Performance Tracking and Feedback

It’s the Friday open thread! The comment section on this post is open for discussion with other readers on any work-related questions that you want to talk about (that includes school). If you want an answer from me, emailing me is still your best bet*, but this is a chance to take your questions to other readers. * If you submitted a question to me recently, please do not repost it here, as it may be in my queue to answer. The post open thread – January 9, 2026 appeared first on Ask a Manager. View the full article

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go… 1. Coworker cheated in our virtual Jeopardy tournament A couple years ago, just for fun, a coworker started a virtual Jeopardy tournament which anyone in the company could participate in. It was the usual setup: three contestants (with cameras on), the coworker hosting, and an audience tuned in once a week. One contestant, “Kurt,” was the reigning champion. The man could not be beat. Until, after a few weeks, there was some speculation that Kurt was not abiding by the honor system and had Google up on his screen. The theory was finally confirmed when there was a question about an obscure national bird. After a pause with…

A reader writes: My department just called all us middle managers into a session to discuss our sickness “issue.” Some context: We live in a country where permanent employees of any level at any company all get unlimited sick days at full pay for a year (with a handful of caveats). Funnily enough, the sickness rate here isn’t particularly high: the average local worker takes three days off for sickness per year. Our company has been through a painful year-long layoff process, which coincided with record-breaking profits, the launch of completely new product lines, and somewhat absurd expectations. Oh, and team celebration budgets were cut in the meantime. Our department…

Here are four updates from past letter-writers. 1. An abusive volunteer is holding our website hostage I am no longer a mere VP — I have been elected president! A short summary of my previous letters: I’m on the board of a small organization and we’re all volunteers. There were issues with our webmaster and our website, but the previous president wasn’t wanting to muck around with the site. I understand his reasons but I disagreed with him about it. At our 2024 convention, the (now former) president announced that he was not running for reelection and that I was running for president. The webmaster pulled me aside after this and told me that he was planning to retire, …

A reader writes: A few weeks ago, our HR manager, Cara, brought in a photo of her dog’s adorable litter of puppies and everybody appropriately ooh’d and ahh’d all over them. Now that the puppies are old enough to be adopted, she’s started to put the bite on everybody in the office, and after a few other employees were winnowed away for various reasons (apartment building doesn’t allow pets, just had a new baby, etc.), she seems to have focused her attention on me. Backstory time, I grew up in a house with a mother who … it’s probably most accurate to say she compulsively hoarded pets … and growing up having to take care of up to 10 dogs at one time has thrown cold water…

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go… 1. Bringing alcohol to the home of a recovering alcoholic My coworker is a recovering alcoholic; he doesn’t discuss it but never drinks, occasionally refers to “when I was drinking,” and once was frightened when he learned there may have been alcohol in a dessert he’d eaten (there wasn’t). His wife has generously invited to office over for dinner. She told us that “we keep a dry house” but we’re welcome to bring alcohol if we want it with our meal. This has created a debate within the office. Two want to bring alcohol, arguing that she told us (without us asking, I should add) that we could. The rest of us feel it would …

A reader writes: This is hard for me to write. I’m a woman in my late forties with two grown children. I remember how stressful it was a decade ago, when my kids were little, to keep them out of earshot during conference calls on the rare days I could work from home. In my current role, I have dotted-line management responsibility for “Steve,” who has two children under four. We’re a fully remote company, and all meetings are on video with cameras on. Steve often has one of his children on his lap during both internal and external calls. His spouse works from home part-time, but he still seems to be the primary caregiver for at least part of the workday. I’m conflicted…

A reader writes: I am a senior project manager in a nonprofit. Over the summer, I been working on a series of focus groups and was assigned Lola as an intern. Our office aims to provide meaningful training to our interns, as nearly 80% of them are hired after their internships, so I assigned Lola to write one of the focus group reports. She was present at the focus group itself and was given the audio recording and transcript, plus a report template with guiding questions in order to complete the assignment. I had a previous experience with an intern producing reports with AI, which required tons of rework. So when I first assigned this to Lola, I explained that AI is n…

