to say something to my intern

[wouldratherbebythepool]

Intern is lovely, we have never met, they are interning from their bedroom on the other side of the country due to COVID.

They have some experience and are 33 years old and living with a partner (no kids in case relevant), but recently graduated from university. I wanted to give them a chance.

I've never had anyone work for me before. I work very very fast, and it is my company so I know the ropes. I wouldn't have expected them to be as fast as me but I am very surprised at how slow they are at working in comparison to me.

They are full time, on £10 p/h yet get a quarter of the work done as I predict I would have, maybe less.

I have started wondering if they are actually working their full hours.

I try and be the best boss possible, I sent them a welcome gift, and told them their 8 hours a day are flexible as long as we have time for a daily catch up. Our catch ups are casual, fun, and I answer all their questions.

I have another job and am looking after my friends child at home (friend is single mum front line worker so I have taken in my very well behaved, immune compromised, 'niece' for 3 months.) This means I only have time for a 1 hour call a day for the intern, if that.

It's important that they feel trusted and I think as soon as someone doesn't feel trusted it can get nasty.

I am an emotional person and have anxiety so hate confrontation, but my approach of setting goals, deadlines, explaining how to reduce the time, have not improved things. They have been working on a document that would have taken me 1 week max, for four weeks and it's half done.

When I break down tasks and set deadlines my intern tells me the deadlines are unrealistic.

I check when they last edited documents and sometimes it says a couple of days ago, but before I awkwardly address this they inform me that they often work on a separate document and copy the information over, so I couldn't track the opening time.

I have no idea what to say. They are only here 12 weeks in total. I wouldn't have brought them on if I had known they would do so little work. But they also do lots of research around a subject. For example if I asked them to write a "quick description" of the company, they would create a document and spend two days researching other companies descriptions and how to write one, to write something I didn't particularly like. If your boss told you to write a "quick one paragraph description" how long would you spend on it? 16 hours?

Do I say something to my intern and what?

They have been working on a document that would have taken me 1 week max, for four weeks and it's half done
You know the answer - they're not putting the time in and doing the work.

When I break down tasks and set deadlines my intern tells me the deadlines are unrealistic
This isn't the intern for you.

They are deliberately being sneaky and not using the log-in system you have provided for tracking the work you have set....ensuring that you don't have the facts so therefore any tasks/deadlines you set are automatically 'unreasonable'

You're being taken for a mug.
They're getting their full pay and not even doing the work....and they plan to drag that out for as long as possible so they continue getting paid for doing very little.

I wouldn't bother with a conversation.
I'd just tell them the arrangement "doesn't work" for you and terminate their 'services'.

I don't know what country you're in but what about using an online transcribing company? i knew of some where you upload your docs/info and pat etc, you can also see comments etc of the transcribers previous work/agents registered there.

they inform me that they often work on a separate document and copy the information over, so I couldn't track the opening time

Apologies for the typos!

I had had utterly brilliant grads but they have all needed support at the beginning. I’ve found it often takes much longer and much more effort for a few months and then you get the benefits 6 months down the line when they are more competent. Are your expectations realistic? They could well be taking the piss but I’ve always found my grads do more work than they should and are desperate to please but I only recruit high achievers.

Are you actually good at giving instructions? The thing is, if it is not clear what you want, you can't really expect to get it.

When exam questions are written, they are proofed many times to make them clear.

I would worry that you in fact could come across as quite vague - and then critical of what comes back. That is the worst type of person to work for.

I think your being taken for a ride. It does not two days to write a paragraph, besides how much research does she need- I assume she applied for the post and would have known about your company and written about it on her CV/coving letter

Be firm. Say you need xyz done by X amount. Small goals. Twice daily reviews. Of twenty mins max to see what she's doing and where/if she is struggling. If she's not reaching her goals you need to discuss it with her to find out why. Be the boss not a friend. If you approach her that way, she may think she can get away with doing bare minimum.

She may need more support, it's new for her, and familiar to you, so maybe you need to lower your expectations a bit. Guide her.

Tell her you don't want her to copy documents. Use the shared drive. You need to understand why she's being so slow or is she actually struggling.

Basically micromanage a bit more. If she doesn't improve I would get rid .. it shouldn't take months to learn basic things.

But if you want to be brutal. Get rid asap. You know she's taking the piss.

But there have been some useful posts here. Take them onboard and use for your next employee.

And I say this as someone who rotates jobs every 6 months. It does not take that long to learn how things work. You should have already seen some improvement.

