How do I deal with a colleague who’s status is Away and Offline various times throughout the day?

[Anonymous]

She never says thank you when I help her with things too. She never raises questions til things are urgent and busy. She takes forever to reply to clients. Her status says Away 60 minutes now, earlier it was Away 15-20 minutes. Then she’s offline for like 20 minutes sometimes. It bothers me because we have loads of work coming in this week and next and I can’t do it all myself. Client requests are also super time sensitive. We had multiple people out recently and she isn’t picking up much work.

[DaveJord]

Honestly this is pretty standard within a lot of organizations... you have good employees and not so good ones. I understand that is hard thing to get around when you have collective task, and it not as easy as just not helping her because it could fall back on you anyway. In the end it comes down to what type of employee and person you are. If you take pride in your work when someone else does not then you will be the one doing more.

All you can do is not stress or assist her when everything is urgent to her, and talk to your supervisor without sounding to pushy or needy about it.

[Asker]

She is seriously exhausting to work with. And in my opinion pretty unintelligent compared to others I work with. My manager made her a lead on a project which is a joke.
Every time I delegate any tasks to this girl because my load is so much and I have back to back meetings she seems so annoyed.

[DaveJord]

I believe you, buts it's not as easy as just getting rid of her, firing her, or telling her off.

[Asker]

Well I need her to take care of some of the workload. And it’s like I have to always reach out to ask her to do it. She takes no initiative. And when I reach out she’s always like “Yes. Doing it now” like wtf! It’s called delegating.

[Asker]

And still can’t get it done in a reasonable time frame.

[DaveJord]

Sounds like a leadership issue, your supervisors needs to take some responsibility here... but if you escalate it remain professional.

[Asker]

I also worked tons of overtime due to a testing go live type of event and with people being out of the office. this girl barely did any work because her systems weren’t “working fast enough.”

[Guy13]

Do not help her. Be busy when she needs something. Prioritize her last thing of the day. It is her fault if her items blow up...