Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 367: Hybrid denier and recovering from crying

Episode Date: July 31, 2023

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: We’ve recently switched to mandatory 2 days of in-person work a week but my employee keeps working from home! Whenever I ask him to come in person he says sure but continues to work from home. When I confront him about not showing up in person he just says “sorry I wasn’t able to make it that day”. He’s a good employee so I don’t want to fire him, but I’m concerned about what upper management will say if/when they find out about this. What should I do? Hi! I am a huge fan of the podcast and a longtime listener. I recently made a professional judgment call in a high-stress situation that, unfortunately, did not turn out well. It was an excellent learning opportunity for me. Both my team and mentors were very supportive and said they’ve all fumbled at one point in their career. I was understandably reprimanded in a private meeting with my manager. I embarrassingly started crying halfway through, which I’ve NEVER done before in a professional setting. I momentarily excused myself to regain my composure, but even after resuming I had to keep the the tissue box close by. It was awkward, and I could tell my manager was very uncomfortable despite being his kind demeanor. I am worried my reaction will call my reputation and professionalism into question. Please help! How do I recover from this?

it takes more than room temperature ambient pressure superconductivity to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 367 i am your host dave smith i am your host jameson dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for engineers who are above room temperature but do you think it's real pressure i don't know anything about this field but i just think it isn't real i think it's a funny twitter phenomenon that i know nothing about the actual science that took place and i know everything about the drama of the people who are publishing the science isn't that the best yeah it's so funny like that i think that cancels out the alien liar guy and so wait liar guy really neutral i there's no way that guy's telling the truth

i know right i just want it to be true though so bad wouldn't it be cool if you could just go testify before congress about anything and just like wildly make stuff up and then you're like but i can't tell you the details because security yeah yeah wait isn't that kind of what we do on this podcast there's just no congress yeah that's a fair point our listeners are the congress in this metaphor we should respect the grift all right i'm gonna thank our patrons thank you so much to these folks who support the show so that we will shout them out every single week thank you to trash panda the computer science book the re-elect jameson dance boogie brigade the re-elect jameson dance committee santa hopar noah frasier loge ken c dodds jenny kim owens

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on there will get you a shout out in the show and with that that is correct shall we read questions yes but we do need to introduce our new patreon tier where instead of reading your name we will just make up a bunch of drama about you and then tweet about it and then i don't know what you get for that but that that is available fame the hatred of the masses all right yes i will read our first question this comes from an anonymous listener who says we have recently switched to mandatory two days of in-person work a week but my employee keeps working from home whenever i ask him to come in in person he says sure but continues to work from home when i confront him about not showing up in person he just says oh sorry i wasn't able to make it that day he's a

he's a good employee so i don't want to fire him but i'm concerned about what upper management will say if and when they find out about this what should i do oh man i have a lot of sympathy for folks in this position of i i definitely hear about increased pressure to return to the office and from what i can gather of this question it doesn't sound like the question asker is is deeply committed to the value of working in person it's more like my boss has said i have to do this but maybe slightly more committed than their employee yeah it's clearly not committed yeah that's an awkward position to be in to say like hey do this thing so i don't get in trouble even though it doesn't make anything better it is to me just incredible that i guess i shouldn't

be surprised by this but there are people who will test the boundaries of their employment by simply not doing what they're asked to do repeatedly oh it's incredible yeah a good employee so i don't want to fire him i'm concerned about um you could get a body double you could get someone to come in and pretend to be this person yes that kind of covers your basis so if if upper management asks about it then you say oh yeah no he he's here he came in yeah yeah how are they gonna know especially depending on how upper the upper management is you know yeah no no he got taller sorry or you're just no he always had that many limbs yeah your memory must be off yeah how many limbs exactly does this person have in your in your

imagination jameson i don't know just imagining it could be more could be fewer you know yeah you uh i think you remember this as a human biologic sample this is a non-human biologic sample it's always been that way oh i just just saying yep i'll do it and then not doing it and then saying oh sorry i couldn't do it yeah i i don't know why that just tickles me it's so sorry i was unable to do that thing yeah i you know to me this just shows how the balance of power while it has swung a little bit to the employers, it has not swung that much. If someone can say, please come into work. If your employer can say, please come into work in the office two days a week, and you say yes and don't, and your boss is more scared of you leaving than what management will say.

