Sorry, I missed it. What is the OP’s protected status?
This isn’t a case of a worker going the extra mile on their assigned work. This is a case of a worker taking on work independently from other departments after her boss told her not to do that and to first get approval for any such tasks. If instead the situation was that she told everyone to go through the boss and the boss never told her to do anything, that might be different. I’m not sure that being part of a protected class will matter if she’s disregarding a reasonable order from her boss to get approval first
This is what the OP said in a recent post:
They said age and ethnicity. I think ethnicity, age I know.
But they were doing work that had begun before the boss came. The workers rights department I dealt with was not on the side of the employer. The employer is going to have to show that their protected class was not the reason for them being fired. You think a lawyer or unbiased HR person is going to think that a jury would consider doing extra work while not being given any is a legitimate cause for them being terminated?
If they were refusing work to this other work, sure. But that isn’t the case here.
I’ve been on the wrong side of this issue, and it sucks to be the employer, believe it or not.
You’re thinking of at will employment. At will employment is when either party can terminate employment for any reason (aside from status in a protected class). Right to work refers to states where membership in a union cannot be a condition of employment. i.e. If you get hired to work as a mechanic at an airport they can’t make you join the union as a condition of employment.
I wouldn’t make a bet one way or another about what would be the outcome if the OP filed for unemployment, much less a lawsuit.
I’ve never heard of a company that large that doesn’t have some sort of formal review/evaluation process, but the fact that the OP seems familiar with a PIP suggests the entire company may be operating on a “one strike and you’re out” process.
The boss may be psycho and chaotic, but she has her next move planned out.
IMHO it’s really not, because way up at the beginning
You know how we’ve told you to document, document, document? Your boss understands that.
But earlier you said
For sure I’d get my hands on a copy of my job description (HR should have it even if you’ve lost yours) but don’t be surprised if it doesn’t clear things up. My experience is that job descriptions always include lines like “as directed by your supervisor.”
You first posted on July 4. Today is July 18. Have you had that meeting with the Chaotic Boss yet? Did someone from HR sit in on it?
I eventually learned that, any time I had a request, I had to close my email with “Given the nature of this project, they need me to move on this by Wednesday noon. If you don’t have any suggestions or concerns by then, I’ll go ahead on this.”
Spoiler: The worst micromanagers almost never got back to me by the deadline.
Shocker, huh?
A good approach. Sorta the flipside to management inundating staff with countless emails that are 99.9% irrelevant, and later holding you responsible for something in a footnote on page 5 of an attachment to one of those emails.
I don’t really face potential repercussions from most of my job decisions. But if I encounter anything out of the usual that I suspect someone might eventually second guess, I fire off an email to management saying, “Thought you would want to know of this. Please assign appropriate staff to look into this, and let me know if you disagree with my proposed handling.” Always a good idea to CYA!
Early in my career, whenever I was in a workgroup I immediately volunteered to keep the notes. When I circulated the notes afterwards, I got to essentially create the history of what took place, and put any spin on it I wanted. (Plus, when they were discussing who should do more substantive things, I could keep my head down - "Hey! I’m busy keeping notes over here! I’ll speak up after everyone else has been assigned some significant task!)
In case it’s not clear why everyone is encouraging you to document everything as the most important task for your job right now:
Your boss is going to do anything that is within their sole purview to do and you have very little control over that. But workers often overestimate exactly how limited that power is. Many of the actions any boss wants to take require considerations from their boss, HR, the executive team, government regulators, employment boards, lawyers in future lawsuits, etc etc. Any external 3rd party cannot “see” your workplace as it actually is, all they can “see” is paper.
Your boss yells you in a meeting and you go and seethe about it to your co-workers and nothing else? You claim it happened, they claim it didn’t, who can tell who is telling the truth? But you go back and put it in an email/slack message that at yesterday’s meeting, there were words said in a tone you didn’t appreciate and that it was inappropriate for a professional workplace and that it shouldn’t happen again. If they agree, apologize and promise it won’t happen again, you now have an “objective” record that both of you did not dispute a factual event. Later on, if they repeat the same action, you send another email documenting it happened again, another note in the paper trail.
Later on, your boss has some kind of issue with you and wants you out of the company? You can go to HR and show them the paperwork you’ve amassed and they can do the math of how these documents would look in front of a labor tribunal adjudicating an unfair dismissal case. People parrot the phrase of “HR is there to protect the company” without fully understanding what it means. HR has a budget for situations like this, they can look at the paperwork you’ve gathered, do the math of how unpleasant it would be (which is also balanced around your local labor laws which is why every voter should care deeply about labor protections) and figure out a sum that would make you go away. There’s lots of flexibility in these negotiations beyond straight cash, they can offer to keep you on the payroll for an additional year or offer to bridge your health insurance or free you from certain restrictive employment covenants etc, etc.
At the same time, paying people out is expensive so HR is in charge of building up it’s own paper trail. There was talk early on about PIPs and while a minority of PIPs are there to genuinely improve the performance of an individual, the majority are a pro-forma exercise of generating the right papertrail to go up against any assumed paper trail you’ve gathered.
