my coworker is in a cult, acting like people are late to a meeting if they aren’t early, and more

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…

1. My coworker is in a cult and it’s affecting my work

A new junior staff person joined my department about a year ago. About six months in, they asked if they could start working remotely because because they had been asked to help start a new church across the country. This employee is quite young and this is their first job after college. They were initially very dedicated to their work, but since moving, they have dropped the ball on multiple projects, frequently ask for time off and don’t make up their hours, and have just generally been performing poorly.

I was starting to think they had just checked out and weren’t committed to their job, but another coworker recently discovered that this “church” is really more of a cult known for preying on college students. Church members have to pay in and are expected to do countless hours of free labor. Ex-members have complained online about being taken advantage of and isolated from their friends and family.

I really feel badly that my coworker is probably being manipulated and, at the same time, their life outside of work is impacting my job. I have had to pick up the slack repeatedly, and their performance is giving our department a bad reputation. Should I tell our supervisor what I know? Or talk to this junior coworker privately? I am old enough to be their parent and I could give them some kind advice. If they were just bad at their job, I would probably wait for my supervisor to deal with their obvious performance issues. But I feel like this situation is more nuanced, and I wonder if my supervisor needs this extra information.

Unless you’re quite close to this coworker (and it doesn’t sound like you are), I don’t think you’re well-positioned to get through to them about the reality that they’re in a cult … since even friends and family are notoriously unable to reach people in that situation, and cults operate that way by design.

But what you are well-positioned to do is to make sure your manager knows about the specific problems you’re seeing because she might not know the extent of everything you’re aware of. As part of that, there’s no reason you can’t discreetly share your concerns; it might provide some useful background about what’s going on, although ultimately there’s not much your boss can do either other than to address the habits that are showing up at work. (Someone might argue that it’s not really your manager’s business, but there’s no particular expectation of privacy around this sort of thing; it’s info you have and there’s no reason you can’t share it with your boss as context for your concerns.)

2. My coworker acts like people are late to a meeting if they aren’t early

My office has a meeting culture of starting meetings 1-2 minutes past the time, so pretty close to on time. People are often going from back-to-back meetings. We are a hybrid office, and virtual joiners aside from the host usually show up on the dot unless they are delayed.

We have a couple people who are always early to join said virtual meetings, and one who is really rubbing me the wrong way.

Arya will start getting antsy several minutes before meeting start time, and then at, for example, 9:59 will say, “I guess we’re waiting on Sansa” or “Well, we better get started. Hopefully Sansa can join us” and often sends people “are you able to join us?” messages the moment the time hits the hour (literally within seconds).

The lack of alignment with the office culture is getting to me. It’s literally true that we are waiting on her, but only because Arya started the meeting early. Sansa and several other people will almost never be able to join early. People in Arya’s role have 1-3 meetings a day, while people in Sansa’s role have at least 5 meetings most days. It affects nothing but I want to know if I’m weird for finding this rude!

I don’t know that it’s rude exactly, but it’s unreasonable and certainly impatient. If you’re quite junior to Arya, there’s probably nothing you can do, but if you’re not you should feel free to say, “We’re not quite at the start time yet so I’d give her a minute or two” or “She’s often in back-to-back meetings; I’m sure she’ll join in a minute or two.” (And if you were her boss, I’d tell you to tell her more directly to chill out about it.)

3. Should I raise this in an employee’s performance review?

I oversee four employees who work at several facilities throughout our city. On the first Thursday of every month at 9 am, we have an in-person meeting at the main office where I am located. I send out an email the Monday before as a reminder and include any other pertinent information.

I am having a minor issue with “Paul.” I am guessing he has our meeting on his calendar so feels he does not need to read the reminder email I sent. I came to this conclusion because several months ago a person from corporate wanted to speak to the group, and to fit her schedule the meeting was moved to 9:30 and Paul showed up at 9 as normal. Another time we had to meet in a different room than our normal one, and he went to the old one (but found our new room before the meeting started). This information was in the reminder email.

His one-year review is coming up. How big of a deal do I make of this? He hasn’t ever been late for the meetings, and he really doesn’t need to prepare anything for the meeting so he isn’t unprepared. Technically he hasn’t done anything wrong, but I feel I need to address the issue somehow before not reading the reminder emails causes an issue.

This doesn’t rise to the level of something to discuss in a performance review; it’s just a normal conversation completely outside of the review. Just name what you’re seeing and want him to do differently: “I noticed you’ve missed some of the info I include in the emails I send out for our meeting prep, like changes to the meeting time and location. Can you make a point of reading those so you see what I’ve included?”

The fact that you haven’t done that but are thinking about addressing it in his review makes me wonder if you shy away from giving routine, fairly low-stakes feedback throughout the normal course of work! It’s worth asking yourself whether corrections (even small ones) feel like a big deal to you and, if so, whether people aren’t getting routine feedback as often as they should. Not only would that mean they’re not getting the chance to do better in their work, but it can mean that when feedback conversations do happen, they feel like Big Deals with high stakes rather than just a normal part of work.

4. Accommodating Tourette’s at work

The recent event at the BAFTAs reminded me of something that happened years ago at work. I used to work with a lovely person who had Tourette’s, the kind with coprolalia (the involuntary outburst of inappropriate words). He was a very kind person who did a lot of educational work about his condition and clearly felt horrible about what his condition made him say. That said, we were in an open office space, and I can’t say it wasn’t hard to hear slurs said — I’m Jewish, for example, and sometimes he would shout Jewish slurs.

At some point, a woman (also a lovely person) complained to HR that she found his slurs triggering; he would sometimes say slurs about her gender and race. As a workaround, they offered her a seat away from him. But then he felt so horrible about it that he started working in a conference room and avoiding his coworkers. He left for a new job shortly after, and it was hard not to read the incident as a cause.

I guess my question is: was this an appropriate solution? What would you have done as a manager or HR in the same situation? On one hand, no one should have to hear slurs all day, but on the other, this person had a disability they had no control over.

When you have two competing needs for an employer to accommodate — in this case, one employee’s medical condition and other employees’ right not to be harassed on the basis of sex, race, or religion — it’s what the law calls “dueling accommodations” and the employer is required to enter into an interactive process with each side to see if they can solve it. Accommodations cannot violate the rights of other employees (so an accommodation couldn’t be “just deal with it because you know it stems from a medical condition”), so in this case you’d typically need to look at having the person work from a different space (as they did) or from home.

5. AAM columns in outside publications

When your answers to reader questions only appear in other publications such as the Cut, will they eventually be available in Ask a Manager archives too? Purchasing several subscriptions to access only your content isn’t an option on my fixed income.

Some of them! My columns for Slate only appear in Slate, but my agreement with The Cut lets me publish my columns here 90 days after they’re originally printed there. I don’t create fresh posts for them here when that happens, but I do go back and add the full columns to the existing posts once those 90 days have passed (for example, like this). I am admittedly sometimes delayed in doing this, but I try to stay on top of them.

With Inc., it’s a little different; my columns for them are all reprints from the archives here, so they appear here long before they appear there (and you can usually find the original by using the site’s search function to search for the headline).

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