April 2007

Dear Evil HR Lady,

Annually my company’s HR lady requests us to review and acknowledge reviewing all documents pertaining to corporate policies. She does this without informing us which documents have actually changed forcing us to re-read the same documents every year. It takes days to re-read the documents. My question follows; Do all HR professionals use this ploy to force others to proof read the error ridden gibberish they produce? And how could I apply this proof-read concept onto others for my peer code reviews.

Bitter? Party of one?

I agree that your HR lady is unprofessional. Sending out things that are error ridden is inexcusable. (Although I won’t mention that just yesterday someone called me about a general release I had written that said they needed to “executive” the release rather than “execute.” Darn non-omniscient spell checker!)

Is she the one who made this policy or does she carry it out? Even though we HR types seem to love paper more than life itself, it’s rarely HR that decides such things need to happen. It’s usually finance or legal that comes up with the idea that everyone needs to sign off on the Code of Conduct every year. HR has to carry it out and we get blamed for wasting time.

Even so, she should be professional.

Refrain from the urge to fill the documents with red pencil marks. That will just make her angry. Although I do give you permission to tell your staff that they are never to send out something without proper proof-reading.

Now, I’m really scared I’ve made a spelling or grammatical error in this post. I spell checked on Microsoft Word, and I hope that is enough.

Sincerely,

Evil HR Lady

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Dear Evil HR Lady,
First, may I just say that I really enjoy reading your blog. It’s always funny and informative. Back in college I was an Evil HR Lady Intern for a Fortune 500 company and I actually really enjoyed it but have gone on to a different profession which leads me to my question about my current position (hmm…now I’m wishing that someone had clarified this for me during my internship of evil but, so it goes, I was too busy filing resumes to ask all the astute questions)…

So I’ve just begun a new job and I’m quite young to have my position. Since the first day that I’ve started my position I’ve been asked with some regularity “how old are you?” While I can tell that some of the question askers are just being friendly and curious and are often hoping to then begin telling stories about “back when they started” at our current employer, I sense that others are seeking to gather information about me in not wholly neutral and/or friendly ways.

First question: I’ve been trying to parry all questions about my age since I recognize that disclosing my age may undermine my authority in some respects. I do this nicely by not directly answering questions and responding to age querries with comments like “well, I’ve had six years of experience doing the particular job I’ve been hired to do” or, slightly more irreverently, “oh, I’m ancient but I’m a disciple of vitamins, veggies, and botox”. Am I doing the right thing to not directly mention my age? Do these sound like appropriate answers to you if I didn’t want to disclose my age or do I sound like I’m being sneaky and unhelpful? What about those who I sense have ulterior motives (e.g. trying to use my age as evidence of a lack of experience)? Any ideas how I should respond to them? Or do you think I should let everyone know my age so that these questions don’t get asked any more?

Second, (okay, this is more of a comment) I’m just really weirded out by the number of people who have asked me how old I am. I’m just trying to keep my nose down and do my job but I feel like once I have more seniority it may be a good idea to perhaps raise the issue that questions regarding age, marital status, etc. are somewhat complicated and troublesome. I don’t really want my company to get sued for violating any HR confidentiality practices. Should my employer be reminding employees that there are certain questions that they should not ask during the interview process and, more broadly, once new employees are hired? Does the confidentiality of the interview situation apply to all current employees of an organization?

Thanks for your help.

Not sooo young

Dear Youthful One,

Ahh, to have youth instead of just beauty. Or, umm, yeah. First, from a legal standpoint, your age only counts as a protected class if you are over 40, which you are not. From an annoyance standpoint, you’ve got a case.

I like your responses. I, being more obnoxious than you are, would start answering, “I’ll be 62 next week. Can’t wait until the grandkids come to visit!” or “I’m 15 and a half. Dad’s going to start giving me driving lessons next month!” But, that’s why I’m an evil HR Lady and you were only an evil HR Intern.

As I said, your age does not put you in a protected class, but if you find you are being discriminatd against you may wish to take it up to HR. My bet is that the reason your co-workers repeatedly ask you how old you are is because you are doing a fabulous job. If you were acting like they expected a dorky 22 year old to act they wouldn’t keep asking. But, because you are performing at a level that seems out of character for your perceived age, they keep asking.

It’s bothersome, but I would try to ignore it as best as possible.

