It’s four answers to four questions. Here we go…

1. Employee never paid me for baby clothes but now wants a reference

I left a job about 2.5 years ago on good terms. One of the people who worked for me (who was a great employee) reached out when I left and asked if I’d be hiring soon, which I wasn’t. I wanted to help her, and I did find a different job opening at another company and sent it to her. She applied and ultimately got the job.

Shortly after, she asked about baby items I was getting rid of. She asked if she could buy them from me (I had already given away a fair amount of maternity clothes and baby things for free) and I said I had several massive bins of clothes/shoes and that she could pick up the lot of clothing, pay me $1 per item, and return the bins and unwanted items. She picked them up and I never heard from her again. She never paid for anything, and I never received leftover clothing or my bins back. I realize the opportunity to ask was way back then, but truthfully I felt too petty to ask for an unknown amount of money or the storage bins (which I had to replace) but she also did not remotely hold up her end of the arrangement.

This week she contacted me asking if I’d be a reference. I said yes, then received a text from a third party with a link to a questionnaire. The instructions said this will take 30-40 mins to complete. Less than 24 hours later, she was reaching out asking when I’d have time to fill this out.

I am going to make good on my word and complete the questionnaire. This situation just rubs me the wrong way all around because it feels very one-sided. Would you say anything about this? Or is this just the risk you run when you try to do something nice within a workplace relationship?

There’s a pretty good chance that her absconding with your baby clothes and bins was just baby brain and she didn’t even realize she did it … but you are allowed to feel peeved by it!

That said, yeah, ideally you would have addressed it at the time by texting her when you hadn’t heard back within a couple of weeks to say, “Hey, just checking in — did you decide what you wanted and when is a good time to return the bins and anything you’re not taking?” I get why you didn’t, but if you’re going to be annoyed it’s nearly always better to just reach out and check.

I do think you’re right to complete the questionnaire because you said you would — and to continue being a reference for her if she was a great employee when you managed her. And because so much time has passed, I don’t think there’s a lot of point in raising the baby clothes now. If you have otherwise known her to be a responsible, conscientious person aside from this, you’re better off figuring that it slipped her mind at the time and she would have made it right if you’d contacted her. (And really, that is the grace we’d all want in her shoes if it was a genuine oversight.)

2. Should we be doing quarterly performance reviews?

My company recently moved from semi-annual to quarterly performance reviews, and I’m trying to figure out if my feelings about them are well-calibrated.

For context, I’ve spent most of my career at small companies without formal review processes. My current larger company is good at giving feedback so there’s nothing surprising in a review, and we have weekly 1:1s with managers to discuss goals and adjustments.

Many of my coworkers find self-reviews and peer feedback stressful enough that we have multiple long-running Slack channels dedicated to discussing them. I’m less stressed about the reviews themselves and more bothered that the whole process feels like a time sink box-checking exercise.

Our system has three ratings that essentially amount to: improvement needed by next quarter, doing fine, and doing excellent. I’m one of roughly 80–90% of the company who will land in the middle category. If someone needs to improve, they already know before the review. If someone is working toward a promotion, they have a general sense of what’s expected and can actually achieve one with a “doing fine” rating. The top rating is uncommon and not structurally achievable by everyone each quarter. Ratings do affect raises, so there’s real motivation behind them.

Given all that, is there a version of quarterly reviews that serves a genuine purpose? Or is what I’m describing closer to what you’d call work theater, a performance of performance management not the same outcome? And do you have general thoughts on what separates a well-designed review process from a performative one?

No, quarterly reviews in most cases are way too often! First, doing formal reviews well takes an enormous amount of time and energy (and if you’re not doing them well, there’s really no point to doing them that often). Second, that frequency just isn’t necessary if your managers are managing effectively; they should already be having ongoing conversations with people about how they’re doing, what’s going well, and anything that needs to change. If they’re not doing that, the solution is to better train those managers, not to implement quarterly bureaucratic time sucks.

I could see if it’s literally just a quick check-in with one of those three ratings and any accompanying discussion that needs to happen for a “needs” improvement” — that could be a way to ensure managers are staying on top of communicating about issues. But if it’s accompanied by the more detailed narrative that evaluations usually include, it’s just too much.

