I work on a small team that has daily meetings at 10 am, usually lasting 30-60 minutes. I personally don’t think daily meetings are even necessary, but they are my boss’s way of keeping up with our work as he rarely meets with any of us individually and he likes for us to know what everyone else is working on.
My boss’s work is his life, so he frequently will work in the evenings and on weekends. He recently said about Thanksgiving, “It’s another day for me to get some work done.” (Thankfully, he does not outright pressure others to follow his example, although as you’ve noted before it sets a bad example coming from the boss.)
As you can imagine, he has built up a lot of unused vacation leave, and despite our organization’s generous carry-over policy, he was going to start losing hours. His solution was a two-month trip to Asia. The problem is, even though he is going to be using leave, he is planning to keep working the entire time and attending our meetings (we already work remotely). With the time difference, our regular meeting time would be the middle of the night for him, so he proposed the times that have the best overlap between timezones, early morning here (7 am) or evening (5-9 pm).
I typically work an 8:30-5 day and have a fairly rigid schedule outside of that with daycare drop-offs, a toddler to take care of, and regular evening activities. I responded with the following: “I can make the occasional meeting outside of regular working hours, but with my schedule and childcare responsibilities I can’t regularly do so.”
His suggestion was that he attends two meetings a week, one early morning and one evening, and we meet at the regular time the other days and write up a summary to send him.
While I could probably make this work most of the time, it will be a real burden. It would be one thing if my boss was on business travel, or if it was just a week or two, but he’s on two-month vacation leave. I feel like I shouldn’t have to accommodate his travel on principle.
How much should I push back on this? I can’t force him to not work on his leave, but his choice to keep participating in our meetings is putting me in an awkward position. I can probably opt out when it is especially inconvenient, but I will feel bad about it. When I do make it to the meetings, I will feel angry that I have to be there guilty about the extra burden it puts on my husband. Is there any way to say he can’t do this while on leave?
Yeah, that’s ridiculous. If he wants to work through his vacation, that’s his choice, but expecting the rest of you to attend evening and early-morning meetings to accommodate that, especially multiple times a week (!), is absurd. I could see maybe asking for one of those during the two months he’s gone if your work is high-stakes and no one is equipped to fill in for him. But twice a week is bananapants; this is someone who isn’t planning to disconnect from work at all and thinks the rest of you should go unreasonably far out of your way to make that possible.
How does the rest of your team feel about this? I’m guessing other people are annoyed about it too, and you might get some traction by saying as a group, “The meeting times you’re asking for would put a significant burden on us, and while we would try to accommodate that for an emergency, it doesn’t make sense to us to do that just because you’re on vacation. We’d like to continue meeting at our regular times, and we can send you meeting notes if you want.” Ideally someone who has good rapport with him would add, “This seems really contrary to why the company wants people taking vacation time — so they can relax and disconnect from work — and it also makes the rest of us feel uneasy about whether we can really disconnect when we take time off.”
Otherwise, though, do any of you have the ear of someone above him? Or a competent HR department that would be alarmed to hear about this? If you work in a reasonably functional company, there’s a decent chance you could find someone to intervene on this.
If that doesn’t work out, consider simply saying no — no, this isn’t possible for your schedule more than once or twice while he’s gone and you can’t attend more than that — and encouraging your coworkers to do the same.
#boss #earlymorning #evening #meetings #attend #vacation #Manager
naukrividesh.com