1. My employee is late every day because she stops for coffee
Our office that isn’t the sort of place where everyone has to be sitting at their desk at exactly 9 a.m. There is some flexibility, and I genuinely don’t care if someone is a little late on occasion. But there is, in fact, a start time. It’s not merely a suggestion.
I manage one person who has developed a habit of strolling in late every day, Starbucks in hand, looking perfectly relaxed. The coffee is the part that’s frustrating me. If she were rushing in because of traffic or a train delay, I’d be sympathetic. But when she walks through the door 10-20 minutes after she’s supposed to be there carrying a drink that she clearly stopped for on the way, it’s hard not to think she’s not taking our start time seriously.
I also don’t want to be the manager who polices everyone’s arrival down to the minute. Her work gets done, and she’s otherwise a good employee (not the best, not the worst). But we have a start time for a reason, and if everyone adjusted their start time back as much as she’s done, that actually would cause some problems.
Am I being unreasonable? Should I let this go because she gets her work done, or is it fair to tell her that she needs to get her coffee earlier?
You’re not being unreasonable; you have a start time, you don’t hold people to it like a drill sergeant, but you do expect them to generally follow it. “I don’t care if you’re occasionally a little late; I do care if arriving late becomes your normal routine” is a reasonable standard.
But don’t make it about the coffee; how she manages that is up to her. Address the thing you actually care about. For example: “We have some flexibility around schedules, and I’m not concerned about the occasional late arrival. But you’ve been arriving 10-20 minutes late every day. I need you to be here and ready to work at our scheduled start time. If there’s something about your schedule that frequently makes that difficult, let me know and that’s something we can talk about it.”
2. Our CEO is having a very obvious affair with an employee
I work for a small startup in an important position, and report directly to our CEO. About six months ago, he started dating one of the directors at our company (who received the promotion shortly before their relationship became public). Since then, their behavior has been raising a lot of eyebrows and it is escalating. Working from home together when everyone else has to be in office, letting her sit and listen to investor calls without notifying the investors she is present, and rubbing thighs, holding hands, and eating off of each other’s plates at an investor dinner. They’ve recently started kissing in the office as well.
In addition to the PDA, he’s developing double standards. He has refused to engage in conversations around defining roles and responsibilities with myself and other members of our team, but has weekly recurring meetings around this topic with her.
I have tried talking to him directly, but he gets defensive and lashes out. We don’t have an HR department. Are my only options at this point to suck it up or quit?
Pretty much, yes.
It’s a huge abuse of power and conflict of interest, not to mention gross and unprofessional (rubbing thighs and eating off each other’s plates?!) but the CEO at a small start-up is really only accountable to your board and your investors. In theory you could complain to the board, but the risk of blowback to you is high enough that you’re better off just getting out. (Or you could get them tickets to a Coldplay concert, I suppose.)
3. Should I refer my friend when she wasn’t a great coworker?
I recently had lunch with a former coworker from a previous job, “Anna.” We last worked together nearly a decade ago, but we’ve kept in touch socially and I now consider her a friend. During our lunch, she told me she’d been abruptly let go from her job of three years and is now scrambling to find something new. She then mentioned she would be interested in working at my current company and would appreciate if I could refer her if there are any jobs that would be a good a fit. I was sympathetic to her job loss and, regarding the referral, just said she should check out our website to see if there are any roles she’s interested in.
My issue is I don’t know if I can honestly give her a good referral. I like her a lot as a friend, but working with her was difficult in a number of ways. We were peers on the same team, and while she did parts of her job well enough, she really struggled anytime there was a process change and would get very frustrated if she felt she wasn’t receiving enough guidance. She also wasn’t good at articulating the reasons behind different work processes, even after doing some of the same work for several years.
My current company is very fast-paced and, while they do provide training, people are expected to make an effort to figure things out on their own and take full ownership of the areas they cover. I don’t know that Anna would be a good fit for this sort of environment. At the same time though, losing her job has caused a ton of financial stress, and I know the job market is terrible. It’s also been a long time since we worked together, so I don’t know how she may have changed as an employee. I’m not sure exactly what happened at her previous job and why she was let go — she seemed to be doing well for some time (and even got promoted at one point), but she didn’t leave voluntarily. All she really said is that she felt like her manager started to dislike her and pushed her out, but she didn’t go into detail (I have to admit, this gave me pause).
