What to do when co-irker not Doing their job affects yours

financialdiva · December 2013

I am really irritated now. The "admin" in our dept has worked for the director for 10+ years. They are super close and he would never say anything to her.

She used to be really good, but this year, she went through a divorce and all her work feel apart. We have been cutting her slack all year. Pitching in to help A LOT. Well, she has dropped the ball again today. I have a lot of stuff to work on today that is due with major financial impact on the company. She called in and isn't able to mail out some of my work that is also due today that I gave her TWO weeks ago. She has been sitting on it for two weeks! She's not sick, she was out yesterday and is too tired to come in today.

WTF? So what do I do? Drop the ball on my work to do admin work? Or do I say no, sorry too busy and look like a bitch who is not a team player?

I am not the only one who notices it, the others in my dept are pissed. I plan on going to my boss today to discuss, but she is unlikely to do anything bc even if she goes to her boss, the director, he won't do shit either.

So what do I do? If the directors boss, a SVP, knew the shit she has been pulling this whole year, she would be gone. I can't keep working like this and picking up her slack, none of us can. I am barely getting by doing my work, I can't take on yet another person responsibilities, nor should I have to! It's not in the best interest of the company to pay me the salary I am getting to do admin work! Not saying I am above it, it's just that my time NEEDS to be and is demanded else where.

Sigh, vent over.

financialdiva · December 2013

I should add that she is not busy with work. She comes in late, leaves early, disappears with another male co-worker for long random times during the day. And when she is here, she is on match.com the whole time.

So frustrating.

FemShep · December 2013

Start documenting. Provide explicit details and examples of how her work problems are directly impacting the company.

In the short term, go to your boss, and ask for additional support from another admin because of the time-sensitive nature of the work. And frankly, it won't hurt if you need to pull in support from other teams so people outside the Director's chain of command are impacted (and raise a fuss accordingly).

cecilyandgautam · December 2013

I had a problem with this sort of thing earlier this year, although my coworker didn't have any major life crisis at the time, at least not that I knew of. I had a few conversations with him directly at a peer level - sitting down and planning out who's going to do what for an upcoming deliverable, writing it out in email afterwards. When he did follow through and do his work, I let him know it was a big relief for me and I was better able to tend to my tasks knowing that he was doing his. When he dropped the ball, I didn't address it with him, mostly because he was just simply not available - he was unexpectedly out of the office for an entire month during which *we* were supposed to be incredibly busy, but in the end, it was just me carrying it all.

When he directly negatively effected my work, I told the first level supervisor about the incident and asked for his help. That supervisor was not particularly interested in the issue since he cared more about other deliverables at the time. When I found myself having to take work home to make up for my coworker's absence, I went to the next level up - our director - and told her about how my work and productivity was taking a hit because of the situation. I posted here about it and you all were very helpful - encouraged me to focus on what specific deliverables were delayed or of lower quality because of the situation. That's what I did and my director reassigned some pieces of our portfolio so it was easier to differentiate my deliverables from his and that really helped motivate my coworker to take more care in his work - it would be him, and only him, on the line if he failed. He's much better now.

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