No matter how hard you work or how good you are, there will always be someone out there that doesn’t like you, your style or your work product. Identifying the signs of when a bad relationship at work is moving towards the end of your employment can allow you to prepare and, in some cases, prolong and protect your employment. Below are 7 signs that you might need to start planning and strategizing:
- Your job duties are slowly being reassigned. This could also be a sign that you are being prepared for a promotion and need to delegate more. However, if you are not getting any new responsibilities in place of the redirected duties, you should at least consider the possibility that your employer has other plans.
- You are being excluded from meetings directly related to your job duties. Of course, sometimes this is just a matter of an employer delegating resources, but if this has never happened before and is now becoming a regular occurrence, it might be time to start taking some actions to protect yourself or, at a minimum, considering your options.
- You are being “written up” for infractions that are either unilaterally applied or never previously enforced. If you are truly violating office policies, you might actually deserve the “write-ups”. Analyzing and acknowledging your own behavior will ensure that you avoid the understandable paranoia that might set in after reading this post.
- No one in the office makes eye contact with you anymore. If this was always the case, you likely just work with people who socially awkward. And, that is ok.
- You have that uncomfortable feeling every time you walk into the office. Don’t underestimate the power of your gut. Most people feel the end coming on long before it happens, but it seems easier to ignore it rather than to take action. Keep in mind it is always easier to find a job from a job. There may be ways to insulate yourself and prolong the job so that you can slide into the next opportunity.
- You are training your replacement. We see this one often. The new guy/gal comes in. Maybe he/she is younger. Maybe he/she is friends with the boss. You are asked to train him/her. After a few weeks you start to notice that the only things this person is learning are your responsibilities. Again, this could be a sign you are moving up, but it could be a sign you are moving out.
- You have been put on a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) without warning. This is another situation where you should carefully analyze your behavior before jumping to any conclusions. You should also analyze the timeline leading up to the PIP. What happened to lead you to this place? After giving this some thought, prepare a well-reasoned response. When we help clients with this aspect of employment, they often want to leave any way. It’s how they leave that they want to control.
This is definitely not legal advice, but we often help clients figure out how to respond when they sense they are being pushed out. Most of the above could just be innocuous meaningless “stuff” that is happening because of some other organizational shift. However, being prepared is almost never a bad thing.