A reader writes: I have seen you and other people say that you shouldn’t usually accept a counteroffer. I wish I had listened to you, but I didn’t. The backstory is I have worked at my company for almost a decade, and for the first several years I was extremely underpaid. I know this because I made a lateral move that resulted in a significant pay increase. With each transfer, I have been clear that growth (and money, of course) are very important to me. Recently I was recruited (I did not seek this new position, it came to me) for a position that would have increased my pay slightly. It would have changed my work status from fully remote to hybrid, but most importantl…

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go… 1. Internship offered me a special project but now I can’t get any answers about it I’m a college student who recently finished a remote internship at a prominent company in a fairly niche field (the company has maybe 10-15 full-time employees). My main task was fairly generic — think setting up a filing system or similar — but I also got a lot of experience in the actual field. Towards the latter end of it, I had a great talk with the CEO about what I wanted out of the internship, and what was really exciting was that he said that he thought a good next step for me would be designing an accessory for one of their product…

A reader writes: I am in a front-line commercial role at a tech start-up. I am responsible for bringing in new business, and this story pertains to my colleague Zayne, who manages a lot of the back-end, integrations side of things. Zayne is fantastic at what he does. The guy might actually be a genius, and I don’t say that lightly. He has a ton of ideas, seems to really love what he does, and is good at it. He’s also very open about his mental health, which I admire but it can admittedly take me back sometimes. I grew up in a family where we often don’t share things like that, and it’s something I’m trying to unpack as an adult, but even so I find myself at a loss for w…

A reader writes: My company recently hired a new employee who has been a problem. We were hesitant to hire her to begin with — she didn’t have glowing recommendations and she’s got a patchy work history, but she has experience in the one thing we can’t train on right now, so we hired her reluctantly. It turns out she’s an over-sharer on social media: Every single detail of her day is listed in a giant personal social media post at least three or four times a day, and she tags everyone she comes in contact with: businesses, products, people. It’s unusual. She has been very opinionated about how we do things and doesn’t really want to participate in feedback or training. …

A reader writes: My job is 99% remote with some on-site event expectations. On-site events are typically mandatory, which is fine with me. I recently asked for events to be either predictable (e.g., first Friday in August) or to have lots of notice, so we can schedule vacations or things like dental cleanings around those events. During the conversation, my manager said that even when we were fully on-site, she sometimes had to move appointments if her boss scheduled a meeting. She gave the example of a short-notice 9 am meeting the next day and thus needing to move her kids’ appointments. That gave me pause. I understand rescheduling things like haircuts or some type…

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go… 1. Employee doesn’t know I have access to her emails I have a direct report that had to take a medical leave (two months) and during that time I needed access to her emails so I could assist customers who had pending issues, and the emails contained the information I needed. She is back now, but I am seeing some performance issues I need to address. She is not aware that I still have access to her email as IT never removed my access. I don’t want to micromanage, and I only look at it when there is an issue and I need to see what she actually said to a customer. I’m now seeing some things that are a bit concerning. At what…

Inspired by yesterday’s letter about someone who vastly overshared personal mental health details with clients, let’s talk about oversharing at work! Over the years we’ve heard about oversharing in the forms of a colleague who showed an explicit slideshow of her baby’s birth, a boss who kept sharing drama between his current wife and his ex-wife, a coworker who felt the need to share that her husband didn’t like her Brazilian bikini wax, a brand new hire who kept asking everyone whether he should cheat on his wife, and much more. Let’s discuss workplace oversharing in the comment section. The post let’s discuss TMI: when coworkers overshare at work appeared first on As…

Remember the letter-writer who was struggling to get their email inbox under control? Here’s the update. I was the person who was overwhelmed by my inbox and was looking for help to manage high volume comms. Overall, the chaos of busy season was definitely easier to manage this year, even though the volume of email did increase up to around 300+ a day in the peak season, likely because I have been in my role longer so more people know me and like to ask me stuff. I really appreciated the commentariat suggestions and would love anyone to add any more systems and hacks – and to those who manage 1000+ emails a day, I take my hat off to you! What worked: * Having set times…

