It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…

1. Should my employee provide any explanation for her repeated last-minute time off?

One of my employees, Ciera, has been regularly requesting her PTO at the last minute over the past few months. For example, she’ll submit a request over the weekend to have Monday off once or twice per month. Our request form has an optional comment box where Ciera can include a note to me, but she always leaves it empty. I don’t need a specific reason for why she’s requesting the day off, but given the repeated last-minute notice, is it unreasonable of me to want some kind of ballpark explanation for why it’s coming in so late (i.e., her waitlist for an appointment came through, she thought she put in the request earlier and forgot, a family emergency came up, etc.)?

While I can typically accommodate the request, it can sometimes strain our workload when we can’t plan in advance. Without any kind of explanation, these continual last-minute requests are starting to make me question her reliability in a way that I probably wouldn’t if I had some context. Am I off-base feeling this way? I don’t want to appear to be prying into her private life (I don’t need to know what the appointment is for or what the family emergency is), but I would like to come up with a solution that would allow her to request her PTO earlier if possible or at least get a heads up that she has A Thing going on that means these last-minute requests will probably continue and we need to put a plan in place to help us better prep for unexpected absences.

I don’t think you’re off-base. In jobs where coverage is needed or where an unexpected absence will cause a strain on other people, PTO normally comes with some expectation of advance notice unless the person is sick or has an emergency. In many jobs, last-minute requests can still be accommodated, but when it’s happening a lot with no context, it’s reasonable to wonder what’s going on and to want to make sure that you’re both on the same page about how time off is managed.

It’s also reasonable that you’d be more willing to shoulder whatever burden the last-minute requests cause if you understand that they are necessary rather than Ciera just, for example, feeling on Sunday that she’d rather not come in the next day.

The right next step is to talk to her and let her know it puts a strain on the team to accommodate frequent last-minute time-off and ask if she’s able to give you more advance notice. Include something like, “Unless you’re sick or have an unanticipated emergency, it’s easier on the team if we can get more advance notice. Thinking back to your recent time-off requests, does that seem like something you’d be able to do more often?”

She may not realize it matters either way, and just having this conversation might change how she approaches it.

Related:
my staff keeps requesting time off at the last minute, even though I keep asking for advance notice
how should I handle last-minute schedule change requests without being a jerk?

2. Coworker hawks up snot in the kitchen every day

Warning: if the headline didn’t alert you, this is gross.

About six months ago, we returned to the office three days a week. The building is new and there are pretty nice kitchens on each floor with sinks and fridges and places to eat lunch.

I eat my lunch earlier than most of my coworkers so I’m often the only person in there. Often, while I’m sitting and reading and eating my lunch, a person from another group whose name I don’t know comes in and performs what I can only describe as the most thorough evacuation of all the mucus in her sinuses and lungs I have ever had the misfortune to observe. For at least five minutes she cycles between deep, liquid throat-clearing and coughing, rich snorty snot-inhaling and sinus-clearing, and spitting the results into the sink or into napkins, which she then throws into the trash. She does this over the counter, next to the coffee mugs and tea, near the office fruit box and snack dispensers, right in there with food and utensils and everything.

It’s one of the most astonishingly disgusting experiences I’ve ever had at work, and I’ve worked at a university where the campus food service catered our meetings.

What can I even do about this? I don’t want to confront her, although she clearly has no self-awareness and isn’t self-conscious about it or she’d go in the bathrooms or outside or something instead of doing her stuff in the kitchen. Also, I’m a tallish man and she is a shortish woman, and I’m not sure how that would look,

Should I take this to HR? Put up a passive-aggressive sign? It’s incredibly gross and she does it almost every time I’m in there eating lunch. Maybe she does it more than once a day, even. Whatever, a shared kitchen isn’t the place to be clearing out ridiculous quantities of snot. Any advice you can offer would be welcome. I didn’t really want to go back to the office in the first place, but this makes it much much worse than I’d anticipated.

From what infernal pit of hell did your coworker ascend? Is there any chance you’re on a reality show and being punked? Because this is disgusting.

The next time it happens, you could just say to her, “Would you mind doing that in the bathroom?” Feel free to add, “There’s food and clean dishes right near you.”

I hear you on feeling weird about the gender dynamics, but she’s doing something truly gross and you’re allowed to ask her to take it to a more appropriate location.

I don’t think it rises to the level of HR … although I also don’t think it would be wildly out of line to ask them to handle it if you really don’t want to speak up yourself, given how unsanitary it is, which affects more people than just the lone unfortunate witness. (This is the kind of thing that makes HR people question their life choices, but that’s not your problem.) Don’t do the sign though, as much I enjoy imaging what it might say; this is something where someone needs to just have a direct conversation with this reprobate.

3. My employer wants to see my family tree

I work for my local county in the Human Resources department. Our county attorney is rewriting some polices, including nepotism, which will be retroactive once approved by the board. For background, I live rurally and my family was an original settler of the area in the 1800’s. The county is the largest employer in our area with over 500 employees. My family on both sides is quite large and the majority of us all still live locally.

