Most of us spend at least, if not more, time at work then we do at home. The people we work with come from different backgrounds, have worries, and issues some of which they cannot leave at home. They come into the workplace. They bring their personalities into the workplace. Sometimes these issues spill into work tasks, activities, and relationships. Some of the issues are very private. At times organizations attempt to indicate such issues don’t belong in the workplace. At times supervisors, managers, and a variety of HR and legal professionals are tasked or asked to get involved in resolution.

But as many of you know organizational personnel just cannot spend the time necessary to deal with subtle issues and of course the push is towards resolution and sometimes to actions like warning, reassigning, or even firing people increasing turnover. Employees do have some recourse when treatment crosses the line and becomes discrimination. You probably also know the success rate on these claims and the consequences to the relationship with the organization.

So what is the organization and it’s personnel supposed to do? As people are people disagreements in organizations will not be eliminated. In fact such disagreements can and do lead to very productive outcomes when they are handled in a positive manner. Very few of us can leave outside issues from manifesting themselves in the work environment.  It could be a family problem, a dispute with the tax collector, a home remodeling job going wrong, even the dreaded barking dog next door, a traffic ticket, and issues with coworkers – an encounter on the tennis court at the club, a romantic relationship with a coworker which noone at work knows about is going wrong. One or more of these issues spill over into the workplace, let’s say an angry outburst during a meeting because our hackles are already up over the outside issue or failure to perform a task correctly because of our distraction with the outside issue. It’s too subtle to reveal in the context of the workplace.

Why:

·         It is too private

·         We’re afraid to reveal it because we feel it may stigmatize us

·         We just don’t trust the organization’s assurances of privacy

·         We feel the individual we’re dealing with is a company employee and we just don’t want to reveal what we consider to be so subtle

·         We don’t see the relationship between the outside issue and organizational issue

·         We question the organizational representatives neutrality

·         We already received a reprimand from a supervisor which we feel carries what might be considered as a done deal before we’ve had a chance to even be heard

By necessity an organization does have limits on its depth of involvement with their employees. It has limits on time which can be spent with an employee be it by its supervisors or inside specialists. So what are steps which can be taken by organizations?

We’ll explore those in future blog entries and your views are welcome.