How do I handle malicious coworker making work unbearable

Question

I recently started working for a small team. At the same time company hired another person for the same position. We were meant to form two person team, because our competences are complementary. That's what our manager told us.

A couple of weeks later it was clear to me that my coworker's skills are not fit for the role at all. Every task needs to be revisited by me (that's what my manager requested considering my education) and all errors needs to be corrected. Quality of my coworker's work is bad to the point I prefer to do it on my own instead of correcting mistakes. Right now they are doing only small tasks that take way longer than they should. Situation wouldn't be bad, but we are treated as a team and all successes and mistakes are assigned to us as a whole (by the team and manager), not individually, where it would be clear I am overburdened. On top of that, there are a lot of small details in their behavior such as: "stealing" internal communication in a way that it looks like they are committed and hardworking. Their behavior made some of the co-workers to be mean to me - they are thinking we are friends and we are not.

I tried to enforce some task assignment, so both of us would be fully accountable for a part of the job, but manager said they are interested only in effects, not who did it. I tried explicitly stating that I did the whole task, but it's overlooked every time. I can clearly see that the problem is more complex than my coworker's behavior, but their actions exposed what's wrong with the company. Manager themselves stated that team spirit was better before we joined.

I am planning to change industry in a couple of months for other reasons, but I would like to work where I am with a respect to the job I am doing. How can I deal with such situation where I can't really count on my manager, first person I would go when I can't resolve problem on my own? I like the tasks I am assigned, but I would like to be appreciated for them. Also I don't like that someone's behavior is worsening my relations with others.

Answer 1

Keep in mind that fairness isn't the metric for job duties

In other words? Just because it's unfair that your coworker is doing extremely little doesn't actually matter in terms of your responsibilities.

In other words, do what your boss asks of you. Keep your own ticketing, keep your own trail of what all you've accomplished. If you were going to be there for awhile, there are two general possibilities:

• Your coworker eventually starts pulling their weight.
• Your coworker is eventually replaced by your manager

I mean, it's likely your boss will eventually be called to task for having a low performing team. And when your boss starts to address it with the two of you, and you've got your tasks-completed list that you've been doing, it'll be obvious that your coworker is the dead weight.

But... you're leaving in 2 months. So don't even worry about it. Just do your job, do what your boss asks of you, and look forward to the new job.

Answer 2

What seems to be the issue here is lack of proper management (and tools). Any sensible project manager will resort to some form of tracking so that by end of the day (figuratively), they can loo into the contributions made by each of the team members. While it's true that most of the cases, it's the overall outcome that matters, however, there are scenarios where the manager should (MUST?) know the individual roles and responsibilities, the weak and strong points, the contribution and shortcomings etc etc, on a per-person basis.

As you also mentioned, your manager refused to listen to your version and address the problems, it's unlikely the're interested in any other advise on proper management - however, should you have the chance, the best way would have been to propose to introduce a work tracker (Like Jira/Trello), where activities can be assigned to individuals and accomplishments can be entered. Over a period of time, the data in the system will make it clear about who did (or did not) what part, and how much of the work was handled by whom.

In current situation, I'd second your decision - find a new job (i.e., manager).

Answer 3

If you have been told that your skills are complementary then that means your co-worker is expected to do parts of the task that you are not expected to do, and you are expected to do the parts of the task that they are not expected to.

To be clear, 'complementary' in this situation means your job and your co-workers job are not the same. They may be at the same level, under the same boss and on the same team, but you are you are doing two different jobs within the team. Understanding this may well help you understand why there is a conflict here.

If for instance one of you is a designer and the other a coder, I would not expect the designer to code anything other than the bare minimum to get it to look the way it needs to look, with the coder fleshing out the details, back end, and implementing best practice for long term maintainability.

If you are waiting for them to complete their part and then tearing it down and rewriting it, there is probably a communications problem here. It is possible that they are having trouble with the coding aspect, and your help at an earlier stage could make things go much faster.

By working with them rather than being antagonistic towards them, you should be able to help them understand why you prefer things to be done in a certain way and get rid of the large amounts of rework you have to do.

Remember that different people work in different ways, and for any system other than the most trivial, coding is about communication more than it is about bashing out lines of code.

You may also want to check you biases. The fact that you make unnecessary references to both your co-worker and your boss' gender suggests that you may have an issue with working with and for women. It is not always the case, but it may be worth a little self reflection on your attitude to women in the workplace.