Dear Prudence,
I’m writing about how to deal with Slack bullies at work. Background: I joined a new company about six months ago, to do program management on a huge new contract for them. While the contract was already up and running, they were not honest with me about the level of disorganization of the project and the maturity of their company in general. The entire company was remote, and the onboarding was really tough. Even six months in, I am regularly discovering gaps. Most of the project team is wonderful. While the project is insanely stressful, the team has a positive, collaborative, can-do attitude. The finance team, on the other hand, makes me cry every single month when client invoicing rolls around. The project finances have been chaotic, but rather than working together to resolve problems when they come up, the finance team seems to treat this as if I am personally responsible for the chaos. They refuse to speak to me on the phone, only communicating via Slack.
On Slack, they never send private messages when there is an issue, which is my default. They send complaints on a channel with many senior leaders. When one person sends a complaint, the other two upvote it with the giant red up arrows, even when usually they don’t know the details at all. If the complaint is valid, and I apologize, they never say thank you or upvote my comments. When I say thank you, which I do often, they never upvote, they never respond, and they never thank me. They never admit their own errors; rather, the minute I ask for their help to resolve something they did wrong, which I try to do privately, they immediately complain that if we didn’t make it so confusing, it would all work out, etc.
Frankly, I am exhausted at this mode of operation. I don’t mind stressful work at all, as long as I know we’re working on it together. I am the only person below a senior director on my team dealing with finance, and I feel like the whipping boy. Is this the way Slack is supposed to be? How should I handle this? I’d love to ignore Slacking with these guys, but it’s literally the only way to communicate with them as they refuse to talk by Zoom!
—Too Old to Be Bullied