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This. You don't own her. 99% of people have to balance life and work, and the other 1% need serious mental help. Your company's inability or unwillingness to spend what's required to maintain sane working hours is not her problem. You would be extremely hard pressed to find anyone willing to work 70+ hour workweeks on a regular basis for years and being told they don't belong to their families.
Yeah.
Bottom line they need to hire enough people to do the work or pay OP a high enough bonus/salary/equity stake/promotional opportunity to put up with the nonsense; if not OP should find a new job and give 2 weeks notice. The problem isn't a subordinate only willing to put in 40-50*, it's the company.
If you have a good relationship with your supervisor, you can go speak to them about this, but don't complain about this person, instead say that you're burning out with the hours required to get everything done, you and your team are already all at or over capacity, and either need more support or for them to make a call on what things can be allowed to wait or simply not get done.
*Unless of course there was an expectation of 60-70 hour weeks when the offer was extended and they are now backtracking, but I get the sense it's not that sort of industry.
Anyone who think 190 hours every two weeks is a good thing is just plain nuts. I can understand a temporary emergency, but even a start up is not an emergency.
I've had a couple bosses like that over the years. They lived to work. 10-12 hours every day, including weekends. Divorced or on the road to be. While in the office they constantly complained about the hours and not seeing family, yet would not leave. Sometimes had to be ordered to leave by their boss.
Sad part was, it was all self inflicted. They just couldn't get product out the door. In a couple cases I took over their position after they left, and within a short time, was getting more product out the door to the customer and everyone was going home at normal time, including me.
Anyone who think 190 hours every two weeks is a good thing is just plain nuts. I can understand a temporary emergency, but even a start up is not an emergency.
I've had a couple bosses like that over the years. They lived to work. 10-12 hours every day, including weekends. Divorced or on the road to be. While in the office they constantly complained about the hours and not seeing family, yet would not leave. Sometimes had to be ordered to leave by their boss.
Sad part was, it was all self inflicted. They just couldn't get product out the door. In a couple cases I took over their position after they left, and within a short time, was getting more product out the door to the customer and everyone was going home at normal time, including me.
Yes, as I said for most it's a mental issue, not the real job requirement.
Working hard and getting the job done while maintaining a healthy lifestyle and raising a family is the right thing to do.
Living to work and expecting others to do the same is a mental illness and outright exploitation.
This doesn't make much sense to me. If you're paid by the hour what difference does it make, work hard for your hours and don't worry about your colleague.
Often we don't know what else other people are doing, this is a silly approach though because you're only one new hire away from being the "slow guy" now.
It doesn't make sense to you because you don't know what I do for a living.
Co-worker and I work in a STAT environment. We have to work together---technically, there is no HIS and MINE---it's OUR work. And considering we are working from the same core stuff, we ALL know what each person is doing because we're all sharing work. Our employer measures TAT, which is a HUGE focus at my place of employment.
So if there is work to do on my shift, it needs to get done ASAP. And if I know thirty things come down and somehow I am doing twenty-five of them, that means this person who is the lead is getting paid more than I am, per hour, to do FAR less work. That isn't right because if the person is extremely slow or lazy, you're getting stuck doing more work.
Sorry, can you define "STAT" and "TAT?" Do you mean stat as in urgent or something else? Reason I ask is we use those terms (STAT and TAT, all caps) where I work, but from your context I think it's a completely different meaning.
I agree, but it is a start-up. We are hiring. It won't last forever, but in this difficult time, I should have a partner willing to shoulder some responsibility. In addition, I hire staff and she allows them to change the hours they were hired to work. In effect, I have ton of day shift staff and no one for evenings or nights. This occurs because she allows them to change their shifts. The "I have my daughter visiting" excuse gets stale--especially when you knew this would be a problem upon hire.
She is your subordinate, she can never be your partner.
You are burning yourself out for the DREAM that this start-up will make it big and take you along for the ride. Don't be foolish. When the company finds itself on better footing, they will dump you for someone with "more experience in a larger company" that can "take the business to the next level".
So, what is the answer when it is a start up situation (see OP), a multi million dollar project (and the survivability of the firm) is on the line, and it requires 'round the clock commitment until the deliverable is finished? Mom pops up and says "I have to go home to be with my child". What do the other professionals do? How should they react? Without Mom's effort/contribution the firm is going to fail and everyone will lose their investment. Is it okay for Mom to jeopardize the livelihood of the other owners because she has a change of heart about committing to the firm versus committing to being a good parent?
