How do I tell management that I can't work with my spouse anymore?

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

I work for a large company that is very short-staffed right now. About 6 months ago the team my spouse had been working on was in desperate need of another employee. My project was ending and my spouse's manager was given my name as a potential employee but held off on bringing me onto the team for some time due to concerns about having me work with my spouse. Finally, he gave in and brought me onto the team because he didn't think he would get anyone else.

We had no idea how it would go, but didn't think we had a say in the matter and so we went ahead with what we were asked to do. It has caused major issues affecting our home life. Every time we are assigned to work on tasks together we find ourselves frustrated with each other, even though we are normally great at working with other coworkers. Even on days when we are not working directly with each other we feel burnt out by spending so much time in the same vicinity and by the end of the day don't want to be around each other.

Within probably 6 weeks I wrote an email to my manager telling him that working together in that way was negatively affecting us and expressing my wish to be moved to a different team. I was pulled into a meeting with him and with another manager. I realize now that they didn't want to lose me and pretended that there was no way for me to leave the team while asking me how they could improve the situation. Their thoughts are centered on how to finish the project in a timely manner and they were and still are not able to see the fact that it's quite possible that the best thing for me is to not be on that team anymore.

Now I find myself 6 months in and the only expert on a specific part of the project. They cannot afford to lose me even more. They have promised me that they would only need me for "a few more months" for too long and are now openly admitting that they want me to stay on the team through the next possibly 6 months. Meanwhile my stress at home caused by working with my spouse has never been worse. I dread having to work with him and it looks like we will only be working together even more in the future.

On top of that, the last time I brought up wanting to move to a different team my manager hinted that I would make life miserable for my spouse, making the rest of the team have to work holidays and weekends. This makes me genuinely nervous to leave. At this point, my marriage is more important to me than my job but I feel like I need to take action to protect both.

Is being forced to stay on the team with my spouse a valid HR concern? How do I gracefully yet firmly express that I need out of the situation, even if it means going over my manager's head? I want to do this in a way that maintains both of our reputations, but that is seeming difficult when I may feel forced to divulge how serious the challenges to our home life have become.

Edit: We are both engineers, each with roughly 5 years of experience.

manpreet 2 years ago

At this point, my marriage is more important to me than my job...

Drawing that line makes it a lot easier to look at this from an economic or cost-benefit perspective:

If both of you were happy with your jobs and home lives before this situation arose, the compensation you were getting in return was a fair exchange for the work you were doing. Work was doing what it should: making your non-work life good by letting you do things like keep a roof over your head, go to the movies and buy your spouse a nice birthday gift.

Your new situation is doing the opposite: you've been forced into a situation at work that has the side effect of destroying some of the value of your non-work life. While putting a dollar figure on it is difficult, the bottom line is that where you were coming out even or ahead, you're not receiving any additional compensation for the value of what's being destroyed. This makes the value of working there a net negative. You're taking a loss on this while your employer is getting a lot of benefit and, to add insult to injury, they're blackmailing you by threatening to make your spouse miserable (destroying even more value) if you try to get work elsewhere in the company.

The blackmail has already poisoned the well; going over your management's heads will poison it further unless they're forcibly ejected from the company (unlikely). There is no positive end to this story for you or your spouse if this is allowed to continue.

...but I feel like I need to take action to protect both.

You really don't. It's plain that the two are incompatible and you haven't shown any benefit in forcing them to coexist. You have said which you value more, and that means you know what deserves to get the short end of the stick: your job. Having been in the same same relationship for 27 years, 23 of it married, I can tell you that the costs of the short-term stress and uncertainty of finding a new job pale in comparison to the cost of destroying a good relationship and establishing a new one or living without one at all.

At this point, you owe that company nothing.

I rarely recommend spiteful behavior in a professional setting, but I think you'd both be justified in quietly finding new jobs, resigning at the same time with the least allowable notice. If you've got contractual obligations, honor them to the letter, but if your employment is at-will, remember that it means at the will of either party. If you'd done something to the company as egregious as what they're doing to you, they'd have you out the door in an instant without batting an eyelash.

Working together as a couple to get this hurdle behind you will go a long way toward undoing some of the damage done, and I wish you both the best of luck.