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The (Way Too) Early Morning Shift
I work for a Fortune 100 company in the Midwest. As with most large companies, mine is trying to get people to return to the office almost full time. I am trying to balance my home and work life but having a hard time. I have a new manager who is instituting twice a week in-person team meetings that begin at 7 a.m. That means I must leave my house by 6:15 a.m. at the latest.
Most of the suppliers I work with are on the West Coast, so my busiest work time is mid- to late-afternoon. I rarely get home before 7 p.m. when I’m working from the office. Having 7 a.m. meetings would mean I miss getting my kids up and to school as well as making and eating dinner with them. It’s unsustainable. I work mostly with men who have stay-at-home wives. My new manager is a young, unmarried woman with aggressive career aspirations. My role is as an individual contributor. A majority of my role is spent on the phone or online with suppliers, and I have a consistent track record of excellent appraisals.
How can I approach trying to find a workable environment?
— Early bird
First, a confession. I would have trouble making it to an in-person 7 a.m. meeting. I am not in the habit of leaving my house at 6:15 a.m. I don’t think I’m alone in that!
But your letter also made me think about a different hour of the day: 5 p.m., and about who I was once at 5 p.m., in the office in my late 20s. Sometimes my boss would call impromptu meetings around 5, right when I knew (and he should have known) a colleague absolutely had to leave to deal with child care. She could not stay; I happily attended the meeting. This was good for my career and probably not for hers. Now, looking back, I wish I had said: “Actually, I have to go too. Can we reconvene tomorrow morning?”
Even if all I had to do was commute home and sit in total silence on my couch and stare into the middle distance, far from a pinging inbox. Or get a beer with a friend. (Two equally fun options.)
But my life circumstances then allowed me to embrace an expansive workday and the career advancement I imagined might hinge on being seen as available in those later hours.
This is to say, people show up to the same jobs at the same companies with very different lives outside of work. They have wildly divergent obligations, having made different calculations about the compromises they are willing or able to make in terms of how much time they have for family, for friends, for nonwork activities.
From your perspective, it seems, everyone else who is affected by this schedule change has more flexibility than you do. I’m not sure you know that to be true, or, more to the point, that it’s a productive assumption to make. Your colleagues with stay-at-home wives probably do still want to see their families. Your new manager may be “young” and “unmarried” and a woman with “aggressive career aspirations,” but that doesn’t mean she has zero obligations outside of the office. (She may also have past experience in corporate settings where younger women aren’t taken seriously as managers, and that could affect her scheduling decisions and the tone she wants to set from the start too.)
I will give your new manager the benefit of the doubt and assume that the scope of your job does legally allow for this schedule and these 12-hour days you are describing.
(If that’s not the case, then your first call needs to be to an employment lawyer.)
But if you work in a salaried role, exempt from overtime, in a demanding corporate environment, where work often expands beyond 40 hours a week — and you are, in your view, fairly compensated for those demands — then this is essentially a communication challenge.
It doesn’t sound as if your new manager fully explained her reasoning for this 7 a.m. meeting, and knowing what it is would help. Perhaps there is a bigger corporate mandate to work on East Coast hours, or a sprint to meet a particular goal that she believes a 7 a.m. in-person start will best serve.
But it’s also likely that your boss doesn’t fully understand the shape of your days. She may know you deal with suppliers on the West Coast, but not that your busiest time is early afternoon Pacific time.
At your next check-in with her, broach the topic of the new schedule.
Ask how she would like you to prioritize your time on the days when you start in-office at 7 a.m.
Does she still want you to be available to West Coast suppliers through their workday? If so, tell her that the best option for you to continue contributing at a high level is to commute home in the afternoon and finish your calls and emails from home, after handling family responsibilities.
Or tell her you will construct a schedule where on the days you are in office from 7 a.m., your workday ends at 3 p.m., after you put in a very reasonable eight-hour day. Your email signature could indicate your schedule with full transparency and suppliers won’t be in the lurch.
