I’m allergic to my coworker’s perfume, is the thumbs-up emoji unprofessional, and more

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…

1. I’m allergic to my coworker’s perfume, and HR says I have to manage it on my own

I work hybrid and am required to be in office a couple days a week. I’m also allergic to certain scents and perfumes. Things like vanilla and citrus don’t bother me, but strong floral scents cause my sinuses to swell up, culminating in a migraine. It’s not pleasant, so I try my best to avoid anything that triggers it.

Unfortunately, nobody seems to take scent allergies seriously or know they exist at all. My colleague, Linda, wears a perfume so strong that I can smell where she’s been 10 minutes after she’s been there. There’s an entire quadrant of the office I avoid because she’s sitting there and I can’t bear the miasma emanating from her cubicle.

My manager, knowing how miserable I have been, reached out to HR about it because we didn’t want to cause any awkwardness or discomfort to Linda and wanted to go about things on the level. HR told her it’s the employee’s responsibility to manage their own allergies. They asked what I do in public. For one thing, in public, I have the option to remove myself from the situation, whereas I’m required to be here for my job and don’t have any avenues to escape. Furthermore, I’m having to isolate myself socially and politely decline invitations for coffee runs from people since being in the elevator with Linda for a few minutes is enough to derail my whole day. As such, after HR’s callous verdict, I’ve spent the past two years silently avoiding her and that part of the office, feeling like there’s nothing I can do to improve my situation.

I’ve gently told her a few times I’m allergic to perfume. Things came to a head a few weeks ago when she was crowding me in a tiny room and I had to reiterate that I’m allergic to her perfume, and she was totally shocked by this revelation, asking everyone else in the room if she smelled. My director was there and smoothed things over with, “She just has a sensitive nose!” The more I thought about it, the more it bothered me. Why am I being forced to tiptoe around someone’s need to smell pretty at the expense of my right to exist in comfort?

After that incident, I cried in the director’s office and told her about what HR said. She told me Linda is a kind person and I should speak to her directly about it. I feel so awkward about this suggestion. I’m not uncomfortable with talking to people to resolve conflicts, but, having never been put in a situation like this, I have no idea how to approach it. I’m not anywhere near the level of demanding nobody uses laundry detergent or needing unscented soap in the bathrooms, but even so, this feels like an unfair stance by HR. How would you suggest I approach this problem? Should I talk to Linda directly? If so, what should I say?

“It’s the employee’s responsibility to manage their own allergies”? Legally speaking, that’s only true to a point. If your allergies are severe enough, the Americans with Disabilities Act requires them to try to find a way to accommodate you, and in a lot of cases implementing a fragrance policy would be considered a reasonable accommodation under the law. (Here’s some info from the Job Accommodation Network on this, and here’s some more.) They could also consider creating a fragrance-free zone for you and others who need it, but that would need to include accommodations for things like elevators too. So first and foremost, HR isn’t doing their job here, and you and your manager should feel free to cite the law and push back.

Beyond that, though, it’s not a bad idea to try to talk to Linda directly since she’s the main source of the problem right now. Since it just came up, you have an easy opening. Sample language: “I’m so sorry to ask this, but I do seem to be allergic to the perfume you wear. It’s a lovely scent but it gives me sinus problems and migraines. Would you be willing not to wear it to work?” If she refuses, then you can say, “In that case, please understand that I can’t be in a small room with you — it’s nothing personal, just a medical thing.” But at that point, HR is really the right next step (preferably with your manager’s involvement this time).

2. Is a thumbs-up emoji an acceptable email response?

I am fully prepared that this is a “me” thing and not worth the battle, but I’ve recently been introduced to Gmail’s emoji response feature. I emailed my direct report and they used the “add reaction” feature to reply with a thumbs-up.

Professional communication is important in our work. I don’t feel disrespected that he replied that way to my email, but I’d be horrified if he did it to someone senior to me or to one of our clients. It just strikes me as unprofessional.

Am I overreacting? I don’t want to be a micromanager, but this does bother me.

