Welcome to Fluther.
Your post leaves me with more questions than answers.
If you started a new job a couple of months ago and the other employees in the department (all of them?) are new, then is it a new company? Or a new department in an established company? And where did the others come from, that they already had personal relationships? (Formed at work or outside of work?)
One thing that I can tell you – in a very general way – about working with bosses is that it’s best if you don’t “take a problem” to them. That’s like dropping a dead fish on your boss’ desk; he or she won’t like that. Instead, see if you can bring “a solution”: maybe moving you to a different department or even a different part of the office that you’re already in, or providing whatever training may be lacking in the new department / new work. But “the solution” is for you to determine and then suggest to the boss, so that all he or she has to do is make a decision and set things in motion – which is what bosses prefer to do anyway – they don’t want to work on “your problems”. That’s not why they’re there.
Aside from that, I’ve worked in offices – and busy, crowded offices, at that – for decades, with people who leave their computers turned on and unguarded all of the time. Yet in all that time I have never once read an email on a coworker’s computer. It’s not that there has never been an opportunity; it is just not done! So that’s a question in my own mind: How and why are you reading others’ emails on their computers?
You say that some others tend to demean the work that you do. Is there any validity to their complaints? Are you taking any value from their criticism to improve what you do? After all, as a new employee there must be tons for you to learn.
And now, the story (there’s nearly always a story):
About ten years ago in the company where I’ve worked for over a quarter-century, the supervisor of the group I work in hired a new guy. No big deal; we needed someone and he interviewed candidates and hired this one. Right away we started to wonder – why this guy? He dressed well. He spoke in well-modulated tones and used good English. He seemed reasonably intelligent. He was unfailingly polite. But he was utterly useless and incompetent. He simply would not do what was required. After a period of several months the rest of us in the group had pretty much closed ranks to him.
To give an example of his lack of value to our group: When we had a bid proposal for a new contract in another part of the world working for a new customer he would go online – for days! – to research the customer, the competition, similar projects in that part of the world and trivia about the country where the work was proposed. He would compile useless fact sheets about all kinds of things that had no bearing on our work. Meanwhile, we TOLD him that he could obtain that information – if he needed it – from our own Proposals group, and that was not what we needed him to do. We needed bid packages assembled for presentation to potential contractors. We needed to respond to bidding contractors’ questions (which never included the information he was collecting on his own, and never would). We needed to prepare estimates of our own costs to support and man these projects over a period of years, and then defend those estimates when they went to Tendering and Estimating, so that we would not have our budgets cut to unworkable levels. We told him what we needed … and he did his own thing. When he was involved in meetings to present and defend the work we actually did and needed to do, then he was irrelevant. He never added value to our group, and in fact he cost us more work – in those first, vital months – doing his work and covering for him while we attempted to get him to fit in.
But we didn’t start off by hating on him or wanting him out. We tried, as we try with any new member of our group, to get him up to speed, to learn the ropes, and to move in tandem with us and do what needed to be done. At the same time, while a guy is new you help to shield him from a certain amount of criticism by running interference for him while he gets acquainted with the job. But, as I say, after a few months we were done with that. And when we closed ranks against him we essentially forced him out. The supervisor didn’t last too much longer after that debacle, either. (The useless new guy eventually went to work somewhere in the government, and in our industry. The supervisor retired early.)
I’m not trying to compare this guy to you or to say that you’re failing in the way he is or for the same reason – or that you’re incompetent or irrelevant to your position. I don’t know you, and I certainly can’t say that you are failing in your duties. But this may very well be what is happening; the superficial parallels are there. And it’s pretty obvious from what you say that you are “failing in that environment.”
Frankly, from the way you’ve described the working environment, you may have passed your evaluation period with your co-workers and it may be time for you to look elsewhere. But just in case you can salvage this … I would suggest that you talk to the ones you think will be helpful about the problems that you’re having fitting in, and where you may have gone off the rails. Be prepared to hear things that you don’t like, and try not to be defensive. If this works, you’re going to hear things that you don’t like. If you manage to have that conversation and get the feedback you need, then you can decide if there’s a way to still pull this out – or whether you should be making plans to go somewhere else.
It’s not in the nature of most groups to be entirely welcoming all of the time to new people indefinitely. It’s really up to you to provide the value that the group needs and to insert yourself into a functioning group in a way that makes you integral and necessary. If you can’t or won’t do that, then the group is going to re-group “against you”. That’s just a fact of life.
It’s also a possibility that the work environment is toxic, and maybe you need to recognize that and move on.
Good luck. And stop reading people’s open emails!
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