coworker keeps complaining, someone went through my desk, and more

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

1. How to tell a coworker to stop complaining about a situation that isn’t going to change

I came across this part of an answer from you to someone who was bitter about the terms of a job changing: “Stop complaining — again, even to yourself — that you took the job with one set of expectations and it turned out to be different. Yes, that sucks. Absolutely it does. But now that you know what the conditions are, it’s up to you to decide whether to continue working there under those conditions or not. You can decide you’d still rather have the job (and the paycheck), even though it’s not what you thought it would be, or you can decide to leave. But what you can’t do is to keep complaining about it and being so bitter about it. That’s not fair to your employer, it’s not fair to your coworkers, and it’s not fair to yourself … Knowing that things aren’t going to change, do you want to continue working there or not? Make a decision, either way, but get yourself — and the people around you — out of this unhappy limbo. Bitterness has a way of moving in for good if you let it take up residence for very long. Don’t do that to yourself.”

This has been my coworker for going on 1.5 years. However she’s my favorite one, so I don’t want to alienate her. But I just want to tell her to either accept it or do something about it, because otherwise nothing will change and the resentment will eat her from the inside. And it’s getting harder each time to bite my tongue when she complains about the same thing constantly.

I think it’s a kindness to say to her, “I know it sucks. It’s also pretty clear it’s not going to change. Do you want to stay, knowing that this is the job, or do you want to work on leaving? Right now you’re stuck in a limbo that’s keeping you unhappy.”

If that doesn’t get through to her, you could consider saying, “Hey, you have all my sympathy, but I can’t keep talking about it because it’s making it hard for me to get through my own day.”

2. My employee doesn’t understand her work isn’t good enough to warrant her demands

I am a long-time individual contributor who was promoted to manage a team of mid-to-upper career employees (thanks in part to your great guidance!). One of the employees, Liz, has a reputation as a territorial complainer, but from the outside, I always thought she got a raw deal — her manager was very checked out and didn’t advocate for their team. Now that I am her manager, it has become clear that she’s pretty mediocre (for our level of organization). Certainly not bad enough to discipline or fire, and probably would be seen as a higher performer at a worse organization, but not good enough for the opportunities she thinks she deserves and thinks she is unfairly being passed over for. Those opportunities range from promotions, to bigger projects, to other employees being told to stay off of her metaphorical lawn. Currently, she’s upset because we hired a more experienced employee who has expertise in her area and they are being given higher-level tasks than her. Liz would like them to be told to defer to her, or kept off her area of focus entirely, but they are serving a business need better and more efficiently than she is.

I am trying to coach her, but I think some of this is just a reality, that she is a middling employee. I’m not sure how to deliver this news to her, that she is doing fine … but not fine enough to be making the demands that she is. She’s very unhappy but for family reasons is unlikely to leave (which I will admit I have sort of hoped for as an outcome, which seems unfair). Do you have a suggested script or path forward for a situation like this?

Rather than trying to convey to Liz that she’s middling, focus on what she would need to do differently to get the outcomes she wants — like that in order to be considered for a promotion, you’d need to see a sustained track record of XYZ, so that you’re painting a picture of what “exceptional” would look like, as well as the gap between that and where she is now. With the more experienced/effective employee who Liz would rather stay out of her area or defer to her, explain matter-of-factly about why you want them involved: “Jane is achieving XYZ, and that’s a priority for us because of ___. Her role warrants the level of autonomy she has, and I don’t see that changing.”

You don’t need to convince her to see things the way you do; you just need to matter-of-factly lay out what the situation is and (where relevant) what it would take to change it.

You might also need to have a big-picture conversation with her at some point along the lines of, “I understand you feel you’re being unfairly passed over for things like X and Y. I’ve tried to explain what we’d need to see to consider you for those opportunities, and I want to be up-front that those requirements aren’t things that will change. My sense is that you’re unhappy about that, and so I want to make sure I’ve given you a realistic understanding of what you can and can’t expect here, because I want you to be able to make the best decisions for yourself.”

3. Someone went through my desk while I was on vacation

I recently came back from a one-week vacation to discover that while I was gone, my department switched out some of our office furniture. I share an office with another person, and we were both given new desks. Because I wasn’t here, someone moved everything that was in my old desk to the new desk (everything on top of the desk and everything I had in the filing drawers, including some personal items). I feel really violated by this and am unhappy that they didn’t tell me before I left that this was going to happen, so I could have put everything in boxes before I went and no one would need to go through my things. Is this worth saying anything about?

No. They may not have known the exact date the desks were going to arrive, or they just may not have thought about it before you left.

More importantly, there’s really no expectation of privacy with this kind of thing at work. When you’re out, it’s always possible that someone might end up needing to look for something in your desk. People shouldn’t do that for the hell of it, of course, but there are a lot of work situations that could necessitate it. It’s better to just assume you don’t have real privacy around anything on or in your desk at work.

4. If a job ad lists an obviously mistaken pay range, is the employer obligated to pay it?

Someone on Reddit circulated a job listing which lists a clearly erroneous pay range — what is presumably the annual range is listed as hourly and then converted to biweekly, thus yielding a biweekly salary of around $3-4 million for a crossing guard. If someone got hired for this position, could they then demand the listed range rather than what was intended? Is it any different because this is a municipal job not a private company?

No. Employers aren’t legally bound to offer the ranges they list in job ads (and even if they were, laws generally allow exceptions for obvious mistakes). Even in states with salary transparency laws, you’d need to show it was a deliberate attempt to deceive, not a mistake — and even then, the remedy would be a regulatory penalty, not an obligation to actually pay the new hire that salary.

5. Offered a lower-level job than the one I interviewed for

I have an okay job in a small field (private foundation — program officer/project manager) with a very specific focus area.

A while ago, I applied for a role at another similar organization focused on this same specific area. The pay range was lower than my current job, but I thought I would apply to learn more about the role. The interviews were successful in no small part because of the similarity to the work I do now. Towards the end of the process, they called me and asked if I would be interested in a different title. I can’t remember the call particularly well, but it seemed like this role would have been senior to the one I interviewed for, which really increased my interest.

The offer came in and in another call with them I discovered that the job I was being offered was actually junior to the job I interviewed for, and that to get the role I interviewed for I needed eight years of experience instead of my six (even though the job posting asked for five to ten years). Despite the work being attractive, I declined the job, since it was a big pay cut and a lot of my friends said the way they had acted in the hiring process was a big red flag, because it suggested they were trying to buy me on sale, so to speak, with a lower role offer.

I am still feeling a little burned so I am wondering what your take is on this. Is it a red flag for an employer to try to offer a lower-level job after interviewing someone? What’s the best way for someone to communicate that sort of change? Would I have been selling myself short accepting essentially a lateral move like this?

It’s not inherently a red flag to offer someone a lower-level job than the one they interviewed for. There are situations where an employer thinks, “We like this person and we’d like to bring them on, but they don’t have the qualifications we want for the original job they applied for.” However, when that happens, they should clearly explain the situation to the candidate; you don’t just offer a lower-level job with no explanation of why. In this case, it sounds like they sort of did; at least, they cited years of experience … and it’s possible that although the ad asked for five to ten, they realized after interviewing people that they wanted the higher end of that range — although the difference between six and eight years is not significant, particularly for someone they apparently wanted to hire in some form. And it’s made weirder by the fact that they’d also talked earlier about a job more senior to the original one.

I don’t think this all clearly combines into a definite outrage, but it’s weird and they’re probably a little disorganized at a minimum.