To think my colleague is BU r.e. 'working from home'?

[TheOtherSideOfNo]

I really need some sort of perspective with this.

This past year my workplace has introduced very flexible working for my particular team. In that we can work remotely or from home or basically wherever there is an internet connection.

This means that sometimes a couple of colleagues will set of to a coffee shop to work or stay at home, indeed, it means some colleagues arrive around 10ish but will leave later etc. This move was not easily given to us, we had to state our case for this sort of arrangement and indeed it has proven to be very effective so much so that management are considering applying the same to another team.

Now my AIBU. In my team there are 5 of us. All the same level and grade and do similar things that are complementary to each other's work. One of the team will e-mail in the morning saying she's "working from home" this is fine but she's never there if you call her on her work phone or e-mail her in business hours. I don't expect a response to an e-mail immediately but she really is taking the piss. She hasn't updated accounts or done her role at all. We're all picking up the slack. She will respond to an e-mail very late in the day and considering our work is very deadline focused we can't afford to have her 'chillaxing' on the job.

As I said, I'm the same level as her so can't really pull her up on this and I don't want to go running to management as the snitch iyswim but she's jeopardising certain projects and targets.

OP it's your manager's job to ensure that his team is an appropriate size i.e. manage headcount and ensure costs (ie salaries) are not higher than necessary. If he is not aware who in the team is doing what then he can't do that. His job is more than just making sure that projects are on time and work is of appropriate quality. And the need to appraise staff is a very important reason to look at individuals' performance and not just the team output. I second the PP who said you should raise it with him as an issue that is affecting YOUR performance.

Can't believe how many people are saying don't tell the manager. If you don't tell the manager then the flexible working will definitely be stopped because your team can't be trusted to self police. If you do talk to the manager then a decent manager will deal with the offender and not punish everyone. If you have a bad manager that punishes everyone when you have self policed you have bigger problems than a co-worker who skives.

I disagree that the flexible working will stop if they don't tell the manager. If the work is being done and deadlines are met then as far as the manager is concerned it is working. You might think managers will just deal with the offender if other workers complain but many will just go for the easy option i.e. stop flexible working.

I don't think this should be only your problem. There are 5 of you in the team.

I think the four of you who are covering for her need to lay it on the line for her: she is jeopardizing arrangements for the whole team, you're done covering her back, none of you want to lose what you have in terms of wfh or the jobs themselves. Give her an ultimatum: if she doesn't knuckle down (be precise about this: eg none of you are going to pick up the work she should be doing, if it doesn't get done you will all let it be known that's because she dropped the ball), you will go to management and tell them what's been going on.

You are a team so should give her another chance. But, because you are a team, she should be pulling her weight and the responsibility for her not doing so shouldn't fall in your shoulders alone (in terms of telling management, I know the rest of you share her work).

Also, it occurs to me that if you can comfortably handle her workload between you, frankly you could be a team of 4 and share her salary between you. She's really robbing you of time and money with this behavior.

Some excellent points there, Sushi

FWIW I understand the worries about not telling management for fear of making things worse for everyone - but in all honesty what's the alternative? It seems pretty clear the staff member knows exactly what she's doing and just doesn't care; let's face it, she's sitting pretty right now and isn't likely to change as long as she's getting away with it

Hard to see how the rest can just let it go on, covering for her indefinitely ...

What an awful position to be in. But you need to take the bull by the horns. How long do you think this can go on? It will be found out, and your flexible hours are already in jeopardy, right now.
You need to call an urgent meeting with the rest of your team. Facts out. Be united and speak to her. Tell her that today was the last day any of you are covering for her.
I think you need to tell your manager that procedures need to be put into place if someone is not pulling their weight. This needs to be done regardless, because the work from home arrangement may be pushed out to other departments and this ugliness will raise its head again. There are slackers everywhere, but unfortunately this one knows you are all afraid to rock the boat and will put up with her. It needs to stop.
The truth will set you free, speak up, call an urgent meeting with your team and it will be all sorted out then.

Was she diligent when she physically worked in the office? Or has she always been a shirker?

I really feel for you. I don't think you have any option but to report it, and fight against the privileges being revoked if that's the course of action they take.

