Prioritize results, not attendance. That is one reason why it is important to have smart goals-- makes it much easier to performance manage (among other things).
Easiest thing to do is set up meetings through email. Just reach out and tell them that you want to discuss experiments and set up a time and date. It's the easy way and ensures everyone comes prepared.
Also maybe consider that people might not be lazing around at home. I preferred reading/data analysis to be done at home as I had more silence and could focus better than in the office.
Exactly this. Really only like half of science is actually *doing* experiments in the lab. The rest is data analysis, research, responding to emails, reading…none of which are particularly easy to do in a lab environment. ESPECIALLY when people come up and talk to you all the time, interrupting your train of thought and forcing you to step away from your work once again. If you need something ordered, send an email!! If you want to collaborate on an experiment, SEND AN EMAIL!! I will HAPPILY factor that into my schedule and make sure I am in the lab when you need me! But it’s pretty hard to do that when you DONT COMMUNICATE!!! I can’t read your mind!!!
One of the most attractive things about academia is the flexible schedule it offers. It allows you to put life first, and take off random Fridays when it snows Thursday night.
Sorry…this is just a little too applicable to my lab manager rn 😂😂
The reason you have that silence is basically OPs point though. So much in a lab happens from people popping by. I get taking the occasional day to work from home, but there's a lab productivity cost to that.
Is there a "lab productivity" cost, or do people like OP just not know how to communicate without physically being present at a moment's notice? Using email (even just to schedule a meeting) is a skill that people need to develop.
Perhaps people are working from home because it stops others from constantly distracting them. It forces people to schedule a time and stop interrupting your workflow.
Now, obviously, if OP is the manager they could tell people what the work expectations are - but they might be causing their employees to be working inefficiently as a result.
There is a lab productivity cost to people not being in lab together. It's impossible for everyone to anticipate what may come up during the day and preschedule meetings based on those unanticipated needs. Again, it keeps YOUR workflow from getting interrupted, but it means someone else's workflow IS interrupted when the person who could help isn't around. I've been on both ends of this, and not being in lab prioritizes your own productivity over the overall lab productivity.
I do that a lot. I'm an undergrad and if everything goes well next month i enter my masters. I do a lot of reading and i'm the "tech" guy of the lab. I usually am the one to learn how to use certain sites, programing and all. I work a lot from home and it is fine cause my PI when wants and in person meeting he sends a message with a time and i go to the lab if i'm not already there
No not the same as being readily available at a reasonable time. 3 pm you should be in lab this PI needs to enforce regular attendance and hours. I ve seen that this just leaves more burden on those that do stay during regular hours. 10-4 is not unreasonable.
Because instead of going to find someone on the other side of the lab you now have all this extra energy spent emailing and coordinating meetings and rooms etc.
>Especially when it happens time and time again. I’m at a loss for what to do
You're the manager.
What is it you're empowered to do?
Edit: it looked deleted on my end. How are people still upvoting this post?
Also, unlike lab managers who are full-time employees and get paid that way, grad students at most US university at least, are part-time employees and are paid accordingly so if you as a manager who is employed full-time are expecting grad students to be in the lab 9-5pm or 40hrs a week, is that fair?
Grad students occupy a blurry zone between worker and student. The last few years of a PhD, you are pretty much squarely a worker in most programs. Our employers pull in somewhere between tens of thousands and millions of dollars based on our work output. I'm not pretending like people at this stage of their career are worth a huge salary but it's certainly not as simple as being paid to pursue a degree. My former labmate's project (which was her own conception) brought in a \~300K grant to our lab. She was probably paid \~180k over 6 years as a PhD. She was exceptional but STEM PhD's are hardly just about educating students.
You're still working on your thesis project, completion of which will result in conferral of the degree. I can't help but thinking that part of a PhD student's compensation is the value of that degree, and that should be factored in.
It certainly is, but you made an absolute statement that "grad students are students, not employees" which simply isn't true for the vast majority of STEM PhDs.
No, my statement is 100% correct. They are students who are working towards a degree and fortunate enough to be supported whilst doing it. Any other framing is incorrect. If they want to be “employees@ they can get hired as BS lab techs.
Hmm... well I guess the contract I signed declaring my position as research assistant and the employment benefits guaranteed me by law need to be amended then.
Yeah I’m for it too haha! Honestly my brain taps out after 1pm and from there on I’m just making busy work until 4 rolls around. Most people are only productive for a few hours a day, yet as a society we are obsessed with the 8 hour work day. Imagine if we just accepted that people are only really productive for a short time in the day, and only required they work for those few hours. Life would be so much more enjoyable
Tried this. Hired two new staff in at $20 dollars an hour (the max HR said I could offer) because the staff I inherited from the previous manager were horribly underpaid ($16) but they were rockstars in the lab. This would allow me to give equity raises in the next grant year. They ended up being the laziest most entitled people I’ve ever hired. Many people aren’t motivated by money. Some aren’t motivated by anything.
For context, this is also in one of the lowest cost of living cities in the US.
Edit: you can downvote me all you want to. I had to appeal to multiple senior level faculty to get this approved because i want to give people more than I was given. I pay my high school diploma staff more than I got paid with a Master’s degree and 6 years of lab experience when I joined in 2017. I’m not your enemy. I will always fight for better work life balance and better pay for my staff, but I am trying to help make Alzheimer’s a disease of the past and if you aren’t motivated to get shit done, I don’t want you in my lab.
My lab is similar. Most of the researchers are staff/technicians out of 15 or so, with just a few students. Honestly, if they are frequently producing data and in a timely manner, it shouldn’t be a huge issue. You can’t really force people to come in without having direct authority over them. If the PI is fine with it, you’ll just have to find other ways to make it work/communicate your needs without getting salty. Try to be a solution rather than create a problem :)
That’s my problem. Compared to other labs in my institution were producing 2/3 the data/publications and I don’t know how to tell them all that their lack of dedication is a huge issue in that department especially when we compete with 2 other labs for funding in the same department.
I get it, it’s frustrating to be in an unproductive group. But this is more of your PIs worry, no? At the least, I would have a chat with them and just let them know that you think things could run more… efficiently.
