My colleagues. We'll stop commenting on everything I need. My assistant rules his eyes at people and meeting. Why does my coworker keep taking credit for all my ideas? Have any wisdom for me? Hi? I'm Alison Green. Welcome to the Aska Manager podcast, where I answer questions from listeners about life at work, everything from what to say if you're allergic to your coworkers perfume to what to do if you drink too much at the company party. Let's
get started, Hi, and welcome to the show. Today. I'm going to answer a bunch of shorter questions from people, and the first question is from someone who works in an office where people do way too much over sharing. Hi, Alison, I've worked in the same office for over a year and a half and I'm bathful at how much my coworkers share. I've worked at several offices before and I've had very open discussions, but nothing quite on this level.
To give you a snapshot, my office is open concept, with the majority of us and cubicles and a few of us sharing offices in other rooms. It's a out ninety percent women, and the majority are in their early thirties, so they're going through similar things when it comes to marriage and children. This past year alone, one of my co workers got married to had babies, and one had a baby about a year ago. This has caused discussion
to always be about the female body and babies. I'm fine with sharing about these moments and hearing all about these milestones. However, I am not sure I need to hear about every kind of breast pump, the specifics of my coworkers bodies after birth, and associated issues related to pregnancy. I understand that they may have questions for each other
as they go through certain things for the first time. However, I now know that one of my co workers had to go to a vaginal physical therapist because of the condition of her reproductive organs post baby, and now has to use keegel weights. Another husband's was not into the Brazilian bikini actually got, and another kind of hates her husband. One of my friends in the office has brought it up to her supervisor, but since her supervisor is also
one of these people who overshares, nothing really happened. The few of us who aren't in this stage of life feels super uncomfortable. If we walked in talking about how much we drank over the weekend or what we did in a nightclub, we would be seen in a negative light. But if we talked about how our child is afraid to use a toilet or that our breastar chiefs from breastfeeding, it would be completely fine. As tempted as we are to go to HR, it doesn't feel like a major
enough issue to bring up in our HR department. Is a bit of a joke. Also, since it's the majority of our office having these discussions, it would be really obvious to figure out who complained. Are there any ways we can reduce over sharing in a house before having to take it up to someone higher. Thank you so much. People are so fascinating with the things that they do and don't have boundaries about and color you have somehow landed in a nest of people with no boundaries at all,
it seems so. In general, I would say it's mostly stuff that you want to try to address yourself rather than escalating it to your manager to HR. There's one exception to which I'm going to get to in a minute, but in general, with interpersonal stuff like this, typically it's something that you would address on your own, unless it's at the point where it's really interfering with your ability
to do your job. Like if you had a client in your office and your coworker was talking loudly about her bikini wax, that's something that would be appropriate to give your boss that heads up about because it's affecting clients and affecting your work, you know. Although even then I would still say talk to your coworker about it yourself first. I mean, if it's a one time thing that's not manager worthy, if it's a pattern, talked to her about it yourself. If that doesn't work, then talk
to your boss. But the reason I would say try talking to her about it yourself first is because first that will often solve the problem without you needing to involve your boss. And also because if it doesn't solve it and you do need to talk to your manager, it's going to look better that you've already tried to handle it yourself. Your boss may ask you have you tried talking to her about this directly, and you want
to be able to say yes. And then also from your co workers perspective, it's annoying to have someone complained to your boss when they didn't talk to you about the issue first, So you want to start with the people themselves. And if it's not stuff that is affecting your work, if it's just annoying interpersonal weirdness, that's not
really stuff to take to your boss. There is an exception to this, though, and that is if someone is over sharing about sex specifically, and if having to listen to sex talk at work is making you uncomfortable, because that is getting into problematic legal territory for your employer, because sexual harassment laws can be in play. Sexual harassment isn't just one person targeting another person. I think a lot of times people think that's all that it is.
