It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…
1. My employer is making us leave fake positive reviews on Glassdoor
My employer has instructed several of us to write fake positive reviews of the company on Glassdoor in an effort to revive their rating and improve recruitment.
We have all marched in lockstep with this, and I have begrudgingly (on the inside) agreed. I’m sure I am not the only one who is hesitant to do this but so far nobody has spoken up against it. Management provided us with a unique template to copy and paste, including a body paragraph and specific ratings, to post on Glassdoor. They stress that this is something that we must complete at home (off-site) and cannot be done in the office on any work computer to prevent tracing.
I’ve told my friends and family about this and I completely understand why they’re disappointed in me. My company shouldn’t be forcing people to lie and while my honest and truthful review would be A LOT different compared to what I’m being forced to write, I want to keep my job for the time being. I can always delete this fake review when I leave the company.
Is something like this a common request these days? Would my employer get in any trouble if Glassdoor somehow found this out?
It’s not super common, but it’s a thing some unethical employers do. It’s remarkably short-sighted — they should want to screen out candidates who object to the aspects of their culture described in honest reviews, not trick them into accepting jobs there under false pretenses. Or, better yet, they could take a look at what those honest reviews say and fix their culture and management, but apparently it’s easier to tackle it this way.
Glassdoor claims that they don’t allow employers to incentivize or coerce employees to write positive reviews. They say they’ll remove reviews if they have evidence that users were coerced into leaving them, and that if the issue persists they may place an alert on the employer’s profile page. So one option is to contact them and ask what kind of evidence they need for that.
2. My boss chewed me out for my husband’s behavior
My husband, Mark, and I work at the same very small company (35-ish total staff) in the same office building. Our company is structured where I work on projects not for a single manager, but my yearly performance evaluation is conducted by the CFO. My husband is a project manager (who I don’t work with unless it’s a dire need) who is also managed by our CFO.
Since spring 2020, Mark, the other project managers, and the CFO all have had a morning status call twice a week. Because it’s an hour before Mark’s normal start time, he has been taking the call at his home computer. Unfortunately, his home computer is currently set up in the living room. While it’s not ideal for me to have to be super quiet getting ready while he gives his status update, it’s for a short amount of time and we’ve not had any issues for the past five years. (He always mutes for the rest of the call unless asked a question.)
The first issue arose this Monday. I had an emergency and made some noises in the background. (Our cat was peeing on some dirty laundry, and I yelped and told him off while I picked him up and took him to his litter box. Genuinely nothing inappropriate for work, but I was able to be heard over the phone.) Mark chose to not drop from the call or mute himself because he was in the middle of his status report. (That’s a separate issue he and I talked out. We found a good solution: he is taking calls downstairs from now on.)
When I got to my desk later that morning, I had an email from the CFO chastising me for the background noise, asking me to refrain from “all background noise” while Mark is on those calls and saying it’s distracting.
Mark and I both find this to be inappropriate. I was not on the call nor on the clock, and this is the first time in five years something like this has happened. Mark equated this to our CFO calling the spouse of a staff member to chastise the spouse.
I was so baffled by the email that I replied explaining Mark chose to not mute and I had had an emergency.
I walked on eggshells for the next call (we’re moving Mark’s home computer downstairs this weekend) and I asked him to say something to our CFO. I wasn’t part of their casual conversation, but Mark tells me it didn’t have the desired outcome. My understanding is our CFO sees nothing wrong for chastising me since I am on staff.
Mark is arranging to have a meeting with our CFO. Should we try to loop the single HR staff member in? If nothing comes of this meeting is there anything else we can do?
Eh. The CEO was wrong to take this up with you rather than with Mark, and you were both right to point that out to him, but unless it becomes an ongoing problem, at this point I don’t think there’s a ton to be gained by continuing to pursue it. It happened once in five years, you have a plan in place for avoiding it being an issue again, and you can probably just let it end there.
It’s not that the CEO’s message to you wasn’t misplaced. It was. He appears to have some weird ideas in this regard. But it’s over, and I’d just let it be over unless anything similar happens again.
3. Can I ask, “How necessary is this feedback?”
I sit a rung or two down from the CEO at a national corporation. I’m here for my very technical knowledge and long-term experience with a part of our business that is different from any other of our peer companies, so I’m pretty specialized and my department is very small. Recently I rolled out an initiative that touches multiple departments and all of our locations across the country. I’m getting a lot of attention from high level folks, so I’m in a pretty great position.