As for what makes a review process well-designed, I have some thoughts here:

how to make performance evaluations useful to your team
conducting strong performance evaluations
how managers mess up performance evaluations

3. Was I wrong to give input to my manager about our frustrating temp?

I am an individual contributor in a creative role at a small company. The work is challenging, but fulfilling.

Recently our team experienced an unexpected setback and needed temporary support so we brought on a temp. This has been challenging. On a practical level, their skills don’t translate well here; as a result, other team members often have to step in to fill gaps or rework deliverables. We are under a deadline and it doesn’t seem like I have a choice but to try to make this work, but it has added strain to an already high-pressure environment.

There are also interpersonal challenges. Their overall tone can come across as negative or tense, which affects team dynamics. In meetings, they sometimes talk over me and can become visibly frazzled under stress. They seem to think that managers provide me with more support and training than them, but in reality, I’ve just been doing this for years and can work independently.

The complicating factor is that we do, in fact, need to hire another full-time person. The temp has expressed strong interest in staying on permanently. From a distance, this might seem like an easy solution: they already know the company, and hiring them would be efficient. However, I have serious reservations about whether they are the right long-term fit for this specific team. My concern is not that they lack talent — they clearly have strengths — but that their strengths don’t align with the demands of this role, and that the interpersonal friction may continue over time.

I recently shared this feedback with my manager. I tried to focus on the work itself and the team’s needs, but I worry that my personal frustrations may be influencing my perspective more than I realize. Was it appropriate for me to voice concerns about hiring this person full-time? Did I just come across as not a team player? Am I overstepping by weighing in so strongly on what could be seen as a management decision? More broadly, how do I distinguish between legitimate concerns about team fit and performance versus personal irritation with a someone?

Yes, when your team is considering hiring a temp full-time and you’ve been working closely with that temp and have input that could be relevant, you absolutely should offer it. Your input presumably wasn’t “I don’t like Jane”; it was about real work issues, like the skills gap that causes other coworkers to have to step in to redo her work. In your manager’s shoes, I’d want to hear about the interpersonal issues too (I want a team that works well together and where people are collegial; someone who regularly talks over others, gets visibly frazzled under stress, or is inappropriately competitive with a peer can be coached, but I’d want to be aware that those are issues as I’m making a hiring decision and not find out about them later if someone could have filled me in earlier.)

To your question about how to distinguish between legitimate concerns and personal irritation, think of it terms of work impact. Skills or lack thereof: highly relevant. Work habits or approaches that make more work for others: highly relevant. Interpersonal habits that are generally recognized as rude (not listening when someone is talking, interrupting, letting stress affect the environment for everyone else): also relevant. Personal habits that are more like pet peeves (gum chewing, uptalk, taking about their social life an annoying amount): usually not relevant (although even there, sometimes it could be relevant — for example, someone who talks non-stop to the point that it’s disruptive to other people’s ability to focus).

4. Changing my name in my email after I get married

I’m probably overthinking this. I recently got married and I’m changing my last name. My company is going to assign me a new email address, and I’ll only have access to the old one for two weeks (too short, in my opinion, but I don’t make the rules). Would it be weird for me to put my maiden name in parentheses in the signature block of my new email for a while, like this:

Miranda (Stewpot) Warbleworth

We deal a lot with people who only know us through the computer, and I think it would be nice for them to see that it’s the same person. If this is okay, how long should I do it for?

Note, I’m positive my company will have no opinion on this. I just want to make sure I’m not overthinking or being too emotional. It never occurred to me that I’d be a little sad to change my name, but it’s bittersweet.

Yes, you should absolutely do that, and it’s very normal when you change your name. Not weird at all! (What is weird is that your company won’t set the old email to forward to your new one, but so be it.)

As for how long … I’d say at least six months. The exception to that would be if you’re generally only emailed by people on a short-term basis and then you’re never in contact again (for example, if you sell a product but then pass the client on to your tech support team for everything after that). If that’s the case, you could keep it there for whatever the typical lifecycle of the relationship is plus a couple of months.