It can also be that you're working in an environment that's inappropriately sexualized and where you're subjected to a barrage of unwelcome sexual discussion. So if something like that is happening, your company has an interest in knowing about it and shutting it down because otherwise they can be legally liable. As for what to do here, you can try shutting it down when it's happening, Like when one of those conversations gets going, you could say, hey, this is more
graphic than I want to hear at work. Can we keep this PG, or you could say, WHOA, that is too much for me at work, Let's move on. So sort of nudging people to realize, oh, there's people here who might not be happy bystanders to this conversation. Now, if you are actually working when this conversation is happening, you have a stronger standing to say this, because you're right to be able to focus on your work without having that distracting conversation around you. Trumps there their right
to talk about vaginal physical therapy. But if it's a conversation that's like more like something a conversation over lunch, where it's more of a social context, if everyone else at the table wants to be talking about post baby body changes or so forth, it might be that you just need to cut back on how often you're having lunch with that group because they do have more freedom with conversations and social settings. Although to be clear, that's still a work context and there's still a line they
shouldn't cross. It just really depends on exactly what the topic is and how graphic they're getting. But you may just need to be armed with some phrases like wow, too graphic for me, or so forth, something that you're ready to say when the conversation veers in that direction, that doesn't mean it will work. I mean, there are definitely groups of people who do this kind of thing, who think it's funny when someone objects, and we'll kind of tease you about it and won't stop at all.
So so how effective this will be will depend on your coworkers. But if you can frame it in terms of like, hey, I'm trying to work over here, that might help. But it is also true that if this is the culture of your office, and since at least one manager is apparently part of the problem too, this might just be the culture there. And that doesn't mean that you would need to put up with sexual harassment if that's what we're happening, or sexually hostile work environment.
I mean, I want to be clear that the answer to those things would not be, oh, it's just the culture there. But assuming that it's not that, and that it's really just people over sharing, there's probably not a ton of recourse. Even if you did have good HR, which you said that you don't, I don't think it would be something that you would get a lot of attraction on from them intervening on I mean a good HR person would talk to that manager who's involved and
explain why she should be raining this in. But HR also doesn't have the power to come in and just insist that people change their conversational habits as long as it's not something like harassment. And in your case, because you said HR at your company is bad, that's probably moot anyway. So the upshot here be armed with some phrases that you can use to redirect the conversation. Emphasize that you're trying to work. But that might be the best that you can do with this group. Okay, let's
go to the next call. So I'm bill like a new team to turn around late deliveries for a pretty important internal customer to our business. So in the process, I'm going to inherit a team member who's just he's away from his desk for hours on his phone and his computor at his desk. I walked by his desk and I've seen him watching movies on his phone while keeping his monitor alive with a spreadsheet or project plan
on the monitor. Um, he comes in at nine am, takes a long lunch, leaves at two pm, and really, seriously, that was just in the course of a typical week. So in this guy's defense, he's pretty new to the organization and he was never really coached by his manager. His manager had been on vacation or was traveling for business the majority of the time that he was here. The person who was responsible for on boarding him was moved to another team because he really couldn't handle the workload.
So I'm I'm really thinking you probably take up some bad habits from that time. So you know what am I going to do? Like, I feel like I'm going to demonstrate the energy I expect. I'm going to give tough but fair deadline, give him some weekly goals, ensure that his passions are aligned to the work. But it's like, do I give him the benefit of the doubt and see if he needed just a more engaged manager, or should I just start out addressing his behavior directly and
allowing him to start with clear expectations immediately. I just don't know whether I should just face this head on or let him evolve into the employee that I need. What do you think maybe there's another way forward? I don't know anyhow. Thank you very much for your time, and I really hope that you have some great ideas for me, and I'm sure you will thank you. You know,
I could argue this either way. There is an argument to be made for addressing it right off the bat, like right up front with him, so that he knows that the bad work habits have been noticed and aren't okay. But if I were you, I would give it a little time to see what happens. Not months, not even weeks, but like one week. See how that first week goes, and if you notice any of those habits during that week,
address it right away. But who knows. I mean, it's possible that the reason that he was slacking off so much under the old manager was because they hadn't given
him much work to do or something like that. And if that's the situation, and he wasn't doing much because they hadn't delegated much to him, but he otherwise would have been happy to be working if there was any work to do, it's going to be pretty mortifying to him and maybe I mean upsetting really to be called on the carpet for that if it wasn't really within his control, and it's going to make him feel like he already has the strike with you, even though it
wasn't a situation of his own making. Now that's giving him a huge amount of benefit of the doubt. But but there are potential I mean, who knows, who knows what was going on and why that slacking was happening, and why that manager, his old manager wasn't intervening. So I would give him that week, and during that week I would watch pretty closely and be ready to step in if you do notice anything problematic, But see how
it goes first. Um, if there wasn't some sort of extenuating circumstance that puts his earlier behavior in a better light, then presumably that's going to show up pretty soon for you too, and you can address it very very head on when you do. But give him that week and see how it goes. We'll take a short break here and be right back with a question about employers who called references who were not on the reference list that
you gave them. I have applied for positions before and been um given a heads up by colleagues that they were contacted to serve as reference for me, even though I hadn't listed them as references. You know that the place of employment had seen somewhere that I had worked with these people before and just contacted them out of the blue. Luckily, they all had great things to say.
