Welcome To 2005, Apparently

I am a social media manager. When the marketing department manager retired, they moved a manager over from elsewhere in the company to take over. This was strange since we had some skilled, seasoned supervisors who could easily be trained up, but whatever. Upper management must surely know what they’re doing, I thought.

The first thing the new manager did was visit each employee to see what they did, which seemed like a positive start. However, when he got to me, it was anything but positive.

Manager: “What are you doing on Facebook?!”

Me: “I’m checking the stats for an ad we’re running. If you look here, we’re getting great conversion rates—”

Manager: “I don’t pay you to sit around and play on Facebook all day!”

Me: “With all due respect, this is my job. I’m a social media manager. I manage the company’s social media accounts. If you look, you can clearly see that this is our corporate—”

Manager: “No social media during work hours. No exceptions.”

Me: *Pauses* “How do you expect me to do my job as a social media manager if I can’t use social media?”

Manager: “That’s your problem. You figure it out. Use social media on your own time. I’m not paying you to play around on Farmville and tweet all day.”

I tried to explain what my role entailed to help him understand why I needed to access social media, including things like checking what competitors were doing — something he especially didn’t like.

Manager: “We have a non-compete clause. You can’t be looking at a competitor’s Facebook!”

I was dumbfounded and had no idea how to respond to such a stupid statement. We didn’t have a non-compete clause. And even if we did, it wouldn’t bar us from looking at social media.

[Manager] went on a tirade about how pointless social media was and how unprofessional it was to be on it while on the clock. He capped it off by proudly proclaiming that he didn’t have a single social media account, and he managed just fine. In his opinion, social media was “just a fad”, and we didn’t need all these “stupid” social media accounts.

I reported my concerns to my supervisor, who said she would talk to him. However, he wasn’t interested and brushed her off. She told us to keep working and she’d handle it.

The next day, I arrived at work and found all social media sites had been blocked. None of us could work. [Supervisor] was furious and demanded that [Manager] unblock the sites as we needed access to do our jobs; we were in the middle of a very important and expensive campaign. [Manager] screamed at her and threatened to fire her for insubordination. 

We had been a tight-knit team for years, and we’d never had issues like this with the previous manager. Now, in just a few days, it was starting to fall apart.

[Supervisor] immediately escalated the issue to [Manager]’s manager. At first, he tried to brush her off and told her to just “sort it out between us”, but [Supervisor] reminded him how much money the company had invested in the latest campaign and that if we could not access social media, it would fail. Were they really happy flushing thousands of pounds down the drain? Miraculously, he decided it might be worth having a talk with [Manager] after all.

I don’t know what was said between them, but it was clear that [Manager] did not take it well. He stormed out of the meeting, screamed at us for “undermining” him, and threatened to fire us.

[Supervisor] quietly collected a group complaint from all of us. Several of us — me included — threatened to walk if the situation did not improve. We all had years of experience and a great record for hitting targets. It would not be hard for us to find work elsewhere. Right now, they needed us a whole lot more than we needed them. This was something [Supervisor] made abundantly clear to Human Resources and to [Manager]’s manager.

We regained access to social media within a few hours. The next day, [Manager] was nowhere to be seen. We were told he had transferred to a different department “to pursue other career options”.

Perhaps they learned their lesson; they then promoted one of the supervisors to fill his place as department manager, and they continue to do a great job to this day.