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…

1. My coworker wrote a sonnet about my absences

I am a teacher. We have professional development days every so often. I take sick time for about half of them. Recently on a PD day I was here for, one of the other teachers read (in front of my colleagues) a sonnet he wrote about me being absent frequently. It was written in a joking, or depending on how you look at it, mocking tone. I was kind of stunned in the moment while it was happening and laughed it off.

I don’t know this teacher very well, and he has only been in our district for a couple years. What he doesn’t know is that the reason I’m often absent on those days is that after my son died, I had a hard time coming back to work. I couldn’t make it through more than a week or so without being absent for one or two days. As part of a strategy to address that, my counselor and I came up with the idea to be absent on PD days and less on regular days — that way the absences were less impactful on me and the students, and being out only on PD days gave me a goal to reach. I got better slowly, but it’s still a process and I still struggle. PD days are still kind of a target to make it to for me — a kind of relief valve. I’m trying to be out less of them, but it’s slow progress.

The more I’ve thought about it, the more I feel like I have to respond to him, and I drafted an email (he works in another school and I have no desire to talk in person to him about this) professionally addressing the issue. In the email I told him why I am absent, and made it clear I’d not address this further. What’s your opinion on sending it? I just don’t feel like I can let it go, but I also have no desire to bring admin into the situation. Also, I feel like I should cc to the other teachers who were present when he read the poem.

I’m so sorry — both for your loss and for this ass writing a poem to mock your coping strategy. Even if you missed a lot of PD days for some less sympathetic reason, he would have been out of line, and it doesn’t sound like you have the sort of relationship with him where he could have reasonably expected that it would taken as good-humored ribbing.

I haven’t seen the email you’ve written, but as long as it’s short and matter-of-fact, just giving him the information he lacked, I think you can send it. If he has any sense at all, he’ll feel mortified, and he should. I’m less convinced that you should cc the other teachers … but I do wonder if there’s someone you’d be comfortable confiding in who would quietly fill in others who were there so that you don’t have to.

2. My boss asked me if I was job hunting because of her

I’m in an uncomfortable spot right now. My boss asked me point-blank during my yearly performance review if I was job hunting because of her. I deflected with a half truth — that I’m job hunting because I need to make more money, and the only way to do that is to move up into a management position, which isn’t a possibility at my current job.

The thing is, I’m also job hunting because of her. I could write a novel about her poor management, but that’s not the point of this email.

How can I address how inappropriate that was with both my boss and with my grandboss (her supervisor)? It was a supremely uncomfortable moment, but more so because it happened during a meeting regarding my performance review. I have no doubt that whatever facial reaction I gave negatively impacted the review, and I’ve already had upper management (my great-great-grandboss) ask me about my review since it happened.

It’s not outrageously inappropriate for a manager to ask an employee if they’re job hunting, particularly in a review conversation where how things are going generally is being discussed. It can be a naive question because there’s no reason to assume they’ll get an honest answer, and it obviously can make the employee uncomfortable if that’s not information they care to share — but it’s not so inherently out-of-line that you should raise it afterwards.

I can’t tell if your manager already knew you were job-searching and only asked if it was because of her, or if she was asking whether you were job-searching, period. The former would make even more sense (“are there things we’re doing that are driving you to want to leave?” is a reasonable thing to ask about) but neither would change what I said in my first paragraph.

For what it’s worth, while she’s welcome to ask the question, you’re never obligated to disclose anything about a job search that you don’t want to disclose. In most cases, it makes sense that say that you’re not actively looking, regardless of whether or not you are. (There are some exceptions to this, but they’re very much exceptions.)

Related:
should I tell my boss I’m job-searching?

3. Why would a company announce layoffs in advance?

This article makes Meta sound awful but also says that in April, Meta announced that it would lay off about 8,000 people in May. Their head of human resources is quoted as saying, “I know this leaves everyone with nearly a month of ambiguity which is incredibly unsettling.”