Workers are often fooled into believing that saying things are only in service of communication and don’t understand that some/many times, you’re talking to someone else not to share information, but to document. Companies understand this deep in their bones which is why there’s an asymmetric power advantage between workers and employers. But workers have to understand that a core skill of work isn’t just doing the job, but navigating the politics of an organization to your advantage and those who master that skill have a leg up on those who don’t and why “as per our conversation” are some of the most powerful words you can wield in a business.
This doesn’t just apply to adversarial situations btw, one persistent frustration I have is that workers don’t know how to do a performance review. You help a co-worker with a problem and they come up to you at lunch and say how much of a life saver you were. Great, tell them to send you a Slack message saying “Hey X, thanks for taking the time out today to help us troubleshoot our problem with Y. Your insight that the problem was in Z was totally correct and we managed to bring the machine back online in 20 minutes. We probably would have taken a few more hours to figure it out ourselves which would have delayed production of A number of widgets”. Take a screenshot of the convo, save it in a folder somewhere.
When it’s time for your next perf review, just collate all of the info you’ve gathered over the last year and tidy it up a bit and submit it as your performance review. If you’re writing vague phrases like “assisted team Y with streamlining processes”, your boss cannot know what that means, they weren’t there to watch you do it. Even if they did know what that meant, it might not matter because they might have to show their boss and the further up you go, the more context is lost and the more the only thing that remains is paper. Document, document, document.
QFT. If HR thinks it is likely that a manager is going to cost the company lots of money in law suits and lawyer fees, the manager is going to be out on their ear. In this case the psycho manager seems to have an in with the higher ups, but it applies as a rule. We no longer have the labor laws of Dickensian London.
This company seems not to have performance reviews any more, which says a lot. But still, good advice. I was on a performance review task force, and we found that the number one complaint of workers was that their bosses went into performance review meetings with inaccurate information, like saying a worker didn’t do something that they had done. We changed the rules so that no manager written performance review summary would be accepted at the department level meeting if not signed by the employee saying they agreed with it, and that the employee written summary of accomplishments had to be available also.
This. Although I tend to feel like if you are at a place where you have to document everything you do to CYA, it’s time to start looking for another place to work.
CYA is usually best applied early on to clarify that what you are working on is what your boss actually wants you to work on or that there is a reason you did (or didn’t do) something that may be contentious. But constantly having to document everything you do or every interaction shows a culture or at least a relationship with your boss where there is little to no trust.
One problem with totally chaotic environments is that there is often little structure to “CYA”. The boss may come back with “I was expecting you to do this and you didn’t” or “you did this other thing, but I didn’t tell you to”. Or they focus on seemingly mundane minutiae as a flex of power instead of what is actually important (ie caring more that you used a non-standard shade of “red” for your RAG status rather than the fact that your project is $10 million over budget.)
Another thing to keep in mind is if you work in a chaotic organization, why would you assume they are Johnny-on-the-spot with their performance review process?
If OP said that their career goal was quitting, I’d be encouraging them to quit. OP stated that their goal was to hang on for a few more months for some unspecified reason vaguely relating to healthcare so I’m giving them advice about how to accomplish that goal. The way you accomplish it is by being a hedgehog, be more of a problem to attack than leave alone and people will stop attacking you. The tool you have in your arsenal to do that is documentation.
The 2nd part of my statement wasn’t directed at OP but everyone else reading this thread about how documentation isn’t only a defensive strategy, it’s also a vital tool to help you get ahead inside of a supportive org as well.
Documenting is a good idea even if you don’t have to. I started documenting just to make filling out my performance review input easier. Doing researchy things I changed directions several times during a year, and sometimes worked on stuff for a month or two, easy to forget after almost a year. Never had to use the documentation in anger, but still useful.
I read all the responses up to #100, took a few days away because wandering in and out of the DoperWorld is what I do, and read the last 50+ entries.
My overall impression is that the OP isn’t receiving the message everyone is repeating. Maybe my impression is incorrect, but the repeated “I do things others don’t/can’t” and “I won’t abandon my coworkers” phrases are getting old and tired. The scary thing is that I realize I look at my job in much the same way. The critical difference is that there isn’t a new manager at my company who seems to be trying to make me go away.$
But let me try reorganizing your critical points so you can contemplate them from a different angle.
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We have seen you repeatedly call your new supervisor the Chaotic Boss and you have described all sorts of stereotypical shitty boss behaviors. We can only take your word at face value and many of us have encountered similar monsters in our own work lives. Assuming Chaotic Boss is as unfit to supervise (anyone) as you say she is, WHY ARE YOU HELPING HER? Why are you coddling her? Why are you covering her mistakes by disobeying her orders (yeah, orders, like from a ranking officer to an enlisted recruit) so she can very slowly kill# the company you seem to care about? Why are you protecing the monster by dampening the impact of her crappy management and keeping others from feeling the effects of that crappy management?