I have two family members who work for the county. Both are distant cousins, a father and son in different departments. I didn’t know they were employed by the county when I applied or was hired. Of course, as soon I found out, I disclosed this to my manager. There was no problem mentioned at that time. Now, a year later, the new polices are being developed, and I’m being asked to submit a family tree to show exactly how distant the relationship is. It’s not only distant on the tree, it’s emotionally distant as well. I haven’t spent any real time with these people since I was a small child in the 1990’s. Others in my department seem to not have been asked for a family tree even though they have family employed by the county as well, which is made very clear and openly appear as a very close family relationship. They often discuss weekend plans together, family dinners, etc.

When I’ve asked how family is being defined, my manager isn’t able to give me a straight answer. I’m curious if you’ve heard of this before? How do I navigate potentially being asked to leave my job based on a policy that didn’t exist when I was hired (but I’ve been told will be retroactive, thus affecting my job directly) and doesn’t seem to affect others in my department?

It’s not unreasonable for them to want clarification on the exact relationship, but it’s unreasonable to only require it of you and not of others. Are you sure other people aren’t being asked similar questions? If they’re not, is there anything that could explain the difference in treatment, like that you’re in a position of authority or influence that they’re not in? Or that those relationships are already clear and don’t require more info?

Also, has anyone actually said you could be asked to leave your job over this, as opposed to simply wanting the info so they can put in place any necessary safeguards against conflicts of interest? I would assume it’s likely to be the latter unless something specific has made you think it’s the former.

If you do end up being asked to leave your job over a policy that isn’t applied to others who are similarly situated, you should push back on that — with a union if you have one, or with an attorney if you don’t. That said, government employers are normally fairly risk-averse about applying clear-cut policies to one person and not to others so, again, unless you have reason to think that will happen, there’s a good chance that’s not where this is going.

4. What should I do in meetings with someone on an improvement plan who’s not improving?

I have an employee with performance issues who is basically on an informal PIP because we don’t have enough documentation of the issues to put her on a formal PIP. I’ve clearly laid out my expectations for what she needs to do and by when, and she’s indicated that she understands. I’ve also told her that the consequences of not meeting these goals are that she will be put on a formal PIP. We’ve previously discussed her personal issues that may be contributing, and I’ve repeatedly offered her FMLA, accommodations, and the EAP, which she has not to my knowledge taken advantage of.

What do I do during my weekly check-in meetings with her? There are occasionally things where I need to ask her “did you do X?” but most of the time I am already aware of whether she has completed her tasks or not. Some weeks she’s doing well and meeting the goals, some weeks she’s not, so there’s no sustained improvement yet. It feels weird to go into that meeting like “you didn’t do the thing. Do the thing,” for the 20th time.

HR said we should document her performance and my communication with her through the end of the year in order to have enough info to get a PIP approved. What do I do in weekly meetings for the next three months where we both already know the status?

If you’re not seeing the sustained improvement you told her was needed and you’re having to repeatedly remind her to do things she’s not doing, you should tell HR you’ve seen enough to be ready to move to the formal PIP now rather than dragging this out.

But meanwhile, use the check-in meetings to give feedback on what you’re seeing and to flag that you’re not seeing the needed improvements: “I’m concerned that you haven’t done XYZ. This is an example of what we’ve discussed needed to improve. What happened?” It sounds like you’ll be repeating that a lot, and there’s no way around that.

5. How do I set goals at a job I don’t like?

Last fall, I was laid off from a job I really loved. Earlier this year, I started a new job I’ve always disliked. While the job is technically in the industry and field I want to be in, I’m not using the skills or knowledge I’ve worked hard to amass. I’m passionate about consumers, but we are firmly B2B. My boss isn’t particularly kind, and we’ve butted heads on lots of issues. I’ve continued looking for a new job since day 3, but I’m still here many months later.

Over the summer, my boss was supposed to conduct a mid-year performance review, but he never did. This would have included setting goals for the rest of the year, so those goals have never been set. He mentioned last week that soon, we’d start working on setting goals for 2025. But I can’t for the life of me figure out what good goals are for this job when my goal is to find a different job and get out of here.

What are generic professional goals I could be working towards in this position? Or how can I think about the goals differently to come up with things I’d like to work on?

Don’t think of this as being about goals for you personally; think of it as being about goals for the position, regardless of who’s in it. In other words, it’s about what needs to be done for the work; if you were replaced tomorrow, what would a successful 2025 look like for the person who took over? For example, if you work in online media, you might have goals around increasing click-through rate or adding email subscribers. If you work in finance, it might be about having a clean audit and lowering overhead costs by X%. If you work in IT, it might be implementing a new CMS and resolving the database errors that have been plaguing your team. And so on — they’re goals that anyone could inherit if you leave, and they describe what successful work or progress would look like for the position, not a specific person who happens to be in it.