updates: employee lies about overtime, coworker blames sexism but is just bad at her job, and more

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. Here are three updates from past letter-writers.

1. Employee keeps working unpaid overtime and lies about it (#5 at the link)

When I had a stern talk to Pam warning her she would be fired for any further unapproved overtime, she wrote an email to say she was suing us.

This bizarre announcement prompted me to start poking around as you advised. I discovered Pam had been stealing cash from work. It explained a lot about her eagerness to do overtime. She was outraged when confronted. Pam declared that she was innocent before god and swore to her recently passed mother’s name she never stole. She wept and pleaded innocence so convincingly that I would’ve believed her if not for the CCTV evidence.

After she was fired, she reported us for migrant exploitation. She alleged (falsely) we forced her to work 100 hour weeks without pay. She would also call me 40-50 times a day and send threatening emails demanding hundreds of thousands of dollars.

This was bewildering because Pam was pleasant, popular with customers, and mild mannered. She did lie about weird personal things unrelated to work, but otherwise she was a good worker.

I wasn’t particularly concerned with her threats because she went back to the her home country after being fired and her work visa automatically cancelled. None of the official investigations came to anything because we clearly had done no wrong, but had plenty of evidence of her wrongdoing.

When she continued the harassment, however, I sent her an email explaining if she contacted me one more time I would post CCTV footage of her stealing on YouTube and forward it to everyone I knew in the local community. She completely stopped after this — except the one time when she listed me as a work reference months later (!!!!)

She did not get a good work reference.

2. My coworker blames sexism when she’s just bad at her job

The coworker was let go, and it’s been a lot easier without her.

They hired someone more experienced to a similar role who was also a woman, and this new employee has been doing well.

I’ve worked a little more directly with the supervisor in question, and I don’t know what he’s like as a manager, but overall he’s much more competent than she portrayed him.

In my original letter, I left out some things like her utter lack of a filter and tendency to carelessly gossip about sensitive things that were grating on me as well, so overall it’s such a relief not to have to work with her anymore.

Thanks for your advice and to the commenters! It was excellent as always.

3. How can I get what I need from my flaky boss?

I really appreciated you publishing my question. I don’t have much of an update to share which is why I was waiting – I am still in the same job with the same boss. She has improved somewhat but I still struggle to get reliable responses/follow through from her throughout the workweek. Your advice was helpful and I’ve found that it’s gotten easier to deal with this as I’ve become more comfortable in my position and confident in my own knowledge and decision making. She has become more self-aware in some ways and has been better about keeping our meetings, documenting things, etc. I also have learned I have to document everything so that I can go back and remind her what she said before! At this point she is generally happy to give me a lot of autonomy and I feel a little more prepared now to operate with that autonomy/get help from other sources. It was just scary at first when I was a new grad working with our vulnerable client population with so little guidance! I am also prepping for the next step in my career so it is much easier to deal with all of this knowing I have an end date!

Thank you so much again for your help! I really appreciated everyone’s comments and thoughts.

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