1. I don’t want to hug our owners
Our smaller west coast insurance company was bought out by a southern-based, family-owned insurance company. The new owners, all male, occasionally come to town and, when greeting our mostly female staff, go in for a tight hug as greeting.
I am not a hugger, even with people I know. I’ve tried to deflect with a fist bump and have been verbally called out with not wanting a hug. This makes me so uncomfortable. The other women in my office do not like the hugs either, but are afraid of being singled out as difficult. This is so wrong, but how do I deflect without putting a target on my back?
If you’re otherwise warm and friendly, simply explaining that you’re not a hugger is very unlikely to put a target on your back (unless there’s extreme dysfunction going on there that’s not mentioned in your letter). You can say, “Oh, I’m not a hugger but it’s so great to see you, how have you been?” and otherwise convey warmth while maintaining a no-hugging boundary.
Since your coworkers don’t like it either, any chance you can convince some of them to do the same? Forming an “oh, we’re not huggers in this office!” united front will make it easier for all of you.
Related:
are we supposed to accept “touch” as an “appreciation language” at work?
2. My coworkers is challenging to work with, and now it’s affecting a high-profile project
I’m not someone who is judgmental about other people’s grammar since it’s not essential to our job. But working with my coworker, Janet, has become a headache because I can barely understand what she types, and she insists on sharing files a certain way.
let me write this paragraph to demonstrate what I mean she writes exactly like this Janet barely uses punctuation and sometimes forgetstoseparatewords, I will read her sentences three times to figure out what she is saying or ask clarifying questions in a polite way she will do this on both Teams and in emails with directors copied sometimes its embarrassing and I cant tell if she says we need to fix the teapot or we dont need to fix the teapot, especially when she has random clauses in the middle like emailing this now and sometimes shell even leave sentences open like this and
This is an upper middle-class American-born woman in her fifties or sixties. Many of my coworkers are first-generation immigrants who speak English as a second language, and I never have this problem with them. I volunteer with middle schoolers outside of work who I never have this problem with. Perhaps there’s some disability issues involved that I’m unaware of.
Janet also insists that I share files with her differently than how I share files with everyone else. I send files through Teams, emails, shared folders in the network drive, and Sharepoint pages, just like everyone else at my job.
When I first sent some PDFs to Janet on Teams, she said, “You need to send each with a separate email subject line [charge code, serial number, etc. in specific order] i cannot view in teams like i can in an email.” She also requested that my subject line be something very specific. If I did so much as, say, type the serial number before the model number instead of the other way around, she would ask that I reattach the file to a brand new email with a corrected subject line. When I broached this with our project manager, they said that Janet uses emails to sort her files. These emails only go to Janet.
I’ve worked with her for a few months, but I never brought up any concerns again. Everyone has their quirks and mild nuisances, and these were just hers that I had to work with.
However, the project manager learned a customer is missing important records that we should’ve given them three years ago. My predecessors should’ve uploaded these to a specific shared folder, but the PM discovered that I was the only one uploading them properly since I’ve joined. The PM and I have been on a deranged scavenger hunt where we peek in every shared folder imaginable and beg those formerly in my position to check their own files. This has gotten visibility from the directors as well.
The stress has made Janet’s idiosyncracies less tolerable. The files that I could recover were too big to email, so I asked the PM if there was a folder that I could place them into. Shortly after, Janet sends me an email with a link to a new folder in her own temp folder in the shared drive to drop them into. After I uploaded a few files, she asked me to email them individually to her. I told her that each file was too big to email, and she asked if I could compress them for her. These were PDFs with detailed graphs that needed to retain their quality, so I couldn’t. I made a zip file for each PDF, but she said that sending zip files to her was “unacceptable” since they’re “difficult to view” (?). I told her that she can access the files herself in the temporary folder that she sent me, but she only reiterated that she needed them emailed individually. Then she told me, “You also misspelled Customer Name on your subject line please make sure not to do that you have to send me another email please this is important thank you.”
I was so fed up with her that I took a 10-minute walk and switched to unrelated assignments for the rest of the day. I want to bring up these issues to either my manager or the project manager, but I don’t know how. A part of me thinks that I’m overreacting, so I’d like to know if I’m making too big a deal out of this.
No, she’s making your work on a high-profile, important project significantly less efficient. That’s something you can raise to your boss and/or the project manager. Frame it this way: “Janet is asking for X, which is making my work to solve this problem much less efficient because of Y, and when I’ve tried pushing back previously, she hasn’t been willing to budge. I would like to do Z, because it would help this work in ___ ways, but I’d need you involved to talk with her.”
Leave her confusing emails out of it unless you can point to concrete problems they’re causing on this specific project (since others who work with her are undoubtedly already aware of how she writes) and keep the focus on how her rigidity is affecting this high-priority project that your directors are watching.
