This is her solutions after I raised the issue of having too much workload and unknown or inconsistent expectations/deadlines on random mini projects that can come up from week to week. She has a tendency to redirect and shift the blame to “individual productivity” and how to improve our work efficiency. When in reality, we have issues that result from her ineffective management strategies and her unwillingness to set up clear protocols on what her expectations are (because let’s be real, that will not allow her to change her mind all the time about what’s the right way to do things).
She never really questions our quality of work, but rather would want to micromanage every details. If something is done perfectly and efficiently but not her way, she’s going to make you feel miserable and incompetent, and you are wrong for not doing the way she wanted it even if your solution objectively is better.
For context, she asked us to do this every 15min tracking after initially asking us to track our time/task for a week to get a sense of our workload. Of course she never said any time limit when she initially brought it up. It’s like she can’t know what she wants from her employees, unless you have tried your way of doing things first so she can tell you wrong/it’s not what I wanted, then by process of elimination, she can tell you oh that’s what I wanted after you try all the “wrong way”.
Additional context is boss is a principle investigator in a research lab, basically there’s no levels of management. You can think of her role as a private small business owner and the rest of us all workers who get paid by her. We are all Research Associates who only took this job because we want more research experiences to apply to grad schools. We get paid $21 an hour in a high COL area, not allowed overtime and has to be flexible to be on call for later afternoon/early morning or weekend research visit, but at the same time we are asked to be in lab strictly 9-5 and email her if we are shifting that even slightly.