how to convince employees to care about showing up, coworkers keep running my team’s work through AI, and more

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

1. How can we convince employees to care about showing up to work?

Part of my job involves working with seasonal employees who are hired in the summer to work as 1-1 aides to kids with disabilities. We have a persistent problem of staff suddenly calling out or announcing late arrivals/early departures. In some ways I’m sympathetic — this is just their summer gig, we aren’t able to pay the rate I wish we could, and life can be complicated.

In other ways, I’m not. The impact of suddenly disappearing on these kids seems so self-evident I feel ridiculous explaining it. The shifts are 9-3, so there is time at the end of the day for appointments and other life stuff. Ideally we would just not hire back staff with consistent issues, but there just aren’t enough qualified people to fill all of these roles (although we are trying to expand our recruiting).

Until now I was not a direct manager to these staff, but I’m in the process of being promoted. So my question is, what is the best way to shift this culture going forward? Incentives for showing up consistently (beyond being paid)? Clearer consequences for call-outs? Explaining the impact of their behavior? I don’t want to be condescending or unreasonable, but this is genuinely a job where being on-site truly matters.

I think the issue isn’t “not enough qualified people to fill these roles” but rather “not enough qualified people to fill these roles at the rate we are paying.” I realize you likely don’t have the power to do anything about that, but are you able to make that case to someone who does, pointing out that without more competitive pay, this will continue to be an issue and will continue to affect the kids in your care?

Beyond that, though, you can try talking about this explicitly in your hiring process — explaining that it’s a job where reliability really matters because of ___ (fill in with specifics about the impact on the kids) and you need people who will commit to showing up reliably and on time. You can reiterate that as part of their training too. From there, yes, ideally you’d have clearer consequences for unreliability — but if you’re in a position where you’re having to hire back people who you know to be consistently unreliable, I’m not sure how practical that is. Realistically, if you don’t have the power to fire people who don’t show up reliably and you’re struggling to hire other candidates because of the pay, you’re in a bad spot.

That said, it would be interesting to actively enlist the repeat offenders in your problem solving — sitting down with them and saying “here’s the issue, here’s why it matters, here are our constraints in solving it, what are your ideas for how we can improve this as a team?”

2. Coworkers keep putting my team’s work into AI software

I work on a marketing and communications team for a public institution affiliated with a state government in the U.S. We produce a lot of written work, as well as photos and videos, for various divisions in our organizations. However, we’ve recently hit a few things that have thrown my team and I for a loop:

1. We produced employee headshots for one of the divisions we serve. An employee took the headshot from our photographer, plugged it into an outside AI service, and “updated” their own headshot. They then wanted our team to use that AI-edited headshot on our website. We refused, because (a) they put the work of our photographer into an AI system without the photographer’s permission and (b) it no longer accurately looked like the employee.

2. I created a written piece for a colleague in one of the divisions we serve. That colleague returned the piece to me having been rewritten by an outside AI service, asking me to approve that version. I felt incredibly insulted, but also frustrated that my work has been used to train AI without my permission. I ended up rewriting the AI version to feel more genuine and asked my colleague to consult with us before moving to AI solutions. Time will tell if that was a good approach.

Our organization does allow gen-AI use in work, as long as it’s cited and as long as we use software that’s been vetted and approved (both examples used unapproved AI software).

Do you have advice on how we handle these kinds of situations in the future? Is there something we can say to our colleagues to keep them from doing this with our work? Working in marketing can be challenging because everyone thinks they can do our jobs — and AI certainly doesn’t help that. And I don’t want to immediately jump to reporting my colleagues to the IT admin for AI misuse; I feel like that could damage our working relationship. Thoughts?

Your organization needs to do more to communicate its policy on AI, because both of these situations violated that policy! Can you point out that people clearly haven’t absorbed what they are and aren’t permitted to do and ask that the company provide better training on what is and isn’t allowed?

On your end when this happens, you should feel free to cite the policy directly! You don’t need to tiptoe around it; it’s fine to say, “Company policy explicits prohibits using that software, so we can’t do this.” If someone is a repeat offender, loop in their boss — not to try to get them in trouble, but to point out that the person needs more training to understand the policy.

But I would try to avoid feeling insulted by people using AI to redo your work; this is just the latest iteration of something that has always existed in writing jobs, where non-writers make changes that weaken the work (but because they’re not good writers, can’t see that).

