Fairness at work

I am struggling around fairness at work even though I know workplaces are really 'fair'. My management doesn't keep track of things and about half of my coworkers take advantage of it.

For example, I know at least 3 coworkers take vacation days that they don't have. They say they are taking a day off but never record it in our time reporting. It is extra vacation for them. Ethically, I would not do that. I have another coworker that disappears almost every afternoon for hours. Everyday is a vacation for him. Another worker forces others to get involved in his work. He feels his work is so important that everyone should have to be involved. It isn't more important and it is annoying because he is one of them that steals vacation.

I know I shouldn't pay attention to others and worry only about myself, but I struggle to deal with negative emotions such as resentment toward my manager and those teammates.

I feel for you, @Yzen, and I can most certainly relate to your predicament! It seems like the rules and policies in your workplace are very loose, and when time is not recorded and watched over by supervisors, people will definitely take advantage of it!

Unfortunately, I don't think anything can really be done because it's a matter of loose policies that you didn't design. Your management team would have to notice this and decide to clamp down on the employees with stricter policies.

In my workplace, all sorts of unfair things occur. I am the most senior on my team and the most efficient, which in their minds, translates to giving me the heftiest workload on the whole team, which isn't fair.

And everyone on my team, including my boss, goof off a lot of the time, distracting me from being able to do my work.

Most workplaces have unfair unwritten policies or unfair work cultures. Most workplaces function unfairly, I would say. At least in my experience.

Try to view it as you having a stronger work ethic than the others. Be proud of the work you do and of your work ethic. I am sure it shows. And maybe look for another job in the meantime.

Hugs to you!!!

Ugh, don’t get me started on this topic ha ha!

This was a huge problem at my past workplace. After they established production minimums, people would find any way to cheat to try and pad their production statistics. In one situation they were caught by our boss’ manager, but there were other underhanded things going on. Several of us knew it, but the people that were doing it were in the boss’s favorites club, whereas those who knew weren’t. So, there is no way she would have listened to us. She saw what she wanted to see in terms of who was supposedly good and who wasn’t. Those of us who actually took the time to do real work often had lower production statistics as a result, because it takes time to do proper work on a project. We were often in the hotseat, threatened because of our lower statistics. It was terrible. Very demoralizing.

I was pretty lucky that this was my first really bad experience like this. But, yeah, it happens at times and there’s usually not much that can be done. Take some solace in the fact that you are not alone. Many managers will ignore what is going on, especially if, as was the case with my former job, the numbers look good because of it. I guess all you can do is document that you are doing your work to the best of your ability.

My husband’s boss does the same with vacation days at times. She’s a government employee, so it’s very hard to fire her even though they caught her on a few occasions. Her managers tried to take disciplinary action to fire her but they were unsuccessful due to some problems with how the process was handled. So, she’s still there and other people have to pick up the slack when she’s not around.

That is my experience too. I think most workplaces have an element of unfairness. At my last workplace, there was a different form of unfairness. I had a manager that promoted members of the team because they were more outgoing and social rather than based on skills and competence. That is too common in the workplace. The manager was shocked when I quit.

I wish I could learn to 'let it go' when it comes to fairness. It isn't healthy for me to feel resentment and get irritated at coworkers. I definitely don't need another source of anxiety. I have to learn to not worry about them.

That is great advice. Thank you!

It surprises me how easy it is for people to get involved in underhanded things. I have seen that at my company too. The way work is measured can becomes a dirty game for some. We have managers that look make themselves look good because they do underhanded things to get their numbers up. Those things could hurt the company, but that doesn't matter to them.

I don't like the company and want to work somewhere else. I do like what my job gives me. I have good benefits. I like the work at times. And, having a manager that doesn't pay attention does have the benefit of not being micromanaged. I think I will reach a point where I start applying for a new job.

The worst thing of it all was that the cheaters were rewarded not just with praise, but with financial bonuses. And the worst of them was always praised by our boss. She was even asked to give a presentation about her methods (which I am sure weren’t her real methods, she didn’t talk about how she cheats, obviously).

Basically, we had to do updates of different types of investment projects. You have to make a certain number of attempts to get information. If you don’t find anything, then there was this boilerplate language you could use to indicate that no new information was found. Then you were supposed to document the attempts to get information. Anyways, five out of six times on average this woman supposedly didn’t find anything. So, either she was doing it half-assed, not making all the attempts and then lying about it, or, she was really bad at her job. But since the “no information” updates count as an updates, she had high numbers. I am sure it was because she was making minimal effort. Either way, she sucked at her job – she was a researcher that couldn’t or didn’t do research. Of course, the clients suffered since they are paying money for updated information.

In another situation, there was one sector that was much easier than the others. Basically, you could take a press release and just copy/paste the information into 20 or 30 different projects. Boring as hell, but it gives you consistently high production stats. Even so, the minimum production goal was the same as for the rest of us. The woman that worked with that sector always got a double bonus for this. Many people expressed that this wasn’t fair, but of course it fell on deaf ears. She was eventually promoted to editor (with no editorial experience) due to her “stellar” production.

This bothers me a lot too. I see all of what you guys mentioned here at my own work place. It’s hard to ignore it and it’s hard not to feel resentful. I feel better about myself for not doing those things but there are definitely days I ask myself why I bother caring about doing the right thing when I see others being rewarded for bad behaviors.

Wow, that is so unfair for that woman to get the double bonus for working in the easy sector.
That reminds me of one place I worked. They had an annual safety award (it was bonus money) for teams that had no safety incidents. I worked in the office where paper cuts were the worse that could happen, so we always got our safety bonus money. The teams in the field hardly ever got the bonus. Things aren't as safe the field. Without them, us in the office wouldn't have jobs. I bet they had resentment towards us.

That sounds like a similar situation Yzen. At my former workplace there was definitely a lot of resentment in my department that the woman who had the easiest job of all received about 30% more pay (due to the double bonus) over the majority of us who didn’t qualify for any bonus.