the horrified new hires, the gift exchange revolt, and other times you pushed back as a group at work

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

Last week we talked about times when banding together as a group and speaking up at work resulted in change. Here are eight stories you shared.

1. The coordinated survey

I work in a regional office of a global company. Every year, global HR sends out a staff survey, and I noticed that the leadership likes to pick one little complaint that popped up in the survey and address it and make a big celebration about the improvement. So every year when the annual survey comes out, I round up as many staff members as I can and we agree on the one thing we are going to complain about, so it can’t be ignored.

One year we all complained about the terrible health insurance, so the leadership started offering a better health insurance option. The next year, we complained about paltry salary raises that don’t even match typical cost-of-living increases, and the leadership gave us all better raises. Most recently, we all complained about the lack of paid parental leave, and the leadership came up with a parental leave package that we were all pretty happy with.

If the leadership has noticed that the complaints are remarkably similar between different staff members, they haven’t pointed it out.

2. The Christmas gift exchange revolt

Christmas/holiday gift exchange revolt! Our fearless leader loved Christmas (small group, everyone celebrated Christmas) and the culture in the office had been for everyone to get everyone (eight people) a small gift, exchange as a group, everyone watch everyone open, etc.

Two years ago, six of us banded together privately to work out that Person 1 would ask for the Christmas plans during the October meeting, #2 would suggest drawing names, #3 and #4 would chime in that they love that idea, #5 would suggest how to do it, #1, 2, 3 & 4 would all back that idea, and #6 would be like, “Great! Are we all good with that?”

Fearless Leader tried to protest but #1-6 kind of steamrolled the conversation. It was fantastic and a well coordinated attack!

3. The bad manager

My department got a new manager, and she was awful. She made five people cry within her first four months. She joked about having to regularly apologize to other managers around the building. She was accusatory, she openly mistrusted her staff, and she was badly mismanaging some of our most successful projects.

Two assistants left because they didn’t get paid enough to deal with her. We encouraged them to be honest in their exit interviews, but both were early-career and really didn’t want to burn any bridges. A few of the veteran staffers went to HR individually, but they didn’t seem to get very far. Mostly, HR insisted that any displeasure with the new manager was just because the old manager was so well-liked and respected.

Finally, our staff started banding together. We talked out exactly what we wanted to say to upper management, we went to HR in groups of two where it made sense, and we all followed through on requesting meetings with HR right after any incidents with the manager. One person left during this time, and she was very honest and direct in her exit interview.

Eventually, management started observing our manager more closely, and surprise surprise, they didn’t like what they saw. She was given the option to leave voluntarily, or be fired. She left without saying a single word to any of the staff she’d managed for well over a year.

I think this worked because the department was very organized, high functioning, professional, and friendly before the issue. We all really, genuinely enjoyed working together, we trusted each other, and we were willing to organize to heal our department. For upper management’s part, while I think they fumbled and missed the early warning signs, they handled the aftermath particularly well. They individually met with each staff member afterward, apologized for allowing the situation to go on for too long, and laid out how they were going to ensure a good pick with the next hire. The culture rebounded better than I would have expected.

4. The professors

I work for a college. Our health insurance costs recently went up by 50%, while also offering less coverage. The president tried to announce this as “austerity measures, but it’s not that bad, and we all have to chip in” and then brush past it.

The math professor raised his hand to give the exact dollar figure that the increase would represent for anyone with a kid. Then the accounting professor raised her hand to point out that we met our budget this year. Then the sociology professor raised his hand to mention that health insurance costs had recently decreased in our area. Then the anthropology professor raised his hand to ask how this fit with the school’s stated mission to support working parents. Then the media studies professor emailed the entire room a link to price comparison across different health insurance providers. Then, then, then.

The 20-minute meeting let out 90 minutes later. It’s been six weeks, and the president just emailed all faculty to announce we were changing health insurance providers and to expect a 75% reduction in monthly costs. Sometimes I love PhDilibusters.

5. The new hires

Almost a year ago, I started at my current job, fully remote, great on paper. I got a few minor flags during the interviews with the CEO and project manager but I let it go. I had an orientation type thing with two other new hires for different departments and for a marketing firm I was shocked at how over-complicated their processes were. I could tell the other new-hires were just as confused as I was. The project management software, which I’d been using for years, was an overcomplicated mess and I have no idea how anyone got their work done.

Within a week, I was blown away by how horribly the staff spoke each other, how accusatory and mean they all were, and also overworked since the procedures were needlessly complicated. I got the inkling that the project manager fostered a lot of this and was one of those people who created a complicated system so they had an actual job to do, that job being making a mess and then fixing it themselves.