I also think your manager is rather shit for not realising this is going on. Its all very well having five (six?) employees all of the same pay grade and responsibility working together, but the manager of that team should realise if one of the team isn't pulling their weight. A manager gets paid extra to manage, surely? Well there doesn't seem to be a hell of a lot of managing going on - more like he/she is just sitting back and letting you all get on with it.

I would ask Manager how effective he thinks its going, has he noticed an increase in results etc, and aybe suggests he gathers the stats on peoples workload ready to present it to other departments.

If he gets the idea to go looking for the data he may well discover this.

I think whether or not WFH would be taken from all or just one depends partly on the employer - but if it was hard to get them to agree, and it's only been in place a year, then there probably is more risk of everyone losing it.

We can work from home from time to time, though we are expected to come in on days with team meetings and so (some others can be done by confirm call.) We're expected to come in the majority of the time because in the past, we did have a colleague who took the piss. (I don't mind - I live alone, and too much WFH is not good for my mental health. But it's useful to have the flexibility when the car breaks down or not feeling 100, but okay to work, or there are childcare problems - also, we sometimes have to work our of hours and do on-call, so it balances that.)

Take it up with the slack colleague, say that last time it was mentioned, she improved for a week or so, but now she's slipped back, she's just having a laugh and it's really impacting on the rest of you. Say that if she doesn't sort it out, or if she slips back again, you'll be taking it up with management, no more warnings.

I think your management should be aware already, though. We know which of us aren't as productive, whose health let's them have a bit of slack, and we let each other know if we are going to be out for the next hour doing a school run or a doctor's appointment or whatever. But we each door our 40 hours (and in the case where that wasn't true, management was on it.) Also, we have individual targets as well as team ones, so evenue if you slack off on the team work, you can't get others to cover your individual stuff.

I don't always answer the phone or IM instantly - I might be talking to someone else or concentrating hard on something, and I do not need a reputation where I am at everyone's beck and call instantly. Asking them to call back at 3pm when I'll have time for them seems to make people more respectful of my time - and it means I can concentrate on them properly. But I do get back to people, and don't take the piss, so it should be clear I am working.

There's a big difference between occasional delays of a few minutes in responding to IM or calls when you're in the loo or finishing up a piece of work and being uncontactable by your co-workers during the entire working day and no work being done.
Difficult to know what your management response will be. They might pull it for her or for all of you. I would suggest you have another word with her and give her fair warning that you as a team won't tolerate her piss taking, suggest that you as a team have an online diary of who is available at any time. If she's saying she's available but you can't contact her you have something concrete.

Forget for a moment that slack colleague is WFH. What would you do in this situation if you were all in the office?
In the first instance as I guess you're all relatively senior you'd speak to her - which you did and has had little lasting impact. If that didn't work, which it hadn't, then you'd speak to your Line Manager.

That's exactly what you should be doing here. Don't make it personal, just say I asked for x, y and z to be done by this date and they weren't and I couldn't get hold of colleague on phone when I contacted her at these times and she took x days to respond to my emails.

Managers aren't omnipotent, although according to a large number of mumsnetters they apparently should be, oh and should also have a large number of extra work elves sitting in back rooms to cover for folks, sorry I digress.... Managers aren't omnipotent, if the work's getting done then you're all covering for this colleague and someone needs to tell the manager.

If you're reluctant to inform manager, maybe you'll have to start doing done nice passive aggressive reply to all emails, cc manager.

Hi x, have you auctioned x please let the team know by 10am?

Dear x, have tried to call you at xxx and xxxx regarding action x but got no reply so have completed task myself. Have you don x action yet as that is also urgent, please let me know by 11am.

And continue in a similar way all day???

Surely your manager will start noticing her lack of response.

Why on earth are you all doing her work for her?

I like puppymonkeys suggestion.

Another thing - I mentioned up thread my slack manager, it looks like I'm the one who's going to take the hit in my EOY appraisal for not flagging it up earlier. Instead I documented the arse out of everything I did and tried to do two jobs at once. I thought I was doing the right thing, but oh no, they have their bell curve distribution to think of and by not dobbing him in I made myself an easy target.

The more I think about it the angrier I get, but don't let my fate be yours. You need to escalate and now, either by copying in on emails or directly.

At first I thought maybe there should be a whole team meeting where you tell her she is being carried, but then I think that could lead to accusations of bullying. You really have to talk to your line manager.

Give her one more warning and tell her you'll be speaking to the line manger if it continues, she's then got a warning shot and if it doesn't improve then report her?

