coworker constantly changes her schedule, interviewer refused to let me meet the job’s manager, and more

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

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

1. My coworker constantly changes her schedule

I am member of a small team with four core staff, including my manager and me. One of my core colleagues is part-time, three days a week. My manager gives her flexibility on this, so she changes her hours to suit her needs every week, to the point where I feel it is negatively affecting all of our work.

Last week, we needed all hands on deck for a major event Wednesday/Thursday/Friday, but she decided to come in on Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday, leaving us extremely short staffed for Thursday/Friday (which were communicated to her as core days three weeks before). This week, we had to cancel a staff photoshoot the day before, as she had previously told us she would be in and available for it in our weekly team meeting. She changed her hours the afternoon before the shoot and we had to cancel the photographer.

Her job is working one-on-one with clients, and oftentimes they will come in looking for her/calling for her, and she will not be in when she told them she would be. My manager does not relay her weekly schedule to us, so I am left scrambling to help her urgent clients or telling them to come back another day she is in (which I never know! because her schedule is so irregular!). She refuses to set an autoreply stating when she is in office and when she is out (even for vacation), leaving clients to complain to us that she is ignoring their emails. None of these are one-off events — these happen regularly.

My manager is very insulated from the problems. Oftentimes he is off-site at meetings, and is overall passive and laissez-faire. However, he had did address this issue a year ago and she committed to fixed shifts for a few months, but since then she has reverted to changing her schedule throughout the week.

I am not her manager but some work projects she has negatively affected (such as the major event she missed/thephotoshoot) are ones that I am in charge of. How can I bring up my concerns to my manager, without it coming off catty?

It’s not catty to point out a work problem that’s interfering with your own work and causing chaos with clients. That’s a very normal thing to do — always, but especially if your manager isn’t around to see the issues himself. I suspect you’re worried about it being catty because you’re so frustrated with your coworker that your aggravation is at a level that feels catty in your head, but this really is normal to raise.

So talk to your manager! He may be assuming his conversation with her last year mostly solved the issues and doesn’t realize the problems have returned in full force. When you talk to him, stick to the facts and the impact on work. For example: “When Jane changes her schedule at the last minute or doesn’t let us know in advance when she’ll be working, it causes a lot of problems, like XYZ. We also often get clients looking for her because she’s not in when she told them she would be, and clients complain to us that she’s ignoring their emails. Could you ask her to stick to fixed, scheduled shifts?”

2. Is it a red flag if your interviewer refuses to let you meet the person who would be managing you?

My son recently was offered a job after interviewing with a group of HR people, but without talking to the person who would be his boss or any of his coworkers. After he was offered the job, he asked if he could set up a Zoom with his would-be supervisor so that he could at least meet him. HR said no, they did not want him to meet with the person who would be supervising him.

This seemed weird and a big red flag to both of us, and with my encouragement, he turned the job down (the job was also nothing special and located in a not-terribly-desirable place to live). It seems strange enough for the department head to play no role in hiring someone who will report to him, but then prohibiting them from meeting even on Zoom for a few minutes just seemed odd. It makes me wonder if they’re trying to hide something. Were we right in thinking this is weird and a red flag, and that it’s better to wait until something else comes along? Or is this more normal than I realize and I gave my son bad advice? I might add that my son just graduated from college last spring and this was his first job offer, and it was with a small public college.

Did they literally say they didn’t want him to meet with the manager? Or could that have been a misunderstanding — like could they have meant the manager was on vacation and the hiring needed to be finalized before he was back, or something along those lines? If so, that’s not ideal but would make more sense. In that case, your son could have asked to speak with someone else on the team instead.

But if they literally said they didn’t want him to meet with the manager, that’s extremely weird and a huge red flag.

There’s also an option in between those — something more like, “Cecil’s schedule is packed and he’s not involved in the hiring for this role.” That’s still a red flag, because asking to meet the person will be managing you is such a reasonable request that generally employers find a way to make that happen, even if it wasn’t originally planned. (Assuming, of course, that there’s not some reason for it, like that the manager is hospitalized or otherwise truly unavailable.)

3. I scream when I’m startled at work

I get easily startled at my desk, and I want to know how to stop. It only happens at my computer when I’m laser-focused on my work and don’t hear someone coming up behind me. A coworker will walk up behind me for something, and I scream. Yes, scream. Not Psycho-shower-scene screeching, but the type of sudden shriek that startles everyone around me, and then we all have a good laugh about it afterwards.

