is it out of touch to expect students to check their email, should I tell my boss a vendor was rude, and more

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

1. Is it out of touch to expect student workers to check their email?

I work at a fairly small college, and I’m noticing that more and more students aren’t checking or responding to their email regularly. Some of my colleagues say that they have to text the students in order to get a response. I really don’t want to do that unless it’s a time-sensitive situation.

My instinct is to tell the students (the ones who work for me anyway) that email is still a really normal business tool and they need to get used to it because it will be part of their professional lives for a while to come. But I also recognize that I’ve worked here for almost 15 years, and norms may have changed. So is email still as widely used as I think it is? Or am I out of touch?

Email is still widely used at work. You are not out of touch about this — or at least you’re not as long as you have told these students that your office uses email to communicate and they are expected to check it with at least X frequency and respond within Y timeframe. It’s true that students aren’t still using email in their personal lives the way students before them did, and so you do need to spell out what you expect — but after that, it’s reasonable to expect them to do it, although you might need to reinforce it with a few reminders.

For what it’s worth, though — even if email weren’t still widely used at work, you could still require them to use it if you needed to; employers require employees to use specific communication tools all the time (whether it’s email or Slack or Teams or on and on). But you can certainly point out to them that this will be something they’ll need to get used to for future jobs as well.

Related:
employee didn’t check email for 60 days

2. Should I tell my manager that a vendor was rude to me?

I work for a tiny retail store (Store A) that is owned by a larger chain of similar stores (Chain B), which is itself owned by an even larger chain of stores (Chain C). It’s ridiculously fiddly to get things approved or fixed because we have to jump through so many hoops. We get a lot of promises from the big bosses that never come to fruition. It’s frustrating for us, but my manager is an angel and no-nonsense and fields a lot of higher-up stuff for us.

She’s on (a deserved!) vacation at the moment and today I answered a phone call from a vendor. He told me that Chain C hasn’t paid any of our bills to his business since August. I was shocked and kind of exclaimed and laughed and said, “Oh that’s ridiculous, I’m so sorry–” and he cut me off and told me that it wasn’t funny and that it needed to be fixed.

I’m autistic and often laugh in inappropriate situations as a reflex when I’m surprised or confused. I wasn’t laughing at him; it was more of an exasperated reflex because of course Chain C hasn’t paid that bill, they never pay anything on time! I apologized and tried to explain to him that Store A doesn’t get answers from Chain C when we need things, let alone when they owe people money, and he cut me off again abruptly saying again that it’s not funny and how unprofessional we are and that he needs to be paid.

I understand that his business is losing money because of something that Chain C is doing, and that must be so much more frustrating than it is for me as an employee, but I can’t stop thinking about him! Because of my autism I don’t know if I’m taking this more personally than I should, but the vendor was so rude to me over something that I have absolutely no control over.

My manager is in constant communication with Chain B and Chain C trying to get them to actually do the things they’re supposed to do but we’re at the bottom of their priorities. It sucks, but we literally could not be doing more than we already are to get things fixed; it’s all above our heads.

Part of me thinks I should tell my manager about the call when she’s back but leave out the vendor being rude. Another part of me wants her no-nonsense side to tell him to direct his anger at the people who are actually screwing him over. We deal with his company frequently and it would upset me if I had to just continue communicating with him knowing how rude he was. I’ve been in retail for over a decade now and I’m used to customers being rude, but it’s shaken me that another business we work closely with could be so harsh with me. Do I tell my manager? Should I just try and shake it off?

His reaction doesn’t sound outrageous to me! He’s justifiably frustrated that he hasn’t been paid since August, and when you laughed that likely sounded to him like you weren’t taking it seriously. I get that you were laughing more in disgust about what Chain C is doing, but that wouldn’t necessarily be clear to someone who doesn’t know you and doesn’t have that context and who is already understandably upset. He’s presumably doing business with your store, Store A, and shouldn’t need to care about the intricacies of how Store A’s bills get paid — just that he gets the money that Store A owes him. And while I get why you feel like he should direct his anger at the people actually responsible, you are representing Store A, regardless of what power you do (or more accurately, don’t) have in this situation.

