Navigating a Colleague's Over-Reporting to Management

I noticed in one of the comments that your boss has instructed you and this co-worker to grant each other full access to each others' email accounts.

Now, the manager has asked us to grant each other full email access, so she can read all my emails.

This is highly, highly unprofessional. It's bad enough that the boss has your peer micromanaging everything that you do. But it's worse to think that in a professional role as a developer that you aren't entitled to reasonable privacy for communication that involves your employment there.

Your boss might think it's a benefit, but the first time there is some personal sensitive information that needs to be transmitted by email, this can become a huge problem. Of course you will send emails directly related to your work product. But you'll also exchange emails with payroll, benefits, and human resources -- and these can contain confidential information that your peer (and sometimes, your boss) has no legitimate business seeing.

You are working in a very toxic work situation, and it's time to go.

Ignore it.

Carry on with your work and report to whomever you feel is appropriate for that piece of communication and don't let the over-reporting worry you or change your behaviour. Ensure that your communication that includes your manager is clear and concise and therefore paints a picture of you being a clear source of truth.

Sooner or later, this will stop when this woman gets bored.

The first thing to recognize is that the core of the problem is not you or your coworker but the manager. When I started reading your question I assumed the answer was going to be "the manager will get sick of it", then you wrote this: "The manager encourages this behavior".

IMHO you have two ways of dealing with it and it all depends upon your approach to office politics. As I don't want to play games my own approach would be the first.

You can go about doing your job the best you can, and because you are a fallible human being you will make mistakes and they will be reported. You will lose creditability and unless you or the manager leaves this position you are heading for a collision course of being an underperformer. This can be mitigated somewhat by limiting your exposure to the tattle tale, never speaking to them or around them. Never letting them know what is going on in your life or what you have going on at work. There might be a different coworker who is less talented than you and is closer to the collision course, but you will get there eventually.

The second thing you can do is feed this person false information. This is a little spy vs spy and it has to be subtly so any blow back does not come back to you. Like I said, that is too much energy for me, but some people thrive off this kind of thing. Eventually the tattle tale will lose all credibility and incur the wrath of the boss.

If this is otherwise a good job, this situation turns it into a mediocre one at best and a terrible one depending on how things play out in the next few weeks.

You could bring this up to the manager as a general efficiency concern:

"I feel we are spending too much time writing reports and e-mails and too little time doing actual work. I would like if we could focus more on [name an important task you all should be working on]."

You can keep the wording in general terms "we" without pointing fingers at your colleague. This might work well particularly when there's a deadline you need to meet or if there is a task that the manager points out as important. You can express it as a concern of not meeting the deadline rather than a concern about the annoying reporting.

This is subtle enough not to risk any negative consequences even if it doesn't work. You might even be able to bring up the same concern again, once again phrased as an efficiency concern. If the manager tells you all you should be doing x, you could get back to them after a couple of days saying "I feel we should all focus more on x instead of all these emails".

Re: those email accounts...

How many "group project management" packages (some free!) are available?

I strongly suggest pushing for adoption of one of these so that ALL eyes can see what is being recorded/reported regarding everyone's interests and activities.

Work together with your manager to wean the co-worker off the stealth of using private channels to report your activities to superiors. If it's worth reporting/recording, all affected parties maintain awareness of developments (including the tone of their expression.)

Vile behaviour shuns the daylight.

(E-mail is not the only kid on the block that can record 'history'.)