I apologize if this isn’t allowed, but I wasn’t sure exactly where to put it. Just let me know if it’s inappropriate and I’ll delete. Thanks.
I’m a loner, so my life is basically just work and the internet. Two of my coworkers are among my favorite people in the whole world, but one of them doesn’t like the other one and will complain to me about how they don’t like them.
We work incredibly closely together…only a few feet apart for hours on end. Our job also necessitates that we frequently communicate with one another. In the beginning, I absolutely loved it and there was no conflict.
Now, I often get my one coworker complaining to me that the other is lazy. And I’m not going to lie, the “lazy” one definitely takes more breaks than everyone and doesn’t at all work as hard as the others. But that doesn’t really bother me because she’s a super incredibly nice and friendly person.
But over time it has bothered my hardworking coworker more and more and driven a wedge into what I would have once considered to be a friendship between the 3 of us.
It never gets to the point where there is yelling or arguments or anything, but it absolutely ruins the mood and then I hear about it later.
I interact with these people for hours on end every single day and I’m just not sure how to handle it. I’ve been struggling to know how to deal with it for months now.
To top it all off it gives me endless paranoia that the hardworking coworker secretly resents me and hates me too. This stuff never used to happen before, but know I feel like it’s all that happens.
I think you need to tell A that sharing this feedback with you won’t help B change, and that they need to address B directly or talk to their supervisor.
You can also say that sharing this feedback with you is putting you in an uncomfortable position, as you are friends with both of them, and you need it to stop. It’s perfectly okay to validate A’s complaints (“I understand why you feel the way you do”) so that A doesn’t feel like you are dismissing them. But that doesn’t mean you have to be in the middle.
Having spent many years in corporate life, I can tell you that one of the biggest blockers to people improving is that no one tells them there is a problem to begin with. Person B may have no idea they’re underperforming. And to be fair, I can’t tell from this whether their supervisor would even agree that B is underperforming; B may be doing just fine from management’s perspective, in which case A needs to let it go.
Good luck!
It’s actually a sentiment shared by many of my coworkers and B has gotten feedback from the supervisor about it in the past before. She doesn’t have any intent on changing tbh. I know that bit because she brought it up to me (not because I was calling her lazy).
I just don’t really personally care much about whether or not someone doesn’t work as hard as someone else…unless they are also a shithead lol. Which she isn’t so it doesn’t bother me. Or if she was maybe gone for like half the day I might care.
Fair enough. Sounds like A is going to have to decide whether they talk to B directly, complain to the supervisor that B still isn’t meeting expectations, or drop it. But keeping you in the middle isn’t going to solve the problem and it needs to stop. You can say that firmly but nicely and with validation. (The validation is important to maintaining your relationship with A.)
At the end of the day, this sounds like a failure at the management level. If B is known to be underperforming, it’s on management to either find a way to help B improve or replace B. Management’s failure here is hurting all 3 of you. A has a right to be pissed. B needs guidance or the boot. And you need to be free of this mess.