Hi everyone,
I am an office manager at a relatively simple office. No coding or mental gymnastics…just admin tasks that are the same week to week with the occasional oddball task thrown in.
I re-entered the workforce 9 months ago after a soft retirement. I really hate work. Not kidding. I took this job because it's 3 days a week with good vacation options, and it's a few miles from my house.
We do administrative tasks for a medium sized company — paying the bills, payroll, keeping up with some distributors. Good salaries and benefits for the area and required qualifications, generous time off, 3 day in the office(monday, tuesday, wednesday) schedule.
My department is mostly employees who have been here longer than I have. Women in their 40s make up 5/7 employees, and we have 2 guys in their 30s.
I am having consistent issues with basic task management from my employees. I genuinely think this job should take people 3-4 hours a day if that. I try to craft a very lax atmosphere. I'm never over people's shoulders or anything. I want to be a good manager.
But my employees keep dropping the ball on basic things like keeping up with their emails. I had a lady today tell me that she wants to know if IT can set something up to send her constant notifications to her cellphone if she has received an email. My response was literally just “Lets just make a point to check our emails a few times a day, like after lunch and before leaving. Nothing we get is so urgent we need notifications but we do need to check daily.”
I have a different employee who missed 6 email notifications that a service we use was not paid. Over 2 weeks. She was just deleting them despite it being a bill she pays every quarter. Says she thought it was spam. Her entire job is to check emails, write external checks, and do some relatively minimal help with payroll.
One of my 30s male employees is ostensibly depressed or something — he sits around doing functionally nothing for 7 hours a day then tornadoes through his tasks in the last hour of the day, sometimes staying late because he just sat there all day. He has dropped the ball on some pretty major systems…he just seems paralyzed by having to do any real work. Brilliant guy, a blast to talk to, but he seems like he needs a different job. Or maybe he would be this dysfunctional at any job and he only survives in the workforce because he can sit and do nothing working here. At this point I have basically acknowledged that I am lying to my higher-ups about his value because I feel sorry for him, but at the same time he is somehow more competent than my other 6 employees because in his hour of work per day he easily gets the most done. I wish I could just let him come in for like 2 hours a day and tell him “Ok Jeff, lets get all this shit done then you can go home”. But I'm already stretching patience with my higher-ups by insisting we keep our 3 days in 2 days out WFH.
I am held accountable for this stuff — but I don't want to micro manage and make people uncomfortable at work. I spent my original 11 year career miserable every day because I felt like a hamster in a cage waiting to get yelled at. I don't want people to feel that way because of me.
Again, these people work 3 days a week in-office and are technically working from home 2 other days but I have made it clear that unless something extraneous comes up I basically just expect them to check emails on Thursday and Friday and otherwise enjoy their lives. That is what I'm doing and I'm no better than they are. We can do our jobs in the window of 3 days a week. Our primary task is just to make sure all the company bills get paid and payroll gets done. I feel so frustrated that my 7 employees can't just get on board with our schedule, which is basically “work for 10-15 hours a week and grin at the higher-ups as they pass by not knowing how easy we have it”.
Dear friends of r/antiwork — how would YOU want your boss to handle frustrations with dropping the ball on basic tasks like reading your emails? I want to be a good boss. I do not want to be the kind of micromanaging jerk who made me drop out of the workforce. But I also feel frustrated that I can't get my team on board with truly basic tasks.
I need help.