Lara Meade

I recently read a post on Inc. titled “4 Ways That Employees Manipulate Bosses”. This article broke some news when it listed things like pretending to be busy, workers changing the subject when they don’t want to discuss something, or burying the lead in an email. O RLY? Hey genius, we also update our Facebook status and read gossip blogs when we’re pretending to read our work email. [Gasps and clutches pearls].

Coworker manipulation is far more prevalent than boss manipulation, mainly because employees outnumber their bosses, and tend to interact with each other more. Below is an open letter to bosses about the manipulation their employees hand out to each other on a daily basis.

Dear Bosses,

I know you just received some very disturbing news, that sometimes your employees manipulate you. But workplace manipulation is far more common among your employees. You have some employees that really hate their jobs so they make the rest of us pay.

Here is what we have to deal with on a daily basis:

Sometimes when your employees call in sick, they’re not actually sick. I know, I know, this is very disturbing. But I guarantee that this sucks more for your other employees than you. There is some poor schmuck in your office that will have to pick up the slack that day. 1 worker’s sick day=11 hour day for another worker.

Slacker employees. I don’t care how careful your hiring process was, I guarantee you have at least one employee who is either a complete slacker, or likes to “delegate” their responsibilities to someone else far too often. This slacker really only works 4 hours (if your lucky), and everyone else is working that much harder to make up for it.

Passing the buck. There is a probably another employee who never takes responsibility for projects when outcomes don’t meet expectations (many times the slacker employee is often the same one who passes the buck, it’s part of the slacker skill set).  So another worker, who may have shared some of the responsibility, is in danger of catching all the blame when the boss is on the warpath. Many times this person will not speak up because they don’t want to be a rat, so they’ll take the verbal beating.

Boss manipulation is the exception not the rule, and in a lot of cases it’s a survival tactic. On day when our office is short-staffed because someone calls in sick, or you managed to hire a lazy-ass, or there’s someone in the office playing the victim I need you to not be up in my junk. I just want to get through the day. Please don’t start assuming that if you see me running around like a chicken with its head cut off that I’m faking it. I might actually be, IDK, busy!

Warmest regards,
Your Employee