my employee refuses to reveal her online status

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

A reader writes:

I manage a small customer-facing portion of a broader team. The 10 of us are responsible for being on the frontlines, understanding our customer needs, and responding to questions and new requests.

Since the pandemic, our company has switched to using Slack as our primary mode of communication. While the company is based in the midwest, my team is highly distributed over multiple geographic locations and most of our partners use Slack to ask questions and make new requests of the team.

One of my newest team members, who joined about six months ago, puts her Slack status as perpetually “away” so that you can never tell if she’s online or not. I waited a few weeks to see if this was temporary, and when it seemed clear it was not, I asked her if this was intentional. She said it was — that she didn’t want people to know if she was online because she didn’t want to feel pressure to respond right away. I told her that this being a client-facing role, it is important to signal when you are available / when you are not, and that perhaps she could do that by using status messages instead. She told me that was too much effort for her, and she will think about what she can do instead “that works best for her.” She also suggested I was not respecting individual work styles/preferences/autonomy and not assuming good intent.

I was super taken aback by all of that and quite upset since I’m actually quite a hands-off manager by nature and have to force myself to be more prescriptive at times (have been working on that with a coach!). I rarely message her during the day or send her time-sensitive requests, partially because I assume she’s not available or I won’t get a timely response. I’ve also received feedback that some of our customers don’t reach out to her because she never appears to be online. As a result, she is likely handling a smaller volume of work and requests than my other team members. When I mentioned that wasn’t fair to the rest of the team, she accused me of making “unnecessary comparisons” between her and other team members.

My HR rep has confirmed it is within my purview to make signaling online availability a requirement of the role and has suggested I schedule a time to set team-wide norms and expectations, which I plan to do next week. But in general, her response to me made me feel like a total jerk and a terrible manager. I’m also worried that if I let her keeping doing this, than there’s no reason I couldn’t let the rest of my team do so — and a client-facing team that appears perpetually offline would be a super bad look.

Your team member is messing with your head, and you’re letting her.

It’s completely reasonable and solidly within your purview to require that people not set themselves to perpetually unavailable on Slack — in any role, really, but particularly in ones where (a) customers use Slack to contact them and/or (b) the team uses Slack as a primary communication tool. You have both factors in play. There’s nothing remotely heavy-handed about your request.

What is ridiculous is your employee’s announcement that being available to colleagues and clients is “too much effort” for her, and her attempt to frame this as a you problem rather than a her problem. To be clear: it’s a her problem. (And believe me when I tell you that she’s going to be a problem in other ways too. If you haven’t seen those yet, brace yourself for them to emerge — in fact, assume they’re already happening and you just haven’t seen them yet. If you go digging into her dealings with coworkers and clients, you’re almost certainly going to find more problems. Take this as a sign to dig.)

There are of course times when it’s perfectly reasonable for someone to set their status to “away” or “unavailable,” like when they need deep-focus time and want to avoid interruptions. But it’s not reasonable to set it that way 24/7 in a job that relies on Slack to communicate.

Let her know what the requirements are for availability status on your team, and then hold her to that. If she wants to think about an alternative that works better for her, she’s welcome to propose one and you can consider whether it will work or not, but until then she needs to indicate her availability and meet whatever responsiveness standards your team requires. If that doesn’t work for her, then the job doesn’t work for her. Which would be perfectly fine for her to conclude! But she can’t expect to stay in the job and turn it into something it’s not.