Even if something was difficult, I would work my damn arse off and out in o ertime and not argue over deadlines- Unless it was really impossible.

They are an intern, not staff. Interns need to be shown what to do, that is the point. How did you acquire this intern, is it though some formal scheme or have you just got someone to work for you for cheap? I think you need to think more carefully about your duty of care. If you want someone to just do the work, get someone who is fully qualified.

I think you need to work out why you hired them. Interns are supposed to be about exposure to a company/work experience etc. They are there to learn: not primarily for productive work. If you want a worker, hire a temp.

By not addressing their poor pace of work/quality of output you are not helping the intern. They are not learning anything.

And if you are don't feel comfortable standing up to them/challenging them/if you do not have the time to devote to training then I would suggest do not hire interns.

Someone getting a proper intern experience is a time suck on the supervising manager.

I would love to hear the intern's side of this. It doesn't sound like they're the best employee, but it must be hard being the only employee of the business owner, who you've never met, and you're at the other side of the country and can only speak to your boss for an hour a day.
My boss is working at home while looking after her kids. She checks in with the team at least twice a day and tells us we can contact her anytime if we need to, she'll get back to us as soon as she can. Maybe you need to be more accessible to the intern. An hour a day really isn't much if you are new and struggling.

I think they're taking the piss but you need to set clearer boundaries now you know that's the case. So 'I want you to write x lines. I expect you to take x time researching and y writing.'

Then at least they can't rip you off any more than they have been

All those who are saying she's maybe not clear- that's up to the intern to clarify. If the paragraph needed isn't clear, then he could do a mock up in an hour, send it over and check it's in the right vein, then spend an hour or two cleaning it up and filling in the blanks.

I think you are being a bit unfair. There may be many many reasons she’s taking longer than you feel she should - lack of confidence, lack of experience, really wanting to do a good job...laziness is really only one possibility of many. It may be obvious to you that a paragraph isn’t a 2 day job, but it isn’t necessarily to someone with no experience or who’s desperate to get it right. I had a research internship once, after my masters, working remotely on set hours where the boss was very harsh that I hadn’t done as much as she expected and refused to write me a reference. I was doing the hours - more than! - but as a novice I was, well, much slower than her! I now have research assistants myself and I really try to see the best in what they’re doing - some are fab, some less so, but all I think are trying their best. So the challenge here I think is how can you help her improve - it may well be setting task ‘importance levels’ helps - eg v important, and urgent - prioritise this! Urgent, but not important - needs doing but don’t waste ages on it. Etc etc.

You think you’re a great employer because you sent them a welcome gift? That’s a nice touch on the side, but it isn’t what makes someone a good employer. I can’t work out how clear your guidelines are.

I don’t understand why you allowed the working offline to continue? You just tell them that they must only work on the online document because you need to be able to review it any time. Honestly, not doing that makes me wonder if you’ve just been vague with them, and not clear enough in your direction.

Or they could be shit, or lazy, or both!

It’s hard to comment of course, without knowing what the work is. But producing a document that takes you a full week yourself, seems to be a big task to entrust to an untrained and not present intern? I don’t think that 4x as long is that surprisingly - you seem to think you work particularly quickly, so is she taking 3x as long as a ‘normal speed’ person? I think for a brand new intern that’s not as bad as it sounds. Why would an untrained intern be able to produce a document that takes you, with all your experience, a full week to produce anyway?

Just re-reading, and I think you haven’t commented on the quality of their work at all. Sounds like you haven’t even seen a lot of it, if they’re working offline. I don’t understand this situation at all. You say you’re speaking to them every day - so why are you not even sure if they’re working every day? I don’t think you’re managing them well.

producing a document that takes you a full week yourself, seems to be a big task to entrust to an untrained and not present intern? I don’t think that 4x as long is that surprising

I agree with this. Are you 4x as experienced as them? It sounds like you are probably 10 or 20x as experienced. So it shouldn’t be surprising it takes them 4x as long.

I also think asking for a “quick description of a company” is pretty vague. For someone who doesn’t have experience in your field they will have no idea what you want and so that’s why they spend a lot of time looking for other examples.

Yes they should have asked you for more specific instruction, but you are only available for one hour per day and not other times (if I read you correctly). So a bit hard to ask for clarification.

When you are very experienced in a particular job it is easy to forget how long everything took and how hard it was when you were just starting out. I remember being given jobs to do as a junior lawyer and being told “oh this’ll take less than an hour” when in reality just tracking down the documents I would need took an hour in itself, never mind reading them and doing and writing up the analysis they wanted.

she received lots of training and has a degree from a top London university and has worked at a desk job, a receptionist, social media content creator, and a publisher for a few years before that.

