My question was posted a couple months after I wrote in, toward the end of my boss’s “vacation,” but I ended up doing some of what was recommended. The particular issue I wrote about, the outside of work hours meetings, ended up not being a big issue but my boss’s vacation led to all sorts of other ridiculousness.
My boss left for his vacation without a specific plan in place for our meetings and we only ended up having meetings twice, once each during the first two weeks. After his first request for a call, I brought up to the rest of the group that this would be challenging for me, and another colleague with kids said he also had a hard stop at 5 pm. We reported back that we couldn’t do after 5, but could do a 4 or 4:30 pm meeting, which my boss agreed to. I think early on in the trip he was jet lagged but as he adjusted he wasn’t as keen on getting up so early in the morning. He never ended up suggesting a 7 am meeting time, so I guess he wasn’t keen on staying up late either.
The last I heard about having any meetings was when he emailed me asking, “Do we have a video call planned this week?” I understood this as a request to set up a meeting. However, since he wasn’t direct about it, I just replied “No, I haven’t heard any plans for this week.” I heard nothing back.
Some of the commenters picked up on the part of the letter where I said I would feel bad about not attending meetings, not that I was worried about other consequences. My role was pretty critical to the group and my boss is non-confrontational so I wasn’t at all worried about being fired. I could have just said no to the meetings and I might have gotten a mildly worded email suggesting I try to join. I know I shouldn’t have felt bad but I would have, and it would’ve added an extra layer of stress that didn’t need to be there.
What became the real problem is the barrage of emails he’d send us each day, often treating everything as urgent whether or not it really was. This included responses on issues he didn’t have the context on because he wasn’t at our meetings (and that we were able to handle without him just fine) and sending the same request separately to multiple people if they didn’t get back fast enough, which once led to three people repeating the same task. What he lacked in management skills was just made worse when he was managing from his vacation.
There were multiple deadlines during his vacation that he didn’t adequately plan for or keep us informed about, which resulted in a lot of last-minute urgent requests to get things done. I knew of one deadline that would come up while he was gone, so before he left I emailed asking if he needed me to do anything to take care of it. I got no response, so I assumed it was handled. Then, the day of the deadline, the person outside our group who was submitting the project contacted me requesting documents, saying that she’d contacted my boss and hadn’t heard back. Since they were due that day and my boss was asleep on the other side of the planet, I had to scramble to get them done as best I could without all of the context. After all that, he finally replied with “no thank you” but a complaint about how I’d worded something. I replied asking how we should be handling things like this while he’s on vacation so this doesn’t happen again, and he just said we all need to make sure nothing falls through the cracks, just like when he’s not on vacation. Unhelpful.
It might make more sense to learn that we are academia-adjacent, doing research but also selling the product. My boss runs the group like an absent-minded professor, only caring about the research he finds interesting and dropping the ball on all of the other work and management the position requires.
It turned out part of the reason for his trip, and the reason he was so inconveniently located for meeting times, was that he was teaching a class overseas on the topic of our research. One of the most problematic things that came up was that he sent a coworker URGENT requests for material that ended up just being for the class he was teaching. My coworker obliged but I was once again upset on principle because this was not part of our jobs at all. Sure enough, instead of being well rested when he returned, he seemed overworked from teaching a class on top of keeping up with his normal work. He confirmed that he worked every day of his leave.
The commenters had some wild speculations about why my boss was taking vacation at all if he was just going to be working. I eventually learned that he was trying to do a financial trick to save the group a bit of money. Apparently the money to cover his salary on vacation days came from a different pot than his regular salary, because the vacation money had already been paid for, in a sense? He hates the part of his job where he has to actually fund the group, so he was eager to save some cash, or I suppose not incur extra costs by letting paid vacation go to waste.
I only learned about this because he tried to pull it again later. About a month after returning, he had a planned surgery and was encouraged to go on FMLA until he was able to work again. Well, he wouldn’t let a surgery get in the way of being able to work all the time so he was back at our virtual meeting the very next day and even went to work for our in person days the following week when he had told us he wouldn’t be able to drive for several weeks. A week after the surgery, he sent us an email saying he was going on FMLA for his surgery so he wouldn’t be allowed to go into the office but we could still keep meeting if we kept it on the down-low. This was even more concerning to me than his vacation because there are legal rules around FMLA and I wondered if I was even allowed to communicate with him during his leave.
Our HR was competent enough to put an end to this by noticing that he was still working (I’m guessing by watching his email or computer activity) and saying he needed to stop or go off of FMLA. Unfortunately they communicated this poorly, by telling our group admin that she had to pass along the message. I heard from her that HR told her to threaten to fire him if he didn’t stop working and said if they had to, they would threaten to fire our team if we communicated with him during his leave (or, they would tell our admin to threaten to fire us). This is when I learned that his reason for trying to take all this leave is to save money, as the FMLA pay would also have come from a different bucket than our group’s direct funds. My boss was incensed, especially because it was going to take a few days for him to get a doctor’s approval to go off FMLA and he couldn’t be bothered to take even a few days off. He never stopped working, but I assume he ended the FMLA because I didn’t hear any more about it. If his plan had gone through, he would have been on some form of leave for five months out of a seven-month period, all the while working every single day anyway. Bizarre.
For this and a host of other issues, I started looking for a new job around the time I wrote to AAM. It took over half a year and some disappointments along the way, but I ended up getting a new position that is a better fit for my experience and a 15% raise! On top of that, the new company ran the interview process really well by AAM standards with lots of timely communication and transparency, so I have a good feeling about how things will be run at the new job.
I’d previously been surprised reading through AAM updates at how many people say they left the job they had written in about, but now I see that when you’re writing about one specific weird situation, there are probably a bunch of other issues going on that we don’t hear about.