I Hate That So Much of What I Have to Say These Days is So Negative…

I am a “Director” in my little sometimes-struggling NonProfit, meaning not a “Manager”. I’m the senior staff member, and in this long strange “transition” I’m the only one of the now 3 full time staff who’s been here longer than a month. There are 3 part time employees 10-20 hours a week, the longest standing of which has been here since end of July.  And then there are a variety of independent contractors that provide services to the company but are basically around on a per-project basis. This is my third boss in four months, and it’s fair to say I’m grieving the other two in one way or another, but most particularly the most recent of them.

Yesterday was a pretty lousy day. NewBoss is angry with me because… oh it’s a pretty long story. But among the highlights are that she feels I have a bad attitude and that she feels “taken advantage of” by the fact that I’m in and out of the office as much as I am. My hours are odd at times and a strategy I’ve had against my Workaholism has been to try to keep track of my hours and “make up” extra time as it comes up. So, for instance, when I got called in for my supposed day off this week, I worked less hours one day later in the week. To this point, flexible hours has been one of the few benefits of my position and all the stress it causes me. I’ve been lucky to be in a job where I can schedule a doctor’s appointment one morning and not have to jump through hoops to clear it, because everyone knows that I will work several hours “overtime” in the long run. This isn’t working for NewBoss, which is her right to determine I suppose, but her intense reaction (considering we’ve never had a discussion about my hours or her expectations in general) and a few things she said greatly concern me.

She wants me to have more regular work hours (9-5 or 10-6 or something) no matter whether there was a late night meeting or event I was required to go to or not. She basically said that telecommuting isn’t really “doing work” and that if I have to “do some typing at home” its on my own time. The implication is that if I was using my time well in the office I wouldn’t have work to bring home. And that as a “Director” if one of my staff calls out on my day off and I have to cover for them all day, I still need to put in the additional hours above that.  I am a salaried, at will employee. So my question becomes, if salary means I don’t get overtime and am expected to come in above and beyond the traditional “8 hour day plus a lunch break,” is there no upper limit to what could be reasonable hours or workload?

One of her other issues is with one of my two assistants, J, who has a young daughter and is currently sharing a car with her husband because she has to save the money to get her car fixed. I hand-picked this assistant because she is nothing short of amazing and helps me out in innumerable ways. She comes in when she is sick, and she goes above and beyond with the tasks I assign to her. When I ask her to do something, I do not worry whether it will be done or done competently. But there have been times where her child care has fallen through, and so she has called me to see if there are possible tasks she could do from home, or in two cases brought her daughter to work with her. The other day it was raining and she was driving to the office from a mountainous area where it was more slippery than in Office’s City, and she called to say she was a little delayed because of traffic and safety but that she was on her way. NewestBoss has serious problems with all of this because it did not “look that bad” outside, and because she “raised two kids while working and never had any trouble.” I care about J and I’m protective of her in a way, but mostly the tenor of NewestBoss’ objections is what really bothers me. It seems like her view is that there aren’t other priorities in life, and that it’s reasonable to expect that J would choose to put her family after her job.  And when she says to me that the 50+ hours I worked last week aren’t that big of a deal, and that in fact she doesn’t consider time I spent subbing for an absent staff member, making phone calls on the way to the office, having business related lunches with potential partners, or typing up multiple reports on my laptop at home count as work done– that in fact she feels I’m trying to get away with something by NOT  WORKING ENOUGH… well, its been a difficult thing to process.

She wants to structure my hours, fine. She wants to define her expectations, fine. She thinks her lifestyle choices have worked for her, fine. But suddenly my struggles to create a life outside of work seem to have another obstacle, and I don’t know what I’m going to do.