That's very interesting. This does expose a difficult, unresolved dilemma, which is why do they need to come in and and it feels like your employee is saying it is not useful or helpful for me to come in so i'm not gonna and presumably there's some message from on high about how we all need to pull together and it's better for i don't know ad hoc conversations and productivity etc but they do not buy it i think this person has decided to live the dream they have moved to some amazing wonderful place and they cannot come in to the office ah they just didn't tell you like yeah i wasn't able to make it that day because i am actually in the himalayas the commute would take a long time

but i'll be there next week yeah i mean you have a few options you can try to motivate them by by explaining why it is valuable and helpful for them why it is a thing that they would like that they should want to do try and convince them like actually it would be better to come to the office you have the carrot you have the stick of like i'm i'm asking you to do this as a condition for your employment yep at the company and the risk of that is the employment is voluntary and i don't know they can just say know they'd be like all right i guess i'll get another job you know that sounds like that's what's going to happen here you could this sucks in different ways you could try to carve out an

exception for this employee to say they are critical to the team they will quit if we say you have to come in so can we just say they don't have to come in yeah but that feels presumably there are other people who would like to also work from home right definitely feels a bit weird for the team dynamics. I mean, what I have learned in my years is that when you enter into a relationship, a professional or otherwise commercial relationship with someone, and there are things that you want them to do in that relationship, it is very useful to have attached consequences to those behaviors. You know, it's one thing to say, look, I'm going to sign a contract that I'm going to rent this house from you. And the landlord says, no smoking. And I'm like,

no smoking or what? And what I've learned is that if you say. It'll be a $10 extra charge on your rent a month. Like, okay, it costs $10 a month to smoke here. No problem. Got it. Exactly. But if they just don't have anything attached, it's kind of like, or, and I think that's what's happening with this employee. They're like, I come into the office or what and you don't really have an or what you know and you certainly don't want and you know the ultimate or what with any employment arrangement is termination but you don't want to do that and this person i think knows that and it's actually just waiting for you to see if they can call your bluff i think you need to somehow make the performance of their computer dependent

on proximity to the office so everything just gets a little bit slower every every few miles away yeah it's like one over n relationship where n is miles and that number is the number of gigabytes you get yeah yeah you're yeah you have fewer gigabytes of ram outside of the office exactly come to the office to pick up your ram yeah i i guess i'm having i'm having trouble engaging with this question because i think it's dumb to say actually you have to come to the office i feel like either you have to say from the top down you have to or you're fired right or you just can't say that you can yeah you just say you're remote and you have an office and people can come in if they want yeah i think i do think there's a little bit of room between a total pushover and you're

fired and i think that room looks something like over the long term opportunities will no longer come to you things like raises promotions working on that really cool new project things like that that you could do but it's going to take months or years to really pay that consequence out to the employee yeah yeah i i guess i was talking more about the company imposing this policy like i think this is a dumb policy are you saying that the idea of having people come to the office is dumb are you saying that asking them to come to the office with no stick i'm saying the idea of going from working remote to you are required to come into the office a certain number of days a week feels arbitrary and less useful. And yeah. Yeah. I think once you've made a fully remote

commitment, it's really hard to put that genie back in the bottle. It is. It really is. I will say that another thing you could do here to manage the situation is to observe the performance of your other team members and note the things that happen, the good things that happen because they are in the office. And then I'll also make note of the bad thing that happens, bad things that happen, if any at all, because this person is not in the office. And then try to make a judgment call yourself. Is it actually worth it to risk losing them to have them come in or to try to force them to come in? And you might find that actually it's just not worth it. Or you might find that it is. And I'll tell you, having recently transitioned from a fully remote to a

