
Bust-ups and burnout: Let our experts help you deal with workplace conflict
Are you concerned about your job's security amid Trump tariffs and an uncertain economic outlook? Have you felt let down by your employer's internal processes?
Perhaps you are burnt out due to an increasing workload? Or maybe you are considering leaving your company altogether due to a drive to return to the office.
We want to hear from you about any work-related issues you want to put to our panel of experts.
We have received many queries on working from home, detailing unique challenges in having to spend more and more time in the office, or dealing with the isolation felt by some while working from home. We want to hear more.
READ MORE
Has your employer called for a greater presence in the office? What effect has this had on you? You might have found that
hybrid working arrangements
have led to a collapse of workplace relationships and friendships.
Other queries have spanned private and public pensions, feeling overqualified for specific roles, inappropriate behaviour in the office, or
being the subject of allegations of misconduct, resulting in suspension
.
Work-related stress and burnout queries are coming in at an increasing rate, which experts say are on the rise. Have you experienced these?
Perhaps you are unhappy in your current role and want to see what else is on offer, particularly in this employees' market in a country at near full employment.
Conflict arising from hybrid working arrangements
, which can often result in allegations of workplace bullying, is also on the rise, according to our panel of experts. Have you experienced such conflict and want to know more on how to handle it?
Maternity-leave related queries
and parental leave worries,
flawed internal grievance processes
, and recruitment and promotion-related queries have also been dealt with by our panel of experts.
Alongside employees, managers and employers grappling with a sometimes unhappy workforce have sought advice on navigating hybrid working arrangements, challenges in retaining talent and
even handling social gatherings outside of the office
.
Finding new ways of coping with conflict is an ever-present challenge, as even very experienced people in charge of their career trajectory will often find themselves coming home each night with a tale of woe to offload on their partner.
The intensity of such experience is clearly often worsened as people take on more responsibility through promotion and years spent in a particular working environment. But people at the start of their careers can easily find themselves in even more testing environments.
This column has sought to specialise in finding new ways to effectively bypass or solve such issues, and readers have proven hugely interested in how peers approach such scenarios, how they would themselves react in these situations, and deal with perceptions of blame.
A remarkable example of workplace conflict involved
a HR executive suffering from burnout
- a phenomenon such staff are typically supposed to solve, not get caught up in.
Please use our attached form to send in any workplace queries that you may have. We do everything to ensure your details are anonymised where necessary in published responses. We seek expert responses from the most relevant people to ensure clear-sighted, accessible advice.
[
Your work questions answered: If offered another job during maternity leave, what are my rights for taking the rest of it?
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]
Please limit your submissions to 400 words or less, and please include a phone number.
Your name and contact details are kept confidential and will only be used for verification purposes. Any details about your employer will also be anonymised.
Please note we may not publish a response to every submission we receive.
This column is not intended to replace professional advice and only questions selected for publication can be answered.
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Tesla suffers suffers biggest one-day drop in market value after Trump-Musk spat
Tesla 's market value suffered its biggest one-day drop on record on Thursday as an escalating feud between Donald Trump and Elon Musk triggered a sharp sell-off in the carmaker's shares. The electric vehicle group's shares closed down more than 14 per cent, erasing $153 billion (€134 billion) from its market capitalisation, after the US president signalled he could terminate US government contracts with Mr Musk's companies. 'The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon's Governmental Subsidies and Contracts,' Mr Trump wrote on his platform Truth Social. Thursday's drop left Tesla's share price down 25 per cent since the start of the year. READ MORE The spat between two of the world's most powerful men included repeated barbs from Mr Musk on his platform X and Mr Trump's comment that the billionaire, who has been a close ally since the election, was 'wearing thin'. The Tesla sell-off reverberated through US stock markets, with the S&P 500 and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite ending the session down 0.5 per cent and 0.8 per cent respectively. Both indices began to decline at around midday, when Mr Trump and Mr Musk began exchanging insults. The pair's 'petulant drama shook up the stock market', said Mike Zigmont, co-head of trading and research at Visdom Investment Group. 'The bond market didn't care, nor should it.' Tesla investors have had a rollercoaster few months. The stock rallied hard in the final quarter of last year after Mr Trump won his second term as president, but fell between mid-December and early March amid a broader market sell-off fuelled by Mr Trump's trade wars. Shares in rivals to Mr Musk's space exploration group SpaceX and its satellite broadband network subsidiary Starlink rose on Thursday as Tesla fell. AST SpaceMobile gained 7.5 per cent while communications group EchoStar jumped 17.4 per cent. The breakdown of Mr Musk's relationship with Mr Trump comes as his public interventions in European politics, including support for far right parties, have contributed to falling car sales across Europe. In March, JPMorgan strategists wrote in a note to clients that they 'struggle[d] to think of anything analogous in the history of the automotive industry, in which a brand has lost so much value so quickly'. The cuts Mr Musk made to federal government spending as head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency also sparked a backlash. The Tesla boss stepped back from his government role at the end of May, having blamed 'blowback' against his businesses. Some investors said the market should have anticipated Mr Musk's feud with Mr Trump, despite their earlier bonhomie. Renowned short seller Jim Chanos said on X that it was the 'Most. Predictable. Break-up. Ever.' – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025


Irish Times
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You might think it's Your Friends & Neighbors, but And Just Like That... is the only true aspirational show on TV
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Irish Times
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Can belated economic sanity save the US from a Liz Truss-style fiasco?