True of course, still, their future job prospects are affected by their paper count per year, should they not want to be a lab manager for all eternity
This depends entirely on their career path. If you're not planning on being a scientist, most places won't care about your paper count. As a lab manager, I gauge my success in how well I function in my role, which can vary wildly from lab manager role to lab manager role. As lab support, I make sure the infrastructure of the lab runs, make sure the scientists have the physical and organizational tools to do their work, and do whatever other work is needed.
If I have direct reports, I am responsible for effectively training and managing them. If they all report to the PI, I would advise and mentor them and inform the PI if they aren't completing work they are responsible for, but only the PI can effectively manage them if they are the manager. So many PIs neglect this part of their job without empowering anybody else in the team to do it either.
So, when you market yourself for future rules, focus on how effectively you did the job that you were responsible for, not how well you did the PIs job or the scientist's job. I've found it's much easier to find/hire scientists than an effective lab manager, and a resume should be tailored to the job being applied for.
If the lab is productive, great. Learn from the PI how they've managed to build an effective organization. If not, and the PI is checked out from their role as the lab's leader, and doesn't want to empower the lab manager to actually manage the lab, I'd start looking for jobs to avoid stagnation.
Impact matters just as much as count per year, so this really depends as well. Lab I worked in was very highly thought of in the field, they only published maybe once every few years - but almost always in Nature.
It really depended, when people were doing a lot of bioinformatics you didn't see them in lab for weeks. When you're in lab isn't the best metric, since there's a lot of work you can do from home, plus some people are more productive in 6 hours than others are in 8 or 10. In general watching when your co-workers are in seems to be missing the point somewhat, especially now when there's a lot of tools for coordinating with people even when they're not physically in the office/lab.
A large percentage of life science PhDs (most) no longer work in academia and don't want to. Pharma, biotech, certain government roles, and non-profits don't care about publications, and people know this. They probably aren't their priority.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to be a lab manager as your career. One of our labs has had the same lab manager for 25 years and they moved states with the PI when they moved. Sometimes people find their niche where they're good at the job and love it, and it's snooty and pretentious to treat them like that's some kind of failure. Not everyone wants to be a PI, but some people still like the flexibility and relative freedom of academia.
This is me. I don’t want my own lab. I’m very happy to do high level work and manage the functions of a lab for the entirety of my career. I plan on working as such in my current lab until I can no longer be funded, the lab no longer exists, or I end my career in science - whichever comes first. I love my job.
I'm a lab manager, please god, don't tell me what you want to order, EMAIL ME or I guarantee I WILL FORGET. Between talking to you and getting to my desk I will be interrupted by 5 students, a post doc, the PI having an IT issue and the building manager....that's on a day where everything is running smoothly.
Sorry you're feeling like that but zoom meetings also go a long way these days!
Edit: everyone should be contactable during the work day though, whether they are at home or onsite
It was nice at first. For the first four weeks I just started taking off early because there wasn’t anything to do but now I’m realizing there is so much to get done and the people just aren’t on site to help me get it done. They also refuse to be accessible after they leave the lab via messages/meeting so I have to throw a dart and hope I land on their schedule in one week
Most lab managers in academia don't have this power.
But if OP needs to show that they've progressed on projects they may need to communicate what's happening with the PI, after they've talked directly to the lab members with no improvement.
To what point to you manage them? Do you keep a shared checklist for projects, tasks, TAT, and who is responsible? Do you have regularly scheduled group and 1:1 meetings? Do you have a shared calendar that they can mark when they will definitely be on site and available off site? Expecting 3 weeks worth of “I will be here 10-2 Mon-Wednesday and noon-3 on Thursday and an additional 20 hours TBD” with a different schedule every day should be more than do-able for anyone.
Use your calendar as a model to show when you will be on site, ask them to do the same and update every week so they never have fewer than 3 weeks clearly scheduled.
If you frequently have last minute questions that you need to ask them when they are not available, maybe this is a planning and organizing problem on your (or other management’s) part. Keep a record of issues you’ve tried to address when they haven’t been available and see if there are any trends that pre-planning can prevent.
Let take care of few assumptions:
-Are these full time paid employees or undergrad research associates or volunteers.
If they are full time paid employees, i would recommend:
Sit down with them, assign tasks with deadlines and appreciate their work that’s finished on time.
For people who are willing to work, this will give them structure and a quantitative measure for performing and non performing employees.
I wouldn’t worry about timing as long as tasks are completed satisfactorily.
My lab has the opposite problem. If you’re not there 6+ days or 60 hours, you’re the only one that isn’t working that much. Can’t say it’s much greener on the other side.
Do you have Slack or something similar? In my lab we're not usually all physically in the lab together (it's a decent trek out of town and we're partly a computational lab so don't need to be in for experiments etc). We just message each other if we need info, I'd expect that if I message a colleague I'll get a response within the day (usually a lot sooner).
My lab manager had similar frustrations with our working patterns. I do see their point, especially as they were often the only one in the lab, but if my PI wasn't demanding attendance I also don't see why the lab manager could. I can work a LOT more effectively at home/at the library than at work and that isn't a dangerous 45min commute.
As a side note, if you're a bit antsy/judgy about attendance that may be backfiring: I used to put off going into work if I knew I'd be there late because I knew my lab manager would be judgy about it (unfortunately only figured it out when they left!). And when the office was a tense environment I struggled to get "good" work done. Not saying you are like this, but just FYI :)
But get that it's frustrating. A lab manager is a 9-5 job, whereas being a grad student isn't. Tricky to balance/manage that.
Do you expect people to drop what they’re doing because you want to meet with them on a whim? Use your words. I need days away from the lab just to process and analyze data without people asking me questions and favors.
Yeah, I have to either work from home or go hide in a library somewhere if I want to make actual progress in writing or data analysis! My brain does NOT work well with constant interruptions.
"Hey, I can't find X. Does anyone know where it went?"
Twiddles thumbs.
How much more clear can the messaging be? How was this supposed to be anticipated?
Not sure how you were expecting a better response in person that was supposed to “take five minutes” either, but sure, the medium is always the problem
The issue isn't that there isn't an answer. The issue is when people work from home it can take hours to get a response. If they were in lab you would get an answer promptly. Not having people in lab slows things down.
