my boss says you should always move personal appointments for work

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 types of personal commitments, but it’s so hard to schedule physicals, dental cleanings, some medical imaging, etc. that I’d be hard pressed to move those for a work event.

Likewise, she said we don’t need to cancel flights for work events, but it was kind of implied that if you have a PTO day planned but aren’t going anywhere (maybe for your birthday or a hobby day) you should plan to attend the work event instead.

This won’t come up often, maybe a few times a year, but the emphasis on work taking priority over pre-planned PTO gave me the ick. Am I overreacting? Is this typical? If this isn’t normal, how can I protect my own time away from the office in a professional way?

P.S. I don’t know if it matters, but I’m salaried (not hourly) and I have vacation time to draw from. On-site events are generally team-building and networking; my job is desk-work, not anything like patient care or politics where a meeting would be an emergency.

No, this is weird! People aren’t normally expected to reschedule appointments that have already been booked and time off approved just because their boss wants to have a short-notice meeting that day or an event comes up afterwards.

There are some exceptions to this — a truly crucial meeting that for some reason can’t be put off, or an event that’s a central part of your job to be at. But those would be unusual exceptions, not normal practice. And even then, the conflict would normally be acknowledged and discussed (“I’m so sorry, I know you’re scheduled to be out that day but this is our only shot at saving this account — any chance you’d be able to rearrange things to make it?”); you wouldn’t be expected to just see the conflict and decide on your own to cancel your already-set plans. (An exception might be if you’re in a very senior role and would be expected to know on your own that this was the only shot at saving the account and take the initiative to act accordingly.)

But for more routine meetings? The normal response to that is, “I’m out that day; would Thursday or Friday work instead?”

However, while your boss is being incredibly weird and her expectations are not in sync with normal professional expectations, if these are her expectations you have to figure out how to navigate them. The easiest thing is to just assert normal professional boundaries, meaning that if you get the sense she’s expecting you to be at something you won’t be available for (again, assuming it’s not a rare high-states exception), you’d simply say, “I have an appointment I can’t move that day,” followed by whatever makes sense next (which could be “I can see if Jane can fill in” or “could we schedule it for Thursday when I’m back?” or so forth). If she pushes back, you’d say, “It’s a medical appointment that can’t be moved” or “it would be really tough for me to change it; are there other options?” or otherwise assert the boundary that no, pre-scheduled things can’t be moved without true and rare need.

If she takes issue with that, I’d think about your options for escalating it because, unless you’ve seen direct evidence that this is the culture of your whole office and not just your boss’s idiosyncrasy, it’s likely that your employer doesn’t want her interfering with people’s time off this way. If you have good rapport with her boss, it might be something you could ask their guidance on (“asking their guidance” is a good way of bringing it to their attention without explicitly complaining about it). Or in some offices, HR might be well positioned to step in.

But you shouldn’t accept this as a normal thing.

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