can I refuse to fetch my manager’s personal mail, accidentally asked people to buy me baby gifts, and more

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…

1. Can I refuse to fetch my manager’s personal mail?

I work in a room with my manager and two colleagues, and between them they order 3-10 personal packages to the office a week. They don’t get up to answer the door even when they’re sitting chatting rather than working; unless I’m on the phone, they expect me to get it. I’ve brought this up with them, but they don’t think it’s unfair. I’ve even injured myself fetching their heavy packages, and the manager’s solution was to email the team telling us to ask delivery drivers to put packages on the floor.

That doesn’t solve my problem. It comes across as very entitled to expect me to interrupt my work multiple times a day to fetch their personal items while they’re sitting next to me. I feel taken advantage of. The excessive amount of packages also makes me uncomfortable, as I don’t agree with overconsumption or buying from exploitative companies that use child labor (I haven’t mentioned this as I don’t want to argue or preach).

It’s complicated because as a team we’re expected to receive company mail and welcome visitors. In future I plan to ignore the doorbell if it’s a delivery driver, but I expect this will cause further conflict. Can I refuse to collect my manager’s personal packages if instructed to?

Your manager has the authority to tell you that receiving deliveries is part of your job, even if the deliveries are people’s personal packages. In fact, in most offices that’s someone’s job!

But I’m curious about what your role is relative to your coworker’s. If you’re the most junior person in the office, it’s not at all surprising that you’d be the one charged with doing this. If you’re peer-level to your coworker or more senior, then it’s more unusual, and I’d wonder whether there’s some favoritism going on toward your coworker. If that’s the case, there might be room to ask if the duty can be shared so that your work isn’t interrupted as frequently.

Either way, though, your boss has the standing to tell you it’s a job requirement.

2. I didn’t mean to ask people to buy me baby gifts!

This happened a few years ago but I’ve always wondered how I could have handled it differently. I was a Big Law lawyer at the time and my large firm did voluntary in-office baby showers. If this was something you wanted, there would be a conference room reserved, catering would bring sparkling wine, cupcakes, and light snacks, and the firm would gift you some firm name onesies. It was a lot of fun. Some people would bring gifts to the expecting parent, but most would just come for the wine and snacks.

Pre-Covid, I was pregnant and asked a friend (also a lawyer, not an admin) to organize it for me. I gave her the link to my baby registry and told her she could provide it in case anyone asked for it. The invite list included lawyers but also admins, legal assistants, staff attorneys, and other people making less money than me who I liked a lot. I only gave her the link so she’d have it if someone specifically inquired. (I’m sure I could have been more clear in the email, it was probably literally “in case someone asks for it.”)

My friend put the registry link directly in the invite. I only found out because some of the cheap stuff (board books, etc.) started getting bought by admins and legal assistants. I felt really terrible. I was already an AAM reader and was firmly against gifting up, but the cat was out of the bag. I was also enormously pregnant and not feeling up to dealing with this three weeks before my due date and one week before I was going to be working from home due to said enormousness. I thanked everyone profusely and wrote thank-you notes, but it’s never felt right to me. What could I have done differently?

There’s no point in beating yourself up about it now, but ideally once you realized the registry link was in the invite, you could have sent out a message saying “no gifts, please!” Your friend’s inclusion of the registry link definitely sent the message “gifts welcome and maybe expected” so you’d just be correcting that. Or if we could go even further back in time, you could have not offered up the registry link to your friend at all or explicitly said, “Please do not include this in the invitation, as I don’t want people to feel they’re supposed to buy anything.”

But again, it was years ago and there’s no point in feeling terrible at it now. Just resolve to speak up if you see junior colleagues feeling any implicit or explicit pressure to contribute to office collections going forward!

3. I don’t like this email greeting

I was wondering if I am having an overly negative reaction to an email greeting. This person starts every email with just my name, like this:

Sarah,

(email text)

Most emails are asking me for help with something. This is really grating on me and I don’t know if I need to chill out or if this really does read as rude. For context, I am a university professor, and the person emailing me is a student working for me who is from a similar work culture. I get all sorts of greetings from students, from “Dear Dr. Professor” to simply “Hi” and those don’t bother me at all. I always just reply with “Dear (first name)” and the students usually pick up the level of formality that way.

