Bust-ups and burnout: Let our experts help you deal with workplace conflict
Perhaps you are burnt out due to an increasing workload? Or maybe you are considering leaving your company altogether due to a drive to return to the office.
We want to hear from you about any work-related issues you want to put to our panel of experts.
We have received many queries on working from home, detailing unique challenges in having to spend more and more time in the office, or dealing with the isolation felt by some while working from home. We want to hear more.
READ MORE
Has your employer called for a greater presence in the office? What effect has this had on you? You might have found that
hybrid working arrangements
have led to a collapse of workplace relationships and friendships.
Other queries have spanned private and public pensions, feeling overqualified for specific roles, inappropriate behaviour in the office, or
being the subject of allegations of misconduct, resulting in suspension
.
Work-related stress and burnout queries are coming in at an increasing rate, which experts say are on the rise. Have you experienced these?
Perhaps you are unhappy in your current role and want to see what else is on offer, particularly in this employees' market in a country at near full employment.
Conflict arising from hybrid working arrangements
, which can often result in allegations of workplace bullying, is also on the rise, according to our panel of experts. Have you experienced such conflict and want to know more on how to handle it?
Maternity-leave related queries
and parental leave worries,
flawed internal grievance processes
, and recruitment and promotion-related queries have also been dealt with by our panel of experts.
Alongside employees, managers and employers grappling with a sometimes unhappy workforce have sought advice on navigating hybrid working arrangements, challenges in retaining talent and
even handling social gatherings outside of the office
.
Finding new ways of coping with conflict is an ever-present challenge, as even very experienced people in charge of their career trajectory will often find themselves coming home each night with a tale of woe to offload on their partner.
The intensity of such experience is clearly often worsened as people take on more responsibility through promotion and years spent in a particular working environment. But people at the start of their careers can easily find themselves in even more testing environments.
This column has sought to specialise in finding new ways to effectively bypass or solve such issues, and readers have proven hugely interested in how peers approach such scenarios, how they would themselves react in these situations, and deal with perceptions of blame.
A remarkable example of workplace conflict involved
a HR executive suffering from burnout
- a phenomenon such staff are typically supposed to solve, not get caught up in.
Please use our attached form to send in any workplace queries that you may have. We do everything to ensure your details are anonymised where necessary in published responses. We seek expert responses from the most relevant people to ensure clear-sighted, accessible advice.
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Your work questions answered: If offered another job during maternity leave, what are my rights for taking the rest of it?
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Please limit your submissions to 400 words or less, and please include a phone number.
Your name and contact details are kept confidential and will only be used for verification purposes. Any details about your employer will also be anonymised.
Please note we may not publish a response to every submission we receive.
This column is not intended to replace professional advice and only questions selected for publication can be answered.
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Irish Times
3 hours ago
- Irish Times
US right-wingers fear Superman's woke ideology. Trust me, guys, you'll be grand
Kellyanne Conway , former senior counsellor to Donald Trump , was recently on Fox News objecting to the supposed wokeness of James Gunn's Superman . 'We don't go to the movie theatre to be lectured to and have somebody throw their ideology on to us,' she bellowed. Trust me, Kellyanne, you will be grand. You can attend the big stupid superhero flick with no fears of encountering spittle-flecked agitprop. Few will confuse it with a social-realist rebuke in the style of Ken Loach or with Maoist propaganda of the Jean-Luc Godard school. Not since the McCarthyite witch hunts have right-wing commentators worked so hard to find subversive material in Hollywood pabulum. The stakes are now much lower, but the noise is much louder. There are so many more platforms from which to shout. The paranoiacs have so many more deranged friends at the head of government. [ Superman review: Utterly charmless. And as funny as toothache Opens in new window ] Another of this week's film stories (we'll keep you in suspense for now) puts the silliness in perspective. There is a sense that the current spat is a playground game – one in which Gunn seems happy to participate. 'Superman is the story of America,' he told the Times. 'An immigrant that came from other places and populated the country.' READ MORE There should not be anything controversial in that. The notion of Superman, refugee from the planet Krypton, being an immigrant, is far from a new one. In a recent article for the Hollywood Reporter, Andrew Slack and Jose Antonio Vargas recalled a campaign they launched in 2013 that asked Americans to reveal their immigration stories while declaring 'Superman is an immigrant'. Batman was the borderline fascist vigilante; Superman was the do-gooder who identified with the huddled masses. Back in 1987, Christopher Reeve only donned the cape for a fourth time on the condition he have some creative control. Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, an anti-nuclear parable, ended up as the wokest ever superhero flick – nothing comes close – some 30 years before the w-word colonised dunderhead right-wing discourse. Evil millionaires take over the Daily Planet. Superman piously addresses the United Nations. The villain really is called Nuclearman. We can forgive the younger Kellyanne Conway for missing that one. The film was so atrocious it banished the franchise to the Fortress of Solitude for close to 20 years. Never forget that Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the creators of Superman, were second-generation Jewish immigrants and that the character emerged as the Nazis were taking over Germany. On the very first page of Action Comics, the publication that launched the man of steel, he is described as 'champion of the oppressed!' [ From the archive: Superman flies into right-wingers' wrath Opens in new window ] None of this dissuaded Dean Cain, who played Superman on the TV show Lois & Clark, from getting his tights in a twist. 'I think that was a mistake by James Gunn to say it's an immigrant thing, and I think it's going to hurt the numbers on the movie,' he said, apparently forgetting that, in season four of Lois & Clark, an antagonist (satirically, one assumes) calls the immigration cops on the man in blue and red. Might Cain be proven correct? What about continuing complaints from right-wingers that – denied by Gunn – the global conflict at the film's centre is modelled on the current Middle Eastern conflict? Might Superman, to parrot an unavoidable saw of the era, go broke by going woke? Not a bit of it. Gunn's film landed with a $217 million opening weekend. That is the third-biggest debut of the year to date. By one measure this is the best-ever opening for a solo Superman picture. The message here is not, alas, that audiences are on the search for politically charged mainstream entertainment. But nor are they, like Ms Conway, terrified that the superhero will begin lecturing them on agrarian reform or dialectical materialism. Ninety-five per cent of the audience pays absolutely no attention to the disputes that so inflame the attention of social media. The supposedly wokearific Snow White failed because it looked like a dud. The allegedly radical Superman (which I thought ghastly) succeeded because folks were hungry for the title character. Meanwhile, another gloomier corner of cinematic discourse was reminded that one of their saints really did have views worth abhorring. Stellan Skarsgård wasn't saying anything we didn't know about Ingmar Bergman, but his confirmation was stark and direct . 'Bergman was manipulative,' he told us earlier in the month. 'He was a Nazi during the war and the only person I know who cried when Hitler died.' One can only imagine how TikTok would have reacted if it had been around at the time of Bergman's The Seventh Seal or Persona. The conversation would have been exhausting, repetitive and unenlightening. But it would have been about something that actually mattered. Almost nobody really cares if Superman is a communist or not.
Irish Times
20 hours ago
- Irish Times
US to destroy almost $10m in contraceptives rather than send abroad for women in need
The Trump administration has decided to destroy $9.7 million (€8.34m) worth of contraceptives rather than send them abroad to women in need. A state department spokesperson confirmed that the decision had been made – a move that will cost US taxpayers $167,000. The contraceptives are primarily long-acting, such as IUDs and birth control implants, and were almost certainly intended for women in Africa, according to two senior congressional aides, one of whom visited a warehouse in Belgium that housed the contraceptives. It is not clear to the aides whether the destruction has already been carried out, but said they had been told that it was set to occur by the end of July. 'It is unacceptable that the State Department would move forward with the destruction of more than $9m in taxpayer-funded family planning commodities purchased to support women in crisis settings, including war zones and refugee camps,' Jeanne Shaheen, a Democratic senator from New Hampshire, said in a statement. Ms Shaheen and Brian Schatz, a Democratic senator from Hawaii, have introduced legislation to stop the destruction. 'This is a waste of US taxpayer dollars and an abdication of US global leadership in preventing unintended pregnancies, unsafe abortions and maternal deaths,' added Ms Shaheen, who in June sent a letter to the secretary of state, Marco Rubio , about the matter. READ MORE The department decided to destroy the contraceptives because it could not sell them to any 'eligible buyers', in part because of US laws and rules that prohibit sending US aid to organisations that provide abortion services, counsel people about the procedure or advocate for the right to it overseas, according to the state department spokesperson. Most of the contraceptives have less than 70 per cent of their shelf life left before they expire, the spokesperson said, and rebranding and selling the contraceptives could cost several million dollars. However, the aide who visited the warehouse said that the earliest expiration date they saw on the contraceptives was 2027, and that two-thirds of the contraceptives did not have any USAid labels that would need to be rebranded. The eradication of the contraceptives is part of the Trump administration's months-long demolition of the Agency for International Development (USAid), the largest funding agency for humanitarian and development aid in the world. After the unofficial 'department of Government efficiency' (Doge) erased 83 per cent of USAID's programmes, Rubio announced in June that USAID's entire international workforce would be abolished and its foreign assistance programs would be moved to the state department. The agency will be replaced by an organisation called United States First. In total, the funding cuts to USAid could lead to more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, according to a recent study published in the journal the Lancet. A third of those deaths could be children. 