coworkers want me to spend the night at their house, employee refuses to do her job, and more — Ask a Manager

It’s “where are you now?” month at Ask a Manager, and all December I’m running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past. Here are four updates from past letter-writers.

There will be more posts than usual this week, so keep checking back throughout the day.

1. My boss and my employee won’t stop asking me to spend the night at their houses

A few little details to clear up things that were brought up in the comments and one big one that I think ended up being the root of the issue (maybe). I am in a large metropolitan area on the east coast, and it is not in any way normal for people to invite other people to spend the night at their house in this area. I grew up Mormon, so my views on alcohol are a bit skewed. I do drink but I find it highly unusual to drink at children’s activities, holidays, and other times when a lot of people think it is normal. Also, when I said I can be a little wild on the weekends, I meant smoking pot and swimming naked in my pool, nothing more.

The biggest thing to clarify, which I think was the root of the invites, is that I actually lived three hours away, but my boyfriend lived about 30-45 minutes away. We (the kids, him, and I) split our time between the two places. We have been dating for many years and the kids had bedrooms and friends in both locations. When I needed to be in the office, I would stay at his house. Most of the time, we were at my house. We referred to both places as home. Since then my kids graduated and went off to college, we sold both houses, and bought a house together that was near his old house and are thoroughly enjoying empty nesting! My coworkers all knew about all of this, but for some reason after the move the invites stopped. The only thing I can think of is that they for some reason thought I (and/or the kids maybe) were not 100% comfortable staying at his house … maybe? Or they didn’t understand that I was only driving back to his house somehow … We stayed there regularly, so I really don’t know.

I definitely agree with you that there are some loose boundaries and sometimes an assumption that everyone else feels the same way. I did say something to my boss about my employee inviting me to spend the night after I had been drinking at a work event and she responded, “I invite you to spend the night too and it isn’t weird when I do it.” To which I just blinked and changed the subject.

As far as my boss and my employee spending too much time together outside of work — my employee has given notice that she is retiring soon. I have been promoted and am being groomed for the C suite. My boss is still my boss, but as the only two women on the leadership team we have developed a very close bond and genuine friendship. All of this makes it feel less awkward to spend time with them outside of work.

2. Should I accept my employee just isn’t well suited to a task?

For the second/final meeting of 2024 where the note-taking was needed, I reassigned the task to someone else, a recent part-time hire we’ll call Sally. Sally did great; she was able to immediately pick up the process, keep up with the conversation, and she tracked edits accurately and with apparent ease. I am really hoping she remains available to do this for 2025 meetings.

I approached the reassignment pretty straightforwardly with Callie, who was, interestingly, surprised and a little embarrassed (I’m not sure that’s quite the right word to use, but it’s in the ballpark). She asked if she’d been doing a bad job and I let her know it just wasn’t a task she was well-suited for and, more importantly, wasn’t using her strengths to their best advantage. She has plenty she’s good at and it makes more sense to have her focus on those tasks than this one. She did say she wasn’t sad to not have to do it anymore, because she found it stressful and difficult. The fact that she was surprised that she wasn’t performing the task satisfactorily did open my eyes to the fact that perhaps I was being less direct than I thought I was in coaching her/giving feedback on her performance, so that was definitely a learning moment for me.

A lot of the commenters focused on how weird the overall group review process was and offered some interesting alternatives, which I appreciated! I don’t have immediate plans to shake things up, but it’s always good to hear (or in this case, read) the outsider perspective to see where there may be room for improvement. While any given chapter of the book itself has a single author and a single technical reviewer, the group review process is a needed third step. The type of stuff we’re writing about is open to interpretation, in many instances, so it’s a case of more heads are better than one to ensure we’re covering content completely and accurately. Person A could read the guidelines and come to Conclusion A, leading them to Implementation A. Person B could read the guidelines, also come to Conclusion A, but they’d choose Implementation B. And Person C could read the guidelines and come to Conclusion C, leading to Implementation C. And so on and so forth. There is usually one right answer, and the group discussion leads us to home in on it and write about it correctly. There are also times where multiple interpretations could reasonably be accepted and it’s important to have that captured in the book as well. All that is to say, it’s content that benefits from discussion more than just multiple people editing the same Google doc or something.

I really appreciate Alison’s reply and all the comments!

3. My company announces employees’ babies … but skipped mine (#3 at the link)

First, I appreciate the supportive comments on my post! (And in terms of the conversation it sparked about work-life boundaries, I’ll just say that I’m on the reserved side of things for my team/organization, and I’m quite confident that no one I work with would call me an over-sharer.)

In terms of the baby announcement itself: I followed Alison’s advice pretty much to the letter. I emailed the HR person, said I realized an announcement had never been made when my son was born, sent a few up-to-date pictures, etc. The update was posted, I received a few well-wishes, and it made me feel like there was less of a weird silence around the topic of my baby. So all good there.

As is often the case with these types of questions, and as I knew to some extent at the time, this small thing was made bigger by the fact that it was a difficult period overall. My son’s medical condition required him to have some surgeries that I needed to take time off for, and some recovery time where he couldn’t be in daycare and I was jugging caring for him, managing a part-time home health aide, and still trying to perform at work to the same level I always had. I felt like my director manager was emotionally supportive but still expected me to get my work done at a busy time of year. My grandboss, who I have worked with for years and with whom I typically have a very good relationship, was clearly so uncomfortable and unsure of what to say about my son that he completely ignored anything to do with my personal life. It was hard logging in to a casual team meeting the week after my son’s surgery and hearing all my coworkers’ weekend stories but not having anyone ask how my son was doing. So it was a hard time, and I felt unsupported at work in general, and the lack of baby announcement fed into all of those feelings.

But: my son had his last (for the time being, and maybe/hopefully forever!) surgery in late April, he resumed full-time daycare after Memorial Day, and he is THRIVING. He is a happy, rambunctious 15-month-old who keeps me very busy and I am so grateful. Now that his health and my home life have stabilized, work is back on good footing as well, and the coworkers who were clearly uncomfortable asking about my son are now comfortable asking the typical “is he walking? what is he being for Halloween?” type questions. So that feeling of having a big thing going on personally that was unaddressed at work has receded.

4. My employee refuses to do her job and leads me in circles about why she won’t (first update here)

I am the manager of Bartleby, who, a couple of years ago, would prefer not to do a lot of the work that was part of their job. Since you asked for updates, even uneventful ones, I thought I’d send a quick note.

I can share that the transformation seems to have stuck for well over a year now: Bartleby has continued to be cooperative and collegial, and they communicate in appropriately-sized chunks of generally pertinent information. If they don’t have paying work, they stop by to let me know that they have time available, and when pointed in the direction of things to do, they do them well. They’re not gonna win Employee of the Year, but they remain solidly on the higher end of “Achieves Expectations.”

I remain more than a bit surprised, but the absence of unnecessary drama has been such a relief.

Thank you, as always, for one of the most interesting and useful sites on the internet.