Jolie Kerr* finds out about the strange things that drive people to distraction in the office.
When Alison Green started handing out workplace advice in 2007, she expected to focus on what she thought of as typical problems. Dealing with a micromanaging boss or landing more job interviews.
Some 11 years later, having spun her blog Ask a Manager into regular columns, a podcast and now a book, Ms Green’s view of her job is different.
“What people really want advice on is the interpersonal weirdness that comes with having a job,” Ms Green says.
“Weirdness like ‘our receptionist won’t stop hugging people’ and ‘my boss is dating my dad’.
“Or ‘I punched a co-worker at the company Christmas party’.
“Work throws us together with people we might not normally choose to hang out with,” she said.
“Add in the pressure that people often feel to preserve harmony because of the power dynamics from office hierarchies, and things can get very, very weird.”
Ms Green shared some lessons she’s learned from over a decade of giving advice and offered tips for navigating the good, the bad and the gross at work.
“Get really clear in your own head about what the impact of the weirdness is on you, your team or the organisation,” she says.
“People have quirks, and that’s okay.
“If it’s something that’s affecting you or the organisation’s work and you want to try to address it, you’re going to have to talk to someone.”
When the office culture is part of the problem, start by having a conversation with your manager.
Identify and speak up about the issues that are important to you.
“Be brutally honest with yourself about what matters to you and how much, and about what you can and can’t change,” Ms Green said.
“You can’t make good decisions for yourself without first coming to terms with those things.
“A theme I’ve seen over and over again is that people end up significantly less happy at work because they’re hesitant to speak up about what’s important to them.
“They worry that they’ll cause drama — and so they stay quiet.”
Ms Green said a huge number of the questions she receives boil down to some version of ‘someone I work with is doing something that annoys or upsets me, but I’m afraid it will go badly if I address it with them’.
“Sometimes that fear is well-founded, but other times that fear is more about the person’s own discomfort with the conversation.”
She recommended approaching the person you have an issue with directly and using a neutral tone.
“If you’re matter-of-fact about it, it’s less likely to become a big awkward ordeal.”
Even if the problem isn’t solved, it’s still a learning experience.
Things become dicier when the person you need to be direct and assertive with is your manager.
If the issue is an interpersonal conflict or discomfort with their management style, Ms Green suggested that you can open a dialogue.
“Beyond that, there often isn’t much you can do — and you might need to decide if you want the job knowing that this is part of the package.”
If the issue is more serious — something illegal or unethical, “you have more recourse and can go over their head, either to their boss or to Human Resources,” she says.
Turning to the perennial problem of the office fridge, she likens it to Garrett Hardin’s 1968 essay The Tragedy of the Commons.
This postulates that individuals will act in their own self-interest when it comes to shared resources, rather than in the interest of maintaining the shared resource.
Her solution to this problem is to “make it part of someone’s job to clean it out every week.
“If you don’t have a policy of tossing everything every Friday the fridge will quickly get taken over by months-old Tupperware containers of mouldy leftovers.”
While that may be dispiriting, Ms Green exhorts you to “be ruthless. People are gross.”
The one thing Ms Green gets a surprising number of letters about is smelly co-workers.
“I have no good solution for that one. Or maybe I’m just too squeamish to take it on,” she says.
*Jolie Kerr is a cleaning expert, advice columnist and host of the podcast, Ask a Clean Person.
This article first appeared at www.nytimes.com.