Is it wrong of me to feel like I don’t want referring her to potentially damage my reputation at work? Would referring her be an implicit endorsement of her skills, or is it on the hiring manager to assess whether she’s a good fit? There’s a job that’s going to be posted within the next couple of weeks on an adjacent team to the one I work on. I think Anna will likely be interested, so I’m trying to figure out what to do before then.
Referring her would indeed be an implicit endorsement of her as a candidate. It’s still on the hiring manager to assess whether she’s a good fit, but recommendations from good employees usually carry weight — and in many/most cases will reflect on your judgment. You should not recommend someone for a job unless you genuinely, wholeheartedly recommend them. Or if you don’t, you need to be clear about that to the hiring manager when you pass their resume along — as in, “She’s good at X and Y, but she struggled with Z when we worked together. It was 10 years ago so she may have changed, but I wanted to flag that as an area to probe if you do talk with her.”
Yes, Anna is your friend — but you’re not required to sacrifice your own professional reputation by making a business recommendation that you don’t actually stand by.
4. I want to move but don’t want to lose my job
I’m a remote-ish employee (the consulting firm I work for is fully remote, but our long-term client is theoretically hybrid and I have to go into the office once a quarter for meetings). For the six months I’ve worked here, my boss hasn’t been in the habit of spontaneously asking me to come into the client’s office or meet in person.
I’m hoping to move to another city a few hundred miles away and within the same state, ideally by the end of this year — think San Francisco to Los Angeles. I’m looking for jobs in the area I’m hoping to move to, but it’s been slow and I haven’t been getting too many responses. I also really like my current job, and I’m excited about certain upcoming projects that will give me a good amount of experience aligning with my longer term career goals.
I realize that I’ll have to tell my boss about my plans to move eventually, but I’m terrified that even trying to talk about this risks losing my job. I’m still pretty new, but I think I’ve been doing well — I’ve been getting good feedback on my work, at the very least, but I wouldn’t really consider myself a rockstar employee. What would be the best way to approach this conversation, and when would be the best time? Is it too much to hope for, to be able to keep this job and just fly in for the required quarterly meetings?
It might not be a big deal at all — or it might be an immediate no (if, for example, they want you to stay available for in-person work with the client, even if that only happens incredibly rarely). You won’t know until you ask. But you also don’t want to make your boss think you might be preparing to move on, especially when you’ve only been there six months.
So to raise it, float it as something you’re curious about but don’t have actual plans to do right now: “I don’t have current plans to do this but I wanted to know what is and isn’t possible since I really like this job and want to stay here long-term: If I ever wanted to move somewhere else in the state — like to LA or Fresno — would that be workable for this role? I’d of course fly in for quarterly meetings.”
5. The company I work for is being bought out
I have worked for a very small business for a decade now, and I’m pretty happy with my job and compensation. Unfortunately, the owner wants to retire and has put it up for sale with several large corporations interested. I looked into purchasing it, but the asking price is astronomical and I can’t even afford the down payment. They keep telling me that these large businesses “don’t want to change anything” and management seems to believe it. I’m polishing my resume, but I have a restrictive non-compete in my contract that would prohibit me from doing my current job without moving to another county, which is absolutely not possible.
Right now I’m trying to network and have signed up for webinars about alternative careers in my field. What else do I do so I can be prepared for my woke life becoming seriously unpleasant and not having many options? Do these things ever go well? The businesses interested in acquiring us work in tangential fields, but have zero experience in our niche industry. Historically these have gone very badly for employees and clients alike.
It’s not impossible for an acquisition to go well — it has happened! — but it’s really, really common for things to change in a way that the acquired employees don’t like. So you’re right to be thinking about alternatives.
The main thing I’d look at it in your shoes is whether that non-compete is even enforceable. They’re notorious for overreaching, and in many, many cases aren’t enforceable for that reason. I’d prioritize running it by a lawyer — because you might find out that they can’t legally hold you to it.