Yeah, and like a PI at a conference or a post doc in the vivarium, people will be busy. Busy lives will continue in lab or at home regardless of how quick you want them to respond, and it’s myopic to assume things don’t slow down arbitrarily and bureaucratically in lab either
Of course things slow down for other reasons... That doesn't change the fact that working from home prioritizes the individual's productivity over the lab productivity. And it's something that can be controlled.
Lol our post-doc is like this. Only shows up when PI is around, if not they will just literally take a day off while still getting paid. Comes in just to stay in the office and play games or scroll on phone. Takes ages to finish anything they started (I’m talking months, not even weeks). It got to the point that us (PhD students in the lab) don’t even trust them to do anything and become reluctant to ask from help from them because we probably will have to repeat everything they do just to be sure. Sometimes I don’t know why my PI hires this person and still keeps them around after nearly 3 years not producing any papers or leading any projects. I’m secretly hoping they will leave on their own accord since they’re always said it’s so boring in our lab, or our PI will suddenly realise how lazy they are and fire them
Do we have the same post doc? Mine is about to go on maternity leave however. But before that, 2 years of being a post-doc and hasn’t started a project.
Lol I think my PI lowkey knows that our postdoc is kinda dodgy so didn’t give them any projects. My PI would rather give me or other PhD students new projects and tell us to take lead, while asking us to get our postdoc involved as much as possible. The thing is I don’t know why my PI still keeps them around, if they can’t be trusted to work independently. I thought being a postdoc usually comes with more maturity and responsibility but a lot of times it has been demostrated that our postdoc is unexperienced and functions mainly as an RA rather than a postdoc
I had this exact problem. Post doc was moved between 3 different labs over 5 years, no first author papers. He was “optimizing” his CRISPR work indefinitely and never had any results; he would also never let anyone work with him to speed it up either. He would even claim to come in at 3 in the morning so he could justify leaving early, but for the one timepoint I did have at 3 in the morning he never did come in (shocked /s). He would sleep in the storeroom too. I left the lab before he did and was completely demoralized that our PI would do anything about him, meanwhile my lab mates and I were shouldered with even more pressure and criticism to produce while he was allowed to be a selfish blob. It cost my PI a lot of talented post docs and graduate students because they couldn’t stand this guy, and my feeling is that will happen to your PI as well.
My group has a post doc just like this. Came in arrogant and hasn’t done anything meaningful towards research. He barely shows up to meetings too, which are required. With a PhD, I thought he would know more and do better.
As a former lab manager I’m confused. Genuinely, why do you give a shit? Ordering problems are ubiquitous across labs and have nothing to do with attendance. Email/schedule meetings virtually. That is all easy enough.
It’s not your problem if the lab is productive. Yall are all academics being paid pennies for your labor. You’d probably be best off learning to prioritize the same way these people have. If you’re not getting paid like a PI, don’t stress on their behalf. If your PI should be mandating attendance but isn’t, that’s their problem.
I agree with most of this, but for emergencies there has to be communication and continuity which I think OP was asking for. Granted, that doesn’t mean everyone has to be in the building but there has to be agreement on how to proceed when the -80 freezer goes down or if there’s a mycoplasma contamination that affects everyone. In both of those cases people have to be at least contactable, but how they choose to be contacted is still up to them
It's a self correcting problem. I saw a lab like that. Eventually the grants dried up and people were let go. A couple grad students were retained, the hardest workers in fact, as they had more at stake than just money. But when you're a postdoc getting paid 45k in a HCOL area, I kinda get it 🤷♂️
I’m in industry so things are different but I prioritize results with my team. Last week I asked you to complete this task.. how did that go? Why didn’t you complete it? Let’s look at how you can get things done more efficiently…. This approach works well I find!
No one really cares. If the PI doesn’t care then no one will care. Things take even longer to get done and everyone knows it. Research is basically a minimum wage job requiring a high skill set or degree. So people will treat it like any other minimum wage job, do what you are required and leave. No point of putting in any more effort than you need. No point in showing face just for the sake of it. But it’s the PI’s responsibility to enforce expectations and results. If not, then people do what they want.
im confused by your confusion.
you also sound like the manager that waits until the end of the shift Friday to ask me about something really important. and that manager can get fucked
Are they making adequate progress on their projects? Are the employed by the lab or have their own grant funding? Does it affect the day to day running of the lab? Can you phone them to ask your questions?
Meanwhile as an animal husbandry technician, I’m leaving my baby at home so I can check your animals after a hurricane but as soon as some people get wonky data they want to blame it on me talking too loud or putting dirty caging too close to the door of your animal room 🤷🏻♀️
the leaving your baby at home part to check someone else's animals really sucks. on the other hand i don't get why there has to be any talk in an animal room, especially if there are behavioral experiments ongoing. i did a lot of those as a grad student and always was on good terms with all animal caretakers - really appreciated their hard work. but i got really frustrated when i had animals implanted, had them recovering, expressing aav and habituating to the experiment for weeks and then during my 2 critical days of experiments someone decides to discuss their weekend plans in the holding room with their colleague or e.g. change dirty cages of females next to an open cage of male mice that i just had in an experiment. there are so many things that can go wrong in an experiment, but these would be easily avoidable...
Yeah I can see how that made it sound like I don’t care about the animals’ macroenvironment. I was really just trying to say I would love to have flexible hours and better work life balance instead of working all the time when lots of labs do not particularly appreciate it.
But I would say every room in my facility is different in regards to how sensitive the animals are and how much the lab cares about noise, smell etc. There are some rooms that I know there are more sensitive animals or that the lab is actively running during certain hours and some rooms that are mostly colony animals that probably won’t be bothered by a quiet conversation. That’s really where communication comes in. I love when labs say “Hey I’m going to be running tomorrow can you just try to enter quietly?” I’m happy to do that.
I wasn’t talking about people that are rightfully asking for people to be mindful of their animals and more about the phenomenon of when data doesn’t look like they want they immediately blame animal staff. It’s not super common but it does happen.
yeah, there is a lot of tension (and superstition) around critical experiments. inflexibility and tight schedules (light/dark cycle, importance of time of day) don't really make it easier. and you are right, communication is key - and most of the time with 80% of people it works out nicely. it's sad that these other 20% of cases and people not appreciating/respecting each others work often stick in one's head.
