coworker is charging personal purchases to our team, work meeting is being held in a church, and more

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

1. My coworker is charging personal purchases to our team

I work in higher ed on a small team. All of us are able to make purchases up to a certain amount with little to no oversight.

I have suspected that my coworker has bought things for herself. It seemed like a few small things here and there, a $30 hand cream, essential oils, things that didn’t seem to have a business purpose.

Recently I purchased an expensive item (with permission) for the office. She said someone asked her where it was from and asked if I could send her the link. A week later, a box arrives with this very item. I look up her purchase order, which says it’s a replacement for a broken one. The original is obviously not broken. I put the package by her desk and the item disappears from the office.

It seems obvious to me that she has purchased this for herself. While the other items were small, this is a $300 appliance. I’m not sure whether I should report it to our boss or not. If I do report it and she isn’t fired, it will be obvious that it was me and that will make my work life difficult. I’ve been here less than a year and my feeling is that getting involved won’t end well for me, but I also don’t want anything to come back to me if she finally gets caught.

You should report it because she’s stealing! A $300 appliance isn’t like taking pens home; it’s serious theft. And you risk seeming like you knew and didn’t say anything. It also risks hurting your department in other ways, like lowering the funds that are available to your team for actual work needs.

You can tell your boss that you’re concerned about blowback in your relationship with the coworker, and ask that your name not be mentioned. The should be easy to do, since it’s entirely plausible that your boss or someone else was reviewing the purchases orders and questioned this one. It doesn’t sound like she’s even trying to cover her tracks very well.

2. Our next work meeting is being held in a church

I work at a nonprofit organization, in healthcare. Up until the last year or so, my leadership generally made its business decisions with good intentions for staff and patients. Then the election happened, and suddenly all leadership talks about is our federal funding — or lack thereof, being that we serve a large migrant/undocumented and LGBTQ+ population.

My department consists of small (4-5 person) teams spread across 20 satellite sites. Together we are a big group, and no one site is big enough to gather us all in person for meetings. For that reason we usually have one in-person meeting yearly in a rented space and manage the rest of our meetings via Zoom or smaller groups. Before the budget tightening, leadership’s idea was to increase in-person meeting frequency to quarterly. After the budget tightening, the idea became have quarterly in-person meetings in a location that is free.

Which is why my next staff meeting in a few weeks is going to be in a church.

Our company has no religious affiliation, and I am extremely uncomfortable with this as I myself am agnostic. I have coworkers who identify as queer and do not feel welcome in churches, and I have coworkers of other faiths (Mormon, Jehovah’s Witness, Methodist, etc.) who feel conflicted being on grounds that aren’t “theirs.” We have been given the option to just take PTO instead of attending (no option to take it unpaid so anyone who doesn’t have PTO is SOL), but I’m a bit peeved I have to do this. Am I wrong to be so bothered?

Churches often offer space to outside groups for a whole range of activities that aren’t religious in nature, as part of serving the community (or, in some cases, as a way to raise money).

It the objection is just “it’s a church,” period, I don’t think that’s going to get you anywhere. But if it’s “this is a space that is actively harmful to people like me and people I love” … well, it still might not get you anywhere, but you’d have a better shot at trying. And surely there are other meeting spaces in your community — and if none of them are free, then maybe this isn’t the time to increase these meetings from annual to quarterly.

3. Why would my interviewer reject me this way?

Years ago, I used to work in a communications role, in-house. My company was circling the drain and I was semi-recruited by a high-level employee of an agency in the same subspecialty that I worked in. I’d worked with this group quite a bit previously and knew most of the (small, less than 10-person) team pretty well. After an on-site interview, the owner called me and his first words were, “So, what did you think of the team?” I talked about how much I liked them and thought we would work well together, feeling that warm “I got it!” glow.

The next words out of his mouth were basically, “You didn’t get the job.”

I found this bizarre, off-putting, and cruel (not to mention embarrassing). I never did get an explanation of why he would deliver this message in such a way. Obviously, I dodged a bullet, but can you think of any reason why he would do this? Have you ever heard of anything like this happening to other people?

That’s obnoxious and it happened because he’s thoughtless, awkward, or a jerk, or possibly all three.

That’s a really awful way to reject someone — he asked a question that would get anyone’s hopes up and which there was no point in asking since he wasn’t hiring you. The most generous explanation is that he feels awkward about rejecting people and hadn’t planned out what he was going to say and started making conversation without realizing what he was setting you up for, or even that he thought it would be rude to jump straight into the message and thought this was a softer way of leading up to it (it wasn’t!). Either of those are more likely than that he’s just a sadist who enjoys toying with people — but since you knew this team pretty well, you probably have a sense of which explanation is most likely.

4. Should I avoid giving staff rewards because of favoritism?

I work at a public university and supervise four people. We have a few university-wide staff awards, some with a monetary prize, others with just positive, public recognition. As a supervisor, I have staff I think about nominating but I worry about showing favoritism. Am I overthinking? Am I right to try to recognize my staff in other ways and not nominate them through these more public ways?

It’s not favoritism to recognize people for doing excellent work; it’s appreciation based on merit and contributions, which is how it’s supposed to work. If you were only nominating people you personally liked or who you ate lunch with, that would be favoritism. But using your employer’s official appreciation systems is not favoritism. I would be more concerned that your staff will be frustrated that you’re blocking them from receiving the types of recognition your employer has specifically set up for them!

If the worry is that some people will be nominated and some people won’t, you of course want to make sure that you can justify your decisions for who is nominated for what (and who isn’t) and that you’re giving people enough regular, ongoing feedback that your recognition decisions will clearly align with that.

One more thing: make sure you’re not overlooking people who do excellent work but in areas that are inherently less flashy; good work is good work, regardless of how glamorous or not-glamorous it might be (and if anything, there might be more need to ensure the less glamorous gets recognized).

5. When can I ask about health insurance details during an interview process?

I’m currently in the second round of interviews for a new job. In my introductory call they told me a bit about the perks (health insurance provider, PTO, 401k, etc.) but I didn’t want to dig into them too much and look overeager. When would be a good time to ask more specific questions? If offered the job, is there anyway for me to ask to review their insurance options/tiers before I say yes? Is that an insane ask?

Wait until you have an offer, but at that point it’s not in any way odd to ask for details about their insurance coverage (including the drug formulary if you want to see how specific medications are covered).

That said, it’s always true that the company could end up changing its insurance in the near future, or the insurance company could change its drug formulary, or so forth. The whole system is way more of a crapshoot than it should be.

Related:
an expert on how to get what you need from your health insurance

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