5 questions after job offers.

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1)What is an ordinary workday like here — in terms of working hours? I know some companies start very early and finish early, for instance. In some places everybody makes their own hours. How does it work here?

You have to know if the employer you’re considering joining is the kind of place where an ordinary workday starts at eight a.m. and ends at eight p.m. You have to ask them what constitutes a workday!

3)How do you handle communication after hours and on the weekends? At one of my jobs, I stayed in pretty close touch with my boss when we had big projects brewing, so we’d text and email on the weekend. At my last job we didn’t do much of that. How does it work here?

Don’t fail to ask this question and get a stuck in a situation where you have no peace because the office is always calling and texting you. That happened to our client Belinda, whose boss texted her from the ski lift line to ask her to revise a report. He also texted the note ‘I’ll call you when I get down the hill.’

Belinda didn’t stay long in the job after that, but she wished she had asked her boss about his expectations before he became her boss.

3)How do you handle time off requests for a person in this position? I don’t have any specific plans coming up but I wanted to find out how you deal with situations when somebody needs a few hours or a day off work, for instance. Can you tell me about that?

Some companies and some managers take time-off requests in stride and others cannot handle them. We had a client years ago who walked out of a new job before she even got to her desk. She asked a question in new-employee orientation about an appointment she had coming up.

She would have had to miss forty minutes of work at the end of the workaday during her third day on Monday job.
The orientation leader told her “It’s simply not possible. You have to be here.”

Belinda thought that was idiotic — obviously people had missed work unexpectedly before and the company survived, so there must be a way to deal with a forty-minute absence that becomes necessary before a new employee has accumulated paid time off hours.

The orientation leader said “Reschedule your appointment,” not realizing or, perhaps, caring that the appointment had to do with a critical family issue and wasn’t something our client could reschedule. She got up and walked out, instead.

Her manager called her and said “I would have worked something out – I have friends in HR,” but who wants to work in a place where a simple time-off request requires a manager to pull strings or sneak around?

4)How does your department communicate, and how do the various departments here communicate together?

The answer you want to hear to this question is “I have a weekly one-on-one with each person on my team, unless we’re all going crazy in which case we meet less often – it’s organic.

“We have a twice-monthly department meeting and of course we’re all talking and meeting together all the time. In terms of other departments, I go to a monthly manager’s meeting and we have a quarterly Town Hall for the whole team.

“We have a newsletter and our HR department does a great job of getting people together for lunch-and-learn sessions and that kind of thing.”

The answer you don’t want to hear is “I’ll tell you anything you need to know about the job. Our department communicates by email. You won’t have much to do with other departments, so don’t worry about that.”

5)How do people here grow their flames by trying and learning new things, supporting one another and in other ways?

The right answer to this question is some variation on “We teach each other. Everybody on the team has come here with a different kind of experience. You’re going to bring something new here also and we’re all excited to learn whatever we can from you. We’re excited to get to know you and help you, too.”

The wrong answer is “Huh?”

Do your best to steer clear of the vortex, and if you find yourself falling in, grab a cynical friend to help you.

Tell your cynical friend about every interview and every conversation you’ve had with the folks at your possible next employer, sparing him or her none of the details.

Your gut may be screaming at you right now, but you have to listen if you want to get its messages.

I want you to get a job, but not just any job that comes along. I want you to get a job that deserves you!




























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