It doesn’t sound like he was abusive; he just told you it wasn’t funny … which it’s not, and while I know your laugh didn’t mean “this is funny,” it’s pretty common for someone to interpret a laugh as a light-heartedness that wasn’t well-matched with the situation he’s in.

You should definitely tell your manager when she’s back that this vendor is upset, but your focus should be about him being frustrated that he still hasn’t been paid, not that he was rude — because for the reasons above it doesn’t really sound like he was!

3. Informal references and “character assassination”

I recently joined the management team of a company, and we are in the process of hiring for a number of positions. A few candidates have worked with past colleagues, though not under me directly. When I told my new team members that I’d be happy to reach out to my network and get the inside scoop on these potential new hires, I was informed that under no circumstance should I do so. We are to confine our reference checks to just the names shared by the job candidates. If we were to talk to someone who wasn’t an official reference and learn negative information that persuaded us away from hiring a candidate, we could be sued for “character assassination.”

Is this true? Can we really only talk to official references? And if so, does that mean that references are basically worthless? Of course an applicant is only going to provide the names of people who will speak well of them. But that can mean that someone with a history of racism or sexual harassment or other problematic behaviors basically has a level playing field with other candidates walking into an interview. When it comes to hiring, experience has taught me that an applicant’s past behavior and work habits are a good indicator of future performance. Having to confine ourselves to resumes, interviews, and sanctioned work references curbs our ability to make informed hiring decisions. So should organizations basically throw reference checks out the window? If a peer happens to mention an applicant was let go for poor performance, should I shut them down and try to forget I ever heard that information?

No, this is not true, at least if you’re in the U.S. It’s perfectly legal to check any references you want, whether they are supplied by the candidate or not, and you are allowed to factor what they tell you into your hiring decision as long you’re not basing it on information about their race, religion, disability, or other protected characteristics.

Your team’s stance is especially weird because they’re implying that your company could be in trouble for “character assassination” (by which they probably mean defamation) when the company wouldn’t be the party “assassinating their character” in this situation; if anyone were on shaky legal ground in this line of thinking, it would be the reference themselves — but they’re not, because U.S. law is clear that providing honest and accurate references is legal.

Related:
we hired without checking references … and it went badly

4. Are company handbooks legally binding?

Are company handbooks in any way legally binding?

My very small company doesn’t have its own handbook. When the company was started, however, we were given the handbook of another (larger) company. The clear implication was that the handbook applied to our company, but no one has so much as mentioned the handbook in the 15 years of my company’s existence.

I ask mostly as a hypothetical exercise. There are some sections in the handbook that some current employees could probably be found in violation of (these would not be actual legal matters, just procedural things spelled out in the handbook). But there are entire sections in the handbook that spell out obligations of the company that have been completely ignored. If the company fired an employee on the basis of a handbook violation, would that employee possibly have a legal leg to stand on by countering that the company’s failure to uphold its own handbook-defined obligations negates the handbook altogether? Given how U.S. employment law always seems to work, I’m guessing not. But I’m interested in your take.

It depends on the specifics and it can vary by state, but in many cases courts have ruled that promises made in employee handbooks may be contractual promises, particularly when an employer writes that it “will” or “shall” take a particular action (as opposed to “may” or “can”). But again, it varies based on the exact circumstances — and either way it’s probably moot here since this is a handbook that belonged to another company and hasn’t been mentioned in the 15 years since.

If it were a currently used handbook, though, the employee in your hypothetical still likely wouldn’t have the sort of recourse you’re talking about. Employers can fire employees for pretty much whatever they want (as long as it’s not for a specifically illegal reason, like discrimination or in retaliation for exercising legally protected rights, such as reporting harassment). It’s possible that the employee could have a completely separate case over the company breaking legally binding promises (again, if the promises in question would qualify as legally binding), but that wouldn’t negate the company’s ability to legally fire them for something else; it would be a separate issue.

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