I do blame myself for this. I hate confrontation and need to find a way to deal with this professionally. I have tried many goal setting tasks, but either the task was very misunderstood which was confusing to me e.g. schedule a months worth of instagram content. I had a document stating a post every three days, this is where we get our images from, these are the sorts of captions we write etc- I gave her a 2 side of A4 brief with lots of details and examples to avoid confusion. I thought she could do this in 8 hours but she insisted she needed 3 days and would also help develop a strategy in that time - fine, I really don't have alot of experience with instagram and thought if she would be able to do something amazing in that time it would be worth it. After 2 days she had done 'research' on other instagram profiles and captions and has a long document of links to instagrams and specific captions she liked. By the end of the third day she had even more links and 4 posts scheduled. Her 'strategy' was to find other instagrams that got it right and copy them. I tried to give her focus and say 'its great to look at others for inspiration, but it's most important that we have a full months worth of instagram content by the end of the three days and a strategy moving forward. I love the 4 posts she created, they were much better than I could do. But it wasn't what I asked. I asked her what can I do to help her meet her deadlines, and her response was that she 'needs more time to research'. I told her we didn't have a lot of time as there was a lot more work that needs doing and she suggested that she cut down the task so only produce a weeks worth of instagram posts in 3 days instead. I just had no idea what to say to that.

I just want to be the best boss I can, I have had so many terrible ones. I have been too much of a push over though. I do need to go on one of those courses.

The reason I cant call 3 times a day Is because I work noon until five at my side job.

I am also too busy to micro manage or worry about this, I just really need someone reliable who gets work done without too many questions.

I don't expect she's lazy, I expect she's distracted. I expect probably due to my casual tone she thinks its ok to go on a slightly longer lunch break and to browse Facebook every now and then, and it may be my fault for not being firm enough.

Overall I think you are BU because how do you have an intern in a lockdown?! An intern shadows you and you show them everything and they learn the job. You cannot do this online. It's a training scheme essentially not a proper job.

I think you think you have employed an assistant, which you haven't. But you are asking them to do things on their own, of course you are quicker at doing it, you are the expert, they are a beginner.

Either you need to offer them a proper training programme where you commit to spending time with just them to get them up to speed before expecting the lone tasks.

Or end things now and employ a remote assistant to help you if there is surplus work.

I don’t think you understand what an intern should be!

You want to contract out so vial media work that you can’t do yourself... and you want to pay £10 an hour for that?!

You love her work, you admit it’s better than you could do. For £10 an hour - and presumably no training (the point of internship?) it she’s better at it than you and you don’t don’t have a lot of experience of Instagram.

What do you actually mean by “goal setting”? Goal setting isn’t you saying, “I want x amount of content by Friday”. Goal setting is her telling you no, that’s not realistic! Which she has.

I’m not sure a mere 2 sides of A4 is a detailed brief either - though hard to tell without seeing the work.

I’m sorry, but it sounds like you want a social media manager for peanuts and don’t know how long content creation and strategy development take.

As for “too busy to micro manage” - why do you call this an internship instead of just a temp job? It’s not an internship at all!

You're not actually working when she is and you're asking her to do stuff you've not done before or are competent in yourself? Agree she's not an intern, she's just a poorly paid Subcontractor

OP what's your remit in terms of the intern? Did you think they could do your work for you instead of learning about the job they are charged with. have you even seen intern's remit?

Use a time tracker where they clock in and out and it screenshots what they're doing at certain intervals

I think she is trying to impress you with the quality for what she is doing at the cost of speed- at least she is producing quality - I've somebody doing something for me at the moment which has taken her a ridiculous amount of time and still isn't very good!

You seem to be giving her a choice about deadlines- you need to tell her what the deadline is and what you want by then and ideally have an interim deadline - and if she goes off track tell her. Different firms have different styles-I somewhere where writing a paragraph (3 lines summarising a non-issue) would generally take about 30 man hours - I also think that when you are new you so don't want to make a mistake that you overcompensate - often with research which defers the time you put pen to paper and also gives you someone/something else to blame if you got it wrong - ie if her company descriptions was very simular to how other companies have written their's its harder to say its wrong.

Surely the point of an internship is to learn, you'd be doing her a disservice if you didn't give her feedback to take away. I would suggest to her that she go on a time management course.