Today I had a conversation with my boss in which I asked for part time. My employer is leaning towards no. What’s confusing to me is I know I’m a valuable employee and they don’t want to lose me, but the reason I’m cutting back is my freelance work is ramping up. Freelance work is my end goal so I’m not sure that they realize if they say no it means that I put in my two weeks sometime in the near future.
But in the larger context, I truly don’t get why employers think they can say no to changes in availability requests in general. Like I’m telling you that that’s the time I have available to you… and you just say no? How does that make sense? I understand the privilege of being able to quit etc. and not everyone is in that position, but if someone is telling you they have a need and you ignore it, it’s most likely going to create worse business outcomes than if they would just say yes and hire someone to fill in the gaps. Plus there are many people hurting for jobs right now and I’m sure someone would be absolutely happy to (especially the job I do which is pretty competitive). It just overall doesn’t make sense to me from just about any perspective except the manager not wanting to put forth the effort to find/hire someone new.