While technically, you probably shouldn’t go around asking your co-workers and underlings questions that you wouldn’t ask in an interview, that’s what real life is all about. “Hey, I need Friday off for Good Friday” or, “we’re going to my mother-in-law’s for Passover” is part of daily conversation, although it reveals your religion. Someone may have a picture of their spouse or partner in their cube. You may have to leave a meeting early to go take some insulin or get something to eat if you are diabetic. You wouldn’t bring any of these things up in an interview, but it would be hard to hide them day to day.

And I’m not saying that you should. Your co-workers should all be adults and we should all be able to handle anything about you, as long as you are working hard.

The longer you are there and the more you prove yourself, the less frequent the questions should be. But, remember that co-workers are frequently like mothers. “Why aren’t you married?” will change, once you get married, to “When are you and Bill going to have a baby?” and (trust me on this one) once you have a baby the question will be, “So, Offspring is almost 4. Aren’t you about ready to have another baby?”

It’s life. It’s annoying, but there it is!

And all too soon no one will as you your age because you’ll look old like me.

Evil HR Lady

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I got the e-mail below on March 29. Somehow, it didn’t register in my brain so I didn’t respond. Here’s the e-mail:

Hi there – love the blog!

The situation is as follows:

Smart, single, long-time employee at management level evades meetings with, but texts senseless messages at odd hours to, his nominal boss. I say nominal because he loves to deal with the boss’s boss – and go drinking and partying with that guy. The senior manager agrees the guy doesn’t seem to be working much, but wants them all to get along, and give the junior manager more chances. There are lots of strange messages left at the office or at home, when middle is usually available on his cell. This has been going on for a year or so. Middle manager accidentally discovered that junior has quite a debt load, but he is well paid and unencumbered by wife/child/mortgage etc. His erratic behaviour (missed meetings, late arrivals, argumentative and hostile conversations, lack of follow up on business objectives etc.) coupled with the odd finances leads to suspicions about drug use, or maybe gambling. Just where is this money going?

Question: does middle manager wait for junior to implode? Or does he say something to HR? Senior manager will not listen as this is now his favourite drinking buddy and he has never fired anyone, ever (ok, the company has lots of issues, but middle/junior are my focus.) Implosion would get junior out of the company, especially if he started stealing to meet his habit. Middle manager could hire/promote a new person, and start anew.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

Frustrated by-stander

Great question and oops on my part for not noticing. I e-mailed the author back and asked if she still wanted an answer, since it had been so long. Here is the response:

Dear Evil,

Timing is everything! Whilst middle waited for junior to implode (and he was working on it) some of junior’s reports staged a coup. They met with HR (in this case, HR is represented by tres cool smart jock type who does not play politics.) They all threatened to quit as they could not deal with the erratic behaviour, and one of them reported a cash stream that mysteriously ballooned after junior handed over the control – to the tune of serious money. In short, middle did not have to go toe-to-toe with the big boss to get this guy fired. They are likely to support him through rehab and hold some sort of job for him, but the stealing is not going to make that easy.

Any comments would be welcomed, as there will be a big post-mortem on this: why it took the line staff to call his bluff etc. when higher-ups could see it, or at least parts of it.

So, that particular problem was solved, but it was solved in entirely the wrong way. Not that Junior’s reports did anything wrong. Good for them–somebody needed to deal with it–but they shouldn’t have to.

Why do higher-ups ignore problems? The same reason I sometimes pretend I don’t notice the offspring eating in the family room. It’s against the rules and she shouldn’t do it, but sometimes I am just too lazy. Of course, managers are also scared. What if they guy freaks out? He’s already proven himself unstable–plus he’s buddy buddy with the head honcho. They are taking a huge risk in doing something.

Of course, it’s exactly situations like this that we pay managers to handle. If you can’t handle it, you shouldn’t be in management.

As for the big boss–he needs to cultivate a company culture where people can come to him with problems without getting in trouble. The fact that the problem employee was good friends with the big boss shouldn’t insulate him. And, ultimately it didn’t.

The fact that problems got solved by the underlings taking matters into their own hands means that there was a misperception among middle management on how senior management would react.

The first thing I would look at is communication in your company/department. And then a good hard look at culture–is merit what matters, or is it knowing the right person? Are your managers trained to deal with such things or are they promoted because they were good at “doing” and just thrown into managing? (That’s how most companies do it, by the way.

I’m glad junior got help. And I apologize for procastinating. But, hey, why do today what I can put off until tomorrow?

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