updates: the office without running water, the person who wouldn’t retire, 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.

There will be more posts than usual this week, so keep checking back throughout the day.

1. Our office didn’t have bathrooms or water, but they wouldn’t send us home (#3 at the link)

After your response was published, I reported the incident through our anonymous compliance network, who forwarded it to employee health, not HR. I got a lukewarm response, something about management being in contact with HR the whole day, but it never addressed why we all felt like we were being held hostage. I let their response simmer until last week, when we were again without water.

I responded with, “Thanks, it’s out again today. We’ll see if the onsite management’s response is different this time.” And then today, both Compliance and Employee Health show up! We all had brief meetings with a rep who assured us that we are allowed to leave and work from home without retaliation. Apparently they weren’t thrilled that we felt like we weren’t allowed to go, even though we are all hybrid and obviously set up to work from home.

Employee Health was really accommodating as well, and several brought up other issues that will be worked on too.

2. I was hired to replace someone who won’t retire

Thank you for sharing my letter a few months back. I wrote about being hired to replace someone who wouldn’t retire. I appreciated your and the readers’ feedback. It definitely made me feel less crazy and encouraged me to put myself first and look for new jobs, without feeling guilty.

When I quit, I didn’t call out my ex-boss on everything I disagreed with — questionable accounting and leadership choices. I decided … not my monkeys not my circus. But I did make it clear to him that the work wasn’t what I wanted and that I had brought this up months before. It was awkward but necessary. And now, that job is so very far in the past!

I was hired as the head of finance for an animal shelter, and I couldn’t be happier. A year ago, I changed career paths to non profit work (and moved across the country for grad school) only dreaming of a job with this kind of impact, for animals and their families.

3. How long should I wait for a new manager to turn things around? (#3 at the link)

I’m in Germany, where we have strong employee protections. One of them is something called an Überlastungsanzeige — roughly “work overload notice.” It’s a formal notification to your employer that your workload is exceeding safe or reasonable limits, so if something goes wrong they can’t claim they weren’t warned. It also obligates management to take action.

I filed one, copied our union rep, and it escalated all the way to the CEO. That revealed the real problem: my boss’s boss had been blocking the hiring we desperately needed and also not been completely transparent with the CEO on what was going on in our department. We have now hired two additional sys admins starting in November.

In the process, I also pointed out my significantly higher contributions compared to my colleagues, set clear workload boundaries (which ended up becoming binding for everyone in the department), and laid out changes to our processes that I wanted to see.

That lit a fire under management and my boss, specifically, really went to bat. They told me they would look into a promotion and significant raise for me, and even created a brand-new role that I got to define. The new processes were adopted and they’ve already reduced my stress levels significantly.

Taking Alison’s advice, I started job hunting anyway as I didn’t know what the outcome of all this was going to be. Last week I received an external offer that included everything I’d been negotiating with my current employer. I told my boss I needed something in writing about the new role and raise before I could turn down the other offer. He delivered that written confirmation, so I declined the external job.

The recruiter wasn’t thrilled (apparently some miscommunication on their end), but I never made a commitment and got back to them politely within three business days. If they choose to see it as me using them for leverage, so be it — I made the right call.

I also reached out directly to the hiring manager from that other company because he had really impressed me during the interview process. We agreed to stay in touch, since we’d both like to work together in the future if the opportunity comes up.

So now I’m much happier, much less stressed, and starting in January I’ll have a new role, more money, and I’m already looking at a much better-functioning department.

Thanks to you and the readers for the advice.

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