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You say you don’t want to abandon your coworkers, leave them without proper documentation, let the slack you were picking up go slack again – at least not until September. Someone speculated that you may be holding out for retirement age or some perk or benefit to hit a milestone date and then, as you say, you’re out of there. But if you really are as important as you say you’ve been, your departure is going to hit those beloved coworkers a lot harder than you estimate, with or without the documentation you’re trying to compile. Knowing that, why wouldn’t you stay just a few more months and finish out the year? Why wouldn’t you stay another few months and finish in the middle of next year – 2025 is a lucky number, after all. Why not stay until the end of 2025 and keep building up a few more bucks instead of drawing on your retirement reserves or whatever? If you really don’t want to let your coworkers down, don’t want to burden them by no longer doing that important stuff you do for them, why not stay until your physician says the latest unexpected incident has rendered you unfit to return to any work?
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You need to immediately
A) do EXACTLY what Chaotic Boss is telling you to do. In particular, you need to stop doing the work that even you recognize is extraneous and outside your department. Yes that will impede deadlines or quotas or whatever and harm outcomes in the short term%. YES, THAT WILL MAKE PEOPLE COMPLAIN. YOU WANT THEM TO COMPLAIN. And if they complain to you, you should refer those complaints to upper management and stick by your documentation that clearly shows your new boss instructed you to stop helping those people. Until you do that, you’re just helping to hide your manager’s poor directives from the company. You are just helping her draw a management paycheck while destroying you and the colleagues you care about.
B) Watch Office Space (1999 Ron Livingston, Jennifer Aniston). Figure out which of those characters we think you are. PM me and tell me who you think it is. If you’re right, I’ll send you a gift.
C) Watch WANTED (2008 Angelina Jolie, James MacAvoy, Morgan Freeman) or at least the first half-hour and just wish your exit interview could be like that.
IF you do this properly, your company’s management will QUICKLY realize how poorly your supervisor manages and they will not only get rid of her but they’ll beg you to come back (at least for a few months) and offer a better salary. And your coworkers will applaud your return.
IF you let things continue as they’re going, the company eventually will take a big hit due to poor management, your colleagues will disperse during the downsizing efforts, and all the extra documentation you’re preparing will be nothing more than a wasted effort.
–G!
$Nevertheless, I do think I’ll start documenting my successes and contributions – OFFline – more. There’s no telling when a new manager might come in with an idea to ‘shake the place up’ or ‘prove himself’ to the executives and decide my eyes are too blue or something.
#Like a chef slowly turning up the heat on the pot of water containing a frog. Before the frog realizes something’s wrong, it’s already DEAD.
%When you fall off a bike and scrape up your elbow, the best thing to do is pour rubbing alcohol on it. Yes, it’ll hurt like hell, but it will also clean the wound and keep things from getting infected. Sometimes an initial shock is better for the long term.
Or, to use another medical-esque analogy, “rip the bandage off.”
I’ve said several times that I’m not doing this. Anything I do for other departments is related to specific projects. I used to be able to take on smaller projects and let my boss know about it. Now I’m asking her for approval before I do anything. She has escalated from asking me to get her approval before doing any requests (no matter how small) from other people to having to get her approval to do routine tasks. I think that’s ridiculous, but I have to play her game.
We did job descriptions years ago, but I don’t know if that still exists somewhere in HR. There is a publicly accessible job description for my general job category (not my specific job) that is very outdated and not accurate. The things that I’ve said are not being done by anyone else are covered in the job descriptions.
There are a lot of assumptions in the comments here that aren’t true. The only thing I’m insisting on doing is making sure my coworkers get copies of documents and associated files that are difficult or impossible for them to recreate. She hasn’t told me I can’t do that, but I don’t think she’ll approve it. I do want to make sure I get that done if I leave suddenly, but by then I won’t care what she says. (If anyone cares to read a little more, these documents involve a little more work than just copying files. There are files that are linked to the documents that I need to make sure are in the right places, and I need to put them in a place where other people can have access to them, because they’re all on my laptop. I plan to get some help from IT, but I don’t want to do that until I’m closer to leaving.)
I may have mentioned a long way back in this thread that I think my boss has been planning on getting rid of me since she took the job. I think she wants to replace me with someone who worked with her in her last little empire. I’m at a disadvantage because she’s done this before and I haven’t, so I just have to let it play out and try to be strategic. I hate it because I do like this job and I have great coworkers and I don’t want to leave, but that’s life. 
Wait. Are these files on your personal laptop or a company laptop? If the latter they can get the files. If the former, your company is badly screwed up. They have the right to monitor communications on your corporate network, but not to look inside your laptop. Unless you explicitly gave them permission to do that.
If you are right and your boss wants to replace you with a crony, you might think about ways of making that person’s life living hell, and double for your boss. Not documenting unless you are told to do so is one way. Asking for permission to continue your long term support (and getting turned down, no doubt) is another.
Make your boss face the consequences of her actions. Consider it part of her moral education. If your boss has to eventually admit you are critical to the company, it will feel very good, no matter if you stay or leave.
I’d really love to hear crazy boss woman’s perspective on the whole thread …
“MagicEyes doesn’t respect my authoritay…”