But I've also been on the other end of this where I have been contacted as a reference not having been listed, and um, the employer has been transparent about that that they were just sort of calling to see what I thought of this candidate. Is this okay? Is there's something that happens a lot, and if so, is it? Um? Is it okay? Or does a candidate have the right to control who gives them a reference when they apply somewhere? Thanks so much? You are talking about what are known
as off list references a meeting. They are going off
the list that you provided, and they're definitely common. From an employer point of view, It's pretty likely that when a candidate hands over a list and says, oh, here are my references, you can contact these people about me, it's pretty likely that they know that those are people who will say good things about them, and maybe that's going to give you a full picture of who they are as an employee, but maybe not, because if someone is kind of a not great employee, they may have
sort of hands selected the very few people who will say something positive, So some employers won't always stick to the list that you give for exactly that reason. I will tell you what I personally do when I check references. When someone gives me a reference list, I really pay attention to who they have chosen to put on there. If it's like their last three managers, then great, that's pretty standard. It doesn't look like they're trying to hide anything.
But if there's only one manager from like a decade ago, and all the more recent people are peers or other people who didn't manage them, I'm going to wonder why what's going on there that they're not offering up any managers, And I'm just going to directly ask, hey, could you put me in touch with your last couple of managers. The exception to that is for their current job. Of course, I'm not going to contact your boss at a job that you're still working at if you haven't given notice yet,
because they could put your job in jeopardy. But if you have a few previous jobs before your current one and none of those managers are on the list, I'm gonna wonder why, and I'm going to ask if I can talk to them, and when I coach managers, I tell them they should be doing that too, because when you are checking references, first of all, you really want to get a full picture of someone, and you really want to talk to their managers, because managers just often
have a different vantage point on someone's work, different than what other references might have for them, because it was their job to assess it, and often they see different things. And so if I got a reference list with few or no managers, I want to go digging into why.
But the other thing that I do, and that a lot of employers do, is if I know someone who has worked with the candidate before, I'm going to contact that person about them, even if their name is not on that official reference list um whether it was their boss or a peer or whoever it might have been. If I know someone whose judgment I trust, who's worked with you before, I'm absolutely going to reach out to
them and get their take. And that type of informal reference checking is super common, where you have mutual connections and they get contacted about you. There is another type of off list reference checking that some employers do, although it is less common. That's where they're reaching out to people not in your reference list and who also are not mutual connections, So they're just like calling up your
last employer and asking about you. And when they talked to people, they might say something like, is there anyone else who Jane worked closely with who you would recommend that I talked to? And then they're calling those people. That's a lot less common. That's a very very thorough kind of check, but it does happen. Now. You also asked, does the candidate have the right to control he's giving them a reference? And the answer to that is no,
at least in the US. I can't speak to other countries, But in the US an employer can seek out references for you from pretty much anyone they want. But the informal ones where they're just talking to mutual connections, that's the most frequent type of off list reference. And that's just pretty basic info sharing. You know, Hey, I see used to work with Jane Smith. I'm thinking about her
for a job. What can you tell me? Okay, let's go to the next call, And before we do, I want to explain some of the terminology that you're going to hear this color using. You will hear her refer to people who are working five eights, which means five eight hour days each week, and four tens, which means for ten hour days each week. Okay, here is the call, Hello Wales, and one of my direct reports is the