Why would they publicly announce layoffs in this way? What’s the benefit to the company’s bottom line that makes the incredibly awful morale this brings worth it? I’d understand if they were offering employees to volunteer to be laid off, but it doesn’t sound like they are. Are they afraid the info would leak? Do they get some benefit from telling shareholders? But is a month of time really worth that?

When a company announces layoffs in advance and tells specific people that they’re being laid off, it can be to comply with the WARN Act, which requires employers with 100 or more employees to give 60 days’ notice of mass layoffs (or to provide an equivalent amount of severance in lieu of notice). But in cases like this, where they’re not notifying specific employees and instead it’s just a general announcement that layoffs are coming but no one knows who’s affected, sometimes it’s because they know word is likely to leak anyway and people will lose trust (or lose more trust) in leadership for denying that it’s happening. Other times they’re sending signals to investors about their management of the company, particularly if it’s obvious they need to make cuts. And sometimes, too, they’re hoping for attrition — that if some people leave on their own, that’s fewer layoffs for them to do. (That’s generally a terrible idea since the people who can usually leave the fastest are likely to be your strongest employees.)

This question is timely because the first round of layoffs that Meta announced back in April happened yesterday. For some reason they chose to do it by informing employees that the people being laid off would receive an email letting them know at 4 am local time in their region (why?!).

4. How can I get back in touch with former coworkers who I really liked?

At my last job, I got along very well with most of my coworkers, but never became the type of friends to hang outside of work. There was also a pretty significant age gap, with me being about 20 years younger than the next youngest coworker.

I left this job to go back to school, which has been overall a good choice, but it can get a bit lonely. I miss spending time with my coworkers from my last job — it wasn’t a close relationship, but they were all really lovely and interesting people, and I enjoyed our lunchtime conversations. I’d like to see them again, but I’m really not sure if it would be appropriate to reach out and say this.

And, if it would be appropriate to reach out, what would be the best way to do this? Should I invite them all for a happy hour? Ask individuals to get coffee? Just send a general message expressing that I value their friendship?

I know I’m probably overthinking this, but it’s hard to know what is normal this early in my career. Any advice or stories from you or the commenters would be appreciated.

Yes, tell them you’d love to catch up and suggest a happy hour (or, if you’re geographically close enough during the day, a lunch during the work day like you used to do). Or if there are a couple of people who you especially clicked with, invite them to coffee! Any of those are fine and normal. (Personally I would be delighted if a much younger former coworker suggested that — they may think you’re not interested in keeping in touch because the age gap puts you in different stages of life and they might be honored to know you’re actively interested in staying in touch.)

5. Our department chair doesn’t know about major work I’m doing

I’m an assistant professor at a community college, where I’ve been on the faculty for a couple of years. I have a PhD, I publish actively, and I’m involved in curriculum development and department leadership. By most measures, I’m a engaged and productive faculty member. Previous to this position, I worked at a much more prestigious university but made this move so that I could prioritize my family (and I do truly love teaching at a community college).

Recently our department completed a hiring search, and during a conversation about the new hire, the newly appointed chair of the department made a comment that surprised me. She said she was excited because the new person would bring active scholarship and publishing to the department, and that no one else in the department does that kind of work. This isn’t true. I publish. I present at national conferences. I’ve done this consistently since joining the faculty. My chair either doesn’t know this or didn’t think of it in the moment, but the effect was that my contributions were erased in a fairly public way, and despite my best efforts, it has really affected how I feel about the chair, the department, and the college in general.

I want to address this with my chair, but I’m not sure how. My goals are twofold: I’d like her to actually know what I’m doing professionally, and I’d like to understand whether there’s something I should be doing differently to make my work more visible at the department or institutional level. I don’t want this to come across as a complaint or as me being precious about recognition. I genuinely want to have a productive professional conversation, and I also want to feel like my work is legible to the department and college.

You can be pretty straightforward about it: “When you announced Valentina Smith’s hiring, I was surprised that you said that no one else in the department is doing active scholarship and publishing! I wanted to make sure you know that I am doing ____ (fill in with specifics).”

Depending on her response, you might then say, “It made me wonder if there’s more I should be doing to ensure that work is visible in the department and more broadly. Do you have thoughts on that?”