Boss continually calls employee outside of work hours, schedules 30 minute meetings after the workday is over: 'I’ve received calls from him at 1am before'

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  via Mushvig Niftaliyev

• “My new boss keeps calling me outside work hours and it’s making me want to quit”

  About three months ago, my old manager left for another company, and this new boss took over our team. At the beginning, he actually seemed pretty decent, polite, capable, and very detail-oriented. The handover process went smoothly and there were no major issues.

  But after everything settled into his way of doing things, it slowly started to change. He often asks for a quick meeting right before the end of the workday. Those meetings usually run less than 30 minutes, so technically it’s not a lot of overtime, but it’s enough to mess up everyone’s schedule and make it hard to leave on time. Since it’s not that long, no one really says anything.

• Nobody wants to be the bee in anyone's bonnet and start drama over something small. But, maybe it's just me, but tacking 30 minutes onto every single workday with no overtime is not a small problem. That's a pretty big and clear crossing of boundaries that needs to be addressed. Nobody should be intimidated into not complaining because they fear they might lose their job. This is no way to run a business, and it's no way to keep your employees happy. But the boss in this story didn't seem to understand that, and wanted their employees to suffer in return.

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  via Unsplash+ (Ahmet Kurt)

  _{Image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.}

• What really stresses me out is that he calls outside of working hours. I’ve received calls from him at 1am before. I didn’t pick up, and he followed up with a message telling me to reply as soon as I wake up.

  It’s not like we haven’t tried to say something. A few of us, including me, have politely asked him not to call during off hours. His response was basically: if he calls, it means something needs to be handled, and if we don’t pick up, he’ll just message us instead.

  One of my coworkers is more straightforward and actually pushed back harder, and they ended up getting into a conflict. About a week later, that coworker was let go and replaced. After that, everyone else just kind of stopped speaking up.

  He also assigns work on weekends pretty often. If you don’t do it, he’ll bring it up in Monday meetings and criticize you in front of others.

  For me personally, weekends are already tight because I have a small side business, I run a little online store on Genstore and I need to operate social media, so my free time is limited. His requests really mess with my plans, but I still try to get things done anyway.

• Your free time is your free time, and you should protect that with everything you can. You already get so little of it if you work full-time, so letting anyone encroach on it is a no-go, even if it's your boss. Especially if it's your boss. It sounds like they need to be sat down and explained how work-life balance operates. But with a power dynamic at play, that is a tricky road to cross. Keep reading to see how this employee handled it. And chime in in the comments to let us know what you think they should have done in this situation. There is no right answer. 

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  via Unsplash+ (Ahmet Kurt)

  _{Image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.}

• I know some people might wonder why we’re all putting up with this. The main reason is that the pay here is actually quite good, and the benefits are solid too. Honestly, aside from this boss, the job itself is not bad. He also has some other issues, but it’s hard to explain everything.

  Recently, I’ve started to feel like he’s targeting me a bit. I get assigned more work than others sometimes, and the way he speaks to me isn’t very respectful. I’ve been dealing with this for about three months now, but it’s getting harder to tolerate.

  My side business makes around 30% of my full-time income right now, so I’ve been thinking about whether I should quit and try to live off that plus my savings for a while. But at the same time, it feels risky to leave a relatively well-paying job just because of a bad manager, especially since the job market isn’t great right now.

  Not really sure what the right move is here. Would appreciate any advice.

  -u/Objective-Feed7250

• 
  via Vitaly Gariev

  _{Image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.}

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