The US approach to trade restrictions is a roller coaster. The tactic so far has been to announce a big increase in tariffs on its trading partners, then some degree of rowing back pending negotiations, then some new threats if negotiations aren't going fully the US's way. Now the US courts have intervened to at least delay proposed tariffs. It's not clear where all this will land. China confronted US tariffs that escalated to more than 100 per cent with its own countermeasures. Then negotiations opened and there has, for now, been significant rowing back . Alongside higher tariffs on steel and cars, the opening salvo against the EU was for 20 per cent tariffs, scaled back to 10 per cent while negotiations opened. The latest threat from the Trump administration is for 50 per cent tariffs on imports from the EU , unless agreement on a trade deal is reached by midsummer. Trade deals are complex and the window for reaching a deal is very short. The short-term effects of these threats are destabilising, both for exporters to the US and for US producers relying on imported inputs. READ MORE The objective of the US administration is, presumably, to see US production replace imported goods. However, unless US firms have spare capacity to replace imports, they need to build such capability. [ EU-US tariff talks: What happens next? Opens in new window ] No sane US firm will invest in new factories until it is clear what the final outcome will be from the negotiations with different big trading partners. In many cases, it could take years to bring such investments on stream – possibly only after the next US presidential election. If Trump's successor were to pursue a different trade policy, import-replacing investment might struggle to make money. The Republic of Ireland exported more than €50 billion of pharmaceuticals to the US last year. New US pharma capacity would be needed to replace imports from Ireland. Firms are unlikely to decide to invest in new factories in the US until they know what the final trade landscape will be. Then, if new plants are built, they will need regulatory approval to produce the relevant drugs in the United States, likely also taking years. Thus, it could take considerable time before pharmaceutical production could switch from Ireland to the US. How to manage your pension in these volatile times Listen | 37:00 Recent studies by the EU Commission and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) have looked at the possible effect of the US-initiated trade war on the EU and the US economies. The studies suggest that the trade war is likely to be particularly damaging for the US, with a much more muted impact on the EU. That is because the tariffs will raise the cost of US imports for US consumers and producers. In turn, this will lead to higher inflation, which could require the US central bank, the Fed, to raise interest rates, slowing the economy further. The EU research suggests that the unilateral imposition of tariffs by the US, just through their effects on trade, would reduce US national income by 1 per cent next year, while the impact on the EU would only be 0.2 per cent. Retaliatory action by the EU and others would raise the United States' loss to 1.5 per cent. The EU analysis also indicates that the US costs would be magnified by any increase in interest rates needed to choke off inflation. If the Fed were to raise rates to counter rising inflation, this could provoke a Trump response, overturning the Fed's vital independent role in setting interest rates. If this were to happen, the loss of faith in US economic policy would be likely to have even more serious consequences. However, the United States faces a further problem. US government debt is 120 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP), back to where it was in 1945 after the second World War. In the OECD, only the Greek, Italian and Japanese governments are more indebted. Nevertheless, the Trump administration plans to implement big tax cuts for the coming years. While serious cuts in expenditure, affecting social and health services, are also promised, the net effect will still mean borrowing of 6 per cent to 7 per cent of GDP each year, adding rapidly to the already high debt burden. The lesson we learned from the fiscal crisis in the 1980s, and again 15 years ago in the financial crash, is that if your national debt goes above 100 per cent of national income, you face big challenges borrowing at reasonable rates. Current US policy raises the possibility of a Liz Truss type event , where government interest rates rise significantly due to the prospect of an ever-increasing government debt burden. Hopefully, before this happens, sanity will prevail in US economic policy.