If all 5 of them in the team are of equal status - ie no one is the manager of the team then I am not sure that speaking to her again is going to make any difference.

she has been warned already. she changed what she did and now she is back again and not working.

you only have 2 options:

1. carry on as you are doing the work of 1.25 people to cover her and accept that not only is she never going to change but she is never going to leave either because this has to be the mother of all cushy jobs.

OR

1. Push the situation up to the manager and let them deal with it.

whilst at the moment the 4 of you can cover there will come a time when you cant, a target will be missed or a client forgotten. then all of the team will be in for a rocket and you cant then turn round and say "ah well its her fault because.." as although that may be true if its the first time your manager has heard it, they will give YOU grief as they think you are the one making excuses.

She clearly is skivving because when warned she bucked her ideas up.

Sorry, but being really brutal here, the other 4 team members are enabling her appalling behaviour. She is only doing this because she can.

either accept that she wont change or do something positive about it. there are no other options.

The working from home issue is clouding your judgement. This is simply an issue of someone not doing them job properly. That issue needs to be addressed.

If you've only been WFH for a year, what was her work like when you were all still in the office?

Thanks for all the advice and opinions. Just to clarify a couple of things;

When I say she doesn't do any work, I didn't mean she does literally nothing. I'll give some examples just for context:

• If she's preparing a draft to a response for a call for tenders the draft she produces is so bad that when she sends it to one of us for an extra pair of eyes we've often re-worked the document so much so that it is an entirely new document. Not just slightly edited as it should be.

• A client once sent us some pre-approved photos to accompany a text. She didn't read the notes on the file and ended up using a stock photo - cue an e-mail from client wondering why she'd taken it upon herself to just select a random photo.

• If there are say 4 drafts of a document, she has been known to upload and publish the wrong document despite the files being labelled appropriately and the correct version even named "finaldocumentapproved" or similar. It would have taken seconds to check the name of the file.

• She once had to prepare a new business pitch. We'd blocked a 2 hour meeting on the calendar and she turned up with a few bullet points on a note pad despite the point of the meeting being for her to tell us the strategy she should have prepared. The meeting lasted about 10 minutes and there were awkward looks all round.

• I know accounts have chased her about keeping her time sheets up to date. She's slack on these so that delays billing and delays a whole other team to boot.

I have taken to e-mailing or messaging her on our system at random times during the day so I can log how long it took to get a response as it's very easy for someone to 'appear' online even if they're not anywhere around.

She does attend our planning meetings and joins in on conference calls so she is always in the loop but she does just enough to get by. In fact the others and I have an unspoken policy that she doesn't do any pitches for new business for new clients as it's 99.9% likely we wouldn't get the contract.

Once one other member of my team sent her a document for her to approve. She e-mailed back saying "Yes, brilliant, go for it", thing is, colleague had purposefully drafted the document wrongly i.e not adhering to house style guidelines and she totally missed it. Colleague has kept their correspondence as proof.

To whomever mentioned, yes you are absolutely right that the flexible working pattern is clouding my thoughts on this because were we in the office, I'd have shopped her ages ago. And yes when we were all in the office she was so much better, I think the flexibility has gone to her head.

One of my team-mates has suggested that we start keeping a different type of log, by this I mean that whenever a client has feedback or a complaint we log just the information - not who was responsible or the 'lead' on that project. Colleague has suggested we start logging name as well so in my earlier example it would have read "Jane uploaded wrong photo with text" or "Jane published wrong version" etc *not her real name.

Tbh, the extra work doesn't bother me - I can hardly feel it if I'm honest, or I'm just used to it and if she left I doubt we'd need a replacement. What does bother me is knowing that I have to police her work because I can't trust her to not drop the ball iyswim.

Apologies for mammoth post but it feels quite good to just get it out there.

Okay, so she's not just unreliable - she's crap at the job as well

Is it really worth all this to avoid a small chance of others getting caught in the fallout? And what happens when there's a major mistake which could have been avoided if you'd reported her earlier? You do realise that the rest are going to get blamed as well, don't you ... ?

I think she is doing another job, or taking extra work from somewhere else she is doing at home. It seems she is skimping on this one for a reason, perhaps just doing a few hours in the evening or weekend to keep up.

Any chance she is setting up her own company or touting for work from clients at cut rate?