manager of a group of fifteen people. Proximately eight years ago, before I was around, this group of fifteen was much smaller at around eight or nine and the work was much less intense. As an experiment, the opportunity was given to the staff to work four ten hour shifts rather than the usual five eights. This worked well for a while. Now the team has grown, and has mentioned above, the
scope and intensity of the work has also increased. Currently six people are on the modified four by ten schedule, with the rest of the team providing coverage for absences. I should note that we are a seven day week operation to some extent, with weekend schedules being covered by a skeleton crew made up of a mixture of folks who have a staggered work week, and by overtime shifts
by the standard Monday through Friday employees. As we've grown and expanded, the four by ten shifts and the coverage concerns they cause have become an increasing problem. After a time, analysis and other considerations did not justify hiring additional staff. My report, the group's manager, and I have come to the conclusion that we need to pull everyone back to five eighths in order to consure adequate coverage. This has been suggested in the past by members of the team
currently on the five eight schedule. Too much wailing and gnashing of teeth of the current four by ten and it's to the point where the business needs are showing us that we really do need to make this change. We're trying to be as kind as we can and the way that we announce this transition, but are struggling with the message, the timing, and the lead up to
the implementation. Any advice on how to approach this. I would like to make it as straightforward and drama free as possible, and I'm aware that some folks may quit over this change, which would put us even more behind the eight ball we while we try to re stuff afterward. Yeah, this is tough for a lot of people working for ten hour days and getting three day weekends every week can be a really significant benefit, and it could be
a blow to hear that that is changing. I think you're right to prepare for the possibility that some people make quit over it, but that's okay. People need to do what's best for them. What you want to avoid is people rage, quitting, being angry at how it's handled, or feeling like they weren't heard. If people quit, you want them doing it from the place of rational decision making, not irritation. So the best thing that you can do
is to be really transparent about what's going on. Be open with people about the reasons for the change, the alternatives that you considered instead of this, and why you ultimately did pick this as the best solution. And tell people that you know that this is a major change, that you appreciate what a benefit the old schedule was, and that if there were alternatives, you would have taken them, but in this case, switching back to five eights is
what made sense because of Blink. And tell people that you get it's a blow, and that you're available to answer questions or talk about concerns they might have, and if you can give people as much of a heads up as possible before that change happens, because people may have childcare schedules to work out or other scheduling issues that they'll need some lead time to address. You don't
want to spring it on them without much notice. And of course, if people do tell you that they're rethinking whether the job will still make sense for them, don't penalize them for telling you that. Let them know that you understand and that you hope they'll stay, but that
you support them in doing what's best for them. Beyond that, though there's not a ton you can do, people are going to feel how they feel, and some might decide that this changes the calculation of whether the job still makes sense for them, And that's okay as long as you're open and transparent and hear people out about their concerns and genuinely listen with an open mind and be willing to be flexible where you can. That's about all you can do to manage a tough situation. Well, but
those things will go a long way. The difference between doing those things and not doing them is pretty significant. We'll do a final break care and when we come back, we have an update from a recent caller who came
on the show. Hi, Alison, I'm a fairly senior lawyer at a large law firm on a partner truck and I have decided after I was passed over for partnership this year for again not having an instillable hours, I've decided that I need to find something that allows me a little bit more work life balance because I have two small children whom I'm trying to parent properly, and hobbies that I like to have, and uh, you know, just generally, I just need a different balance in my life.