'If you have an unintended pregnancy and you end up having to seek unsafe abortion, it's quite likely that you will die,' said Sarah Shaw, the associate director of advocacy at MSI Reproductive Choices, a global family planning organisation that works in nearly 40 countries. 'If you're not given the means to space or limit your births, you're putting your life at risk or your child's life at risk.' The fact that the contraceptives are going to be burned when there's so much need – it's just egregious Sar Shaw, MSI Reproductive Choices MSI tried to purchase the contraceptives from the US Government, Ms Shaw said. But the Government would only accept full price – which Shaw said the agency could not afford, given that MSI would also have to shoulder the expense of transportingthe contraceptives and the fact that they are inching closer to their expiration date, which could affect MSI's ability to distribute them. The state department spokesperson did not specifically respond to a request for comment on Ms Shaw's allegation, but MSI does provide abortions as part of its global work, which may have led the department to rule it out as an 'eligible buyer'. In an internal survey, MSI programs in 10 countries reported that, within the next month, they expect to be out of stock or be on the brink of being out of stock of at least one contraceptive method. The countries include Burkina Faso, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mali, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Tanzania, Timor-Leste, Senegal, Kenya and Sierra Leone. Ms Shaw expects the stock to be incinerated. 'The fact that the contraceptives are going to be burned when there's so much need – it's just egregious,' she said. 'It's disgusting.' The Department of State spokesperson did not respond to a request for information on the planned method of destruction. The destruction of the contraceptives is, to Ms Shaw, emblematic of the overall destruction of a system that once provided worldwide help to women and families. USAid funding is threaded through so much of the global supply chain of family planning aid that, without its money, the chain has come apart. In Mali, Ms Shaw said, USAid helped pay for the gas used by the vehicles that transport contraceptives from a warehouse. Without the gas money, the vehicles were stuck – and so were the contraceptives. 'I've worked in this sector for over 20 years and I've never seen anything on this scale,' Ms Shaw said. 'The speed at which they've managed to dismantle excellent work and really great progress – I mean, it's just vanished in weeks.' Food waste Other kinds of assistance are also reportedly being wasted. This week, the Atlantic reported that almost 500 metric tons of emergency food were expiring and would be incinerated, rather than being used to feed about 1.5 million children in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Meanwhile, almost 800,000 Mpox vaccines that were supposed to be sent to Africa are now unusable because they are too close to their expiration date, according to Politico. The cuts to foreign aid are slated to deepen. Early on Friday morning, Congress passed a bill to claw back roughly $8 billion that had been earmarked for foreign assistance. 'It's not just about an empty shelf,' Ms Shaw said. 'It's about unfulfilled potential. It's about a girl having to drop out of school. It's about someone having to seek an unsafe abortion and risking their lives. That's what it's really about.' – Guardian
Irish Times
20 hours ago
- Irish Times
Company says investigation under way into footage of its workers at Coldplay gig
The company at the centre of the Coldplay scandal in which its CEO was caught embracing with its chief human resources officer, has issued a statement on the matter. More than 24 hours after a Jumbotron camera at a Coldplay concert in Boston, Massachusetts, caught Astronomer's married CEO, Andy Byron, with his arms around the company's HR head, Kristin Cabot, the software company has responded to the incident which has taken the internet by storm. On X, the software start-up company said: 'Astronomer is committed to the values and culture that have guided us since our founding. Our leaders are expected to set the standard in both conduct and accountability. The Board of Directors has initiated a formal investigation into this matter and we will have additional details to share very shortly.' BREAKING: Astronomer announces their Board of Directors has launched a formal investigation into the viral Coldplay concert incident. "Astronomer is committed to the values and culture that have guided us since our founding. Our leaders are expected to set the standard in both… — Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) It also denied rumours that another one of its employees, Alyssa Stoddard, was there, as well as denied false reports of Mr Byron issuing an apology. 'Alyssa Stoddard was not at the event and no other employees were in the video. Andy Byron has not put out any statement, reports saying otherwise are all incorrect,' the company said. Both Mr Byron and Ms Cabot were immediately placed on leave, a source familiar with the situation told Axios. Additionally, Astronomer's delayed response has partially been because of Mr Byron's slow resignation and exit package negotiations, another source told the outlet. Mr Byron has been the head of Astronomer since 2023. In 2024, Ms Cabot joined the company as its head of HR. In an announcement about Ms Cabot's hiring, Mr Byron said: 'Kristin's exceptional leadership and deep expertise in talent management, employee engagement and scaling people strategies will be critical as we continue our rapid trajectory.' Meanwhile, in the same press release, Ms Cabot said: 'I was energised in my conversations with Andy and the Astronomer leadership team about the opportunities that exist here.' - Guardian