(These can also be posed as questions to her — “would it be OK if I …?” — if you’re more comfortable doing it that way, or if you intuit that she might respond more warmly to supplication.)
I would hope she would pick the 7 to 3 option. Or reconsider the in-office morning meeting.
If she is a good manager, she won’t want to lose you and your excellent record of appraisals. She seems like someone who is eager to optimize her time; a job search for your replacement would take a lot of it.
The Nightmare in the Cubicle Next Door
I was promoted a year ago over a colleague, and she has been uncooperative, insubordinate and belligerent in a passive-aggressive way ever since. But my boss thinks we “need” her. Should I quit? Otherwise, I love my job!
— Simmering
Your question is admirably efficient, word-count-wise, but it does tell an epic tale. Of hurt feelings, I am assuming. Of icily snippy workplace dialogue; the casual “Oh, is that how we’re doing those forms now? I usually do it the way our boss told me to”; the “Hey, next time could you send the deck over earlier? It could just be me, but I like to have time to proofread my work”; the under-the-breath “Oh, that’s different.”
A tale relatable to most anyone who has ever had co-workers.
The people we spend our workdays with are not, for the most part, people we have chosen ourselves. They are not people we met through mutually gravitated-toward leisure pursuits or algorithm-sorted matchmaking, connections refined over shared beverages and bonhomie.
In the best cases, we are working in a field we were drawn to for a reason, and we can find real and meaningful connections with other people in that field.
But still. For many people who work full-time, having a job means spending many hours a day in the company of other human beings we didn’t vet.
Maybe you and your colleague got along just fine before you were promoted. Maybe there was always tension simmering. Either way, an internal promotion can be a difficult situation to navigate. Established dynamics shift. Even in an entirely fair and well-handled process, it is challenging to adjust to treating someone as a peer one day and higher up the ladder the next.
And I am guessing your boss didn’t do a great job with the process — guessing with not much to go on, but the quotation marks you put around “need” in your letter (“we ‘need’ her”) are a clue.
It’s difficult to give people bad news, and telling someone she didn’t get a promotion while her colleague did is a hard message to deliver. Especially because, it seems, your boss wanted to keep this person at the company.
So your boss may not have been entirely candid about why you got the promotion and your colleague didn’t.
It’s possible your boss went for the “compliment sandwich,” a feedback technique that, as you might guess, puts some flattering observation on either side of an unpleasant truth.
I attended a management training a few years ago where we were explicitly told, “Hey, no more sandwiches.” The idea being: People are most likely to remember the last thing they heard. So if it’s a compliment, that’s what they’ll leave the meeting thinking about. The critical feedback or notes on needed improvements will fade from memory and only the gold star will remain.
If that was the message to your colleague — “we need you, you’re amazing, you’re not getting the promotion, we really need your incredible contributions” — it could make it difficult to move on from the disappointment of not getting promoted, since it won’t make sense.
So, what to do about it? If your colleague’s behavior is negatively affecting your ability to get your work done, I do think you should talk to your boss. Make sure to do it in as constructive a way as possible, one that does not involve discussion of feelings or attitudes. You say it’s been a year, which is a natural moment to reflect. Tell your boss that you want to address areas in which, in your view, collaboration and communication could improve for everyone’s benefit. Talk strategies, not slights.
That’s if this situation is affecting your ability to do your job. If it’s not, my actual advice is not to raise it. Instead, remember that the people you spend your workdays with may be your work friends or your work enemies or your work passive aggressive passed-over-for-a-promotion colleagues who are making your 9-to-5 miserable. But they are not the people who make up the totality of your life.
So what I hope for you, is that you have a good group of nonwork friends and a robust group chat where the indignities of your day can be recounted and exorcised.
Your real friends will celebrate your successes in life — you got the promotion! — and be ready with the perfect emoji of commiseration when you need it most.
Really, it’s a gift you’re giving them too. It will put their days in perspective. At least they don’t have to work with that lady.
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