The Most Toxic Ways Bosses Affected Family Time

Toxic bosses not only ruin your workday, but their special brand of awfulness can also affect your time off the clock.

The Most Toxic Ways Bosses Affected Family Time

Bosses. We’ve all had them at some point. And for every supervisor who is kind, fair and wants you to succeed, there are dozens of “horrible bosses” from hell. (Hey, someone should make a movie with that title — oh, wait — they have.)

If you like or even love your boss, consider yourself fortunate. Toxic bosses, on the other hand, not only ruin your workday, but their special brand of awfulness can also affect your time off the clock and put a damper on quality time with your significant other and children. And thanks to smartphones, you often can’t escape an ogre of a supervisor, even on vacation.

The horror stories about bosses impinging on personal time are legion, but here we share just a few of the most toxic ways bosses affected family time.

Who Needs a Vacation?

For anyone over the age of say 35, you might recall a time when being away meant communicating back home via postcards or, if you had a few extra pennies, a long-distance phone call. Well, welcome to the 21st century, where email, social media and cellphones keep you on a virtual leash — which some bosses are only too happy to yank from across the miles and time zones.

A writer by the name of Kat Boogaard wrote of a particularly trying instance while on a family vacation, wherein her boss kept pestering about not being able to find something “super important” at the office. Boogaard describes this call as “needless” (unless someone’s life was in danger, it could have waited), but she also castigates herself for not being firmer with her boss. She grumbled about it at the time rather than put her foot down, reminding the boss that she’d previously approved the vacation request.

The Bottom Line

Our initial instinct is to snap back at a pesky boss like this, but a gentle-yet-firm email or text to the effect that you’re on an approved break is best.

If your supervisor won’t stop, it may be worth escalating to Human Resources. Remember, you’re entitled to your break!

Stress at Work Means Stress at Home

Unsurprisingly, a supervisor who is supportive of both your office needs and is sensitive to your personal issues makes for a happier employee. The reverse pushes an already negative situation into a whirlpool of despair, according to recent research.

Some people are able to just “turn off” a toxic work environment the moment they leave the jobsite, but for many of us, being yelled at unfairly, insulted or belittled by a supervisor will follow you home, where the negative energy sets up shop at the place you least want it to take root.

The Bottom Line

The same researchers also discovered that bosses who model healthy behaviors become role models. In other words, if your boss demonstrates a healthy balance of work versus home life and/or makes sure you don’t work late when you’ve already promised to get to Junior’s soccer game on time, this positivity becomes self-reinforcing.

When interviewing for a job, try to look for signs or ask questions that indicate your boss has this balance in check. After all, you might end up with Kevin Spacey’s supervillain of a supervisor from “Horrible Bosses,” who mocks you if you show up even two minutes late, and expects you to slave away for the company.

Not Preaching to the Choir

Sometimes, a supervisor can go over the line to push their beliefs, which can be uncomfortable at best but a human resources — or even legal — nightmare at worst, especially if you feel pressured to say yes to keep things kosher in the office.

One unhappy soul sent a letter to her Northern California newspaper asking for advice when her boss, an evangelical, kept pressuring her to come to her church and be “saved.” Not only that, the overseer in question felt compelled to offer unsolicited advice about the worker’s personal life and, when such “good advice” was rebuffed, became actively hostile to the employee.

The Bottom Line

Look, we all want to be polite, and there are ways to say no without hurting someone else’s feelings — “thank you, but I’m not interested” is a good one — but the pressure this supervisor was putting on her charge is both inappropriate and borderline illegal.

No one has the right to tell you how to live your life outside of the office, least of all your boss.

Who Goes There?

Unless you’re a doctor, firefighter, cop or in the Secret Service, there’s pretty much no work “emergency” that can’t wait until after a nap. But one unlucky person who works nights claims they were harshly awakened after a long shift thanks to a supervisor banging on their house’s doors and windows. The clamor was so loud that it even attracted the concern of neighbors. The confused laborer finally opened the door to ask what was wrong.

