How to deal with “old guard” coworker who slacks off
TLDR; my older, senior coworker keeps going to the store and for walks during work hours. I want to bring this up to our boss without causing drama or causing a rift.
Hey, so I have been working in public libraries for about a year now and it’s had its ups and downs. The biggest down however is one of my coworkers. She is in her 50s, a grade above me and recently has gone back to full time after her old contract which allowed her to pick her hours expired. The issue is she’s a part of what we call “the old guard” in the branches in our area.
They’re staff who have been around decades, are very set in their ways and quite frankly make life harder for the rest of us.
My main issue with this coworker however is that she will leave and go to the shop on average about 5 times a day. No matter how understaffed or busy we are she’ll just be very blatant about it, going off to literally do her groceries while still on the clock.
I’ve reached a boiling point after last Friday when all of our systems were down and people needed refunds for printing jobs. We were also extremely busy. It was just me, this coworker and our branch manager. I was running around like a headless chicken trying to fix everything while she went to the shop 40 minutes before closing and our branch head was in a meeting.
It’s infuriating because she’s simply bad at her job when she is there and will pile on more work on me needlessly.
I want to go to our branch manager about this (who is younger and very new) but I don’t want to cause drama (there is a history of this which has resulted in the newer staff getting run out of a job). Also because in other instances I get on great with her.
Anyone have any advice on how I’d do this and how to navigate what I didn’t realise would be such an intense political and social atmosphere in the library profession lol? If I could speak my mind I’d say never put me working with just her again and I don’t want her telling me what to do. But I think I’ll settle for complaining about the going the store.
Apologies for the rant and if this isn’t really suited for this sub!!