“hair extensions at work, can I ask for my old desk back, and more” plus 3 more Ask a Manager

hair extensions at work, can I ask for my old desk back, and more
my boss said I have “disconcerting heart-to-hearts” with my coworkers
my boss loves me but hates my coworker
I share an office with a smoker, and the smell is making me sick

hair extensions at work, can I ask for my old desk back, and more

Posted: 20 Feb 2018 09:03 PM PST

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

1. Hair extensions at work

I was asked not to wear hair extensions at work, in an casual office setting. My hair extensions are clip-in, but they’re real human hair, they’re professionally dyed to match my own hair color (natural color, no unnatural colors), and they blend in seamlessly. The only reason anyone can tell it’s not my real hair is some days I wear my hair short and other mornings I choose to place in my extensions. (Clearly I am not able to grow a foot of hair overnight.) This seems personal and rather ridiculous. The request came from a manager who had no reason other than stating, "Well, we all know it’s not real so it’s inappropriate.” Am I crazy or is this overstepping?

This is a little like the fascinating Michelle letter of last year!

I think it’s probably overstepping, although like that letter, it depends on how conservative your workplace is. In an office that placed a high emphasis on conservative appearance (some parts of law or finance, I suppose, but I’m just guessing), frequently changing from very short hair to very long hair and back again, from one day to the next, might be A Thing That Is Frowned Upon. In other offices, you wouldn’t get told not to, but it still might come across as you being overly focused on your appearance in a way that could be at odds with the professional image you want. Of course, you might decide you don't care. And in lots of other offices, it wouldn't matter one bit. (To be clear, this is only about the frequent switching it up; if it were just about extensions in general, it would be a non-issue, period.)

Ultimately, your manager can tell you to stop doing this, whether you or I think it's reasonable or not. But you can push back on that if you want to, although you'd need to decide how much capital you're willing to spend on it. (One addendum to that: If you're from a racial background where extensions/wigs/weaves are common and your manager isn’t, I think that changes the calculus, and in that case I'd spend more capital on this and explicitly point out the different demographic norms.)

2. Applicant made weird demands for interview timeline

In a recent period of hiring I came across plenty of slightly strange (and some more than slightly strange) things that applicants felt the need to include in their resumes or cover letters. None confused me more than the below, which to me reads more like a logic puzzle than a statement of availability. For context, this was at the very bottom of a four-page resume under the heading “Availability for Interview":

“I would be available for an interview only within a period of let’s say four days and preferably sooner, from the time of receiving the formal shortlisting email notice. This also means that I would not be available for the interview in case the email notice is sent to me earlier than four days prior to the interview date. The time periods include also weekends.”

I just have so many questions! It seems like the applicant wants as short a time as possible to elapse between being shortlisted and being interviewed, but I’m at a loss as to why. And why is four days the magic number? Am I missing something?

Even if it were more of a straightforward statement, I would find such a thing rather presumptuous on a resume. Maybe in a cover letter if your availability will be unusually limited in the weeks following applying for a job, but in a resume like it’s a blanket requirement of yours regardless of the timing of the application? It just seems off, or maybe that is overly rigid of me?

Noooo, this is quite weird. You are not being overly rigid.

I also like that he himself is very rigid but then says "let's say four days," as if he's just thinking up the number on the spot.

He is weirdly demanding and out of touch with the norms of humans, and you should reject him (but only within a period of let's say four days and preferably sooner).

3. Can I ask for my old desk back?

A year ago, I took a temporary role at another location in my company (same city.) It was always known that this role was temporary. While it was likely that I would return to my original role, that was never a guarantee.

When I started at the company, they were going through a big ergonomics push and they were encouraging new employees to complete a health screening that would then allow us to order supportive office chairs, better keyboards, etc. I did it for the chair, but they also allowed (and encouraged me to get) a sit/stand desk. This is just a small extra desk that fits inside the cubicles and can hold two monitors and not much else.

When I changed jobs, I was able to take my chair but not my desk because the place I was going to had a fancy new open floor plan where all of the desks were fully sit/stand. Eventually someone else took over my old cubicle as well as my sit/stand desk.

Now I’m going back to that job and I really want my desk back (it’s simple enough to move the desk from cube to cube.) I currently spend over half my day standing and I have terrible posture when sitting, so standing really helps my neck (which has issues due to a previous surgery.) It only helps because of the posture thing, so I don’t think this raises to the level of ADA accommodation. However, I feel kind of petty for asking, mainly because almost no one in that group has sit/stand desks. Soon after I got mine, they stopped allowing ergonomic furniture orders. Apparently, I just got really lucky with my timing of when I was hired.

