Bxdty

I recently (around the beginning of December) just transferred to a new team due to the abuse and reckless behavior of my former team. This was a complete lateral move as I will continue to be a technical lead for this team working very closely with them. I fought very hard and followed some advice from some of the other posts in this Stack Exchange and barely was given blessings to go ahead to transfer to this new team. This also included relocating to another city my employer operates in, which is a minor loss, but is necessary. Feeling refreshed about the possibility of working in a more productive environment was quickly diminished during the past few weeks.

I unfortunately noticed on my first day that in my current office space, I am the lightest person here by at least 50kg. Now I don’t actually mind, people come in all sizes and I am not in the best shape anyways. Well some of the red flags that I noticed during the first couple of weeks mostly included verbal complaints about the construction being done to the building. Yeah, I get it, construction is loud and we wish them to hurry up.

One of the things I like to do to get to know and learn of my team’s concerns is to ask them to email me a private summary of how they feel. Last week, I received all of the responses and was completely shocked aside from the usual complaints. All of the complaints were not necessarily about the construction, but rather the symptoms of what happens when a building is under construction. These complains pretty much all looked like this:

“With the elevator out of service, walking up the flights of stairs has taken a large amount of time out of my day to use the restroom”

“Our standups are too far away. I suggest we just do it at our desks since we don’t need to see each other”

“[Business Owner] constantly wants me to meet up with him, he should come to us since we’re all too busy and he’s too far away”

“Food options since construction has made it very difficult for us to get lunch, I would rather just work from home so we have easier access”

The final straw that triggered me to post this was when construction on our working space needed to begin. Somehow, word got out and people are NOT happy since they found out that they now have to walk to our main office (which is quite nice and is out of sight from management for some reason). I want to tell my team and others to suck it up, but this is on a new level of upset. I am afraid that people will lash out and accuse me of things. I will try to convince my team to stop complaining about these things, but I want to know if I should be strict about it or passive in my approach or if there is another way to handle my situation?

I would also like to mention that I have a bad history with the law and was extremely lucky to have been hired despite my past and it will be almost impossible for me get hired in the same industry.