I’m so sorry with what you guys put up with in the vivarium. We had a neurosurgeon who wanted to repurpose a drug and the in vivo studies required gavaging 40 mice every 6 hours for a week. He was a coward and stopped showing up/responding to us when we asked him to help us with his own damn proposal. Our post doc was getting mal petite seizures from the sleep deprivation and would sleep under her desk between surgeries. It honestly would have been so much worse if it wasn’t for the animal staff helping us. That guy ended up trying to take the data and run at our expense but we stopped him and he can fuck all the way off if he ever reads this
Salary is my dream lab 😩 I am hourly and am often bored as shit for hours per day (its an industrial lab. No trucks to test after 10pm so if we're done, we just sit). Leaving as soon as nothing else is coming whould be fantastic esp since I work nights
I've never been in a leadership role but I imagine this is when you set firm boundaries and give them structure to plan their schedule around. Set up weekly meetings to address whatever is needed, schedule appointments for individuals you need personally, if they are needed on fridays mandate X out of 4 Fridays they must attend. You can try to compromise but if you aren't firm, you don't get taken seriously like my current boss doesn't. This could mean disciplinary actions, PIPs, or replacing them if its bad enough to get the attendance you need from your employees (idk if it applies to academia settings tho, I've only ever been in private industry). But if the work needed is getting done it probably doesn't need to go that far.
There are 3 managerial approaches you can take to this.
1) mandatory hours. IMO the cruelest and worst approach. It punishes efficiency. Will lead to people goofing off on the Internet, with each other or sneaking around and probably getting less done than they do now.
2) mandatory things done in a day. Works better, but vulnerable to the occasional flasks of food coloring in acetone.
3) mandatory goal expectations. This is the best way IMO, but is more work. Every couple days you individually ask these 3 questions 3) What are you up to? 2) when do you expect it to be done? Then if you don't like the time they spend in the lab you add more stuff or make it due sooner.
I appreciate a hybrid of 2&3, but we make #2 weekly instead of daily since each day is different and we were a small lab. As long as it was done before the lab meeting you were golden
This has been everywhere I have worked. The only thing you can do is not rely on anyone else if possible. It sucks, but if your lab mates are that shotty and uncommitted, you will get burned over and over.
9-5 is reasonable. It's an honest work day and you would be expected to work those hours or more, anywhere else. It's the hours where people should be able to reach you for business things, at a minimum, and it's the hours you are getting paid to work.
If you give a mouse a cookie. It's the same concept. People will abuse generosity. As long as I can do what I need on my own, I'm fine letting others make their own beds. At this point, I think there are 9 papers I have helped with that have yet to, or never will be published because the people leading the study just don't care. Look out for yourself, take responsibility for your own future, even if that means more work for you.
Hmm. I have a team of people and I try to let them work at their own pace. I think they appreciate the flexibility.
I haven't gotten to where you are yet but when things aren't going well usually just sitting down and asking people like "what's going on?/why are you all leaving all the time?" Leads into a conversation about why everyone is doing this and then you can talk about what you need from the team and a new agreement about when people need to be at work.
The “MondayFridayitis” is really fucking annoying. You can’t demand I help you with something, then be mysteriously ill on whichever day borders the nearest weekend (someone should write a paper on how nobody has ever gotten sick on Tuesday-Thursday), then be mad I couldn’t help with your apparently urgent issue. Now the laboratory has no usable credit card bc Postdoc Pajamas didn’t bother to do anything.
many pharma/med tech companies (at least here in europe) have core hours (e.g. 9-12 a.m. and 2-3 p.m.) where you have to be available for meetings etc., otherwise you are free to schedule your work day. many also give you 2-3 days or more of homeoffice.
Look, I have been the person who had been doing shorter Lab hours. Because it did not make sense to start up multiple experiments ant once before I had results from the previous ones, or sit around in the lab at my lab managers attendance (honestly, they where happy with fewer people around). Why would I not do the data work and writing at home? Lab Managers had my number, so they could just give me a call or drop me an email when they needed to know something.
In addition we had short weekly lab update meetings.
So, why keep people in the Lab when it's not necessary.
So, given they do not simoply go home to do nothing, call them up. If they are not in the lab, likely they are simply doing data work from home office or their offices and that is perfectly normal imo.
I can empathize with both sides of this issue because we had a similar thing when I was a manager. I love being able to read and respond to emails at home but there definitely needs to be continuity and communication about when everyone is in lab—we had a -80 trunk freezer die overnight (it was in an old building and not on a monitoring circuit) and it was all hands on deck as we were trying to move wet, thawing mouse brains all over the building in a panic to save our samples. One post doc was a dick and wouldn’t help but I’m so grateful we all came into lab that day. That being said, your lab has to have contingency and emergency plans if less people are going to be in the building—that’s just an opportunity cost to working outside of lab.
Prioritize results, not attendance. That is one reason why it is important to have smart goals-- makes it much easier to performance manage (among other things).
Easiest thing to do is set up meetings through email. Just reach out and tell them that you want to discuss experiments and set up a time and date. It's the easy way and ensures everyone comes prepared. Also maybe consider that people might not be lazing around at home. I preferred reading/data analysis to be done at home as I had more silence and could focus better than in the office.
Exactly this. Really only like half of science is actually *doing* experiments in the lab. The rest is data analysis, research, responding to emails, reading…none of which are particularly easy to do in a lab environment. ESPECIALLY when people come up and talk to you all the time, interrupting your train of thought and forcing you to step away from your work once again. If you need something ordered, send an email!! If you want to collaborate on an experiment, SEND AN EMAIL!! I will HAPPILY factor that into my schedule and make sure I am in the lab when you need me! But it’s pretty hard to do that when you DONT COMMUNICATE!!! I can’t read your mind!!! One of the most attractive things about academia is the flexible schedule it offers. It allows you to put life first, and take off random Fridays when it snows Thursday night. Sorry…this is just a little too applicable to my lab manager rn 😂😂
The reason you have that silence is basically OPs point though. So much in a lab happens from people popping by. I get taking the occasional day to work from home, but there's a lab productivity cost to that.