A reader writes: I need to partner with a team whose manager rejected me for a job, and I’m struggling to have a positive attitude. A year ago, I applied to an internal role for which I met 90% of the criteria on the nose. It was a team doing the same work as I did but in another part of the company, and the gap in qualifications was akin to having experience grooming llamas but not alpacas – it’s highly transferrable. I have great performance reviews, scoring the elusive 5/5, and I had completed an internal leadership program that is supposed to highlight me as a candidate for internal roles. I didn’t expect to be handed the role but I did think I was a strong internal…

It’s four answers to four questions. Here we go… 1. My interviewer mentioned my boudoir photos I went to an interview at an event planning company I have wanted to work at for a long time. The first interview was successful and I got along with the group of managers really well. They gave me an assignment to do and, after I did that, they happily invited me to return for a follow-up interview, this time with only one of the managers. We got along so well, and I was told I did very well on the assignment. Near the end of the interview, the manager told me to wait a minute and she left and then came back and offered me the job. I was super ecstatic, and we started chatti…

A reader writes: I’m dealing with two issues from the same event with the same employee. I am the manager for a warehouse distribution center for a larger company. For our holiday party, I handed out RSVP cards with a choice of one of three dinners for the employee and a guest a few weeks ahead of the party so we knew of a count for the meals and we could pre-pay. The dinner was at a somewhat upscale location (a country club). I was somewhat surprised when one of my employees (Kyle) showed up not only with his wife, but also a 5-6 year old child/grandchild. After the meal and while I was making a speech about how the company was doing, work anniversaries, etc., the chi…

A reader writes: I’m the manager of a large department, one of whose functions is to run an in-person helpdesk service. Our primary audience is under-25s. We have a member of staff who has requested to wear earphones whilst working on the helpdesk to help manage sensory overload. We always make adjustments for staff where we can to help manage any conditions they may have, be they physical or mental, with the proviso that the adjustments ensure they can do the job. Here’s where I wonder if I’m being unreasonable and/or out-of-date in my thinking. I’ve said that I don’t mind discreet in-ear headphones, but I draw the line at big over-ear headphones. It’s a customer-faci…

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go… 1. Employee misses a ton of work and we don’t know what to do I manage the manager of a newer employee. We’re outside the U.S., where everyone has generous paid vacation and sick leave. The problem is that she takes long vacations at inconvenient times and far more sick days than average. Taken together, these absences are creating real strain on the team. Because some of it may be health-related, I’m not confident about how to address it. Since starting a year ago, she has taken far more (five times more) sick leave than her peers, often on Fridays or Mondays or on days with important deadlines and presentations. Her wo…

A few months ago, a commenter mentioned that they work as a conflict of interest professional, and many of us wanted to hear more. She graciously agreed to do an interview about her work, and here’s our conversation. Can you start by describing what conflict of interest professionals do, overall? So, broadly, conflict of interest professionals are usually housed somewhere in a company or university’s compliance department, working closely with the rest of the teams who make sure various laws or policies are being followed. In the most general sense, what we do is to ask questions about the non-work relationships and activities of our employees that could affect the pers…

A reader writes: I’m a professional woman in my early 50s hiring for a position on my team. My colleague (a mid-40s man) and I interviewed a good candidate for a junior position (a man in his late 20s) with whom we have each subsequently exchanged a few emails. In each email the candidate has sent to my colleague, he calls him “Mr. [last name]” but in mine, he calls me by my first name. We’re pretty informal in our office, were relaxed in our interviews, and have always signed our emails with just our first names. I’m confused by the difference in addressing us. My husband says it’s sexism and a big red flag. I’m curious as to your thoughts. I answer this question — and…

Movies and TV shows are notorious for getting things wildly wrong about real-life jobs. What’s something ridiculous about your profession that you’ve seen in movies or on TV? Please share in the comments. The post what’s something ridiculous about your profession that you’ve seen in movies or on TV? appeared first on Ask a Manager. View the full article

Here are four updates from past letter-writers. 1. My husband doesn’t want anyone I work with to know we’re married Thank you for publishing my letter — it was quite reassuring to read that this particular request from my husband was giving others pause as well. There was a lot of speculation in the comments, which was quite amusing to read, and lots of excellent points being made too! I do want to add that my husband has always been very conscious about sharing “private” info, but to be clear — he’s never hidden the fact that he is a married (straight) man, but he won’t go around telling his coworkers my name or my employer. Like you said, this was more of a husband p…