Frances has worked for a pharmaceutical company for a year, a role which she has enjoyed. She is assigned a new project to create social media content for her company with two colleagues, Andrew and Pat, with whom she has not previously worked. Although Frances is excited to take on the new challenge, she finds that collaborating with Andrew and Pat is very difficult and takes a lot of energy. She takes the lead on the project and is glad when it is finished. Frances tells her boss, Maya, about her difficulties, and Maya reveals to her that actually, the social media project was fake and was intended to test Andrew and Pat, who have been having performance issues at work. Frances feels she has been mis-led and isn’t sure what to do next.
Frances has been working at her job at a pharmaceutical company for one year, and she mostly works remotely. Although she hasn't been working for this company for long, she has enjoyed the work atmosphere and her day-to-day tasks. Frances' role includes many projects and multiple collaborations with her co-workers, and she gets along well with all of them.
Earlier in the week, Frances' boss assigned Frances and two of her co-workers, Andrew and Pat, a project. Their boss requested that they work together to write articles and other content for the company's social media outlets. When Frances heard about the assigned task, she was slightly apprehensive: she'd rarely heard of three people writing articles together successfully. Regardless, Frances was still excited to work with Andrew and Pat, two co-workers that she had not yet had the chance to work closely with.
After her first meeting with Andrew and Pat, Frances realized that the task would be even more challenging than she had anticipated. While Andrew, Pat, and Frances had agreed to chat over a video call, Andrew had kept his camera turned off for the entire one-hour meeting and only unmuted himself to either agree or disagree with what Frances and Pat were discussing. On the other hand, Pat was coming up with far-fetched ideas to promote the company's Instagram that would not realistically represent the firm's image.
Frances came out of the meeting exhausted and stressed about the social media project. She had spent the entire meeting either politely discouraging Pat's unrealistic suggestions or unsuccessfully encouraging Andrew to contribute to the discussion. Furthermore, Andrew and Pat had both been working at the company longer than Frances. She felt uncomfortable mediating between two people who were supposed to be more experienced and more knowledgeable about the company than she was.
As the project continued and Frances, Andrew, and Pat held more meetings together, Frances decided that she needed to take control of the project if they were to make any progress. She started delegating tasks to Andrew and Pat so that it would be more clear who was supposed to do what, and Frances felt less stress. As the project came to an end with the delivery of a set of social media posts and strategies, Frances was extremely relieved and felt glad to put it behind her.
As is usual with every project completion, Frances was expected to report a summary of her work to her manager, Maya. Frances was unsure whether to be completely honest about the difficulties she had experienced with Andrew and Pat and how challenging she found this task. After thinking it over, Frances decided to be honest with Maya: she said that the project was challenging because she, Pat, and Andrew had different ideas and could not easily agree on the direction to take for the social media.
After Frances explained herself, Maya told her something surprising: the social media task was actually a fake project. Maya had set up the project after colleagues had voiced concerns about Andrew and Pat's work performance. Maya decided to create the fake project to test Andrew and Pat’s performance and chose to include Frances because she was new and would be more open to working with Andrew and Pat. Maya then complimented Frances on her work for this project and told her she had demonstrated a good attitude and did an excellent job.
Frances was shocked to find out that a project that had stressed her out had just been a ploy to test her two other co-workers and that she had been caught in the cross-fire. Frances felt betrayed by Maya and disappointed in the company she had previously enjoyed working for. She also felt badly for Andrew and Pat, since they had been equally deceived by an arguably senseless project that should not have been used as a marker for their work performance.
Now that she knows the truth, Frances does not know what to do. She's not sure she can trust her manager Maya anymore and doesn't appreciate her hard work and time being taken for granted. She is also unsure if she wants to keep working for a company that thinks setting up fake projects is an efficient way to test their employees' abilities. At the same time, up until this most recent experience, she had been enjoying her job. She also needs to stay employed for financial reasons.
What factors might Frances weigh when she considers whether or not to stay at the company? Which of Frances’s values might have been challenged during this situation?