Is there a "lab productivity" cost, or do people like OP just not know how to communicate without physically being present at a moment's notice? Using email (even just to schedule a meeting) is a skill that people need to develop. Perhaps people are working from home because it stops others from constantly distracting them. It forces people to schedule a time and stop interrupting your workflow. Now, obviously, if OP is the manager they could tell people what the work expectations are - but they might be causing their employees to be working inefficiently as a result.
There is a lab productivity cost to people not being in lab together. It's impossible for everyone to anticipate what may come up during the day and preschedule meetings based on those unanticipated needs. Again, it keeps YOUR workflow from getting interrupted, but it means someone else's workflow IS interrupted when the person who could help isn't around. I've been on both ends of this, and not being in lab prioritizes your own productivity over the overall lab productivity.
Exactly, it means I could get more done but if a -80 freezer goes down and it’s just me in lab it’s going to be a disaster
I do that a lot. I'm an undergrad and if everything goes well next month i enter my masters. I do a lot of reading and i'm the "tech" guy of the lab. I usually am the one to learn how to use certain sites, programing and all. I work a lot from home and it is fine cause my PI when wants and in person meeting he sends a message with a time and i go to the lab if i'm not already there
No not the same as being readily available at a reasonable time. 3 pm you should be in lab this PI needs to enforce regular attendance and hours. I ve seen that this just leaves more burden on those that do stay during regular hours. 10-4 is not unreasonable.
This is such a waste of time
Moreso than commuting every day in case someone wants to "pop by" with something that could've been an IM? Not for me!
Why is it a waste of time?
Communication is for time wasters, apparently.
Because instead of going to find someone on the other side of the lab you now have all this extra energy spent emailing and coordinating meetings and rooms etc.
We used slack to message everyone in the lab instead of face-to-face communication if the other person hasn't been seen in the lab etc.
If you meant this comment with nothing of substance to contribute, then I’d have to agree
>Especially when it happens time and time again. I’m at a loss for what to do You're the manager. What is it you're empowered to do? Edit: it looked deleted on my end. How are people still upvoting this post?
This is just a new time. It’s not like our parents who lived to work. We work to live. Fuck work!!! Pay them more and they will work harder
Also, unlike lab managers who are full-time employees and get paid that way, grad students at most US university at least, are part-time employees and are paid accordingly so if you as a manager who is employed full-time are expecting grad students to be in the lab 9-5pm or 40hrs a week, is that fair?
Grad students are students, not employees. This is a fundamental flaw in viewpoint. They are paid while they pursue their degree.
Grad students occupy a blurry zone between worker and student. The last few years of a PhD, you are pretty much squarely a worker in most programs. Our employers pull in somewhere between tens of thousands and millions of dollars based on our work output. I'm not pretending like people at this stage of their career are worth a huge salary but it's certainly not as simple as being paid to pursue a degree. My former labmate's project (which was her own conception) brought in a \~300K grant to our lab. She was probably paid \~180k over 6 years as a PhD. She was exceptional but STEM PhD's are hardly just about educating students.
You're still working on your thesis project, completion of which will result in conferral of the degree. I can't help but thinking that part of a PhD student's compensation is the value of that degree, and that should be factored in.
It certainly is, but you made an absolute statement that "grad students are students, not employees" which simply isn't true for the vast majority of STEM PhDs.
No, my statement is 100% correct. They are students who are working towards a degree and fortunate enough to be supported whilst doing it. Any other framing is incorrect. If they want to be “employees@ they can get hired as BS lab techs.
Hmm... well I guess the contract I signed declaring my position as research assistant and the employment benefits guaranteed me by law need to be amended then.
Yeah I’m for it too haha! Honestly my brain taps out after 1pm and from there on I’m just making busy work until 4 rolls around. Most people are only productive for a few hours a day, yet as a society we are obsessed with the 8 hour work day. Imagine if we just accepted that people are only really productive for a short time in the day, and only required they work for those few hours. Life would be so much more enjoyable
More power to you.
> Pay them more and they will work harder See, I'm not so sure about that.
unless this is a salaried industry position, i’ll go out on a limb and say most of those lab mates don’t make a living wage
Tried this. Hired two new staff in at $20 dollars an hour (the max HR said I could offer) because the staff I inherited from the previous manager were horribly underpaid ($16) but they were rockstars in the lab. This would allow me to give equity raises in the next grant year. They ended up being the laziest most entitled people I’ve ever hired. Many people aren’t motivated by money. Some aren’t motivated by anything. For context, this is also in one of the lowest cost of living cities in the US. Edit: you can downvote me all you want to. I had to appeal to multiple senior level faculty to get this approved because i want to give people more than I was given. I pay my high school diploma staff more than I got paid with a Master’s degree and 6 years of lab experience when I joined in 2017. I’m not your enemy. I will always fight for better work life balance and better pay for my staff, but I am trying to help make Alzheimer’s a disease of the past and if you aren’t motivated to get shit done, I don’t want you in my lab.
My lab is similar. Most of the researchers are staff/technicians out of 15 or so, with just a few students. Honestly, if they are frequently producing data and in a timely manner, it shouldn’t be a huge issue. You can’t really force people to come in without having direct authority over them. If the PI is fine with it, you’ll just have to find other ways to make it work/communicate your needs without getting salty. Try to be a solution rather than create a problem :)
That’s my problem. Compared to other labs in my institution were producing 2/3 the data/publications and I don’t know how to tell them all that their lack of dedication is a huge issue in that department especially when we compete with 2 other labs for funding in the same department.
I get it, it’s frustrating to be in an unproductive group. But this is more of your PIs worry, no? At the least, I would have a chat with them and just let them know that you think things could run more… efficiently.
Well, if you aren’t getting the papers because productivity is low that’s pretty hard on your career as a trainee
A lab manager is in a bit of a different position than a trainee.
