my employee gets huffy when we play music in the office

[ResidentialBusiness]

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

A reader writes:

We work in a completely open plan office, and are a PR/ creative services agency. There are separate meeting rooms, and two banks of unused desks round the side of the kitchen which feel slightly separate from the main seating area and are often used for hot desking or ad hoc meetings.

We are mandated in the office three days a week. The guidelines are for everyone to be in Monday and Wednesday (these are our anchor days), and for teams to make an effort to choose the same third day to maximize the chances for in-person working on office days.

We’re a small staff of around 25, so on some days the office can feel incredibly quiet. For the last six months or so, on and off, we’ve been playing the radio from a small Alexa speaker, which is controlled by whoever has taken the initiative to turn it on, and plays local radio stations or old school pop playlists. The speaker/radio was introduced following widespread feedback to the Employee Council after returning to the office that the environment was dead, with a specific request for music to played in the background.

Despite majority support, there are a few people in the office who dislike having music in the office (understandably, can’t please everyone!), one of whom is my direct report, Julie. Whenever the radio is turned on, she visibly/audibly is annoyed and often abruptly packs up her desk and moves to the co-working area for the rest of the day, without saying anything to the team. The manner in which she does it could be read as passive-aggressive, and her working away from the team then makes the point of coming together in the office slightly null.

Julie has previously formally complained to me about the music (in writing), and I handled it by speaking to her in person to explain that while I understood her frustrations, the music is not on all the time (about 10% of the time I’d say, since it’s often forgotten about) and that as an office, we want to be creating a “buzzy” atmosphere and the music is part of that and a specific request from the majority of the office. I also told her she’s welcome to leverage the co-working space when it feels too much, and that she can always speak to me if she feels the volume is too loud (personally, the HR manager and I don’t feel it is), so I can ask the person in control that day to turn it down.

However, her huffy response each time the music comes on is starting to become really obvious to everyone in the office, and I worry it’s setting the wrong expectation of how we should interact with each other to her new employee, who only joined our team a few months ago. I think what jars the most is the lack of communication when she heads over to the other desk and the way it sets the tone from her for the rest of the day.

Is there a better way for me to handle the situation? For what it’s worth, Julie listens to music in her headphones most days as standard throughout the day, and has previously vocalized that she’s unhappy working from the office due to her commute and would prefer to work from home.

It’s not okay to be repeatedly huffy at work … but it’s impossible to tackle this without acknowledging that a lot of people would have trouble working with music on! It’s not unreasonable if Julie finds it tough to do that. And the fact that she listens to her own music through headphones doesn’t change that; people often have a certain type of background music that they can work easily with, while having a harder time focusing with something different. (One easily understood example would be someone who finds classical music helps them focus, but music with words breaks their concentration. The same can be true of music you know well — which might fade into a sort of pleasant background buzz — but less familiar music intrudes on your focus differently.)

If you’re someone who can’t focus with certain types of music on but is told you have to be in the office “to be more productive” … well, that’s going to grate. And if you raise it to your manager and are told, essentially, “too bad because everyone else likes it” and “we want a buzzy atmosphere” … it’s going to feel pretty bad, like your ability to focus and do your job is less important than other people’s desire for “buzz.” (That’s why typically music in an office is one of those things where a veto from any one person should be decisive — especially when other people can use headphones to listen to what they want.)

All that said, you’re in office that sometimes plays music and it doesn’t sound like that’s going to change — and Julie does have a space she can move to where it’s quieter. You’ve heard her out, you’ve told her the music is there to stay, and you allow her to move when she needs to. It’s reasonable to expect her to do that without obvious huffiness.

To be clear, I’m sympathetic to Julie’s frustration. I’d find it hard as hell to write in the conditions you describe. But being obviously huffy about it every time she moves isn’t okay either. If she’s that upset, she needs to either revisit it with you or conclude the conditions of this job aren’t ones she can work with.

That said … how huffy are we talking about? If she’s rolling her eyes and sighing heavily and storming off, that’s not okay and you should tell her she can’t do that. (Be prepared for her to be frustrated that you’re telling her to stop disrupting others but not stopping them from disrupting her … but if that happens, you can point out that injecting anger into a shared work environment is not the same thing as playing music.) But if it’s more that she’s quietly picking up her things and moving without saying anything … that doesn’t seem like such a problem. What real benefit is there to her announcing she’s moving every time? (If anything, it might be more disruptive if she declares it every time.)

Again, obvious huffiness/frustration is not okay. If that’s what’s happening, I would say it this way: “I’m sympathetic to it being harder for you to work when music is playing, and I fully support you moving to a quieter area when you need to. I also understand why you’re frustrated. But when you roll your eyes and slam your things down, you’re making the work environment uncomfortable for others in a very different way. Again, it’s fine to move to a different space if you need to. I just need you to do it without the visible display of frustration.”

But you should also recognize that you’ve put her in a situation where she’s required to work from an environment that would be tough for a lot of people to focus in.

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