Trigger at Work
Work drama once in a while is always exciting but a never ending one? Ugh.. It’s such a pain in the ass. I came at work today feeling quite happy because everything’s going well with me. I slept pretty well and didn’t have much to do. First hour of the shift was fine. I had a small talk with M about how his training is going. Not long after, JL sent a screenshot on our group chat about our team lead, JM, nagging on an escalation from one of our stakeholders. It wasn’t directly a problem of mine but it triggered me somehow knowing that the workload is not equally distributed to the team and it’s been going on for months and they’re doing nothing about it. It came off as if she’s putting the blame to my colleague instead of acknowledging that there’s really a problem with how things are distributed among us. I was furious.
An hour later, JM scheduled an online team meeting at 12:30 AM. I already have a bad feeling that things won’t end up well knowing how emotional she can be and how resistant she is of feedback. Meeting started and as expected JM started nagging about this escalation of JL and trying to put the blame on us for not managing our time well. JL started explaining how overwhelming her workload is which caused her to make the error. As expected, JM cut her off and said that there’s really nothing they can do about it now and that JL should come up with an action plan instead. This is when things started to get heated. She then proceeded on raising another concern about implementing a new process which we think is really not efficient. Some of us tried to explain how hard it would be for us and that we have other important things to prioritize besides that “process”. As expected, she started cutting people off without even trying to understand where we’re coming from.
I decided to speak up and side with my colleagues this time. I unmuted my microphone and tried to explain my thoughts in the most professional way I can.
“I understand that we really need to provide such updates, however, I hope you can consider to not strictly implement us to send it first hour of the shift. There are other urgent matters we need to attend to during the first 4 hours of the shift such as urgent requests from stakeholders, the queue, etc.”, I said.
“It’s not also smart to send those updates without completing the action items on our end because they’ll just end up reaching back….”
SHE CUT ME OFF.
“I’ll end the meeting here. Send the updates first half of the shift. I’m not gonna accept any reasons”, JM said in a shaky voice.
One of my colleagues B then got disconnected. JM noticed it and started nagging about how some of us are being unprofessional by joining late or leaving early during meetings. JL asked B to rejoin the call as JM started nagging about unprofessionalism. Knowing B and JM’s history with each other, things went sideways. B started confronting JM as to why she is being called unprofessional. I do understand B‘s frustration on JM’s remarks because she just got disconnected for a couple of minutes and she’s able to rejoin the call right away. Internet connection can really be a challenge when working from home especially where we live. The argument went on for a couple of minutes until I stepped in and advised to end the call.
Everyone’s pretty tensed right now because of what happened. To be honest, I am still feeling kinda triggered until now. Worse things has happened before and I thought that everything’s already coming to an end. Obviously, it’s not gonna happen anytime soon. This is just too draining specially for someone like me who’s life only revolves around home and work. I might need a change of surroundings early next year if this continue to happen.