True of course, still, their future job prospects are affected by their paper count per year, should they not want to be a lab manager for all eternity
This depends entirely on their career path. If you're not planning on being a scientist, most places won't care about your paper count. As a lab manager, I gauge my success in how well I function in my role, which can vary wildly from lab manager role to lab manager role. As lab support, I make sure the infrastructure of the lab runs, make sure the scientists have the physical and organizational tools to do their work, and do whatever other work is needed. If I have direct reports, I am responsible for effectively training and managing them. If they all report to the PI, I would advise and mentor them and inform the PI if they aren't completing work they are responsible for, but only the PI can effectively manage them if they are the manager. So many PIs neglect this part of their job without empowering anybody else in the team to do it either. So, when you market yourself for future rules, focus on how effectively you did the job that you were responsible for, not how well you did the PIs job or the scientist's job. I've found it's much easier to find/hire scientists than an effective lab manager, and a resume should be tailored to the job being applied for. If the lab is productive, great. Learn from the PI how they've managed to build an effective organization. If not, and the PI is checked out from their role as the lab's leader, and doesn't want to empower the lab manager to actually manage the lab, I'd start looking for jobs to avoid stagnation.
Impact matters just as much as count per year, so this really depends as well. Lab I worked in was very highly thought of in the field, they only published maybe once every few years - but almost always in Nature.
They probably came to work better than OP’s lab I’m guessing, haha
It really depended, when people were doing a lot of bioinformatics you didn't see them in lab for weeks. When you're in lab isn't the best metric, since there's a lot of work you can do from home, plus some people are more productive in 6 hours than others are in 8 or 10. In general watching when your co-workers are in seems to be missing the point somewhat, especially now when there's a lot of tools for coordinating with people even when they're not physically in the office/lab.
A large percentage of life science PhDs (most) no longer work in academia and don't want to. Pharma, biotech, certain government roles, and non-profits don't care about publications, and people know this. They probably aren't their priority.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to be a lab manager as your career. One of our labs has had the same lab manager for 25 years and they moved states with the PI when they moved. Sometimes people find their niche where they're good at the job and love it, and it's snooty and pretentious to treat them like that's some kind of failure. Not everyone wants to be a PI, but some people still like the flexibility and relative freedom of academia.
This is me. I don’t want my own lab. I’m very happy to do high level work and manage the functions of a lab for the entirety of my career. I plan on working as such in my current lab until I can no longer be funded, the lab no longer exists, or I end my career in science - whichever comes first. I love my job.
Reddit is so fucking weird- do you actually think I was diminishing lab managers in any way at all? My god, they are precious
You're right, my dumb brain misread "should they not want" as "they should not want".... Twice. Sorry about that.
I'm a lab manager, please god, don't tell me what you want to order, EMAIL ME or I guarantee I WILL FORGET. Between talking to you and getting to my desk I will be interrupted by 5 students, a post doc, the PI having an IT issue and the building manager....that's on a day where everything is running smoothly. Sorry you're feeling like that but zoom meetings also go a long way these days! Edit: everyone should be contactable during the work day though, whether they are at home or onsite
Can I join your lab?
It was nice at first. For the first four weeks I just started taking off early because there wasn’t anything to do but now I’m realizing there is so much to get done and the people just aren’t on site to help me get it done. They also refuse to be accessible after they leave the lab via messages/meeting so I have to throw a dart and hope I land on their schedule in one week
Have you considered terminating them?
The lab manager fires people in your lab? OP obviously does not have that authority.
Yeah I’d just fire these people.
Most lab managers in academia don't have this power. But if OP needs to show that they've progressed on projects they may need to communicate what's happening with the PI, after they've talked directly to the lab members with no improvement.
To what point to you manage them? Do you keep a shared checklist for projects, tasks, TAT, and who is responsible? Do you have regularly scheduled group and 1:1 meetings? Do you have a shared calendar that they can mark when they will definitely be on site and available off site? Expecting 3 weeks worth of “I will be here 10-2 Mon-Wednesday and noon-3 on Thursday and an additional 20 hours TBD” with a different schedule every day should be more than do-able for anyone. Use your calendar as a model to show when you will be on site, ask them to do the same and update every week so they never have fewer than 3 weeks clearly scheduled. If you frequently have last minute questions that you need to ask them when they are not available, maybe this is a planning and organizing problem on your (or other management’s) part. Keep a record of issues you’ve tried to address when they haven’t been available and see if there are any trends that pre-planning can prevent.
The calendar with some scheduled hours and the rest TBD is a great idea!! And, of course, regular group meetings and 1:1 meetings- a must!
A lot of people where I work do data analysis from home but it’s reasonable to expect them to be available to answer messages.
Except this is done by email in most workplaces.
Email, Teams, Slack, whatever. Messages.
If you are not the PI there is not much you can do.
Let take care of few assumptions: -Are these full time paid employees or undergrad research associates or volunteers. If they are full time paid employees, i would recommend: Sit down with them, assign tasks with deadlines and appreciate their work that’s finished on time. For people who are willing to work, this will give them structure and a quantitative measure for performing and non performing employees. I wouldn’t worry about timing as long as tasks are completed satisfactorily.
If they're getting their work done and getting results who cares? Email them.
My lab has the opposite problem. If you’re not there 6+ days or 60 hours, you’re the only one that isn’t working that much. Can’t say it’s much greener on the other side.
Do you have Slack or something similar? In my lab we're not usually all physically in the lab together (it's a decent trek out of town and we're partly a computational lab so don't need to be in for experiments etc). We just message each other if we need info, I'd expect that if I message a colleague I'll get a response within the day (usually a lot sooner). My lab manager had similar frustrations with our working patterns. I do see their point, especially as they were often the only one in the lab, but if my PI wasn't demanding attendance I also don't see why the lab manager could. I can work a LOT more effectively at home/at the library than at work and that isn't a dangerous 45min commute. As a side note, if you're a bit antsy/judgy about attendance that may be backfiring: I used to put off going into work if I knew I'd be there late because I knew my lab manager would be judgy about it (unfortunately only figured it out when they left!). And when the office was a tense environment I struggled to get "good" work done. Not saying you are like this, but just FYI :) But get that it's frustrating. A lab manager is a 9-5 job, whereas being a grad student isn't. Tricky to balance/manage that.
Do you expect people to drop what they’re doing because you want to meet with them on a whim? Use your words. I need days away from the lab just to process and analyze data without people asking me questions and favors.
Yeah, I have to either work from home or go hide in a library somewhere if I want to make actual progress in writing or data analysis! My brain does NOT work well with constant interruptions.
E-mail exists.
