updates: swearing at work, letting difficult coworkers be wrong, and more

It’s “where are you now?” month at Ask a Manager, and all December I’m running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past. Here are four updates from past letter-writers.

1. How common is swearing at work? (#2 at the link)

I always thought that if you answered a question for me, I would engage with the commentariat and also send in an update! But when I saw the post was up, I was experiencing severe pregnancy-induced anxiety … and promptly avoided the site for around a year. Today I went and looked at the published post for the very first time. (And I felt like the responses from everyone were actually quite lovely, so I don’t know what I was anxious about.)

Someone asked in the comments how I know all my coworkers’ religious affiliations. I don’t! But I belong to one of those religions where it’s pretty obvious if you aren’t a member. For example, you know when people aren’t Hasidic Jews because they don’t cover their heads or wear prayer shawls.

Personally, I try to avoid talking about religion at work. It just doesn’t seem the place. In contrast, Lesley frequently talked about religion in offhand comments, and so did some of my other coworkers. So it felt blatant when he started acting completely differently.

I think the main thing that bothered me was that Lesley was pretty unprofessional in general. It seemed like he was trying to be my friend (think Leslie Knope, but more tone deaf), but I just wanted him to be my boss. When his behavior around religion changed, it felt like he was forcing us all to be party to his faith crisis or whatever was happening. And as some people guessed on the original post, it was also jarring since frequent swearing wasn’t part of the workplace culture. The anxiety probably also wasn’t helping.

On to the update. Since I wrote in, a lot has happened. While I was on parental leave, Lesley stopped being my boss and moved to a different department, so I no longer had to deal with anything he was doing. My baby had health problems, but instead of focusing on that, I spent a good portion of my leave responding to emails about medical paperwork issues that were supposedly taken care of before I left. It wasn’t a great time.

When I returned, there were lots of crises at my job, including our CEO going viral for saying some insensitive things. I kept my head down and just tried to do my job despite everything crumbling around me.

I recently had another baby, and this time, my company told me the day before I was supposed to return that they’d supplied paperwork with the wrong dates and that I therefore couldn’t come back to work (!). Long story short, that was the last straw. I have since resigned to do freelance work and spend more time with my beautiful infant and now-healthy toddler.

I’m glad I was Lesley-less for the last few years working there, but I do sometimes wonder if I could have harnessed Lesley’s excessive, boundary-stomping friendliness to get him on “my team” to push back against the parental leave paperwork weirdness. I guess I’ll never know.

2. Can I just let difficult coworkers be wrong?

Even before I wrote in, I guess things were brewing internally. I wasn’t the only person aware of this part of our culture. I think I was downplaying it too much. We ended up having a big company-wide meeting about not being jerks to each other. Then we all had some smaller meetings with HR individually and in groups just after your answer went live. From the scuttlebutt around the office, one of the HR managers got sick of exit interviews where people said they were leaving with nothing lined up because the company culture was too toxic. This made the CEO and executives send in a third party company to do an audit of culture, output, leadership, and stuff like that.

I was asked to meet with someone from the audit company and HR to specifically discuss the logo incident. Other people had brought it up multiple times as an example of bad culture and bullying (1) because Leslie went on for a while and (2) none of the managers stepped in to redirect. HR asked why I didn’t say anything during the meeting or after the fact so I told them that I prefer to just let people be wrong, almost everyone knew that it was a contractor’s design, and I was more concerned about looking argumentative because engaging in these things tend to make it worse. They noted that but also told me not to accept bullying just because it’s easy.

This and your response along with the comments really opened my eyes that I thought was staying out of things was actually a freeze-response to confrontation and this place is more confrontational than a boxing match. This is also what my partner and friends were trying to address with me, too. I guess they saw it for what it was early on. Because my field is entertainment-adjacent, it has a long history of backstabbing and bad behavior. My company is newer and they want to get rid of that industry environment, so we’ll see how this plays out. Leslie is now part of a group of my coworkers who are not necessarily in deep crap but they’re being monitored closely. Good.

3. How to respond when a candidate discloses autism in an interview (#2 at the link)

I saw my initial question from a few years ago was reposted and thought this would be a good time for an update.

First off, I changed some details for anonymity’s sake, but one important detail is that the colleague who responded to the candidate saying they shouldn’t disclose their autism diagnosis was actually my boss and the head of the organization. This was also my first time hiring anyone, and the unease I felt in my initial letter was my gut instinct telling me my boss was not handling this properly, but not feeling comfortable enough to say anything.

We ended up getting a new head of the organization a couple years later and when I told them about this specific experience, they were horrified that our last boss had said that to a job candidate. We also learned over time that there were many, many things our old boss had said or done that were misguided at best and potentially illegal at worst, so … let’s just say there was a lot of unlearning that needed to happen.

Thankfully, I learned and grew a lot from our new boss, and although I’m no longer at that job, I feel much more equipped to handle these situations if/when they come up.

The post updates: swearing at work, letting difficult coworkers be wrong, and more appeared first on Ask a Manager.

View the full article