I’ve been at my job for about three months. My department has six people, including the department head. We have a weekly meeting scheduled for Monday at 11am (our standard office hours are 10am-6pm).
Since I started, the department head, John, has never been on time to this meeting once. Typically, he’ll send an email sometime between 10:55 and 11:15 letting us know he will be in at 11:30, and then he walks in anywhere from 11:30-11:45. Sometimes he’ll send an email rescheduling the meeting for 12 or 12:30, but he is sometimes late even to that meeting. Sometimes we don’t get an email at all, and he just arrives at 11:15 or later. He always apologizes for being late, but in a very perfunctory way.
We can’t start the meeting without John, so every Monday at 11, the rest of us gather in the conference room and wait. Sometimes if the meeting is rescheduled significantly, we’ll disperse and come back later, but most often we just sit there and wait for him.
I find this whole dynamic very irritating and it makes me feel like my time is being disrespected. I’ve floated my concerns to my colleagues, but it seems like everyone else enjoys using this time to catch up socially, with one person saying this is the best part of their week.
I get the sense that I might have a higher workload than my colleagues, but it could be that I’m still adjusting to the new job. On high-pressure days, I’ve started bringing my laptop to the conference room so I can do work while we wait, but it makes me feel like an anti-social weirdo since no one else does this.
Plus, this fall I’ll be supervising a college intern and I’m already starting to stress about how to explain this dynamic to her. Even if I decide there’s nothing more I can do, I don’t want her to come away with the impression that this is just how workplaces are.
I’ve brought all of this up gently with my direct manager (who reports to John). She let me know that John is recovering from a recent surgery, and that she expects the issue will resolve itself when he’s fully recovered. However, I talked to a different colleague who told me that while this issue has been more egregious in the last few months, this general pattern has been going on for at least a year.
Is there anything else for me to do or do I just have to accept this weirdly entrenched dynamic? I feel like a stick in the mud for being the only person bothered.
(A side note that may not be relevant but adds to my frustration: John is a man in his 60s and the rest of us are women in our 20s and 30s.)
