Weird situation here.
About 3 months ago I got a new boss. He's young-ish, early 30s. There's 3 people in my department. Myself, my boss, and the department head. The department head works remotely on the East coast. My boss and I are in California, at the company headquarters where there are about 60 people total.
My boss for the most part is OK except for his attendance and punctuality. Now, given, I could be wrong about this because I'm not privy to whether or not he's called in sick or declared a different start time, but for other reasons everything seems like he's severely abusing the fact that our dept. head cannot physically see him.
When he started he came in around 8:00 a.m. Rapidly that deteriorated to 8:15 a.m. (I'd say within the first 2 weeks). Now he doesn't come in until 8:30, and frequently 9:00. I work from 7:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., so to be fair I don't know when he leaves, but the start times are very erratic.
His lunches vary from 1.25 hours to 2 hours, with most of them being 1.5 hours. One time he was out for 1.5 hours, came back for 20 minutes, and then left for another 30 minutes. I saw him come up the lobby stairs, so I'm pretty sure he left the building for those 30 minutes.
Three times now he has been completely absent from work, once for half a day and two other times for an entire day. There has been no communication to me as to whether he was sick or at a conference (unlikely, although his position does attend conferences, it's like twice a year). I suspect that on these days he may be checking his e-mail remotely and then coming in only if someone has contacted him for a specific assignment. Voice mails are also forwarded to our e-mail accounts, so all he has to do is set up his mobile phone so that he can receive work e-mail on it. There is a company time-off calendar that records any absences, vacation or sick, and I know from this he is not reporting these days. And all 3 absences were on Friday or Monday, making it conveniently a long weekend.
For the most part I don't really care how he conducts his professional life, but I suspect this is eventually going to catch up with him. When somebody notices he is gone, they will come to me, the only other member in the department in California, and ask if I've seen him. At that point I would probably just give a factual, "No, I haven't seen him all day." But I also feel that eventually they'll suspect the problem is deeper and start probing further. At this point I'm stuck in a bad spot. If I tell them the truth and say that I suspect he's been abusive with his hours, then I create friction between him and I, and he gives me my reviews. If I don't say anything and senior management finds out the extent of things, then I'm in trouble with them. I feel the abuse of time is so big senior management probably will eventually find out.
The reason I don't do anything now is that I would have to bring it up to senior management. It is unlikely they'd just fire him as I haven't heard that he's doing poorly otherwise. They'd likely just have a talk with him, probably not even write him up, because they wouldn't realize the full extent of the situation not having observed it themselves. So that would leave me in a bad position with him.
Does anybody have suggestions on how to navigate this?
About 3 months ago I got a new boss. He's young-ish, early 30s. There's 3 people in my department. Myself, my boss, and the department head. The department head works remotely on the East coast. My boss and I are in California, at the company headquarters where there are about 60 people total.
My boss for the most part is OK except for his attendance and punctuality. Now, given, I could be wrong about this because I'm not privy to whether or not he's called in sick or declared a different start time, but for other reasons everything seems like he's severely abusing the fact that our dept. head cannot physically see him.
When he started he came in around 8:00 a.m. Rapidly that deteriorated to 8:15 a.m. (I'd say within the first 2 weeks). Now he doesn't come in until 8:30, and frequently 9:00. I work from 7:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., so to be fair I don't know when he leaves, but the start times are very erratic.
His lunches vary from 1.25 hours to 2 hours, with most of them being 1.5 hours. One time he was out for 1.5 hours, came back for 20 minutes, and then left for another 30 minutes. I saw him come up the lobby stairs, so I'm pretty sure he left the building for those 30 minutes.
Three times now he has been completely absent from work, once for half a day and two other times for an entire day. There has been no communication to me as to whether he was sick or at a conference (unlikely, although his position does attend conferences, it's like twice a year). I suspect that on these days he may be checking his e-mail remotely and then coming in only if someone has contacted him for a specific assignment. Voice mails are also forwarded to our e-mail accounts, so all he has to do is set up his mobile phone so that he can receive work e-mail on it. There is a company time-off calendar that records any absences, vacation or sick, and I know from this he is not reporting these days. And all 3 absences were on Friday or Monday, making it conveniently a long weekend.
For the most part I don't really care how he conducts his professional life, but I suspect this is eventually going to catch up with him. When somebody notices he is gone, they will come to me, the only other member in the department in California, and ask if I've seen him. At that point I would probably just give a factual, "No, I haven't seen him all day." But I also feel that eventually they'll suspect the problem is deeper and start probing further. At this point I'm stuck in a bad spot. If I tell them the truth and say that I suspect he's been abusive with his hours, then I create friction between him and I, and he gives me my reviews. If I don't say anything and senior management finds out the extent of things, then I'm in trouble with them. I feel the abuse of time is so big senior management probably will eventually find out.
The reason I don't do anything now is that I would have to bring it up to senior management. It is unlikely they'd just fire him as I haven't heard that he's doing poorly otherwise. They'd likely just have a talk with him, probably not even write him up, because they wouldn't realize the full extent of the situation not having observed it themselves. So that would leave me in a bad position with him.
Does anybody have suggestions on how to navigate this?
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