Two people (in this job and my last job) have told me that me being startled has startled them in turn. I don’t want my coworkers to walk on eggshells around me. They’ve kind of already accepted this as a “quirk” I have and do their best not to scare me (which has helped, and I let them know that I appreciate it), but I want to know what I can do to alleviate this. The good news is that my cubicle is set up on a machine shop floor instead of a quiet office area, so my occasional screams go out into a void of equipment noise instead of disrupting a quiet office. Nonetheless, I don’t want to jumpscare any nearby coworkers!

I already have a little mirror at my desk that shows the opening behind me (although I wish I could install one of those fisheye shoplifter mirrors you find at pharmacies). If I want to listen to something while I work, I only put one earbud in. My friends outside of work suggested that I should ask for a desk that doesn’t have my back towards an opening, which I think would help a lot. However, I’m a junior employee who doesn’t feel like I’m in a position to ask for much, and I know that the reason the cubicles are set up the way they are so that everyone can see your computer screen.

I was diagnosed with general anxiety disorder and Level 1 autism two years ago. I also have childhood trauma from an abusive parent. I have never told anyone in my professional life or sought any sort of accommodations for these because I otherwise can perform my duties just fine. I see my conditions as my responsibility to cope with, and I just want to excel in my job without others feeling like they have to give me special privileges. If nobody knows about my conditions, then they can only address my behavior and performance. I also just wouldn’t know how to navigate that conversation because aside from maybe the desk positioning, I wouldn’t really know what to ask *for.*

I’ll actually be moving to a different location next month to work in a project I’ve been asking to be involved in, so I want to see what I can do differently.

Talk to your manager and ask if you can change the way your desk is positioned. You’re not saying “I want to move my desk so no one can see what’s on my screen.” You’ll be saying, “With the way my desk is positioned, I’ve been getting startled when people come up behind me — and I have such a strong startle reflex that it’s been making me involuntarily scream. I’m embarrassed when it happens, and it’s disruptive to people around me. I’ve tried putting up a mirror but it hasn’t solved it. I’d like to angle my desk differently so this stops happening. Is that okay?”

Maybe they’ll say no, all the desks need to stay exactly where they are. But it’s reasonable to ask. If the answer is no, at that point you can decide if you want to go the formal accommodation route — but a conversation might take care of it.

Also, in advance of your move next month, say a version of this to whoever’s in charge of where you’ll be sitting before the move, and ask for your desk to face outward. Again, this is reasonable.

4. My boss showed up at my house and banged on the door

I work for a golf course, which is supposed to be relaxing job. Although I have never been late to work, I was supposed to meet my boss at the bank one day out of work and overslept. He has had been dead against me since then.

Then, early one morning, I was about 20 minutes late for work (I had just done a closing shift the night before and was sick and had a fever) when my husband hears banging on the door so loud that it wakes him up out of a dead sleep on the second story of our home. (You normally can’t even hear the front door from upstairs.) I come running downstairs to see the owner of the golf course standing there with his arms folded. When I opened the door, I told him, “Oh my goodness, I’m so sorry, I’ll be right into work.” When I got into work, he proceeded to try to call someone else to have my shift covered even though he had already banged on my house door. My question is, is it against the law for managers to show up at your private residence and bang on your door, demanding you come into work, and then once you get into work have somebody come in to replace you?

It is legal for your boss to show up at your house and bang on the door (because it’s legal for anyone to show up at your house and bang on your door, at least unless circumstances occur that would make it trespassing or harassment, like if they refuse to leave when told to). It’s also legal for him to get someone else to cover your shift, even after demanding you show up. Some states do have laws requiring employers to pay you a minimum number of hours simply for showing up. But in states without those laws, you’d only need to be paid for whatever amount of time you were there after clocking in.

Separately from the law, there’s also the question of whether your boss is a jerk, and the answer to that is yes.

5. Listing a target position on LinkedIn that you don’t actually have

I am job hunting after being laid off. I recently took a LinkedIn workshop and the instructor told us to put in a placeholder position if we weren’t actively employed, on the grounds that we won’t come up in searches by recruiters without an active job title. This placeholder would basically be full of SEO. Roughly, the idea would be:

• job title: number one preferred job title
• company field: target industries
• description field: “seeking” other relevant job titles and whatever other search terms that might apply

This obviously wouldn’t look like an actual position to any human reading it, so it’s not quite the same as lying about one’s job history. It still seems dodgy to me, and like the sort of thing a recruiter might reject immediately. Am I just behind the times? Is this an accepted practice now?

No, this is crap advice. Ignore it.

Humans will look at your LinkedIn profile and this will be a weird thing to have there.