how do we hire people who won’t be alarmed by our cardboard coworker?

A reader writes:

Recently my manager asked me to help revise a job posting and the hiring process because the last two people we hired left only a few weeks after starting. One said she didn’t think our workplace had a professional environment, and the other said she realized her values didn’t align with the company. Since I’m the most recent successful hire, my manager wants me to help her understand what was different about how I was selected.

You’re probably assuming my workplace must be toxic or terrible, but honestly it’s the most fun place I’ve ever worked, and that might actually be the problem. Nothing about it fits the usual idea of a bad workplace, but it is definitely … peculiar.

People often eat lunch together. Not everyone every day, but a few times a week most of us end up eating with coworkers. (Not everyone participates. The person who splits tasks with me says she already sees us enough at the office and never joins us, and no one minds.) Lunch is where most of the unusual things happen.

One employee created a betting sheet for which celebrity will be the next to die or get involved in a scandal. You can add one name per month, and if you guess correctly you win a day off. It sounds worse written down than it actually feels, but the people who participate genuinely enjoy it.

Lunch conversations can also drift into very unprofessional territory. The week one employee resigned, the lunch debate was whether extraterrestrials are capable of orgasms. That discussion lasted more than one lunch break because people kept proposing different possible alien anatomies.

But the least professional thing we do might be the cardboard figure sitting at a desk named Robert. Robert has been part of the company culture long before I joined. The story behind him is about a former employee who would arrive, greet everyone, and then disappear until it was time to go home. No one ever knew where Robert was, and whenever someone needed him they couldn’t find him, but the work always appeared completed.

One day the company needed a team photo, and someone grabbed a cardboard box, drew a face on it, added a badge, and included “Robert” in the picture. After the real Robert retired, the box eventually evolved into a full cardboard cutout that now sits at its own desk.

At the end of each month we usually have less work, and there’s a game where someone hides Robert somewhere in the company and everyone searches for him. At the end, everyone gets candy. Not everyone actively participates, one person keeps a map coordinating where Robert hasn’t been searched for yet, some people give suggestions, and others don’t care about the game, but no one objects to it except HR did ban hiding Robert in the interview room and the public-facing areas.

Both employees who resigned witnessed a “Find Robert” search. They didn’t mention it specifically, but I imagine it might have contributed to their impression that the environment wasn’t professional.

My manager wants help finding people who would think these things are funny rather than strange, and she asked how I felt when I started. I happened to begin (luckily or unluckily) when people were decorating Robert with a heart-pattern tie and a box of bonbons while discussing what kind of box Robert would like as a girlfriend. I thought it was weird in a funny way, and it didn’t bother me enough to reconsider the job.

Outside of lunch and the occasional Robert hunt, people are actually very professional during working hours, aside from occasionally greeting the cardboard coworker or decorating him for holidays. We’re a very productive and inclusive team, but I understand how it might seem strange to someone seeing it for the first time.

I honestly don’t know how to help my manager find competent people who would be comfortable with this environment. The person who interviewed me said the team was laid-back, but that definitely didn’t prepare me for what the office is actually like.

Someone suggested hiding Robert for a while, but wouldn’t it be better for new hires to know what they’re getting into? How could we find people who would feel comfortable discussing whether the aliens from Arrival understand sex and also think it’s perfectly normal to greet a cardboard coworker?

I realize your answer might be that our company isn’t the wonderful place I think it is and that we should behave more professionally. But considering that our CEO once hid Robert in his own office during one of the searches, I don’t think the culture will change. (Still, feel free to say so if that’s your view, sometimes an outside perspective is very different.) I’m mainly looking for ideas on how to select people who would actually find this kind of thing fun rather than uncomfortable.

I don’t think people are quitting over Robert, unless Robert is way more of a focal point than it sounds like he is. Lots of offices have Robert-type traditions that people have fun with.

If it were just Robert, then the way to screen for people who won’t be unhappy in your culture would be to talk about your culture in interviews — explain the Robert tradition as a way of painting a picture of what working there is like.

But I think the issue is more likely to be other aspects of the culture. The biggest problem with talking about whether aliens have orgasms isn’t that it’s unprofessional; it’s that a lot of people don’t want to hear their coworkers talking about sex, period, and you’re in territory where it’s going to be very easy for people to feel working at your company requires tolerating a sexualized atmosphere that they don’t want at work, which is a form of sexual harassment.

Now, maybe the alien orgasm conversation was an anomaly, but you said that lunch conversations drift into “very unprofessional territory” regularly. And here’s the thing: if a topic is inappropriate during work hours, it’s inappropriate during lunch too, if you’re eating with colleagues. If the topic might make someone feel sexually harassed at 2 pm, that doesn’t change just because it’s happening at 12:30 over sandwiches. And legally, employers are responsible for it all.

You might figure you know everyone is comfortable with it — but (a) you definitely can’t know that when you have new hires, and (b) even people who have been around for a while won’t always speak up when they’re uncomfortable because they don’t want to be seen as a party pooper. That’s why you need to just steer clear of that stuff at work, period. There are still tons of interesting topics that don’t involve sex (or religion or violence or politics, the other big ones to avoid).

If what your boss is really asking is, “How can we hire employees who won’t object to working in a sexualized environment?” … well, that’s the wrong question to ask. The question needs to be, “How can change our culture so people don’t feel this is a sexualized environment?” You mentioned you’re an inclusive team, but by definition this isn’t inclusive — so if inclusivity is something you value, this is something that you’ve got to change.

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