3. Why do employers lead candidates on like this?
My husband recently applied for a job and was given an in-person initial interview. During the interview, on a Friday, several things were said or done that led him to believe that they were very interested in him — they gave him a tour, said he should hear from them later that afternoon, asked him if he could start on Monday, asked him what salary he was looking for. I know you’ve said before that none of that guarantees anything, but WHY don’t employers think before they talk like that? They could just have easily said he’d hear from them next week, or not asked if he could start on Monday, even if it was jokingly. Instead, they not only got his hopes up while he had to wait over the weekend (because of course he didn’t hear on Friday) but he hasn’t heard anything yet today, Monday, either. If they’re not going to commit to doing what they say, then don’t say it!
I realize that they’re probably very busy, but how long does it take to send a quick email? “Sorry, something came up, we won’t know anything until next week/week after/next month,” etc. That took me all of about 10 seconds, it’s not that hard!
I know probably nothing will change, but I just don’t understand why companies can’t do better. And this is not an isolated incident — it seems like it’s become the default response these days (or non-response actually.) Companies want to hire the best people, so be the best company and stop ghosting those best people!
It’s ridiculous to ask someone on a Friday if they can start Monday unless they’re prepared to make a job offer on the spot. (I do wonder if that was meant to be a joke and they thought he would take it that way— like just a way of saying, “We’re so busy and in need of this vacancy to be filled” or even just, “You seem great.”)
However, none of the rest of it — the tour, asking about salary, and saying he should hear something later that day — sounds like they were implying that he got the job. Those are just normal things that happen in interviews without meaning anything about the person’s chances. But definitely after they told him to expect to hear something later that day and then realized that wasn’t going to happen, they should have sent a quick email explaining that — and if they couldn’t do it that day (which is the reality of how things sometimes go when there are competing priorities), then definitely on Monday.
To your question about why employers give candidates timelines and then don’t follow up until weeks or months later, and sometimes not at all: yes, it’s rude! There’s no excuse for it; as you note, it really doesn’t take more than seconds. But on the candidate side, it’s far better for your quality of life to recognize that this is endemic in job-hunting and you should never put a ton of weight on those timelines and just let it be a pleasant surprise if they do stick to them. That’s not to excuse it because, again, it’s rude. But as a candidate, the only part you do have control over are your own expectations and it’s better for you to make them realistic ones.
Related:
you are reading too much into things employers say to you
4. Can I use positive performance reviews in my job search?
Am I able to use positive performance reviews in my job search somehow? My last one was absolutely glowing, and I got “Exceptional” in several categories. It’s so bleak out there right now, I’d like to use anything I can to help.
The more context you can provide to make it sound truly superlative (and not just like something lots of people got), the better. For example, “Awarded highest company rating on annual performance evaluation, awarded only to top 5% of employees” or “Awarded highest company rating on annual performance evaluation three years in a row” are better on your resume than “Awarded highest company rating on annual performance evaluation.”
You can also think about what you did that resulted in those exceptional ratings and talk about those specifics in your resume or cover letter — like, “Regularly praised for meeting tight deadlines under challenging circumstances” or “frequently lauded by customers for leading engaging, entertaining trainings” or so forth.
And also, if there was something particularly superlative in the review that stands out as truly exceptional, you can sometimes include that. (For example, I used to mention in cover letters that my manager called me “the fastest writer on the planet,” but something like “communicates well and meets deadlines” wouldn’t rise to the level of resume-worthy.)
5. Going back after taking a voluntary buy-out
My (UK government) employer is talking about doing a “voluntary exit” scheme (I think you’d call it voluntary redundancy in the U.S.?) which I’m thinking about applying for. It’d get me about nine months pay in severance, and I could also temp while I looked for another job. I’d want to go back into government but at another department, ideally, doing similar work. I’m just burned out on my current job and love the idea of getting away and having a break.
How would I explain that to people when I was applying to go back though? Like, of course I could say I took a break due to a now-resolved health issue, but that sounds weird for a voluntary exit, which is scheduled. I think it would sound like I was lying, like, oh, your health declined just at the time you could get paid to leave your job? Come on!
I can’t speak to how this works in the UK, but in the U.S. you’d want to check the details of the severance agreement. With voluntary exit packages/buy-outs like this, some organizations will require a waiting period (often one to three years) before you can reapply (this is to avoid people leaving to get the package and then coming right back) and some even have no-rehire rules attached. In some cases, if you’re rehired within a certain amount of time, you have to pay back a prorated portion of your severance.
But if the terms of the departure don’t prohibit it, there’s nothing wrong with reapplying later and just saying it was the right decision for you at the time but after being in the private sector for a while, you’re interested in returning to government.