My current thought is to simply ask the other employee if I can have my desk back, but not to push the issue if she says no. I’m also worried that even asking might make me sound petty, because she never had an option to order one. What’s the best way to approach this without coming across as whiny? I’m not always the best at avoiding social land mines.

Unfortunately, I think it's probably hers now and you don't really have dibs on it, just like you wouldn't if she had inherited your old office space or your old keyboard. It moved on when you moved on.

The most you could really do is to ask her — with genuine curiosity, not in a tone of possessiveness — how she's liking it. If she responds with enthusiasm about it, you definitely need to back off at that point. But if she says she doesn't really care for it or doesn't use it that much, at that point you could say something like, "If you really don't like it, I'd love to take it back and use it again."

4. When multiple people are selling Girl Scout cookies

I hope this is a pleasantly low-stakes question. Is there a general consensus about how coworkers should handle it when more than one wants to bring Girl Scout cookie order forms into the office? If there isn’t, what do you recommend?

We generally leave fundraising order forms in a common area, both for people’s convenience and to keep everything low-key. Should cookie-offering coworkers leave out their forms together, and communicate their hope that people ordering multiple boxes will split their orders? (Almost everyone orders multiple boxes.) Or should co-workers agree that one person will take the early orders and one take orders from the procrastinators? What’s a good way to avoid popularity contests and treat everyone equitably?

I pondered this and determined that I have no opinion on it! If anything, I'd come down on the side of being laissez faire about it and just letting people handle their order forms however they want, as long as they're being low-key about it and not pushing cookie purchases on their coworkers. Anyone have strong feelings to the contrary?

5. Using the STAR format for interview answers

I have a question about interviewing techniques. I recently made it to the very final stage of a lengthy hiring process for a great job. Unfortunately, I didn’t get the position. I asked the recruiter if there was any feedback she could share from the hiring team, so that I can make myself a more attractive candidate in the future. She shared that while the overall feedback was great, for future interviews I should be prepared to answer questions using the STAR format (wherein the candidate states the Situation or Task, the Action they took, and what the Result was).

The ironic part is, in preparation for the interviews, I did write out some STAR-format interview responses beforehand; I even took my written responses to the interview with me, in case I needed to refer to them at some point. If it matters, none of the interviewing managers asked me to respond in STAR format. They asked questions in a straightforward manner, like this: “Can you talk about a time when you worked well with members of another department of team?” and then gave me time to answer. Should I have literally said each cue word (‘Situation,” “Task,” “the Action was…” “the Result was…”) during the interview?

No, no good interviewer will expect you to do that on your own without any prompting, and it would come across a little strangely — like announcing "I am going to use an interview technique I read about now." It's true that using STAR-format answers is a very common piece of advice about interviewing, but it would still sound stilted to spell it out that way. The idea is that you give your answers in that format because it covers each of the key pieces of info an interviewer will want to hear and will produce stronger answers, but not that you need to have special allegiance to those particular cue words.

I suspect that the recruiter's feedback meant that you weren't giving your interviewers as much info as they wanted about some of those elements, or weren't conveying it clearly enough. A lot of candidates are pretty vague about exactly what their role was in things they discuss in interviews, and even vaguer about the outcomes or results. To me, the recruiter's feedback says that they wanted a clearer discussion of those things.

I've joined an academic research group about nine months ago for a PhD and am very happy here! The team is enthusiastic, we get along great, and also regularly have drinks after work or during weekends. In that group, I am directly supervised by the professor, but for anything more practical Fergus, a post-doc, acts as a mentor for me. He is about 10 years my senior, very focused, and doesn't generally communicate much with anyone, but I felt like we got along well and I've gotten a few nice interactions with him; he complimented my skills a few times, and when we were at a conference together he invited me out for dinner.

Recently I've won a quite prestigious award and our professor hosted a dinner at his house for the entire group to celebrate. So Fergus gave a little toast with the usual topics but at the end said (verbatim), "We're happy to have her around for the next three years and we're looking forward to many more of her disconcerting heart-to-hearts.”

That remark really stunned me, on top of it because everyone laughed at it and seemed to know what he was referring to! After some reflection, I think I know what he meant – I try to communicate clearly when something isn't working for me or also when I have made a mistake, which isn't really done in that group. There have been maybe five or six moments like this since I joined. For example, in my first month, I had to perform a new technique and I had asked Fergus beforehand to go through the steps with me before we got the samples – only that on that day, he wasn't around because he was at a consortium, which he hadn't told me about. I was stressed about performing this experiment alone and when he came in later in the evening I was quite curt. The next day I just casually told him "Hey, I'm sorry if I was a bit short with you yesterday. I didn't realize you were not going to be here in the morning and I was actually quite stressed because I had wanted to discuss the protocol with you before I got the samples." He promptly apologized and the matter seemed closed.