now hybrid in-person situation, which I did by changing companies, not by changing a policy at a company, there are a lot of serendipitously good things that happen by virtue of being in an office together. And these are things like new ideas are discovered, solutions to problems happen really quick sometimes, and all those things I remember being either slow or non-existent in a remote environment. So I think what you're saying is outside of the two ends of the spectrum of do nothing or you're fired if you don't do this, make the case, pitch them, see if that works a little bit. Well, yeah. Well, first I would just collect information because it could be that you don't have a case to make at all. It could very well be that the best thing for the

company and for this person is for them to stay remote. But I don't think you really know that based on you know just a few weeks of observation yeah there's also just the bureaucracy kind of policy piece of like yeah i know everyone has to come in two days a week and and i might look like not an effective manager if my team is not doing that which you might but i i don't think that i think that's the wrong concern is how you look as a manager the right concern is is my team performing is this good for the business is this good for the team member and yeah if you can make a compelling argument that this particular person should stay remote, I would bring that argument up to upper management. And I would do it by, like what I said, observing over time the good and the

bad and seeing if there's a strong case to let this situation stay. And then try to get, I like what you said, Jameson, try to get an exception carved out just for this person. And you'd be surprised. I think sometimes they'll do it. And in requesting the exception, you're going to learn where management really stands on this issue. Because they might come back and say, no exceptions back in the office or you're fired or they might come back and say yeah that's fine you can stay remote yeah kind of like discovering the nuance available by pushing a little bit exactly which is what this employee is doing yes that's exactly what i was thinking it's like the teenager approach to life you know yeah try things yeah find out what gets you in trouble now you know where the

boundaries are sometimes i'm so much of a rule follower that i just admire people like this me too i just think i i didn't know you could do that i didn't know you could just say no to some of that stuff i didn't know you could just say oh whoops no i'm not doing that it is truly amazing like i really do have a lot of respect for this person sort of but i also have a little bit of like on the one hand i have a lot of respect for them on the other hand i'm like look why can't you come out and be open about the fact that you're not coming back in the office now just say it yeah you know have the conversation i know it'll be hard but be forward about that yeah right now they're kind of being passive aggressive you know i'm not saying

i'm not coming in but i'm also not saying i am well except i am sometimes i just couldn't make it this last time right i swear i'll do it next time yeah and it's two days a week so this is happening you know over the next few weeks you're gonna have a lot of data points to collect here it'll just be out honestly i would sit back and just watch this situation unfold because i would love to see what excuses this person comes up with next week and the week after and the week after like how long can they really go yeah i think it would be kind of fun just to watch as a manager seems like forever for now i don't think the excuse the novelty of the excuse is the constraint here that's true well i don't know i couldn't think of a good enough excuse i guess i'll drive

in seriously you don't i think it would be highly entertaining just to have a counter that's written on a piece of paper on my desk of how many times this person said i wasn't able to make it just like how high can that number really go and they keep a straight face every time maybe i'll try this with performance reviews you have to write your self-review it's due by this date i've been late on them before because of life but whenever someone asks it's always like oh yeah yeah i'm on it i'll get to it and then i get to it but instead if i just say oh i wasn't able to do it sorry i wasn't able to do it this year yeah i i had a i had something come up couldn't get to it this year all right should we read the next question yeah let's go answer this question yep good luck okay

this is from an anonymous listener who says hi i'm a huge fan of the podcast and a long-time listener thank you i recently made a professional judgment call in a high stress situation that unfortunately did not turn out well it was an excellent learning opportunity for me both my team and mentors were very supportive and said they've all fumbled at one point in their career i was understandably reprimanded in a private meeting with my manager i embarrassingly started crying halfway through which i've never done before in a professional setting i momentarily excused myself to regain my composure but even after resuming i had to keep the tissue box close by it was awkward and i could tell my manager was very uncomfortable despite his kind demeanor

