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agonyaunt2020-03-24 04:08 pm
minoanmiss) wrote in agonyaunt2020-03-24 04:08 pm
Entry tags:
Ask a Manager: I saw my coworkers’ chat conversation insulting our boss – who is also my father
A reader writes:
I recently started working full-time at the company run by my father. It has around 20 employees, and I took over a position from someone who left to pursue work in another field.
In taking over his duties, my company email account was merged with his. He had turned off his email chat feature, but did not delete any of the chat messages, and all of them became visible to me. They include long message threads with other current employees about how much they hate their boss (my father), not only critiquing his professional decisions but getting quite nasty about who he is as a person. They even say a few terrible non-professional things about me.
This is completely blindsiding, as everyone has been more than kind to me, and many have been working with my father for more than 15 years. I know reading these messages will be hard for my father, but I am not inclined to ignore this issue, especially since this is over company email. How should I proceed?
Oh no.
People get to blow off steam about their boss, but this sounds like more than light griping; it sounds personal and vicious.
If I’m wrong about that and it is just light griping that you could imagine seeing in a different job and not thinking was really out of line, then I would urge you to let this go. People do complain about their bosses, even bosses they like, and it’s just part of the job of managing people — unnerving as I imagine that would be to see as a daughter. If you reported that kind of thing to your father, you’d be ensuring your coworkers never trusted you and always saw you as a spy for your dad.
But if the stuff you saw was indeed egregious … well, of course you’re more loyal to your father than to people you just met who apparently have been trash-talking you both.
The one caveat I would give is to look at the complaints really objectively — try to see them the way you would if you didn’t have any personal investment. If they’re complaining about legitimate things, even very heatedly, give that a lot of leeway. They may have legitimate complaints! For all we know, they may have tried to solve them through other avenues earlier and not gotten anywhere. If that’s the case, I’d use what you saw as background information but not do anything further with it.
But otherwise, yeah, I can see wanting to talk to your dad. And it’s not about getting people in trouble — it’s that you now have this awful information about his company and the people he’s employing that he doesn’t have. I don’t think anyone would expect you to keep that from, say, a spouse, and if you’re at all close to your dad I don’t think it’s reasonable to have to keep that kind of secret in that relationship either.
If/when you talk to him, you might also talk about what this will mean for you. You presumably need to work with these people and it’s not great for you if they see whatever results from this as being your fault (even though they’re responsible for whatever they said). There might not be any way to mitigate that — the timing might make it very obvious it came from you — but it’s worth talking that through too.
I recently started working full-time at the company run by my father. It has around 20 employees, and I took over a position from someone who left to pursue work in another field.
In taking over his duties, my company email account was merged with his. He had turned off his email chat feature, but did not delete any of the chat messages, and all of them became visible to me. They include long message threads with other current employees about how much they hate their boss (my father), not only critiquing his professional decisions but getting quite nasty about who he is as a person. They even say a few terrible non-professional things about me.
This is completely blindsiding, as everyone has been more than kind to me, and many have been working with my father for more than 15 years. I know reading these messages will be hard for my father, but I am not inclined to ignore this issue, especially since this is over company email. How should I proceed?
Oh no.
People get to blow off steam about their boss, but this sounds like more than light griping; it sounds personal and vicious.
If I’m wrong about that and it is just light griping that you could imagine seeing in a different job and not thinking was really out of line, then I would urge you to let this go. People do complain about their bosses, even bosses they like, and it’s just part of the job of managing people — unnerving as I imagine that would be to see as a daughter. If you reported that kind of thing to your father, you’d be ensuring your coworkers never trusted you and always saw you as a spy for your dad.
But if the stuff you saw was indeed egregious … well, of course you’re more loyal to your father than to people you just met who apparently have been trash-talking you both.
The one caveat I would give is to look at the complaints really objectively — try to see them the way you would if you didn’t have any personal investment. If they’re complaining about legitimate things, even very heatedly, give that a lot of leeway. They may have legitimate complaints! For all we know, they may have tried to solve them through other avenues earlier and not gotten anywhere. If that’s the case, I’d use what you saw as background information but not do anything further with it.