So my question to you is, so i'm reading your blog, it seems like being a lawyer, particularly at a at a large, large law firm, is one of those jobs that typically is understood to just not be skewed towards balance. UM. So I take hope from that that there are jobs out there that I can achieve some sense of, um,
being able to serve other parts of my life besides work. However, what I would like to know is, when I'm interviewing, how can I get across the idea that I'm leaving my job in order to be able to spend more time doing other things without sounding like I don't want to work hard. I'm happy to work hard. The way I've been framing it in the few, you know, sort of headhunter conversations that I've been having is I want
to be the client. I don't want to be the service provider, because it's really the on call nature that I'm really struggling with. But I've also mentioned saying things like I don't mind working hard. I'm happy to work nights and weekends. I'm happy to travel. I just don't want it to be every night or every weekend. Anyway. I would love your opinion about how to make it sound like I'm not just looking for part time. I
don't want to coast. It's not that I just I'm not doing anything but work and parenting, and I need to do things like sleep and exercise occasionally. Thank you so much. I love your site. Thanks for everything you do. This is going to be easier than you think it is. You are absolutely right that people generally know that being a lawyer at a large firm means absolutely crazy hours and no work life balance. So you can really lean on that in explaining why you're looking for something else now,
because people will get it. You can just say something like I love my work, but I'm ready to move on from eighty hour weeks and I'm looking for a job where I can still work hard, but also where being able to have dinner with my family won't be a novelty, and that's all. You don't need more explanation beyond that, you're not going to sound like you're looking
to coast or not work much. People know there's a middle ground between crazy law firm hours and part time hours, and most of the population is in that middle ground. For what it's worth, I would not use that framing that you mentioned about wanting to be the client not the service provider. I don't think it's totally clear what you mean there, and you don't want to confuse people, and it's also possible that they'll take that as meaning
something different than how you intend it. I think you're using that because you feel like you need to have more of an explanation than you do. But really, it is totally fine to just say you were working eighty hour weeks or whatever it was and are ready to live like a more normal human being. You could even use you could even use that language, but being wanting to be a normal human you don't need anything more than that. People will get it and you will be fine.
Before we wrap up, I want to share an update that I got from the caller who was on last week's show the episode called My co Worker is Unbearably Negative. She's the person who had to work closely with someone who was doing a couple of difficult things. One was that she was just talking NonStop, including just talking out
loud to herself while sharing workspace with the Collar. And second, she was just really really negative, like unrelenting lee negative, constantly injecting their shared space with negativity, which was getting hard to handle. The Collar had even said she felt like she was sort of an unconsenting therapist to this coworker because it was just this stream of negative problems in her life. Well, she recorded an update about was
happened since she was on the show. Let's hear it. Hi, Allison, I'm the letter writer that recorded the podcast with you about my coworker who wanted me to be her non consensual therapist. And thank you so much again for taking the time to talk over the issues that I was having with her, and I wanted to let you know
how that's been going. And you know, I've been keeping my unusual coping strategies like taking a lot of breaks and having a lot of work to do um which hasn't been hard I've had a lot of work to do. And at one point she came in and I was doing a stack of calls, and um, you know, I said, hey, I got a lot of work to get through, so I may not be as talkative today, um, even though
I'm not a talkative one. But I said that, and she said she said okay, and she started to do that thing again where she talked out loud to herself and just says negative things out loud. And I just turned and said, hey, Jane, would you mind not talking out loud like that. It's just kind of distracting for me. And she totally stopped, and I just so appreciate it. And because you know, while she was a little happy at first, I think I was just being so reasonable
that she wasn't going to push back on that. And I just can't even believe it was this symbol of a solution to get that to stop. Um. And then as for the negativity kind of stuff where she's just
really negative. You shared an anecdote with me on the show about your mom and how sometimes she just gets a kind of like a kind of twisted joy out of sharing that experiences almost like a way to connect um and I started to see things that Jane was saying that way, and it really really helped because I was less frustrated, um, I was let I was able
to use my normal coping strategies. But just having that different mindset and attitude about her and about why she does that really made a difference and made me be able to have better empathy for her um as that was going on and not take that negativity in quite so hard. So it's not perfect, but it's way way better. And thank you so much for your show and your website. As didn't just really appreciate um all the work you do here because I know there's a lot find the scenes,
So thanks so much. That is a great update. It's so interesting how sometimes solutions to things that are really bothering us can end up being much more simple and more straightforward than what we're fearing they will be. So that's a testament to what you can get done by just being direct, friendly, but direct. That's our show for today. If you would like to hear your question answered on a future episode, you can record it on the show voicemail by calling eight five five four two six work.
That's eight by five two six nine, six, seven five, Or if you have a longer question, a question where you would actually want to come on the show and talk with me, email it to podcast at ask a manager dot org. That's it for today and I will be back next time with more questions. M