I am worried my reaction will call my reputation and professionalism into question. Please help. How do I recover from this? That's a great question There is no coming back from this. I'm sorry Your career is over Just kidding Oh Yeah, i'm sorry that happened who among us has not made a poor judgment call in a high stress situation. Well most of us have done that and what what many of you don't know is that on most episodes of this podcast i have we have to turn off the recording for just a few minutes so i can cry it out because

of something jameson said uh the ai technology to wipe away the tears yes advanced tremendously you can't see it on video yes we've got the no i wasn't just crying filter turned on yeah you know i i i feel like i should make this comment and i'm not making this comment just to make this question asker feel better about themselves i am making this comment because it is true and that is that when i went into management for the first time which is about eight or nine years ago i was surprised at the amount of crying at work that i was that i witnessed i had never before being in management seen tears at work and it's not a it's not a gender thing it's not an age thing it was across the boards i would say half the people probably

that i managed at some point had some kind of emotional breakdown in at work maybe not half maybe maybe less hey that's a poor track record i know and i'm people you manage literally what what did you do literally as i was saying this that was running through my mind um yeah you know i never until this moment jamis and i never blamed myself for that well you're welcome it's time for your cry okay positive recording yeah so like i guess like i said i'm not saying this just to make you feel better but statistically speaking you are nowhere near an anomaly a lot of people cry at work and it's usually in the privacy of a meeting with their manager i have had several reports cry in

one-on-one meetings with me as well definitely not rare yeah being around crying people is kind of uncomfortable so it makes sense your manager was really uncomfortable or and and also it's uh it's just very intimate and vulnerable in a way that we don't normally engage with at work yeah It's true. It's true. But I can't think of a time. I'm trying to think of the past few instances I've had of folks crying and it didn't, it didn't change anything about how I worked with them afterwards. It was sort of like cathartic almost of, of like, uh, kind of getting through something difficult and then moving on. And I feel like honestly, in the most recent instances I can think of, it felt like things got better afterwards. And I'm not saying it was because

someone cried, but it wasn't like, well, they have a black mark in my mind now because they dared to shed a tear. Yeah, exactly. No, I mean, if I'm your boss, this is not at all something that will blemish your reputation or your history for me. Not even a little bit. In fact, have you ever cried at work? Well, I haven't. I'll tell that story next, but let me just wrap this thought. I would say in my mind, if someone broke down like this in response to a professional, you know, non-abusive reprimand in a professional setting, that would actually make me feel good about them because I can see just how invested they are in this team and their success at work. You know, honestly, it's the people who make big mistakes and just kind of

walk away like, whatever. Those are the people that I really have a problem with, you know, But when people are just so invested in doing a good job at work and they're so proud of the work they do that it causes them to become emotional when they are dealing with the aftermath of a mistake. I love that. Like, that's very positive to me. This is like, this tells me this is someone who cares about doing a good job. So my respect goes up generally. So we're kind of speculating on what a good manager would do. a good manager would not it's not going to go gossip about about you to other people you would

not believe the one-on-one i just had and yeah they'll be like why are you even telling me about this that's uninteresting how how unbelievable their reaction was to my feedback i read my reaction call my reputation professionalism into question nah yeah i can't see that ever happening I mean, ideally, your reputation and professionalism is based on your performance and not not it's not a one time thing. It's not like a. Yeah, you can't it can't all be shattered through a few tears. Yeah. Yeah. It's not like a glass artifact that is now dropped on the ground.

Right. If it's something like abusive or public, if you like flip out and start crying and screaming abuse at the at your boss in a meeting like, yeah, maybe maybe that would be a little more impactful. But hearing criticism of something that I know I did wrong, yeah, it's tough and it's intense. It's an understandable reaction. It doesn't seem outside the bounds of what to expect for someone, like you said, who cares a lot and wants to do a good job and is aware that they didn't hit their expectations. Now, you might not have a mature manager, but I think you probably do in this case, just based on the question and what was said about them. But from my, one of the things that I'll just tell a little story, not about me, but about a friend, I had a coworker and that coworker had some kind of professional reprimand at

work. And for some reason, I don't remember why I became privy to the manager's side of the story. And the manager said that when he delivered the bad news to the coworker or the feedback to the coworker, to my coworker, he said, oh yeah, the coworker got defensive. And I thought, oh boy, here we go. They're going to criticize this person. but instead the manager said which i expected and i understand so i gave them time to go think it

through and i realized in that moment like this is a sign of a very mature manager because they understand that when giving certain kinds of feedback to people there are going to be human emotions involved and sometimes those emotions are uncontrollable they surface when we don't want them to and so a mature manager will will take that into account and know that this happens and know that, look, they're not at their best in this moment. Let's come back later and talk about it some more when they've had a chance to let their emotional system kind of process this whole thing.

