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Mourning loss as a remote team

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Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#141

Post by olvy0 »

dvtrn wrote: post #88

Pete would ask to work more hours. He claimed he could use the money. He was a contractor remember Amidst the loss here, this line stood out to me and brings to mind all the terrible ways contractors are taken advantage of, or at least, treated and compensated vastly different than their "staff"/"full-time" peers who are often doing the exact same work . For fun, google the phrase "permatemp". E.g. I had a past job a…

That's awful.

I was a contractor myself, and I still work with contractors every day. I wasn't treated as badly as that, but I was not too happy with how I was treated either. I and my team lead try to go out of our ways to acknowledge and include all workers, without regard to their actual employers, in all the team's meetings and interactions, and acknowledging their contributions.

It's still not enough. Just last week, I found out that a team member is now considering to leave, and one of their reasons is being treated as "less worthy" by the higher-ups in my company. There was some internal confusion where they forgot to assign them an office, and since they're a contractor, HR ended up putting them in a somewhat remote office, away from the team, completely ignoring our protests.

The thing is, we (my team lead and I) don't know what to tell them, how can we convince them to stay after this. We're at a loss.

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#142

Post by cebert »

Sometimes I am amazed employers aren’t a little more sympathetic of personal situations as doing so can result in greater productivity (if that’s all firms care about). My dad was in the hospital this past September-November with complications from pancreatic cancer and passed away late November. My spouse’s father died from complications of multiple-myeloma the November before that. Needless to say this was a lot to process, and I really could have used a week or two off following my father’s death. In December, things start to slow down anyway but I didn’t have the vacation time left to take a break. Instead, I continued working but had a hard time focusing and dealing with the past two years. I’m finally starting to feel myself again in March and am becoming more productive. If I could have had a week or two off, I think I would have been in a much better mental state and it would have been better for me and my employer in the long run.

I recently had an ok performance review a few weeks ago, but it was difficult for me to hear some of the negative feedback considering the past year I’ve been dealing with my dad’s situation. That’s not to say the feedback wasn’t all fair, but it wasn’t the best timing when I was trying to get back to normal. My goal was really just to survive last year, not necessarily advance in my career or get a raise.

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#143

Post by simsla »

gcheong wrote: post #126

I don’t know if Pete was working from Scotland in which case he would have had access to NHS, but if not, then I’m all the more convinced that we need such a system in the US so nobody need depend on their company status to have access to what should be basic healthcare.

Unfortunately, NHS waiting times for mental health are abysmally long.

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#144

Post by _bfhp »

dvtrn wrote: post #88

Pete would ask to work more hours. He claimed he could use the money. He was a contractor remember Amidst the loss here, this line stood out to me and brings to mind all the terrible ways contractors are taken advantage of, or at least, treated and compensated vastly different than their "staff"/"full-time" peers who are often doing the exact same work . For fun, google the phrase "permatemp". E.g. I had a past job a…

In some time the future generations will come to consider this contractor/employee dichotomy with the same disgust we have for child labor. Same with surrogacy and many other things.

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#146

Post by dvtrn »

_bfhp wrote: post #144
dvtrn wrote: post #88

Pete would ask to work more hours. He claimed he could use the money. He was a contractor remember Amidst the loss here, this line stood out to me and brings to mind all the terrible ways contractors are taken advantage of, or at least, treated and compensated vastly different than their "staff"/"full-time" peers who are often doing the exact same work . For fun, google the phrase "permatemp". E.g. I had a past job a…

In some time the future generations will come to consider this contractor/employee dichotomy with the same disgust we have for child labor. Same with surrogacy and many other things.

Funny you say that, the entire reason I even opened my mouth was because I used to be on those contractor teams early in my career. Experienced it first hand. It sucked. I knew how much it sucked. I promised to be a better leader than the ones I had and saw.

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#147

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

kn0where wrote: post #137
vlunkr wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this the norm? I don't see why they wouldn't at least announce it an email. It's a bit of a weird topic for a work email, but it's certainly better than doing absolutely nothing.

Yeah, I’ve worked at a couple places where someone died, and it was definitely acknowledged by management and I feel like it would be incredibly weird not to. At one place, a guy who had left the company a few months prior died in a car crash. The guy had a wife and newborn baby. The CEO shared the news and the company made a contribution to a GoFundMe for the wife and baby. I think the company offered grief counseli…

Reactions from management and everyone else is typically different for suicides than for car crashes and other causes. In my experience, suicides are hushed and not discussed while car crashes and heart attacks are. It’s a terrible double-standard.

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#148

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

bqmjjx0kac wrote: post #70
vlunkr wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this the norm? I don't see why they wouldn't at least announce it an email. It's a bit of a weird topic for a work email, but it's certainly better than doing absolutely nothing.

Apathy is the path of least resistance.

Maybe if you are apathetic by nature?

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#149

Post by Macha »

jnwatson wrote: post #41

7 years as a contractor is abuse. It is abuse of the crappy enforcement of labor laws and abuse of the contractor. That you can have an integrated member of the team clearly be a second-class citizen, that’s just hard to fathom.

Worked in the vicinity of a guy in one of our US offices who flip flopped between employee and contractor a few times on his own initiative. He eventually settled on a FTE role when he became a manager and to my understanding that was a company decision that no we can't have a contractor manager.
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