I’m very confused by this. If you haven’t actually been assigned to do the task, then it’s not your responsibility, no matter how long you’ve been doing it, or how badly it’s falling apart if you don’t step in to fix it.
We’ve all kind of overlooked the obvious question so far, so I’ll go ahead and ask it. If the side work is doing is so valuable to other departments, why don’t you ask those managers about transferring to one of those departments, and getting out of the firing line of Chaos Boss? Forget about whether there are any posted job openings, if your specific talent is that important, they’ll figure out a way to keep you.
No. I hate to say it, but the root of your problem is the root of the problem I had with my job. The job that you think you’re supposed to be doing is not the job that your manager thinks should be charged to her headcount. If another manager thinks that job is important enough to take on your salary, that’s great. If not, then your job will cease to exist, whether you leave voluntarily or are laid off.
This is, from what I can see, the fundamental tension in your problem, @MagicEyes . You’ve made it very clear that it’s very important to you that you are able to stay in this job for another two-ish months. But, you also keep saying that it’s important to you that you continue to do things that have historically been part of your job, and to support your colleagues (but which your boss no longer seems to want you to be doing).
One of these two has to give. If “I really need to stay in this job until September” truly is the most important thing to you, then, IMO, you need to follow, to the letter, exactly what your boss is telling you to do – even if it means not doing the work that you think is important to your company or your colleagues, and you are going to have to accept that you will be “letting them down.” Get your head down, and don’t rock the boat for two months. It’s really that simple. You need your boss to absolutely believe that you are on board with her way of doing things, even if she’s not consistent in it, and even if you don’t think she knows what she is doing.
If your moral code or work ethic simply won’t allow you to do that, then you need to accept that there may be a very good chance that your boss will, sometime in the next few weeks, decide that you are not willing to do things her way, and she will force you out before your September goal. Do not count on your observation that “it’s really hard to get people fired here at this company.”
Trying to have things both ways, being passive-aggressive in following her mandates (as several have suggested) or work behind her back, probably has a non-zero chance of landing you on the street earlier than you want.
You don’t fire someone by not giving them work. You fire someone by writing them up. Your focus should be on not giving her reason to write you up.
Taking away someone’s work can be a reason to lay them off, but that’s a much slower process. Companies also don’t generally like laying people off if they can transfer them to somewhere else.
Not giving most people work is an excellent way of making them quit without all the paperwork needed to fire them. All but the most lazy types find this intolerable. I’ve heard that this is standard practice in the military.
Since you are going to the mattresses on this, can they go through you boss asking, “Can MagicEyes do this?”
Very extremely true. Plus that problem is on the boss not the OP.
Then don’t do it; she’s the boss. BUT make sure you have it documented that she is depriving you of work or guarantied SHE will make it look like you’re the slacker.
You answered your own question. If your boss tells you to sit in the corner and play solitaire all day, then it is not on you but her when your coworkers do not get the TPS reports. Is that shitty? Of course but it is not your problem to resolve other than a professional email to your boss outlining why you think you should be allowed to make the TPS reports and then your job is that once you have relayed your concern, follow her directions.
And we gave you the answers
Act professionally in the face of tyranny
Document everything
Follow her directions to the letter even if it goes into malicious compliance
So do it despite how you feel about it. And if she doesn’t reply, fine. You have documentation that you sent the requests.
Assuming in the US and not Montana, everything the OP is doing is a terminatable offence. If you boss says not to do something and you do then that is insubordination and the real question is if they can make a case if that resulted in termination for cause.
Or have their managers push it up the chain above the boss’ head.
Please clarify. Why can’t you?
Is it possible that this isn’t really about you but her department and that no matter who were working for her that her attitude would be the same that all other departments must fail? Kmart is the case-study for this.
I’ve met a few. The problem was the “Oh shit we should have kept him.” only happens after they are let go - never while they are there because managers cannot make the connection of: They are here = things get done.
