It’s seven short answers to seven short questions. Here we go…
1. Employee lied about me in a customer survey
I was recently mentioned on a negative comment in our customer service survey. I found out that this customer was really an employee who I manage. He said I was rude to our customers and that is why he would not refer anyone to the company. When I asked him to explain why he said that, he told me it was the only way people would listen to him and his problem could be solved. He added that he was told the survey was confidential and wanted to complaint about this too. He claims I’ve mistreated him and feels harassed by me.
I made HR aware of this and now he has filed a proper complaint and spoken to the head of HR and now I have a meeting with him to respond to the accusations. What he claims is false and a retaliation on his part for a bad performance review, but how can I defend myself and point out that he deliberately made a false statement about me without wanting to be identified?
You don’t need to defend yourself to him. You only need to explain to HR that his statement was false, that he attempted to cloak it in anonymity by using a survey meant for customers, and that it appears to be in retaliation for his performance review. Do not go on the defensive, particularly since you haven’t done anything wrong — instead, tell HR that you need them to support you in your management of this employee and not to undermine you by leading him to believe he can undermine you with false accusations. Say this like you of course expect them to agree with you (because they should). If you sound less than confident, you risk them thinking there’s an issue here when there isn’t.
And then tell the employee that if he has concerns about you, the appropriate way to handle it is to talk to you directly, rather than posing as a customer. And then drop it because it’s too much drama to continue focusing on, and get back to focusing on his performance.
2. Companies that monitor how you organize your desk drawers and your email
I am American, but I have been living abroad for the past five years and I am married to an Italian. I have been slowly trying to convince my husband that he would like living in the U.S. and that he would do really well in a merit-based system, as opposed to what they have in Italy, which is a system so completely overrun with nepotism that most people are still underpaid or unpaid interns at age 30. But I digress.
I have two Italian friends who recently accepted jobs at a company in Chicago and they are having a miserable experience and, to be frank, I can’t blame them. Their company has random spot checks which monitor how their email folders are organized, how their desk drawers are organized, and how much time they spend in the bathroom. They also have extremely strict policies about the start and the end of the workdays and you are not allowed to respond to your cell phone (even messaging) during the work day. While the latter two policies seem overly strict to me, the former seem absolutely absurd. I have tried to convince my husband that this company is an anomaly and not the norm in the U.S., but I have been having difficulties, particularly because I haven’t lived there in a while. So my question to you is, are these policies standard in the U.S.? Do you think that a company with these kinds of rigid rules is the norm or the aberration?
These policies are not standard. They’re far, far from the norm. They key is to evaluate a company before accepting a job offer, so that you know what type of culture it has.
3. Should you really send your resume cold to hiring managers without advertised openings?
I recently listened to a job searching webinar from a person who claims to be an expert on recruiting. She said a job seeker should send their resume, unsolicited, to hiring managers instead of sending it to HR managers. She even said to do this whether or not an open position is advertised, because 80-odd percent of job openings are not publicized. Ideally, she said, a candidate should contact at least 200 managers! I cringed when I heard this, because if I were a hiring manager, the last thing I would want is a flood of incoming resumes, especially if there weren’t any open positions. Do people actually do this?
This is one of those things where it depends entirely on how you do it. Do it really well (great letter and a resume that shows a track record of achievement in exactly what they happen to need), and it can sometimes work. But do it anything less than excellently, and it’s likely to just be a waste of time. Unfortunately, most people do it less than excellently, so you have a bunch of people trying this and wasting their time.
But either way, if you’re just sending out resumes to random hiring managers, you’re going to get a lot less bang for your buck than if you were actually networking — meeting people in your field, using your connections, etc. So I’m puzzled why an expert would recommend spending so much time on this when that energy would be far better spent on a different activity.
4. My uncle’s manager won’t give him any weekends off and we never see him
My uncle’s manager clocks herself in and then leaves, and at the end of the week her hours rack up to 50 even though she does no work. We can’t have family gatherings because he can’t have off on weekends; she won’t let him. He barely gets to see his kids and the manager’s boss knows what’s going on and does nothing. There has to be something we can do. Any suggestions?
“We,” meaning you and the rest of the family? You can encourage your uncle to start applying for other jobs, but you certainly don’t have standing to do any more than that. Your uncle’s options are to (a) accept the schedule that comes with this job, (b) push back and negotiate weekends off, or (c) change jobs.
I think you want a solution that involves the boss being punished or forced to do more work, but her own boss knows the situation and doesn’t care — so this is how that workplace works.
5. Asking for contract work once an internship ends
I’m currently doing an internship. I plan to offer to contract at the end of the internship, because I’ve noticed a lot of work that I could take on and value that I can add to the organization. The problem is I’m not sure how to suggest that to them diplomatically. It’s mostly weaknesses and mistakes I could correct. For instance, a lot of the customer documentation is out of date, hard to navigate, or vaguely worded. I definitely don’t want to make people feel defensive about their work, but I want to make the case that these are problems worth paying me to fix. This is a problem that’s kind of intrinsic to technical writing and editing.
You could say, “Have you ever thought of hiring someone on contract to do XYZ? As I’ve been here, I’ve been thinking about how useful it would be to do that, and I have a good grasp on what would help now. I’d love to talk to you about what I could do in that area and how we might structure a contract for it.”
Focus on how it would help them, not on how bad their current stuff is. Be prepared to be turned down, because they haven’t felt it was a priority up until now (apparently), but it’s certainly worth asking.
6. How to draw boundaries in an unpaid internship
(This is the second part of letter-writer #5′s question.)
I’m being allowed to determine nearly everything about the projects I’m doing: scope, deadlines, hours I work, etc. Luckily my program gave me a bit of guidance on project planning, so I’m not totally floundering. I think it’s a good opportunity to demonstrate my abilities but also to set boundaries. What do you think is the best approach if my goal is to contract with the company? Give them my all, but also give them an end date beyond which I can’t do free work anymore? Or give the impression of competence and submerged knowledge, but draw boundaries around what kinds of tasks and deliverables I can offer?
You should definitely negotiate an end date and how many hours you’ll work per week until then (and ideally would have done that at the start, but if you didn’t, it’s not too late to do that now). But as for deliverables, that really depends on what you agreed to when you accepted the role. If you agreed to work on X, Y, and Z, and since this is an unpaid internship, it’s reasonable to say that you’re hesitant to do A and B without pay as well, since you’d typically charge for that type of work. But it wouldn’t be reasonable to say you won’t do Z after all, since you already agreed to that at the start. And you should do the best you can on the agreed-to work, not hold back, both because you’re trying to get contract work from them afterwards and because that’s key to building your reputation.
7. Can I use customer emails praising me when applying for jobs?
For my annual reviews, I complete a form to give my manager a friendly reminder of my accomplishments from the past year. It’s been helpful also to attach copies of emails documenting when I’ve gone above and beyond or really pleased a customer or internal representative. A recent example is of a customer emailing my boss to tell him that I saved the account from taking their business elsewhere. These sort of messages aren’t common, but I have received quite a few unsolicited. Is there a way to use these emails in applying for other jobs?
You could summarize them in a cover letter or on a resume — such as “regularly received accolades from customers for XYZ” or “convinced largest client to renew its account, when it was expected to leave.” But I wouldn’t present the emails themselves. Unless you have one that’s both over-the-top glowing (not just positive, but truly extraordinary) and detailed about why you’re so fantastic, in which case you could bring that one to an interview or forward it after a phone interview. But I wouldn’t include them otherwise.