“Can you work today? Someone called in sick.”

The employee agreed to take the “emergency” shift, but was understandably miffed about the inappropriateness of the supervisor attacking their doors and windows like Jason Voorhees on a bender.

The Bottom Line

The boss in question was honestly lucky he wasn’t mistaken for a potential burglar and shot.

Uninvited Wedding Guest

Can you think of anything more nauseating than your boss showing up, uninvited, to your wedding??? Especially when it’s to ask where his stapler went (OK, I made that last part up, but if you’ve seen “Office Space,” you know where we're going with that)?

This first-person story relates that’s precisely what happened to one unlucky bride, who was in the midst of the happiest day of her life when her uncaring, clearly deranged boss stormed the chapel with an “urgent” question about work. Fortunately, one of the bride’s relatives was a cop, who firmly escorted out the intruder. But it wasn’t enough to stop the ogre from then trying to write up his employee for insubordination.

The Bottom Line

Thankfully, the bride — who likely went from plain blushing to flush with crimson rage — quit this miserable specimen’s employ before even getting on a plane for the honeymoon.

It seems like there should be a lawsuit in there somewhere.

Work Stress Infects Family Relationships Like a Virus

We’ve all come home from a bad day at the office and needed to vent to a parent, friend or significant other. But some experts are finding that the angst of dealing with a bad boss can actually turn your home into a toxic stew of negativity.

As detailed by The Washington Post, one study of hotel staffers found that stressed workers effectively “spread” their stress to their family, much like a virus passing from host to host.

The Bottom Line

Sometimes, quitting your job is the healthiest choice for you and everyone around you.

If you don’t “inoculate” yourself, the illness will be transmitted to everyone else around you.

Enabling Indiscretions

Alison Green, who writes a “workplace advice” column for Slate, thought she had seen and heard it all, but one especially perverse anecdote came to her attention from an executive assistant who related how the boss in question enlisted said assistant to help cover up the tracks of his numerous extramarital affairs.

This included ordering his assistant to book hotel rooms around town for trysts, purchase gifts for his paramours on the company dime and even fudge expense reports to hide the fact he was wining and dining “clients” while on work trips. The employee even had to help him out when he inadvertently used a company card to pay for a night out at a strip club.

The Bottom Line

Just ask Nixon: The crime is bad, but the cover-up is always worse. Our advice to this employee: Turn him in.

We guarantee when (not if) he gets busted, he’ll try to blame it all on you anyway.

Inflexible Bosses Give You Heart Attacks

The worse your boss, the worse for your heart. This from The Washington Post, which reported that having a stentorian, immutable supervisor increases your risk of heart disease.

However, people who work in an environment where they feel supported by their boss and coworkers tend to lead healthier lives away from the office.

The Bottom Line

If you have kids, remember that they model their behavior on what they see you do.

Ergo, if you come home from work stressed and then melt into the couch for eight hours rather than exercise or at least be somewhat active, chances are they’ll take this as a proper way to behave.

Hanky Panky

Supervisor-supervisee romances are nothing new, but things can get messy if the situation goes sour because you still have to work together. Then, there are times when, for whatever reason, you’re just not interested in your boss, and that’s perfectly OK, too.

If you’re both mature, you can just say so and, if your boss is an adult, he or she will back off. But if your manager isn’t backing down, it’s time to consult Human Resources and, potentially, legal counsel.

The Bottom Line

Of course, in the #MeToo era, more attention than ever is being paid to those instances where a worker feels he or she cannot say no — or is coerced — into an intimate relationship with someone in a position of power. It’s super important to draw the line, because once work life and home life begin to merge, it can be difficult to untangle, especially if your manager is your boss one moment and your “boyfriend” the next, who is meeting your friends and family but doesn’t know when it’s time to be off the clock.