I was in a similar situation to the OP. Works at most two hours in the morning then sit until 5pm and make sure the automatic reports started. Maybe twice a year I would have to start them manually. I used the time to teach myself UNIX-C and made a very basic database with it.
Wait. Then how are they your responsibility? Or have you assigned them yourself as your responsibility. msmith537 may have a point that this is all about making you stay in your lane.
That’s her right. Not saying it’s good management but she is your boss.
Who made you responsible for these tasks? And if it was a previous boss, it is within her power to tell you to stop doing them (make sure that is documented) and if that is in error, it is between her and her bosses - not you.
And this has not been said but when (not if) they offer you the choice to quit instead of being fired, force them to terminate you so you don’t lose unemployment benefits or the potential for lawsuits. Also, if they give you termination documentation to sign, run it by an attorney before you sign off.
Interesting. I’m sure upper management will say “I wasn’t showing favoritism by hiring her. A contractor did it.”
A suggestion - if you email her with stuff you would like to do, add something saying that if you don’t hear otherwise on one week, you’ll take that as approval. And print it out. I’m sure you are right that her plan is to give you nothing to do and then firing you for doing nothing, or making your life so intolerable you’ll quit.
When I was doing my PhD I found that my adviser had a policy that if he didn’t have any changes in two weeks it was okay. His delay in reviewing things was three weeks. I got done much faster thanks to that. He was also not a jerk, so I can’t guarantee your boss will be as rational.
The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced it is a departmental issue. The OP is working on self-assigned duties outside of their department. Maybe the boss is looking to make her mark and let the other departments fail by denying them OP’s help. Maybe it is a budget issue - why should Facilities get OP’s help if they are not paying their salary? Maybe it is as simple as, you work for my department so focus on our departmental work. If that is not enough then we will deal with that.
Since the OP is setting themselves for termination despite our help, no-harm if they go all out and meet with a high Pooh-Bah, not to complain about the boss but to explain the whole gamut of their work and ask that instead of departmental vision, what is the corporation’s vision of their job. I think the answer would be eye-opening for the OP.
In any corp, even small ones, there’s what the org chart and job descriptions say, and then there’s what everybody does or doesn’t do to push the whole org along from day to day.
There are always people like the OP. Sort of self-appointed janitor of the nooks, crannys, and cracks in the wiring diagram. Both the wiring of jobs and bosses & underlings, but also the wiring of manual information flow from this source to that report to this other output, or of IT stuff be it great or tiny.
In an informally-run org, the people in those self-managed self-appointed roles often achieve high personal job satisfaction, and even some measure of positive fame among the people they interface with. After all, there are hundreds of unmet needs so they pick the half-dozen that interest them for whatever reason and become guru of those. They get self-actualization, and the people depending on those dozen things get the results the entire rest of the org was unable / unwilling to provide.
Which is all well and good until some competent outsider comes in, looks at the random thicket of organically grown f***ed up workflows that have nothing to do with how to run a well-run business, and decides it’s time to change things in a positive organized way.
Or until some incompetent outsider comes in, looks around, can’t make heads nor tails of anything they see then decides a bulldozer is the first step of any good renovation. Of course they don’t know how to drive a bulldozer either. So they just sit and screech.
The OP is in a Paradise Lost situation. It ain’t coming back, and trying to hold back the tide of change will not work.
There is nothing odd about prioritizing work for your department. What is odd is being told to stop work for outside departments without being given any work in your own department. That’s pure psycho boss.
Absolutely. And managers, particularly new ones, are often clueless about the importance of this work.
My daughter used to work for an airline in Hong Kong. After she left, they got rid of all the foreigners with no transition. It turned out that one of them was responsible for renewing a web site certification for a site hosted in the US. Since no one was aware he did this - and they kicked him out too quickly for him to document it, if he bothered - their main site went dark just at a peak travel season.
Oops.