3. When a job wants me to answer questions instead of sending a cover letter, how long should the answers be?

I’m currently applying for remote jobs at nonprofits. Many are not asking for cover letters, but instead have open-ended questions they ask you to answer when you submit your resume, such as “what about our work makes you most interested in working with us,” “describe your familiarity with and interest in Work Area X,” and “describe something you’ve worked on that you’re particularly proud of.”

Any advice on the recommended length for these responses?

Typically one well-considered paragraph. Or two at most, unless they specifically ask for something longer.

And because these are short answers (and also because the reader will likely be skimming, at least in their first pass), you really want to strip away any fluff and ensue what you write is heavy on substance.

4. My company is interviewing other people for the job I’ve been covering

My boss retired eight months ago, and I have been filling the position on an interim basis since then. I had an interim agreement which expired after three months, but no agreement since then. I am being stipended a small amount each week for additional duties.

I am being told that the position has to be posted externally, but they hope I will apply. But also they “want to see who is out there and available.” Other positions in other teams recently, where a similar thing has happened, have not been advertised externally. I was told they would like to complete in the next three months, but maybe not. No promises.

I’min the U.S. but I have a friend who is an HR professional in Europe, who told me that in that jurisdiction I would be considered to be de facto in the role and if asked to take part in a process, I would have some other options. I am not trying to cause trouble here, because I love this organization and this role, but do I have any recourse here? I feel like I am being held to a different standard than others are, and it makes me feel less valued by the organization.

It’s a Europe/U.S. difference (or at least, parts of Europe). In the U.S., you don’t have any rights to special preference for the position (assuming you don’t have a contract or union agreement that says otherwise), even if they’ve handled it differently for other roles. The exception would be if you felt you were being treated differently because of your race, sex, religion, or other protected class, in which case that could move into discrimination territory. But absent something like that, they’re allowed to treat this hiring process differently than others.

There are a lot of reasons why they might want to do that: this position might have higher stakes or pickier stakeholders, or they might want a change in strategy that they think an external hire would be better positioned to lead, or they might think you aren’t as qualified to fill the role on a permanent basis as the people recently promoted on those other teams were (even if you’re doing just fine in a pared-down interim version of it), and on and on.

You could definitely ask whether there’s anything about the way you’ve approached the role that they’d like you to do differently, but try to approach it assuming there may be legitimate reasons for why they want to talk to multiple candidates.

5. Can I ask for a higher raise?

A coworker left a different section of our department (think like payroll and recruiting) last year and I was assigned some of his tasks until we could find a replacement. The tasks I took on aren’t necessarily strenuous, but they do take 2-3 set hours per day and utilize a different skill set than my actual job, and I had to rearrange my daily work schedule and cadence. My manager helped pull back on some of the responsibilities of my day-to-day role to accommodate the time for the other work, but sometimes it takes extended hours to get both done.

When the interim period stretched to nearly a year without hiring anybody, I asked my manager how we might be able to adjust my compensation to reflect doing a not-insignificant portion of another person’s job for a more extended period than either of us anticipated. I was informed that my efforts would be reflected in my annual review and any resulting pay increase.

I have now received my positive review and the increase, and I’m getting the standard cost of living bump that everyone in the company is getting plus about 1% for “going above and beyond.” This equates to several hundred dollars over the year. Am I wrong to think this is an inappropriately low amount? I generally like where I work and the people I work with, including my manager. Is there any scenario in which “responding” to my raise amount has a point and doesn’t just make me a difficult employee?

Yes, many, many scenarios, including this one. Think of the increase they offered as a starting point in negotiations and ask for more. They may not be thinking of it that way, but it’s reasonable for you to.

Say this to your manager: “As you know, I was willing to help out with the X work in a pinch, but it’s been a year and it’s a considerable change to my responsibilities and daily work for a significant period of time. I don’t believe the extra $300 (replace with the correct number, but do give the exact figure because it’s a ridiculous one when spelled out that way) added to my salary accounts for that, and I’d like to request that be revisited.” If you have a number in mind, name it, but you don’t have to.

You are being the opposite of a difficult employee; you’ve been the solution to a major problem for them, and you should ask to be compensated accordingly for that.

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