All kinds of power dynamics are at play here, and it’s necessary to define things very clearly sooner rather than later if you truly want to get involved with a boss. (Many companies have policies against coworker dating for this very reason.)

‘Nursing’ a Grudge

Pregnant women have so much to deal with, especially as they get closer to giving birth, including the right date to begin maternity leave. This is, of course, something of concern to your supervisor, who will need to make arrangements to cover your workload while you’re out of the office creating new life. This does not, however, extend to giving you guff for maternity wear!

An elementary school teacher in Tennessee shared with Reader’s Digest that, as her body naturally expanded with the growing fetus inside of her, her boss — also a woman — became “concerned” about the increasing size of her mammaries. “I’m concerned because your breasts have become inappropriately large for a secondary school teacher,” the teacher’s supervisor allegedly told her.

The Bottom Line

No mention of prepartum wardrobe choices was made again in this case. Is it possible the boss lady was just jealous of her subordinate’s increasing bust size?

Seriously, who does that?

Lack of Organization

A manager who is completely out to sea when it comes to the extra-office needs of his or her employees is all but guaranteed to breed resentment and lost productivity. HealthDay.com quoted a professor from Portland State University in Oregon who said that supervisors prone to moving schedules around without notice are making life worse for everyone.

This has a domino effect, wherein employees are suddenly required to turn on a dime and move around non-work family responsibilities to accommodate the shifty manager.

The Bottom Line

We get it, things come up at work, but it’s irresponsible to toss the schedule out the window at the last minute.

Adequate preparation makes for fewer emergencies.

Like Family, Like Boss

This is interesting: Forbes reports that your relationship with your parents can unconsciously inform your relationship with your boss. Since parents are the first real authority figures you encounter, how you have reacted to them throughout your life can inform how you relate to your boss.

This can be as simple as trying a bit too hard to get your supervisor’s approval if your dad withheld approbation. On the more sinister end, just like how we sometimes model our romantic relationships thanks to some of the more negative aspects of our home lives, we sometimes follow those same patterns into the workplace.

The Bottom Line

In other words, you might be paradoxically drawn to that supervisor who constantly berates you and tells you you’ll never amount to anything and you’re a loser.

If you’ve never known better, you might well be on your way to continuing that toxic atmosphere in your professional world, and this negativity will further domino into your relationships with friends, family and romantic partners. The best option is to stop the cycle before it takes over.

Indecent Proposal

In the so-gross-we-might-actually-throw-up-in-our-mouths sweepstakes, this story of a boss dangling a promotion for his subordinate, but only if the employee’s wife slept with him, has to be the absolute creepiest. An anonymous woman wrote an essay for the site NowtoLove.com, in which she tells of how her husband’s boss drunkenly offered the couple the keys to the kingdom if she spent one night with him in a motel.

After mulling it over, and with her husband having no idea about the offer, she agreed to meet his boss at a seedy motel. The husband got the job, and it’s been roses and champagne for the couple ever since — but at what price?

The Bottom Line

If the tall-taler is to be believed, her husband still doesn’t know why things suddenly went his way at work.

Granted, this is a pretty extreme example, but it only goes to show precisely what a truly poisonous effect the most toxic boss can have on your family life.

Grave Concerns

We had to double-check this one to make sure we read it correctly. Strap yourselves in, folks! An understandably upset office drone sent a missive to the site AskAManager.org to say that one of their coworkers had recently lost a relative. The letter-writer said their supervisor asked him or her (the writer’s gender wasn’t identified) to leave a letter for the coworker out on bereavement … at the grave.

Suspicious of the boss’ motivations, the letter-writer opened what looked like a condolence card, only to find that it contained work-related questions. “He gave me directions to the cemetery and everything,” the incredulous worker said.

The Bottom Line

This is so wrong in so many ways that it's impossible to know where to begin. We suspect this boss will likely have a sparsely attended funeral of his own someday.

You can’t make this stuff up, folks.