I’m not worried about getting laid off. That’s very unlikely. I’m trying to not get fired.
These tasks have been my responsibility for years. It is her right to change what my responsibilities are, but she hasn’t talked to me much about what I do and she hasn’t told me to stop doing these things (until now). For the first six months that she was in the job, she was busy doing other things and didn’t talk to me much, so I just got on with the things that needed to be done. She’s knee-jerk reacting to me doing things she hasn’t approved, instead of looking at my tasks in an organized way.
None of the things that I do without being assigned are outside of my department. They might even be part of my job description. I do have one, but I don’t know if I have a copy of it.
100 percent pure psycho.
Thanks for the attorney info. I think I am in a protected class (age and gender), so that might help.
Guarantied your firing will not be documented to be related to your protected status. It will be claimed to be due to not doing your work, insubordination in doing work you were told not to do, your position being redundant, etc. So assume you have no protection BUT if you quit you will not have any protection even if you find out later you were fired (errrr… given the option to quit) due to your status.
If as you say they do not do performance reviews, and if they have not carefully documented your supposed infractions, you might have some success with the state labor board. Especially if you keep documenting your efforts to do work. Definitely get a lawyer if you get fired. Your company is likely to decide that paying you is better than trying to fight you, especially if they have no records.
I was involved with a case where the manager, who was losing it, threw away performance review records for someone who got fired, and we were SOL. Not having any is even worse.
I may have missed this upthread somewhere, but do you have an up-to-date job description? Has Chaos Boss seen it? Does it specifically list all the things you do for other depts, things that you say are your responsibility so that you can point to it and tell her that it is your job to do that?
I see you saying that you do things because someone needs to do it. Does that mean it’s in your job spec? Or is it something you did because nobody else did, and you’ve assumed responsibility for it without that ever being “official”?
I dont thonk she can fire you for not workong if you have completed all assigned tasks. How do you see that going?
I also don’t think she can fire you until you’ve failed to meet the criteria for a couple formal PiPs. Those are a month each, and youdclilely technically meet them (like, if ypu have specifics, you’ll do that).
In a right to work state (everyone except Montana), they can fire you for any reason except those protected by law. If they can’t fire the OP for those reasons, they’ll just make one up. The only time it make a difference is if they try to fight the unemployment benefits.
It is not entirely unheard of - especially in union situations - for bosses to not want to go through the effort of firing an employee, and to simply tell them to sit there and do nothing. Then, should a later boss try to fire the employee for not doing work, the employee can say that not doing anything was their expressly assigned task.
More common, an employee is only doing 5-10% of what is expected of an average employee. But the boss will not be able to replace them if they fire them, so they prefer to get that 5-10% of work done. Later, the employee may be able to claim that their work efforts were deemed acceptable.
The boss may still need to justify the firing to the bosses and taking away the work may be part of the strategy. The other possibility is that (we think) MagicEyes has self-assigned herself responsibilities and the boss may not want to pay for work done for other departments out of her budget. And if MagicEyes had enough work to do as per her job description then how did she ever get time to do extra work?
Unless you’re in a union or something, companies generally don’t need a good reason to let you go. They need a reason if they want to avoid paying unemployment. But if they let you go because they can’t afford to pay you anymore, they can make the decision and walk you out the door that day.
Doing stuff like working for other departments after your manager told you not to may be considered a valid reason for being let go and cause your unemployment claim to be denied. The company is notified if you apply for unemployment. They can respond as to the reason you were let go. If they have documentation that your manager told you to clear all work through her, yet you continued to take on work from other departments on your own, then that may disqualify your unemployment claim. Trying to fight it by saying your manager didn’t give you enough work will not be considered valid. If the company wants to pay you to sit around and do nothing, then that’s their right.
But if you are in a protected class, which is the case here, and you file a complaint, a response of “they were fired for doing too much” is not going to look non-discriminatory. Especially if requests for work have been documented.