But otherwise, yeah, I can see wanting to talk to your dad. And it’s not about getting people in trouble — it’s that you now have this awful information about his company and the people he’s employing that he doesn’t have. I don’t think anyone would expect you to keep that from, say, a spouse, and if you’re at all close to your dad I don’t think it’s reasonable to have to keep that kind of secret in that relationship either.
If/when you talk to him, you might also talk about what this will mean for you. You presumably need to work with these people and it’s not great for you if they see whatever results from this as being your fault (even though they’re responsible for whatever they said). There might not be any way to mitigate that — the timing might make it very obvious it came from you — but it’s worth talking that through too.
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I can't help feeling, "screw you LW"--you're part of the problem. "Business over people--death to disrupters of capital gain!" May you be first up against the walls . . .
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That said, I think the LW should keep their mouth shut except perhaps to inform the employees that they can actually read what's posted in this chat.
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The employees clearly had an expectation of privacy. Under those circumstances in the US, they might have a right to it. The employer would have to show that the expectation was unreasonable -- which takes more than ownership of the servers and a paragraph in the employee handbook.
(I am not a lawyer; I'm making assumptions based on my understanding of the legal issues of employee work-area searches during fraud investigations.)
I get that the material was personally upsetting, and there might be a question of the honesty and integrity of the workers who say one thing to your face and something else behind your back. But if the material wasn't the kind of offensive where the target doesn't matter, I'd say let it go.
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Because a), that's the actual issue here - something about your company's IT gave you access to his chatlogs without any training on privacy like an actual IT person would have. This isn't great. And b), let them stew not knowing what you'll do with the info.
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I dunno if it's a good idea for the boss's daughter to issue an implicit threat. She has power the other employees don't.
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I've had it with appeasement of these wankers wanting to exercise whatever cushy power they got on others--that's so not a good thing--it's pretty evil. I say it again, Screw you, LW. We all need to stop sympathizing with the people on top, imaging their dilemmas could be ours if they ever went on sale--it's what got us to the moment we're in.
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(Maybe it could have been reasonable venting or necessary criticism and she's over-reacting, but it really sounds like they were saying things that should have not been said using official company communications, or at least not without the awareness that the boss or a lawyer might read them someday. It can be really tough, especially with remote-working where "go out to lunch and kvetch" isn't an option, to have outlets for that kind of stuff that isn't official company channels, but it still doesn't belong on them. You shouldn't unionize over the official company chat, either, as much as I'm in favor of unions.)
It sounds like it's a small enough company that there's nobody in authority *other* than her dad that she could go to about fixing these problems about the way the chat is functioning and being used, and telling dad doesn't sound like a good option. And they need fixed. And the other employees need to be aware of them.
When I said "let them stew" I was really meaning "leave the ball in their court". If you bring it to them informally *as* an issue of "These channels aren't actually private, and this was super-awkward for me, so we all need to remember that" you should be able to play it as "I am trying to be on your side here", and let the other employees decide if they need to do anything else about what you saw. If they don't think what they did was inappropriate, then they will be fine. If they do, it gives them a chance to move first.
It's not ideal? But in a 20-person company where one of the 20 is the boss's daughter, interpersonal stuff sometimes needs to be worked out in a non-ideal way.
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Do you still not get it and want to talk about company protocols and all that 1984 drivel? Do you like that Trump wants to kill us all for the sake of his stock gains? This is all directly connected--the whole elephant is completely visible!!! Look and see!!!
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Mod Note
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Have you considered that he might be a shitty person?
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And in a time when billionaire bosses are trying to send workers back to work and saying it is OK if a percentage of them die---I can provide a number of quotes from Robert Reich's newsletter today of this--it's really important to ALWAYS put priority on worker complains about their higher ups. #Metoo is not just for het cis white women in relation to the sexual abuses of het men--it's for all people in the subordinate position in a hierarchical culture and we should always be putting priority on the subordinate voices; AAM has a chance to make LW consider their privileged power and what effect it has on their subordinates, but instead gets wrapped up on corporate protocol that uses language that obscures these power dynamics, and is made for the purpose of doing so. Here AAM's response is awful and wrong.