Hi,
I currently work as a staff position at a prestigious university. I don’t particularly like my manager, she doesn’t seem too competent at managing. I joined as a remote employee as I live 3 hours away from the office.
My manager has constantly challenged my remote position stating that an urgent meeting is required in office (late notice). My commute is approx 6 hours if I go into the office, I try taking the train as I cannot drive for those lengths and the commute gets longer due to delays. I’ve constantly told her that it’s not feasible for me and it’s causing financial hardships as you don’T get paid well at unis. She doesn’t even regard my concerns and keeps asking me to come to the office when two of my coworkers are fully remote. I’m the only female in the group and my male peers tend to get more praises and promotions.
I feel like I’m being micromanaged and I’m having a lot of financial and mental health struggles due to it.
Reasons I feel micromanaged:
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On joining, my manager demanded that she HAS to be cc’d on all emails as she needs to ensure that I’m doing my job correctly, I didn’t have an issue initially but she made a point to reply to each of my email telling me I’m doing my job incorrectly and what needs to be done instead. She’s constantly criticizing my work and is sometimes extremely incorrect about her own work.
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She keeps a list of my tasks on her personal folder and needs an update every single day. She constantly asks me to email faculty members for updates which annoys them.
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every task has to be done according to her, for example someone asked me to update an excel sheet and I updated it with the required information. She had me re do the task because the person asked me to update Column O but I added and updated column Q due to formatting issues. The information was all there but I had to resend it because it wasn’t the column she wanted updated. By the time I sent the updated sheet, the person who requested felt bad and said it wasn’t necessary as they were just referring to the information required in the particular column.
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she never understands and always makes my tasks overly complicated. I’m afraid to reach out to her for questions because she makes me collect irrelevant information and honestly doesn’t understand the question I’m asking.
-Within two months in, I was able to understand this role and pointed out mistakes on her end which she said was not a mistake but ended up changing the information.
This role was advertised as a financial analyst role, my previous role was a lot more technical and I was working on lot more interesting projects. This role is mostly admin and my manager doesn’T understand excel and if I try to use formulas to calculate stupid tasks, she doesn’t understand and thinks I overcomplicate things. Two people have changed departments after I joined so we’re understaffed. The previous two people in my role left within 7 months.
I don’T know what to do, i’m mentally exhausted and her constant criticism make me question my abilities. I’m thinking of refusing to comply with her meeting requests because she calls me in for 30-60 min meetings while my commute is 6 hours and hers is 15 mins.
I feel like I’m taking a step back in my career with this role as it’s literally admin work for very specific uni systems and the skills are not really transferable to private sector.
I’m part of the teamsters union if that can help.