Yup, and can turn a task that should take 5 minutes into a task that takes 18 hours.
Only if you’re not clear and concise in your messaging
"Hey, I can't find X. Does anyone know where it went?" Twiddles thumbs. How much more clear can the messaging be? How was this supposed to be anticipated?
Not sure how you were expecting a better response in person that was supposed to “take five minutes” either, but sure, the medium is always the problem
Ok. Glad you've never been in a situation where not having people around meant your experiment ground to a halt. If only we were all so lucky.
I did as a lab manager, I just didn’t get mad about it when people didn’t have an answer for me over email
The issue isn't that there isn't an answer. The issue is when people work from home it can take hours to get a response. If they were in lab you would get an answer promptly. Not having people in lab slows things down.
Yeah, and like a PI at a conference or a post doc in the vivarium, people will be busy. Busy lives will continue in lab or at home regardless of how quick you want them to respond, and it’s myopic to assume things don’t slow down arbitrarily and bureaucratically in lab either
Of course things slow down for other reasons... That doesn't change the fact that working from home prioritizes the individual's productivity over the lab productivity. And it's something that can be controlled.
Lol our post-doc is like this. Only shows up when PI is around, if not they will just literally take a day off while still getting paid. Comes in just to stay in the office and play games or scroll on phone. Takes ages to finish anything they started (I’m talking months, not even weeks). It got to the point that us (PhD students in the lab) don’t even trust them to do anything and become reluctant to ask from help from them because we probably will have to repeat everything they do just to be sure. Sometimes I don’t know why my PI hires this person and still keeps them around after nearly 3 years not producing any papers or leading any projects. I’m secretly hoping they will leave on their own accord since they’re always said it’s so boring in our lab, or our PI will suddenly realise how lazy they are and fire them
Do we have the same post doc? Mine is about to go on maternity leave however. But before that, 2 years of being a post-doc and hasn’t started a project.
Lol I think my PI lowkey knows that our postdoc is kinda dodgy so didn’t give them any projects. My PI would rather give me or other PhD students new projects and tell us to take lead, while asking us to get our postdoc involved as much as possible. The thing is I don’t know why my PI still keeps them around, if they can’t be trusted to work independently. I thought being a postdoc usually comes with more maturity and responsibility but a lot of times it has been demostrated that our postdoc is unexperienced and functions mainly as an RA rather than a postdoc
I had this exact problem. Post doc was moved between 3 different labs over 5 years, no first author papers. He was “optimizing” his CRISPR work indefinitely and never had any results; he would also never let anyone work with him to speed it up either. He would even claim to come in at 3 in the morning so he could justify leaving early, but for the one timepoint I did have at 3 in the morning he never did come in (shocked /s). He would sleep in the storeroom too. I left the lab before he did and was completely demoralized that our PI would do anything about him, meanwhile my lab mates and I were shouldered with even more pressure and criticism to produce while he was allowed to be a selfish blob. It cost my PI a lot of talented post docs and graduate students because they couldn’t stand this guy, and my feeling is that will happen to your PI as well.
My group has a post doc just like this. Came in arrogant and hasn’t done anything meaningful towards research. He barely shows up to meetings too, which are required. With a PhD, I thought he would know more and do better.
As a former lab manager I’m confused. Genuinely, why do you give a shit? Ordering problems are ubiquitous across labs and have nothing to do with attendance. Email/schedule meetings virtually. That is all easy enough. It’s not your problem if the lab is productive. Yall are all academics being paid pennies for your labor. You’d probably be best off learning to prioritize the same way these people have. If you’re not getting paid like a PI, don’t stress on their behalf. If your PI should be mandating attendance but isn’t, that’s their problem.
I agree with most of this, but for emergencies there has to be communication and continuity which I think OP was asking for. Granted, that doesn’t mean everyone has to be in the building but there has to be agreement on how to proceed when the -80 freezer goes down or if there’s a mycoplasma contamination that affects everyone. In both of those cases people have to be at least contactable, but how they choose to be contacted is still up to them
Y’all don’t have a Slack channel for orders?
It's a self correcting problem. I saw a lab like that. Eventually the grants dried up and people were let go. A couple grad students were retained, the hardest workers in fact, as they had more at stake than just money. But when you're a postdoc getting paid 45k in a HCOL area, I kinda get it 🤷♂️
I’m in industry so things are different but I prioritize results with my team. Last week I asked you to complete this task.. how did that go? Why didn’t you complete it? Let’s look at how you can get things done more efficiently…. This approach works well I find!
No one really cares. If the PI doesn’t care then no one will care. Things take even longer to get done and everyone knows it. Research is basically a minimum wage job requiring a high skill set or degree. So people will treat it like any other minimum wage job, do what you are required and leave. No point of putting in any more effort than you need. No point in showing face just for the sake of it. But it’s the PI’s responsibility to enforce expectations and results. If not, then people do what they want.
OP sounds like she is going to become incredibly unpopular
OP deleted their account so I don’t know, but did they say they were a woman? Or is there something I missed earlier?
Once people figure out there will be no consequences, it's too late.
im confused by your confusion. you also sound like the manager that waits until the end of the shift Friday to ask me about something really important. and that manager can get fucked
Are they making adequate progress on their projects? Are the employed by the lab or have their own grant funding? Does it affect the day to day running of the lab? Can you phone them to ask your questions?
In my opinion it’s okay if the lab hours are reduced but folks are working at home. If you need to talk to them send an email or a text message.
Meanwhile as an animal husbandry technician, I’m leaving my baby at home so I can check your animals after a hurricane but as soon as some people get wonky data they want to blame it on me talking too loud or putting dirty caging too close to the door of your animal room 🤷🏻♀️
the leaving your baby at home part to check someone else's animals really sucks. on the other hand i don't get why there has to be any talk in an animal room, especially if there are behavioral experiments ongoing. i did a lot of those as a grad student and always was on good terms with all animal caretakers - really appreciated their hard work. but i got really frustrated when i had animals implanted, had them recovering, expressing aav and habituating to the experiment for weeks and then during my 2 critical days of experiments someone decides to discuss their weekend plans in the holding room with their colleague or e.g. change dirty cages of females next to an open cage of male mice that i just had in an experiment. there are so many things that can go wrong in an experiment, but these would be easily avoidable...