It's a startup, not a family business. The OP and her subordinate aren't owners, and won't be reaping the benefits of the short-staffed business model.
She was obviously a poor hiring decision. No doubt, they'll fix it.
Regardless of what people believe is fair and right, the truth is, this is a common expectation for a healthcare start up (in my experience). If she's a supervisor then she came to the job with unrealistic expectations. Were those expectations clear to her when she took the job, I wonder?
I just went through a little over a year of working those kind of hours as a manager. I'm starting to work less now that we've been in business a while and things are settling down. My salaried non-supervisory staff call themselves workaholics when they work 50 hours. I don't say this to them, but laugh inside my head. It was communicated to them when they took the job that there would be overtime, and lots of it.
I don't think 45 or 50 hours a week is a reasonable expectation within the first few years of a healthcare start up. Fair or unfair, that's what the job entails and that fact is well known.
But to answer the OP's question about kids, it does seem to be one of those politically correct reasons people get out of not pulling their weight. Personally I have a disability and it seems to be less accepted as a reason to not work so many hours. Strange.
Quote:
Startups may require extra hours, but at the same time it is the company's decision on whether to bring more people on. If they can't balance workloads correctly for the employees, they will never make it.
Absolutely--and it's the manager's responsibility to continue to communicate the lack of staffing to her superiors until it gets resolved.
But when you're in that situation, you have a choice to make. The job requires x number of hours and you're salaried. You're a manager and it's your responsibility to ensure the job gets done. You can quit, blow off the work, or do it. You're not going to have a job if you blow it off--either the company will fail or they will fire you. So you make your choice.
Last edited by imagineAA; 06-28-2015 at 09:21 AM..
You also must have a mgmt. team willing to weed out hiring errors.
If they need more hours initially, hiring anyone not willing to work more in that stage is stupid.
Again, these are people who will derive no benefit whatsoever by burning themselves out, in pay or equity. They are not owners, nor will they ever be. The fact that it is a 'start up' is just an excuse to milk more work out of fewer employees. There is no 'pot of gold' at the end of the rainbow for them.
Excuse me. This is a START UP! Sure it's absurd but it's a temporary hardship situation. Every job has temporary situations where hardships occur and one has to suck it up. I've been in situations at 3 different jobs where there was mandated overtime due to temporary situations, whether it was client damage control or getting behind in work or weather related backlog...They didn't give any notice and they didn't accept any excuses. Oh, you have kids? Not an excuse. Everyone had to do the mandated OT. Companies cannot discriminate against one group or another today.
Also, there shouldn't be any expectation of "quality of life" in jobs where people make over $50K, esp not start ups. There have been many threads on here about that topic. "Quality of life" is when you retire. Practically all jobs over $50K salary require long hours. No one should expect to put in 8 point zero hours each day and then sashay out the door to go spend time with the family. If you want quality of life, go get a minimum wage job. If you are making over $50K then companies expect you to be available according to "business needs".
If this woman needs to leave at a certain time in the evening to go get her child and go home and feed the kid or whatever, then she needs to pick up some alternative hours sometime else throughout the week to make up for it. She can come in earlier in the morning, pick up extra hours on the weekend, or maybe work from home at night after getting the kid to bed. Don't tell me that there isn't any solution to this.
As far as the man who said documentation is the wrong thing to do, he's dead wrong. Every company I've worked at has captured objective data about employee work performance. They look at workload, they look at work hours, they look at number of projects or accounts the person has or how many quality defects were made, or whatever can be captured in numbers. It's called "metrics". Our society is very litigious today and companies cannot simply evaluate people on a gut basis. They have to have objective data to measure performance, otherwise people will complain if their evaluation is poor and say they are being discriminated against. How is this woman getting evaluated? What are the metrics? If the OP keeps documentation then it will provide an objective measure of what she's really doing.
As far as the OP's question about childless people being expected to do more, I think yes, I believe that was an expectation maybe 10 years ago but I think in today's climate, the laws have gotten to the point that companies have to be extremely careful about unfairness. People with kids are given flexibility where I work but the same flexibiility and considerations are offered to childless people too. Childless people DO have responsibilities--many childless people have responsibility for aging parents. My company doesn't discriminate against childless people. Also, not everyone with children has issues with child care because they have parents and local extended relatives and neighbors who can babysit or their kids are older and don't need constant surveillance.
So don't assume that everyone with kids should be exempt from hard labor whereas childless people shouldn't be. It's a case by case basis.
I feel such sadness for you that you feel this way. There is no 'magic wage number' that you become a corporate slave upon accepting. That is simply ridiculous.
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