Secretary role playing as Partner - WFH and Leave
I work in a law firm. Hours are notoriously long, often requiring me to work late into the night (average 11pm-1am). This is also because we are expected to urgently respond to clients in different time zones.
Our team’s policy is WFH once a week. But for anyone in legal practice, you would know that the culture is that WFH is not strictly policed, and it’s also generally acceptable coming into office a bit later, especially if you had a late night or needed to rush something out in the morning.
After all, as professionals, our work follows us everywhere and whether we work in office or at home makes no real difference to the work product.
Recently, my Partner’s secretary has been strictly enforcing the WFH policy and going around checking whether the lawyers in the team are in by a certain time. If not, she will ask that lawyer’s secretary to constantly check on their whereabouts and report back what time they will be reaching office. She keeps an excel spreadsheet of who is WFH on which days, and if a lawyer is late to work, she will cancel our WFH entitlement for that week.
When she was approached about this cancel of WFH entitlement and whether this is something that should be communicated to the team, her response was basically that she didn’t want this in writing and she wants it to be spread by word of mouth.
I’ve been in my team for many years and this is the first time she’s been policing us like that. Her justification is that the Partner is very upset we have not been complying with the WFH policy. But we’ve never heard this directly from the Partner themself. In fact, the Partner probably is in office 30% of the time.
This same secretary also manages the team’s leave calendar to ensure only a few lawyers are on leave on any given date. We are contractually entitled to 30 days leave. It’s literally in our employment contract. Yet when we try to apply for more than 20+ days of leave, she will reject our leave on the basis that “boss doesn’t like you to take all your leave - you all already get to WFH, and WFH is like leave, so if you all take all your leave, then might as well not work”Yet I’ve never heard this rule from my Partner directly.
What is going on? Is she a sadist on a power trip? Or am I just being whiny?