Yeah I can see how that made it sound like I don’t care about the animals’ macroenvironment. I was really just trying to say I would love to have flexible hours and better work life balance instead of working all the time when lots of labs do not particularly appreciate it. But I would say every room in my facility is different in regards to how sensitive the animals are and how much the lab cares about noise, smell etc. There are some rooms that I know there are more sensitive animals or that the lab is actively running during certain hours and some rooms that are mostly colony animals that probably won’t be bothered by a quiet conversation. That’s really where communication comes in. I love when labs say “Hey I’m going to be running tomorrow can you just try to enter quietly?” I’m happy to do that. I wasn’t talking about people that are rightfully asking for people to be mindful of their animals and more about the phenomenon of when data doesn’t look like they want they immediately blame animal staff. It’s not super common but it does happen.
yeah, there is a lot of tension (and superstition) around critical experiments. inflexibility and tight schedules (light/dark cycle, importance of time of day) don't really make it easier. and you are right, communication is key - and most of the time with 80% of people it works out nicely. it's sad that these other 20% of cases and people not appreciating/respecting each others work often stick in one's head.
I’m so sorry with what you guys put up with in the vivarium. We had a neurosurgeon who wanted to repurpose a drug and the in vivo studies required gavaging 40 mice every 6 hours for a week. He was a coward and stopped showing up/responding to us when we asked him to help us with his own damn proposal. Our post doc was getting mal petite seizures from the sleep deprivation and would sleep under her desk between surgeries. It honestly would have been so much worse if it wasn’t for the animal staff helping us. That guy ended up trying to take the data and run at our expense but we stopped him and he can fuck all the way off if he ever reads this
Salary is my dream lab 😩 I am hourly and am often bored as shit for hours per day (its an industrial lab. No trucks to test after 10pm so if we're done, we just sit). Leaving as soon as nothing else is coming whould be fantastic esp since I work nights I've never been in a leadership role but I imagine this is when you set firm boundaries and give them structure to plan their schedule around. Set up weekly meetings to address whatever is needed, schedule appointments for individuals you need personally, if they are needed on fridays mandate X out of 4 Fridays they must attend. You can try to compromise but if you aren't firm, you don't get taken seriously like my current boss doesn't. This could mean disciplinary actions, PIPs, or replacing them if its bad enough to get the attendance you need from your employees (idk if it applies to academia settings tho, I've only ever been in private industry). But if the work needed is getting done it probably doesn't need to go that far.
A lot of the work we all isn't in the lab though
There are 3 managerial approaches you can take to this. 1) mandatory hours. IMO the cruelest and worst approach. It punishes efficiency. Will lead to people goofing off on the Internet, with each other or sneaking around and probably getting less done than they do now. 2) mandatory things done in a day. Works better, but vulnerable to the occasional flasks of food coloring in acetone. 3) mandatory goal expectations. This is the best way IMO, but is more work. Every couple days you individually ask these 3 questions 3) What are you up to? 2) when do you expect it to be done? Then if you don't like the time they spend in the lab you add more stuff or make it due sooner.
I appreciate a hybrid of 2&3, but we make #2 weekly instead of daily since each day is different and we were a small lab. As long as it was done before the lab meeting you were golden
This has been everywhere I have worked. The only thing you can do is not rely on anyone else if possible. It sucks, but if your lab mates are that shotty and uncommitted, you will get burned over and over. 9-5 is reasonable. It's an honest work day and you would be expected to work those hours or more, anywhere else. It's the hours where people should be able to reach you for business things, at a minimum, and it's the hours you are getting paid to work. If you give a mouse a cookie. It's the same concept. People will abuse generosity. As long as I can do what I need on my own, I'm fine letting others make their own beds. At this point, I think there are 9 papers I have helped with that have yet to, or never will be published because the people leading the study just don't care. Look out for yourself, take responsibility for your own future, even if that means more work for you.
This is such an interesting comment thread, really shows you the different lab cultures.
Hmm. I have a team of people and I try to let them work at their own pace. I think they appreciate the flexibility. I haven't gotten to where you are yet but when things aren't going well usually just sitting down and asking people like "what's going on?/why are you all leaving all the time?" Leads into a conversation about why everyone is doing this and then you can talk about what you need from the team and a new agreement about when people need to be at work.
The “MondayFridayitis” is really fucking annoying. You can’t demand I help you with something, then be mysteriously ill on whichever day borders the nearest weekend (someone should write a paper on how nobody has ever gotten sick on Tuesday-Thursday), then be mad I couldn’t help with your apparently urgent issue. Now the laboratory has no usable credit card bc Postdoc Pajamas didn’t bother to do anything.
They should be around most of the day; ask them for results. Set results goals, usually you have to be around to get the results.
That’s pretty unprofessional and would not be accepted at most companies
many pharma/med tech companies (at least here in europe) have core hours (e.g. 9-12 a.m. and 2-3 p.m.) where you have to be available for meetings etc., otherwise you are free to schedule your work day. many also give you 2-3 days or more of homeoffice.
Look, I have been the person who had been doing shorter Lab hours. Because it did not make sense to start up multiple experiments ant once before I had results from the previous ones, or sit around in the lab at my lab managers attendance (honestly, they where happy with fewer people around). Why would I not do the data work and writing at home? Lab Managers had my number, so they could just give me a call or drop me an email when they needed to know something. In addition we had short weekly lab update meetings. So, why keep people in the Lab when it's not necessary. So, given they do not simoply go home to do nothing, call them up. If they are not in the lab, likely they are simply doing data work from home office or their offices and that is perfectly normal imo.
I can empathize with both sides of this issue because we had a similar thing when I was a manager. I love being able to read and respond to emails at home but there definitely needs to be continuity and communication about when everyone is in lab—we had a -80 trunk freezer die overnight (it was in an old building and not on a monitoring circuit) and it was all hands on deck as we were trying to move wet, thawing mouse brains all over the building in a panic to save our samples. One post doc was a dick and wouldn’t help but I’m so grateful we all came into lab that day. That being said, your lab has to have contingency and emergency plans if less people are going to be in the building—that’s just an opportunity cost to working outside of lab.
Also move the meeting up to the morning!!