In another instance, a colleague was constantly asking me for opinions on inconsequential things while I was working and didn't pick up on any signs that I didn't want to interact. I then quite abruptly told her that I didn't have time to talk about this. On my way home I just popped into her office and said, "I didn't mean to shoot you down like this earlier – I didn't sleep well last night and was just tired and stressed. Hope you don't take it to heart!"

I feel like those interactions are actually really important and I've tried to be polite but direct about any issues that arise (or that I have caused). However, I haven't really heard this being done in the lab group and people instead usually complain behind a person's back. When I initiated this type of conversation, the reaction from everyone was always very positive and I feel it dissuaded what otherwise could have become a tense atmosphere.

So I guess my questions are: Is what I'm doing inappropriate? Those “heart-to-hearts” are always work-related and I'm never revealing anything private even though most of us are also friends outside of work (academia…). Those conversations don't feel overly touchy-feeley to me and I'm very casual about them so I didn't really think that they could be disconcerting to anyone! Should I ask Fergus or even our boss if they are truly uncomfortable or disconcerting? And if they are not intrinsically inappropriate but don't really fit with the culture of the group, what do I do? Do I adapt to the culture, find some middle way or do I keep doing what I'm doing?

I wrote back to this letter-writer and asked, "The two examples you gave were cases where it sounds like you kind of snapped at someone and later apologized. Are all the 5-6 times it’s happened that same basic pattern?"

The moments I think Fergus was referring to weren't exclusively instances where I had snapped at others and then apologized. For example, I also brought up that meetings for one of our projects were scheduled with extremely short notice (emails were literally sent out at 7 p.m. for meetings the next morning which require substantial preparation from some participants), saying something like, “Guys, I realize that the scheduling for those meetings has probably been done like this for a while now but I was wondering if there is a particular reason for it. I personally feel very stressed when I get an email in the evening announcing a meeting for the next morning. I am not able to prepare as well as I want on such short notice and I think our meetings are less efficient as a consequence. I think others might feel the same so I thought I would bring it up.”

I think it's maybe 60% me apologizing for being a bit snappy or not having done something on time and 40% me saying that something about how we do things seems suboptimal to me or isn't working out well for me (and then politely asking if it's done that way for a particular reason. If it is I never insist or push).

Okay! Here's what I suspect is happening: You're making your emotions central to work business more than you should, and that's what's standing out.

Certainly if you snap at someone, it's good to apologize. But that fact that it's happened more than once is worrisome. You shouldn't really be snapping at people at work at all, and in a lot of offices doing it as rarely as once a year would still be enough to get a reputation as being kind of prickly. So yeah, if it's happened several times in nine months, that's a lot.

And it sounds like you might be framing other things through an emotional lens that feels out of place in this particular office. Pointing out the problems with a 7 p.m. invite to a meeting the next morning is totally fine and reasonable. But — especially in a context where you've already shown less control of your emotions than others (the snapping) — saying “I personally feel very stressed when I get an email in the evening" might be contributing to an impression of you as more driven by your emotions than other people you're working with.

To be clear, we're all driven by our emotions to some extent! That doesn't change just because we're at work. But when you make your emotions front and center in your work interactions, that will stand out. (More on this here.)

It also sounds like when this stuff happens, you're openly attributing it to stress. There's a risk that you could be creating a reputation for being unusually stressed by the normal demands of the job. People can like you and enjoy working with you (and it sounds like they do!) and still see that as a significant negative. So that's a piece of this to pay attention to.

That said, your instincts to be direct about issues are great. Keep those! Just try to take your emotions out of those conversations, as far the specific language you're using when you talk about said issues. For example, with the last-minute meetings, you could revise it this way: '”I realize that the scheduling for those meetings has probably been done like this for a while now but I was wondering if there is a particular reason for it. ~~I personally feel very stressed~~ When I get an email in the evening announcing a meeting for the next morning, I am not able to prepare as well as I want on such short notice and I think our meetings are less efficient as a consequence. ~~I think others might feel the same so I thought I would bring it up.~~ Would there be a way to schedule these with more notice?”

Of course, it's also possible that this is all reading way too much into an off-the-cuff remark from Fergus that didn't really mean much. But based on what you've laid out, I think this might be what's going on.

I share an office with one office mate. We are the only two employees under our boss and we cover for each other (and two other employees in another department) when the other isn’t here. I’m six months pregnant and am planning on using all 12 weeks I’m allowed for my maternity leave this spring/summer. Since this would mean my coworker would need to do my job for three months, we were able to convince my boss and her bosses to hire in a temp — yay!

