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Don’t Butt In
Dear Work Friend,
My company has an employee who is intelligent and hard-working. He is a logistics specialist and has no trouble with the day-to-day work of handling shipments. The problem is with the other part of his job, which involves classifying products in many different ways for transportation purposes.
He is slow to complete these tasks and talks of getting stuck. The issues he gets stuck on are often minor, as in many cases there is more than one reasonable classification. He rarely asks for guidance when he has a problem; he simply stops. His desk is a total mess of papers.
I suspect that he has a form of A.D.H.D. I have seen problems like this with family members and they have benefited from formal treatment. As an employer, how can I reach out to him and tell him he needs help? This would be covered by our health insurance.
Anonymous
Let me get to the most important point first: Do not tell your employee that you think he has A.D.H.D. You are not a doctor. You are not his doctor. You do not have the diagnostic expertise or sufficient knowledge of your employee’s life to make this assessment, and even if you did it would be wildly unprofessional and invasive. And even if this appeal to professional considerations doesn’t move you, consider the legal liability: If you tell this employee you think he has a disability, and later fire him, you are leaving yourself open to an expensive lawsuit.
It’s for this reason that the best thing here is to talk to him directly about the behaviors and outcomes that are creating problems, rather than some root psychological cause. Ask him what causes him to get “stuck” on classifications and what’s stopping him from asking for guidance. Then see if he has any suggestions for structural solutions — new policies or accommodations that could help him speed up his completions.
These accommodations might be helpful for other employees as well. He’s probably not the only worker who’s been confused by classification ambiguity, and a decision framework or flow chart with explicit instructions for outliers could make everyone’s life a little better.
Finally, as a separate matter, you could make it a policy to periodically remind all your employees of your benefits package, and encourage them to see doctors regularly and seek professional help if they’re finding personal problems affecting their work. This is another policy that would likely benefit all of your employees — and allow you to remain their boss, rather than their psychiatrist.
Their Affair. My Problem.
I work on a team of three people at a nonprofit. I’m relatively new, and I had struggles with my original two colleagues from the start. They both let me know that I wasn’t their top pick for the job, and prevented me from working on any projects with them. I raised concerns with management repeatedly over the past year, and while they have recognized the situation is not ideal, they haven’t wanted to intercede.
What’s more, I have long suspected that these colleagues were having an affair, a suspicion that I kept to myself. Recently, in an effort to promote better relations between us, management sent us and another colleague on a work trip to Hawaii. This colleague and I discovered that the other two were spending large amounts of time not working, and we accidentally — when stopping by one of their condos for a planned dinner — overheard them clearly having sex. This became one of many other signs of their physical intimacy that we witnessed on the trip.
When we got back to work, my colleague and I chose to report our suspicions that they had been using company funds to pay for romantic getaways. Management did a broader investigation and found many months of financial problems relating to misuse of work funds. As a result, one of my colleagues was fired. The other, who was a longstanding, much-beloved employee, remains employed, but is extremely angry.
Assuming she remains at the company, I will be expected to work with her. I believe she blames me for everything that has happened. We have no H.R. department, and I am at a loss for how to navigate this relationship. Any advice?
— Anonymous
I wouldn’t want to minimize an obviously stressful situation. But I hope you can recognize the silver lining here: Your vexing workplace drama is juicy.
In my capacity as an advice columnist I’ve heard a lot of interminable tales of internecine office conflict, and imagined the effort the submitters’ friends must have needed to feign interest. Your friends, I can only imagine, are genuinely interested. Not many work complaints can boast so many turns: Secret affairs! Misappropriated funds! Sex! Conflict! Hawaii! It’s like a thriller, or, at least, a slice-of-life Sundance drama.
Obviously it doesn’t solve your actual problem, but at least your stress is caused by a good story, one that you will be able to recount for many years to come. And that can be good not just for your reputation as a raconteur, but also, I’d hope, as a way of establishing perspective and distance.
Still, there’s obviously more to do than just laugh about it. In the absence of an H.R. department, a good rule of thumb for dealing with a hostile colleague is: Document everything. In fact, this is a good policy even when your employer has an H.R. department — you never know when you might want to have a separate record of your own to show an employment lawyer. But it’s especially important when your only advocate within your organization is yourself.
By “document everything,” I mean you should maintain both an email correspondence with her that can act as a written reference to any verbal agreements, and a record of any difficult interactions with this colleague. It doesn’t need to be a detailed diary with elaborate descriptions — just a running log with dates, times, witnesses and a brief record of what was said. (Keep notes for your movie script in a separate file.)
You may never need to refer to this documentation. But in the event her hostility tips into retaliation or harassment, you’ll want it.
Before it gets to the point of conflict, though, you should also open up a line of communication with your bosses. You say they haven’t wanted to intercede in the past, and while I can be sympathetic to their position, insofar as I, too, am sometimes lazy and avoidant, it’s a dereliction of managerial duty for them to have allowed this kind of noxious dynamic to develop. At the very least, they should be providing written expectations for professional workplace conduct and a blanket warning against retaliation.
But if you can’t make them do their jobs, you can at least make them define yours. Asking for structure from your bosses — clearly defined tasks and roles that allow you to do your job without depending on her cooperation — seems like a reasonable request in this situation, as would a policy of regular check-ins to flag issues as they arise.
All of this would help establish boundaries before you even need to strategize the in-person interactions with a person who potentially hates you. If you’ve secured autonomy and clarity from your bosses, and are maintaining your own records, you can treat your colleague the way you’d treat any difficult person who has no real power over you: with kid gloves, and at a distance.
Be unfailingly polite, clear and direct, but don’t try to repair the relationship or ingratiate yourself, and most importantly, don’t take any bait that’s offered to you. It’s not your fault that she had an affair with her co-worker and misappropriated nonprofit funds. It wasn’t you having loud sex in Hawaii, and you didn’t get her lover fired — they did, together.
At the same time, I might start to quietly send my résumé around to other employers. The fact that your bosses were already declining to mediate your dysfunctional workplace relationship even before The Hawaii Incident (working screenplay title) — and are continuing to do so after an offense significant enough to get someone fired — should not fill you with confidence that they will have your back when the time comes.
The post I Think My Employee Has A.D.H.D. Should I Tell Him? appeared first on New York Times.
