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Send your workplace conundrums to workologist@nytimes.com including your name and contact information (even if you want it withheld for publication). The Workologist is a guy with well-intentioned opinions, not a professional career adviser. Letters may be edited.
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Usually, your Workologist can take hours or days to ponder and ruminate over reader questions about workplace conundrums, and maybe even check in with an expert or two. But there were no such luxuries when I recently spent a good 40 minutes or so on The Daily Circuit, from Minnesota Public Radio, responding in real time to listeners coping with a dizzying variety of on-the-job challenges.
On the plus side, I wasnt alone: Jacqueline Whitmore, a business etiquette expert, was also a guest, and the host, Kerri Miller, had useful opinions, too. Also on the plus side: The questions were fascinating, all over the map, and perhaps because of the nature of call-in radio? quite distinct from what arrives in the inbox of workologist@nytimes.com.
Days later, I found that I was still brooding over some of the inquiries. So I thought Id share them here along with some responses that might just reflect a bit of considered hindsight. (Obviously, Im paraphrasing the callers questions, for reasons of length, clarity and discretion.)
Drawing a Line on Facebook
A co-worker of mine posts offensive material on her Facebook page (four-letter words and the like). I told her that it was not only offensive to me personally, but that it also reflected badly on our organization. Its her personal page, but she mentions work and the company. She ignored me, and continues to post similar material. Now what?
I congratulated this caller for doing his colleague a favor. Its a shame that she brushed him off, because as noted here in the past social media sites like Facebook blur the line between public and private communication in ways that can easily get employees in trouble (and routinely do). Even if this person isnt explicitly violating rules intended to keep an employee from besmirching a companys reputation, shes at high risk of undermining her own professional reputation if shes coming off online like an a character in a Quentin Tarantino movie. So be scrupulous about your privacy settings, and dont say anything in social media that you wouldnt say out loud at an office party.
But what about the caller? If he really thinks that this person is doing damage to the companys image, he should go to a manager with his concerns, and let that person decide how to proceed. Alternatively, he could broach the matter with superiors as a hypothetical, and return to his colleague with a more tangible argument: If the bosses see one of these posts, youll get fired for violating XYZ provision of the employee handbook.
On the other hand, he could simply unfriend this person, or hide her status updates. That doesnt solve the bigger problem, but it does free him from exposure to offensive material. And, after all, he tried.
Bad Manners, Gone Viral
I work in a professional corporate setting, and it has become common for people to clip their fingernails at work. Even my boss does it; the other day I had my notepad on her desk, and noticed a large fingernail clipping next to it. And several other co-workers do it, too. This isnt something for the office.
Continue reading the main storyA surprising number of callers had grooming and hygiene questions and comments, covering almost everything from chewing tobacco to the wearing of Crocs. But I found this situation truly inexplicable. An officewide outbreak of nail-clipping? What could explain that?
Perhaps we can take some inspiration from a subsequent caller, who had a triumphant tale of resolving a quality-of-life office problem. In her case, the offense was a popcorn machine in an open space, presumably meant as a morale booster but in practice a source of headache-inducing odors. When her initial requests to have the machine relegated to the office kitchen went nowhere, she dug up a routine human-resources memo forbidding smelly lunches in the office. Confronted with its own policy, management relented.
The lesson is that the arcane boilerplate in that employee manual you never read, and all those H.R. dispatches you instinctively delete, may contain useful ammunition. In this case, theres probably no anti-nail-clipping provision, but theres a reasonable chance that somewhere in all that fine print there is a rule about inappropriate office behavior and that the caller could use that rule to best advantage.
Two more notes on such situations. First, enlist allies. Surely, this person is not the only one in her office grossed out by the clippers, and there is strength in numbers. Second, my fellow guest, Ms. Whitmore, the work etiquette expert, notes that she often advises deploying humor in making certain workplace-change requests. That seems appropriate here. A request for colleagues to restrict nail maintenance to the domestic sphere is less likely to come across as confrontational if its treated as at least slightly funny. (And, besides, it is funny.)
The Courtesy of a Reply
What should I do when Ive received no answer to an email, and I need one soon?
Ms. Whitmore suggested using the phone. Its true: Some of us are still proficient in this neglected form of communication. I would add that were in a strange transitional moment, with too many choices for delivering and responding to messages. I more or less defer to the preferences of the person Im dealing with: phone, email or instant message, or showing up in his or her office unannounced. Use whatever works.
On the specific subject of unanswered email, Ive found that just sending the message a second time, without comment, is surprisingly effective. Yeah, its a little passive-aggressive, but youre not accusing anyone of ignoring you. Perhaps youve just re-sent it because youre not sure the initial message arrived? In any case, the easiest way for your recipient to make the whole thing go away is to finally answer.
It was fun to be the Workologist in real time, but I still love being able to consider your workplace quandaries in the more leisurely context of this column, so keep sending them and, if necessary, send them twice!
Send your workplace conundrums to workologist@nytimes.com, including your name and contact information (even if you want it withheld for publication). The Workologist is a guy with well-intentioned opinions, not a professional career adviser. Letters may be edited.
A version of this article appears in print on May 18, 2014, on page BU7 of the New York edition with the headline: Invasion of the Nail Clippers.
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Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/18/jobs/workologist-invasion-of-the-nail-clippers-and-other-office-dangers.html
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