update: my new employee feels excluded on a well-meaning but cliquey team

It’s “where are you now?” month at Ask a Manager, and all December I’m running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past.

Remember the letter-writer whose new employee felt excluded on a well-meaning but cliquey team? Here’s the update.

I had actually done some of the things you suggested when Anya joined (e.g., organizing a Teams call before she started so she could ask me questions and briefly meet the rest of the team before she started, having a team lunch in the staff cafeteria on her first day with us in the office, setting up coffee meetings with each member of the team in her first couple of weeks, designating an official buddy in another team and an informal buddy in our team, having individual members of the team work with her on particular pieces of work and provide her some of her on the job training) but none of them had created the right atmosphere.

One thing that I didn’t mention at the time was that the managers on Anya’s old team tried to make a big deal out of the issue during the performance ratings conversation and argued that Buffy, Cordelia and Willow should all have their ratings downgraded, which would have affected their bonuses. I got a bit emotional at this suggestion because I genuinely didn’t feel it was fair to use information against people that they were unaware of and hadn’t been given a chance to respond to. None of the other managers in the meeting had any idea what we were talking about and it got extremely awkward, but in the end it was agreed that it would not be fair to downgrade people based on hearsay that hadn’t been fully investigated. Anya was too new at that point to get a performance rating (two months in, much of which had been spent on induction/orientation).

Shortly after this happened, Buffy was promoted and moved to a different team and I moved as well. The team was meant to get an internal transfer to backfill Buffy’s role, but due to reorganization of the workload, this didn’t happen. The work Willow had been doing moved with me to my new team and she wound up doing Buffy’s old job, Anya stayed where she was and seems happier, reporting to Xander, even when a new manager eventually came to replace me. When we interact, she seems to find it awkward to talk to me, but I make sure to treat her with complete professionalism. Over the summer, Cordelia also got a promotion and has moved to a team in the same department as Buffy. Cordelia also hasn’t been replaced, so now the team is just Willow, Xander and Anya plus the managers. We’re all on the same floor and I can see that Cordelia and Buffy still hang out together a lot (coffee, lunch, but still not outside of work hours), often with Willow as well even though they are all on different teams. Cordelia’s ex-boyfriend went for promotion at the same time as Buffy, didn’t get it and resigned for a job externally.

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