All of a sudden, everyone wants a piece of my initiative. I am always collaborative and do what I can to accommodate the needs of different departments, but the process has become unwieldy and I’m trying to find a balance between getting all the input I need and becoming overwhelmed with data.
Specifically, I’d like to limit people’s input to their areas of expertise. I have one colleague (same level as me, different department) who is notorious for providing his opinion about things that aren’t within his purview. Let’s say he’s HR. He asked me to meet with him to discuss my initiative and I’m wondering if there is any professional way for me to ask, “Is this an HR requirement or just your opinion about my area of expertise?” What do you think?
“I’ve been inundated with feedback, much of it conflicting, so I’m asking people to limit feedback to things that are requirements for their area.”
That said, whether or not it’s smart to say this to any given person depends on the internal politics in your workplace — who the person is, how senior they are, and how much influence they have. In some cases it will be smarter to listen to the feedback and say you’ll add it to the list of things you’re considering (whether or not you ultimately do anything with it). In other cases it will be smart to engage in real discussion about their suggestions (“the issue with doing X is Y”). So judge case by case.
4. Every team email turns into a reply-all fiasco
I have a low-stakes question — my team’s supportiveness is clogging my inbox! Several times a week in the course of doing business, we’ll get updates about something happening in our division: a project gets a nice review in an industry trade publication, or someone lands a new client, or an event we planned goes well. Updates about this sort of day-to-day work are sent out to the full 25-person team … but then the reply-all-apocalypse begins.
My issue: A single update can yield up to a dozen reply-alls of encouragement or congratulations: “Great work!” “Wow, go team!” “This group is really knocking it out of the park!” This is all, objectively, lovely! But multiply that by several updates per day, every week, and you can see the problem. I just came back from a few days away from work, and fully half of my emails were long cheerleading threads of people just chiming in to say “hurrah” and adding nothing else. Alison, one email about a team member’s promotion elicited no fewer than 17 reply-all “congratulations” to the full distro list! What?!
I’m a more seasoned employee here and I’m also a veteran of the original early 2000s reply-all wars, when people were just learning email norms and reply-all explosions were often the hilarious butt of jokes. So I’m admittedly perhaps over-sensitive about this. But I think a word of encouragement or congratulations for just, well, doing your job should typically go directly to the individual not the full group, right? Thank you for your ruling on this matter, which I will consider final and binding.
I can and have issued the ruling you want, but sadly I cannot make anyone follow it. And if this is the culture of your office, you probably can’t either, unless you’re in a position of a lot of influence and willing to spend a lot of effort and capital trying to change it, and even then you might not. Your best bet is to look for technical tools to manage it — if your email program gives you the option, sort messages by conversation or mute whole conversations. It won’t solve it entirely, but it’ll push fewer “go team” messages at you throughout the day.
5. I struggle with talking about conflict in interviews
I am an experienced communicator and former journalist, currently working as a spokesperson for a large company. I have experience talking live on the air and coach others on how to do so.
And yet over and over, as I search for my next job, I find myself lost on how to answer questions, especially “Tell us about a difficult situation you faced and how you handle conflict when working with others.” I always feel like they are looking for a story about a big fight, but I am a professional person and do what all professional people do. Have a bunch of meetings, send lots of emails, until everyone is happy or at least not mad. I have no idea what else to say even though I know I should have some real examples to share.
You’re reading too much into it. They aren’t looking for a story about a big fight! Or at least, they’re not assuming you’ll have one. (If you do, they’ll likely be very interested in hearing about it, but not necessarily in a way that reflects well on you.)
They are literally just looking for an example of a time that you needed to navigate a conflict. It doesn’t need to be dramatic, just anything where your perspective or goals differed from someone you needed to work with, and how you handled it. Obviously you want to try to pick an example that has some substance to it, but you don’t need to land on something full of blood and thunder. It could be as simple as, “I wasn’t getting work I needed from a colleague to move forward with my own piece of the project and so I did XYZ” or “I needed to work closely with a colleague on X and I thought the outcomes should be Y and she felt strongly they should be Z, and so I did ABC and EDF was the result.”
The same applies to other “tell me about a time when…” questions, too. They’re not looking for big, dramatic answers, just a sense of how you’ve navigated a thing that is likely to come up in this job too; they’re asking you to paint them a picture of how you work.
Related:
how to answer behavioral interview questions when you don’t have good examples