Employees personal life impacting “extra” work

My direct report got married last year. During her annual review last week, she told me she did nothing “extra” because she was so focused on wedding planning. Honestly, fine. I don’t care. She got a meets expectations on her review.

Her feedback was that she felt other people on the team had more opportunities for “extra” work so that they could get an “exceeds” expectations. I felt frustrated because she didn’t want any “extra” work, but I accepted that feedback.

Last week, I had an opportunity for someone on my team to do a project that would take a total of maybe 2 hours across 4 weeks. I offered it to her and she accepted it. She went to the kick off meeting (the first 30 mins of the 2 hour commitment) and then told me she actually could not do the project unless I excuse her from her other work because her mother is in town for the next month and she will need to cook dinner earlier every day.

I told her the priority is to complete her job during the standard work week and to forget the project (I now have to do it.)

My knee jerk reaction is to not offer her any other “extra” projects because of this, but then I think I’m being unreasonable. I’ve always just buckled down and worked extra when I needed to, but I can’t expect everyone to be like me.

She makes over 100k/salary, works from home, and does the minimum requirements of the job so I have her at a meets expectations. I’m in no way exploiting her or looking for free labor. She asked for more opportunities and then instead of declining, she accepted and backed out which created more work for other employees (myself and the PM).

What’s the next step here? Give her another chance? I have other people on the team who want “extra” work because they like to get exceeds expectations and pad their internal resumes for future promotions and such.

*****Edit for clarification about what I mean by “extra work” as I think it’s triggered something unintentional here:

There was a promotion opportunity last year and every applicant was required (as part of the interview) to present a case study to an interview panel. One of my directs applied and didn’t do well in the interview and the team commented in feedback that his presentation skills were not as good as some of the other applicants and this was a key part of the role.

For the next few months, I invited him to take on a few projects with me where he would be able to work with me to create and present work to clients. He eventually got comfortable and even did one on his own.

That’s what I mean by extra work. He still had to do his job for which we pay him, but in addition to that, he wanted to learn a new skill. I mentored him and trained him. But yes, he did “extra” work that was not in his job description. I did not have the authority to give him extra money for that work. I could have and would have done it without him had he not wanted to learn the skill.

The person I made the post about mentioned in her review that it wasn’t fair that he got to present to clients. So I offered her a project to present to clients and she backed out midway through …. not because she had to get her work done, but because her mother is visiting.

I appreciate the different perspectives and I am thinking a lot about how to make development more a part of the job. They can get exceeds expectations by getting positive feedback from clients, but they do the same thing every day so they don’t have extra development opportunities unless they use their own time to do it.