manager, Bob, is (a) on standard business hours and (b) managing multiple teams, so if we have an issue with work by someone on another team, it typically needs to be emailed to him to deal with it, as we will physically see him two days a week at most and not at all if he’s WFH when we’re in.
This would be fine, but his idea of dealing with it includes attaching your email to the email he’s sending to the person in question so there’s no anonymity. His reasoning is, “You’re all adults, you can deal with it and I believe in transparency, you should know what other people are saying about you.” This is exactly what happened with a major error we found in another team’s work, corrected, and sent to him so the person could be retrained. Bob included our emails in the one he sent to the person who made the error! Thankfully it was all professional, but still! What makes it worse is that this person is a known bully who now knows exactly who found and highlighted their errors.
I shared this with my team to warn them and their immediate reactions were “he’s throwing us under the bus” and “we can’t tell him anything at all, much less anything in confidence.” I agree with them completely, and I’ve told my team to funnel future issues through me and I’ll anonymize it before forwarding it on to Bob. I’ve also been in touch with HR but their response has been lukewarm. It also doesn’t help that Bob has a vindictive streak a mile wide and I’ve told HR I am very concerned about retaliation.
I’m not overreacting? This is bad practice?
You are not overreacting and this is terrible practice!
It’s all well and good to say you’re all adults and he believes in transparency — but human nature and internal politics are both real things! Of course people will worry about the consequences. And even if he doesn’t understand why because he wouldn’t feel that way himself (something that’s easy to say when you’re the one in a position of authority), it’s still how many people will feel and he needs to engage with the reality of human nature, not just pretend it doesn’t exist. He’s going to hear about far fewer issues if his staff knows that what they relay to him will be seen, in writing, by the person in question.
I’m not terribly surprised HR isn’t helping; at a lot of organizations, HR doesn’t get involved in coaching managers on things like this and instead gives them wide berth in how they operate as long as they’re not breaking the law. So your solution of having people funnel issues through you is probably the best place you’re going to land.
4. My new job just laid people off but I’m still here
I started my job at a small workplace (16 staff) in December. They just laid off three employees for budgetary reasons, which was a big shock to everyone. Despite being the newest person on the team, I was not let go. I can only assume it has to do with my specific role, but I really don’t know why they made the decision they made. I keep thinking they should have let me go and promoted one of the other staff who had been here several years into my role.
Whatever the reasoning for how this all shook out, I’m wracked with guilt about it. I feel awkward in the office now. I’m not sure how to address all of this among the small team, or even how to just be, when I was still working on learning the ropes and making good impressions with everyone. I appreciate any advice you can offer.
There are a ton of very good reasons for why they might have done it this way! The likeliest is that it was indeed about your role — layoffs are most commonly about cutting positions, not specific people. The organization can’t afford as many positions as it could previously, so it has to look at which roles are most expendable; it might be a lot easier to stop having, for example, a marketing assistant than a bookkeeper. Or sometimes they have to cut an entire program, and so the people who worked on that program are the ones who are cut.
But if your role is similar to ones that were cut, then it’s possible that they had different reasons for choosing the people who were laid off — for example, that they weren’t performing well, were difficult to work with, or their salaries were much more expensive than yours.
It’s very unlikely that any of your remaining coworkers blame you or resent you for still being there. (Plus, in such a small office, they might have a good idea of the factors that went into the decision and be able to see clearly why those specific people were cut.) Focus on learning the job and contributing in your role, and this should be fine.