I think “horrified” is a bit much, but if you don’t want them to use that feature in certain situations, just let them know that! It’s perfectly fine to say, “I’ve noticed you using the Gmail thumbs-up response recently, and I want to make sure you know it’s fine with me but you shouldn’t use it with higher-ups or clients since some people will find it too informal for those contexts.”

3. When a company actively avoids naming a salary range, are they trying to lowball you?

I applied for a job that might be a slight step back from my director level position now. I’ve had two conversations and a brief email exchange with HR where they keep asking me what I’m looking for, and I at one point politely but directly said I was looking for what they’ve budgeted for the position and how the bonus structure works and an overview of benefits as I’ve requested before. They promised before to send something and now committed to having someone call with the info. I suppose I can presume they hope to lowball someone, right? Otherwise why do this? This is a large, publicly traded company on NASDAQ.

Yes, companies do this because they hope to be able to pay you less. They don’t always consciously think of it that way — it’s less likely that they’re rubbing their hands together with glee while they contemplate lowballing you and more that they think, “We don’t want to pay more than we have to, so let’s see what people are looking for” — but at the end of the day, it amounts to the same thing.

They know the range they’ve budgeted. It’s not a mystery to them. They’re just trying to avoid telling you because they think that if they do, you’ll be more likely to ask for or expect the top of that range.

4. Who should be in the loop when someone is out on medical leave?

Our office manager is upset because she didn’t know about another staff member going on medical leave (using FMLA). After some dramatics, I forwarded her the email sent previously letting her and the management team know about the employee’s upcoming leave. The office manager doesn’t need to know about the leave but insists on knowing absolutely everything. (She doesn’t manage scheduling, calendaring, or time off. She does manage another admin who manages scheduling/calendaring.)

My boss scolded me, even after I showed her the email/paper trail. I suggested that the management team share major updates in a private, password-protected notebook since things were getting lost in email. This is a work approved, fire-walled notebook tool. She said that this was a violation of FMLA laws. I have whiplash from her aggressive stance. Sharing through email is fine but sharing in a password-protected notebook isn’t?

Am I violating FMLA laws by sharing the fact that a staff member is on FMLA with the entire management team? To clarify, this would just be a note about their leave dates, not the “why” or any other details of their leave.

It’s not illegal to share that an employee is on medical leave (or going to be out on medical leave), as long as you don’t share the specific reason for the leave (because that’s private medical information that FMLA requires be kept confidential from people without a true job-based need to know).

It’s not clear why your boss is okay with informing the management team by email but objects to your password-protected notebook idea, but both would be fine under the law. It’s also not clear why your boss objected to you forwarding the office manager an email that she’d apparently already been included on originally.

5. What to do after being a misclassified contractor

My mom recently got a new job after two years of being a 1099 contractor in an office. She was required to work in-office at specific hours for 40 hours a week, and had to request days off. She was also sometimes expected to be on-call over the weekend (not sure if there was any additional compensation). To me, there is no world in which this wasn’t a misclassification; they were treating her as an employee while paying her as a contractor (she paid her own payroll taxes and received no benefits). She also wasn’t the only one — there were at least two other women with the same terms.

In an area with few opportunities, while she was employed it was too risky to raise the issue as she would have just been fired and lose the employment altogether. I know the next piece of advice is “hire an employment lawyer.” But can you give more information on what that entails and what that process looks like?

Actually, in this case she doesn’t even need a lawyer. She can simply request that the IRS determine what her correct employment status should have been by filing IRS Form SS-8 (Determination of Worker Status for Purposes of Federal Employment Taxes and Income Tax Withholding). She’ll answer a series of questions about the nature of her work and the structure of her relationship with the employer; once the IRS receives the form, they will investigate and issue a ruling. It’s free to file it, and it’s fairly straightforward and absolutely worth doing. (She does need to factor in that her former employer will figure out that she did this, but it’s likely still worth doing.)

That said, if she does want to talk to a lawyer before proceeding, here’s info on how to find one.

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