Luckily they were interviewing to replace a retiring employee, and we were able to get the second choice candidate to agree to come on to train with me and cover my desk while I’m on leave, with the possibility of being hired on to the company in some capacity when I return if it goes well. Awesome all around because we can use the extra person!

However. She’s a smoker. I’m pregnant and already am sensitive to smells and my office mate is prone to migraines. In the first two days, it got mentioned by many people, including C-level execs, that our office stunk. Our boss spoke with the temp about it because it's distracting and frankly, it was making me and my office mate feel not so hot. So she is storing her coat outside the office and isn’t smoking during work hours. She took it very well. Great, right? Well…

She still smokes at home and admitted to my office mate that she is only down from a pack a day to three-quarters of a pack a day. I’m training her so most of the time she is sitting directly next to me at my desk or at a small desk we have for her in our small office. I can sometimes still smell the smoke on her clothes, but she also is obviously trying to cover up the smell with lotion and perfumes and… Alison, it’s not good. She was out sick yesterday and now that she’s back today, my nose is burning and I have a headache. There is no way this isn’t related and I don’t know how I’m going to handle this for 12 more weeks.

This is her third week so it’s also too early to tell how she’ll work out in general, but I think she’ll be able to learn the job tasks fine enough to cover while I’m gone, but then my office mate has to share a small space with her that entire time. Plus, thirdhand smoke is a very real thing and can cause issues with small children and unborn children. I’m planning to talk to my doctor about this at my appointment next week. but it makes me very wary to work so closely with her and have her working at my desk space.

I feel like many I’m just being anxious and pregnancy crazy, but my office mate is feeling unwell and has expressed concerns, too. We’re also afraid that this may be coloring our opinion of her. We get along so well so we’re trying to make a conscious effort of including her and being aware that some minor issues may just be us adjusting to include a new person on our small team, but the smoking thing is making it harder, we think.

I feel like we don’t have a lot of options because she has to work in this office with both of us. So what do we do, or are we just being overly sensitive?

(Also, a quick note: I really don’t care if people smoke — everyone can make their own choices. My husband was a one- to two-pack-a-week smoker when we met but quit several years ago, which I’m thankful for as a non-smoker, but I feel trapped and overwhelmed and anxious in this small space with this strong smell! Maybe it’s first-time mom anxiety, but maybe not?)

It doesn’t sound like groundless anxiety — you're having physical reactions to the smell of the smoke. And many people find it unpleasant and physically uncomfortable to spend time in a small, enclosed area with a heavy smoker. This isn't just you.

And then add on top of that that you're pregnant and particularly sensitive to smells right now, and your coworker gets migraines, and that makes the situation even worse.

The fact that C-suite execs have commented on it and that your boss has already been willing to talk to your temp are promising signs that they'll take this seriously. At this point, I think you need to go back to your boss and say something like this: "Jane is doing good work, but the smell of smoke on her is so strong that I'm having a physical reaction when she's in our office space. I'm getting headaches and my nose has been burning, and I'm particularly concerned about thirdhand smoke because I'm pregnant. I know she's been trying to contain it, but my physical reactions aren't going away and I don't think I can continue to share a space with her. Is it possible to move her to a space where the smell won't be as much of an issue?"

Because you're training her, it might feel like physical separation isn't a possibility, but I'd urge you to consider how to make it work. If, for example, she had a guide dog and you were allergic to dogs, your office would find a way (or at least, in many cases they'd be legally required to, depending on the details) — like putting you in separate spaces with screen sharing and/or video calls.

If your manager seems vague or hesitant about what to do, you do have standing to push harder. If the situation doesn't get dealt with quickly, it’s reasonable for you to say, "I’m so sorry about this because I like Jane, but I can’t continue to share an office with her because the smell of smoke is making me physically sick. I can't work with a headache and burning nose all day, and I need to either work from a different space or have her work from one." (You could also offer to bring in documentation from your doctor, although a good employer won't require that.)

It might also make sense to have a very candid conversation with Jane herself about the problem. The lotions and perfumes she’s using to try to cover up the smell might be making your physical reactions worse, and if the two of you can talk openly about the situation, you could ask her to try temporarily eliminating those to see if it improves anything.

Some readers might be thinking, “Jane is a temp — couldn’t the company just replace her with a different temp?” But 29 states and D.C. have laws that bar discriminating against smokers in hiring (although some have exceptions for nonprofits and the health care industry), so whether or not that’s even on the table will depend on what state the letter-writer is in.

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