I really appreciated that insight. And to me, that was a sign of maturity that you could not just have a dramatic response to the uncontrollable emotion, but rather have an expectation that it would exist and a plan for working with it. Yeah. All right.

Do you want to hear the story about me crying at work now? Oh, heck yeah. this is actually not a very good story but i i was actually pretty young in this case but i did i had an hourly job as a teenager but it was a job so i think it fits the question here and essentially there was a scheduling conflict between my work and some school activities and my boss or rather one of my school activity adults so i think it was like a theater teacher called up my work and I think may have kind of chewed them out for scheduling me the way they did. And maybe a little bit tactlessly asked them to schedule me differently. Maybe. I don't

actually know exactly how that conversation went down, but one way or another, my boss was very upset by the situation. You know, what do you do when you're an adult who manages teenagers at work you take all your frustration out on the teenagers that's that's the healthy response you don't take it up with the other adult that frustrated you and so these two managers adult managers kind of cornered me in a small office and they put in front of me a one page written write-up of the things that had gone wrong and essentially asked me to take fault for it all and they had me sign this this thing it was kind of like a it was kind of like signing a confession is what it felt like and i broke down in that moment because i was just like i don't even know

what's happening these adults are all fighting so yeah i broke down and then i quit that job which actually in that very moment in the 90s is what set the stage for this show's main theme ah you've been quitting jobs since you first started working that's right it's perfect so that's why we go back to story teenage jobs i think i have cried at work i don't think i've cried at work since my my adult professional career started but yeah mine is different i think i just cried because someone stood me up on a date and then i had to go to work and i was sad ah it wasn't it wasn't because somebody made me cry at work about work stuff right right right i'm not even sure i would count that sniffling while i take in the dry cleaning

did you notice how sad the dry cleaning boy was tags yeah just weeping your way through your shift yep oh how do i recover from this yeah i i think you're i think you're good i think the way you recover from it no recovery necessary in my opinion yeah you you just move on and and pull the feedback out that you can and and keep doing a good job and this is a not an well i could see how this is embarrassing it is not a harmful to your career i think right and and now you get to show you can learn and improve i think next year you'll look back at this and and it'll be maybe not your fondest happiest memory but you won't think it's a big deal anymore yeah yeah and and definitely the the if you take the feedback and and um incorporate it that's great like who cares

if you cried in the meeting it's fine it's intense and then you get better and fix the thing and and that's what more could your could your manager or your employer expect from you exactly i think it's great i wouldn't worry one bit about this and from the sign of it you have a great manager who didn't freak out who you know everyone's going to be a little uncomfortable and someone's crying of course that's fine but uh they did a good job and you called this person kind so i don't know i'll take that at face value now i'm just imagining crying happening in the mundane regular meetings like every sprint sprint planning somebody cries yeah every oh more tickets more tickets please no they they never stop that would actually be when will the backlog be done yeah

it only grows and never shrinks yes that's true it's all part of the plan to keep your job good luck i think you're fine yeah all right what can people do if they would like their own questions answered dave just weep your way over to soft skills.audio and click the ask a question button. And then after drying your tears from the sheer beauty of our form, that's a different kind of crying, by the way. Forms can be so beautiful that they bring you to tears. And it will also not tarnish your reputation to do so. In fact, we judge people who don't cry when they look at our website. Go there and you can fill out our form. We want to say thank you so much to everyone who's done that. We love your questions. And in fact, if you've had your

question read on air, which has been like, I don't know, a few hundred of you have had that happen, we would love to hear the outcome for you. You can use the same form. Click the ask a question button form, ignore the word question, and just write your story. What we said, whether it worked or not. Jameson and I have a little bit of a pool open. I'm guessing that 80% of the time, our advice makes your life worse. Jameson thinks it makes it better. So we're going to do some statistical analysis on this and figure out how often we're actually good. And then cry about the results. One way or another work, Ryan. Yep. All right. Thank you. We will catch you next week.