This is a very, very normal way to open an email! It has always read a tiny bit chilly to me too, but it’s just some people’s email style and not anything you should read into.

You are definitely allowed to have pet peeves, but the thing about pet peeves is that you need to recognize that that’s all they are, not anything with any more weight to them (and definitely not something that needs to be held against someone or corrected).

4. When in a hiring process should we use a skills assessment?

When is the appropriate time to include a skills assessment in the interview process?

For context, we’re in academia and trying to hire a postdoc — so theoretically “entry level” but with an awful lot of schooling first. This is my first time being involved in hiring. Many of our candidates have never had a non-student job before. We’re also in a very challenging period funding-wise (due to being in science in the U.S.), so I imagine a lot of applicants are panic-applying to every job that might potentially be relevant. We have a good number of applicants, but I wouldn’t say we’re flooded. The job itself is quite technical — we need someone with specific skills, and it can be challenging to tell whether or not they have those from their cover letter and CV (a lot of people have adjacent skills that can easily be represented as the specific skills we’re looking for).

I think we should do an initial screen of the applications, then interview our top picks, and then do the skill assessment. My colleague thinks we should invite borderline candidates to do a skill assessment before interviewing them, as a way for them to bump themselves into (or out of) consideration. I’m concerned that this is disrespectful of their time, since they haven’t even had a chance to meet us or hear about the job. Our skill assessment is geared to take less than two hours (our top candidates should be able to do it in less than an hour), but I can easily see someone desperate for a job but without the relevant experience pouring much more time into it.

My colleague pointed out that this would give candidates we wouldn’t otherwise consider a chance to prove themselves. I’m afraid that we’ll chase good candidates away, and have weaker candidates wasting their time (potentially large amounts of time, if they’re desperate).

When in the process should the skill assessment occur? How do the level of the position and the complexity of the skills affect the preferred timing?

Yeah, asking a bunch of people to spend an hour or two on a skills assessment before they’ve even had a chance to talk to you is a bad practice. It would be fine if it were something closer to 10-15 minutes and you did some significant culling of the pool first, but one to two hours is just far too long. You’re right to think you risk losing your best candidates over it.

That said, have you considered putting phone interviews in the mix? Ideally you’d do the initial application screen, short phone interviews, then the skills assessment for people still in the running after that, then a more in-depth interview. The phone interview stage will allow you to cut a lot of candidates from the pool while also giving people a chance to talk to you and get their questions answered before you ask them to invest time in an assessment (plus, at that point it’s more likely to feel to them that you determined they were plausible candidates before asking them to spend time on a test — and therefore it’s a better use of their time — as opposed to an employer that asks hundreds of people to do the test first).

5. When should I mention the job accommodations I’ll need?

I’m searching for a job, but I have a variety of chronic medical issues that limit the type of work I can do and that may necessitate accommodations. The thing I’m most concerned about is that I have various musculoskeletal issues with my hands, including chronic joint inflammation. My previous job primarily consisted of computer use, but I only worked 37.5 hours per week because of my hand issues.

My problem is, of course, that the full-time positions I’m applying for are 40 hours a week. In interviews, people sometimes ask me to confirm that I’m available to work 40 hours per week, and I say I am because I assume they’ll disqualify me otherwise. If I get an offer, then I’ll have to request accommodations. But I’m concerned companies won’t be willing to employ me if I can’t work the full 40 hours.

I would possibly look for a job that entails less computer work, but I have other limitations, as well. For instance, I have issues with my vocal cords, so I’d hesitate to take a job that requires a lot of talking.

If they ask if you’re available 40 hours a week, say yes. A lot of 40-hour/week jobs are really only 37.5 hours, with the remaining time allocated to lunch, so it’s not a huge stretch to answer that way. Once you’re offered the job, explain what accommodations you’ll need. If it’s a problem, they can tell you — but don’t risk getting kicked out of the running early on for something that they might be able to accommodate perfectly easily once they’ve decided they want to hire you.

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