It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…
1. My company interviewed a man to celebrate International Women’s Day
My company has been around for over 100 years and is one of the big ones in Australia. To celebrate International Women’s Day (IWD) they asked a man who has been with the company for over 40 years for his opinion on how the company has changed how they’ve treated women.
It’s not necessarily a bad article, he talks about how he was one of the first people to hire a woman as a manager, how when he started women had to have their skirts measured to make sure they were not more than one inch above their knee, and how as soon as someone became pregnant they could no longer work in customer-facing roles, but I am absolutely furious that they have asked the opinion of a man before any women.
To me this piece (that they promoted as the number one thing that they did to celebrate IWD) says that they care more about pretending to do the right thing than actually doing the right thing. I don’t understand how anyone could have possible thought “What should we do to celebrate IWD?” and came up with the answer “Interview a man!” as the correct response.
I feel like I would rather have had NO update from my company to celebrate IWD than to have this article about a man’s opinion on women and no one else in my company seems to be upset or taking the same approach. Am I overreacting?
It’s pretty oblivious! I assume their thinking was that they wanted to do a historical look at how women’s place in the company had changed, and this is the one person who’d been there long enough to give the kind of historical overview he did … but yeah. It’s rather stunning that they didn’t think to include women, and instead let a male voice define women’s experiences there.
If you have DEI staff, they’d be logical people to raise this to. If you don’t, you could complain to whoever runs this sort of program, or whoever’s above them. They should hear why this missed.
2. Interviewing when I make adult-oriented leather goods and work with a Leather Pride organization
I was laid off in January, so I’ve started hunting for a new position. (I work in a healthcare-adjacent field.) While writing my resume and cover letter, I’m running into a bit of a pickle. Why? I spend a lot of time running my own business, and hold a titled position on the board of a nonprofit in my area. This sounds great, until I need to elaborate. The board I’m on is part of the LGBTQ community, specifically a statewide “Leather Pride” organization. This is something that, correctly or incorrectly, would come across as risque and inappropriate for the workplace. And my business? Making adult-oriented leather goods, which would absolutely be inappropriate to share with a future employer.
These experiences have taught me a lot, and I’ve done some very good work in both places. (I’ve been on the board over five years, and run the business for over ten.) Not to mention they’re occupying a lot of my current downtime. Is there any way I can bring this information up in a cover letter or interview, and not sound like I have horrible judgement? Also, I worry that three months down the road I’ll get asked how I’ve spent my time off — I can’t be honest and say I’ve spent it making blindfolds and bondage cuffs! If I had the savings or was independently wealthy I’d turn my small business into a full time career, but unfortunately that’s not feasible at the moment.
I’ve been sitting on this letter for a while because I keep going back and forth on it. Maybe I’m being naive, but I do think you can mention that you run a leather-goods business and/or that you are a craftsperson who works with leather, or so forth. You don’t need to specify that the leather goods you make are bondage cuffs.
But even if you can’t hide the nature of what you make (for example, if the business has an obviously risqué name or they’re going to see exactly what it is if they look it up), I’m still not sure it’s such a problem. You’re working in a legal adult business; that’s legitimate work for a legitimate market. This is about business, not your own sex life.
The Leather Pride board work is a little trickier, and I think the answer to that will be really regional and field-dependent. There are some regions (especially places with big Pride events) and fields where it wouldn’t be shocking to see that on a resume. In others it would be too out of place.
But I don’t think either of these is an absolute no across the board, as long as you’re talking about them in professional terms (which of course you would be).
3. Should I be paid for the time I spend calling coworkers to find shift coverage?
I work part-time (about 10 hours a week) as a yoga instructor at a big community fitness center. This is a part-time, hourly position.
As a team, we use a scheduling app that allows instructors to request shift coverage as needed. If no one agrees to cover an open shift via the app, standard practice is for the instructor to send a group email asking for other instructors to cover the shift.
However, in the event that no one offers to pick up a shift after sending a mass email, my boss has instructed us to call each person individually to ask if they can cover an absence. Am I out of line to expect to be paid for a task like this? My list of available coworkers may be 20+ individuals and it takes a lot of time to call that many people. Not to mention fielding the follow-up calls when they inevitably don’t answer the phone and I need to leave a message. I may not be as bothered by this if I wasn’t already doing a bunch of unpaid work for this role (creating music playlists, formatting yoga sequences, attending yoga conferences, and other continuing education).
I recently consulted our employee handbook (for the entire fitness center, not just the yoga instructor team) and there was no mention of policies or procedures for finding shift coverage. Just the following language: “employees are not allowed to perform any work off the clock. The employee must be compensated for all hours in which they work.”
Do I have standing to clock-in when my boss requests that I call each coworker individually to request they cover my shift?
Ooooh, this is an interesting question because it’s an area where what’s legal and what’s commonly done are two different things. It’s incredibly common for some coverage-based employers to expect employees to do this for free. Any reasonable reading of the law would indicate that it’s work that should be paid (since it’s scheduling work you’re engaging in on behalf of an employer) — but in practice, it very often isn’t, so be prepared for your employer to balk if you raise it. However, the next time it comes up, you could say, “How should I record the time I spend trying to find someone to cover my shift?” or even just, “You’ll see an additional 45 minutes on my timecard for the week; that’s the time I spent calling people to cover a shift.”
If they push back, you could say, “I do think we’re legally required to pay for that time since it’s work. Could we check with a lawyer or contact the state labor department, since otherwise I think we could get into legal trouble?” (You can also do that on your own if you want to pursue it, and then bring your findings back to them.)
4. Quitting without telling people I’m founding a new company
I’m hoping for some advice on how to quit on good terms without telling my manager anything about the new (biotech) company I am starting. The fact that I’m not quitting for another job and am quitting to start a company will be very juicy news in my workplace, and I’m basically hoping to tell them as little as possible. Partly because of obvious intellectual property issues, but also because I am hoping to start it with another former employee who was both exceptional at her job and very well liked.
This company has a history of bad behavior that’s not the worst, but it’s certainly not good. I wouldn’t put it past them to try to sabotage my efforts or at least smear my name a bit. The new company will be in an adjacent but not overlapping field and I am nearly guaranteed to run into many of these people for for the foreseeable future. Any advice on how to leave gently and cordially without telling them a darn thing?
You’re fully allowed to be vague about what you’ll be doing next! Some options: you are taking some time to focus on some personal projects that you’ve been wanting to get to for some time (if asked for details, you’re “not ready to talk about it quite yet”) … you are taking some time off before deciding what’s next … you’re not ready to share publicly yet but you’ll let them know when you can … you’re going to a small start-up (true) in AdjacentField but have been asked not to share details yet.
Obviously make sure you’re familiar with whatever you’ve signed re: intellectual property, what data you can and can’t take with you, etc.
5. Should I share post-interview accomplishments with the hiring manager?
While waiting to hear back about a job I interviewed for, I’ve since had some big accomplishments at my current job, including getting a stellar performance review. Should I follow up with the hiring manager to share updates like this?
Nope, that’s not really a thing. If you already happened to be emailing them about something else, I could see mentioning something like “Since we last spoke, the space travel project we discussed in my interview has won the ExtremelyImpressiveIndustryAward” … but you’d want to reserve that for stuff that’s truly unusually impressive (a great performance review doesn’t quite hit the bar). Otherwise, though, hiring managers generally don’t want ongoing updates on what you’re doing.