The culture was awful. As a former onboarding trainer myself, I’d never speak to a new employee or trainee the way I was spoken to by management or my coworkers. For example, I had to mute myself as there was construction going on outside my window, my coworker yelled at me for muting myself and said I wasn’t paying attention. I unmuted myself and then they yelled at me for the noise and not taking work seriously. They had a policy that all work calls were recorded, so I recorded it and kept it, along with MANY others like it. It was one of the most toxic environments I’d ever started in.

The other new-hires and I met in on a personal Zoom call after hours and decided to talk to the CEO. We collected screen shots and video calls from our first ten days and asked to meet with the VP and CEO. They were appalled, especially with how department heads, the project manager, and especially HR spoke to us. That was a Friday on a holiday weekend. The next workday the CEO, VP, and two other silent partners had a staff call where they apologized for not being as present as they should be but also said the attitude and tone of the company has to change. It helped that me and another new hire who are experts they desperately needed were both were willing to leave with nothing else lined up.

Magically, the project board got organized and intuitive, people started saying please and thank you, and we don’t record every thought and idea we have as a gotcha. We have a new HR person. We’ve had four new hires since and their onboarding is smooth, organized, and most importantly, welcoming.

6. The training

I was a teacher. New admin decided to schedule mandatory “teacher training” for a week late in the summer but before the school year started. This was to be a week long off-site that required most people to stay in college dorms and eat cafeteria food so we could attend useless lectures – and now it was going to be smack during our precious summer vacation.

Folks pushed back HARD. So the admin said if folks had proof of travel plans that conflicted with that time, they’d be excused. Everyone went and bought $13 bus tickets to a town just across the border that … isn’t exactly a vacation destination, hence the tickets being $13. But we all had the tickets for the dates of the training, so everyone was excused. They canceled the training. (None of us actually took the bus trip. $13 was worth it to get out of that nonsense.)

7. The pay equality

At every single place I’ve worked, people have asked for pay transparency and leadership has always declined. Well, one day I was in a meeting with everyone who had the same title as me, and someone asked if we would all feel comfortable sharing our salaries with each other. An anonymous poll revealed that everyone was fine with it. So we all around, round robin style, and shared our salaries with each other.

It is the first and last time anything in my life has happened like that. It also revealed that women were grossly underpaid, and we took that to leadership. The women in the team were given hefty market adjustments that brought their compensation on the same level of the men, along with apologies and some flimsy excuse about for why it happened.

Had just one woman gone to leadership and asked if they were paid fairly, I don’t know that any change would have come from that. But when the whole group went and said “WTF” (the men in the group were also outraged and demanded more equal pay), then there was change.

8. The pay adjustment

My manager called me on my day off to let me know my team was transitioning from hourly to salary. I did the math and realized that with the amount of overtime I worked I would be losing about $7K in income a year. When I came back to the office, I talked to my manager about it and told her I wasn’t happy. She said the overtime had been taken into account by HR when creating our offers and there wasn’t much to be done. I said, “Well, I’m still not happy, so what is our next step?” And then I was quiet. She agreed to get me a meeting with the higher ups. From there, I went to my team and asked them if they had the same experience. They had almost all decided to accept the change but when I pointed out my large income discrepancy (and I was the most junior team member working the least overtime), they ran their own numbers and then everyone was mad lol. I asked for their permission to speak for them at my upcoming meeting and they agreed.

Meeting day came and I was given a lot of BS about how they ran the numbers and they accounted for overtime and I just needed to sign the paperwork and get past my feelings. I stopped them mid-sentence and said, “I hate to interrupt but I just wanted to check and see if we should reschedule this for a time when the whole team can be present, because nobody is happy.” They paused and said no one but me was complaining. I told them I had discussed it with the team and everyone was unhappy and asked again if they wanted to reschedule the meeting, and then I was quiet. At this point my manager stepped in and said she never found me to be unreasonable and that my attention to detail was great so if I ran numbers and found an error, then something was off.

Upper management ended up going back to HR and discovered that everyone’s overtime had been calculated at .5 instead of 1.5 and the HR person who did it just didn’t realize because of how our payroll system listed everything out (suuuure).

My entire team ended up with salaries that were $7-15K higher than originally proposed for the transition. It was a great experience in team bonding and taught me a lot about being calm but vocal and the power of remaining silent at key times. If it hadn’t been for this blog and Alison’s advice, I don’t know that I would have had the guts to do it.