What is and isn't too personal for the workplace?
What is and isn't too personal for the workplace?
Hear me out: GDPR, but for work small talk.
Welcome back to Monday morning (or afternoon). In case the day has already started to run away with itself - remember that you’re here because you want to work in a nicer place! We’re right there with you.
We know some of creating a nicer workplace is within our control (see: we owe to our colleagues) and we also understand that a nicer workplace can be found on the other side of understanding what our colleagues owe to us.
That’s all well, and good, but a bit…meta. Let’s get into the nitty-gritty. What does all this philosophy mean for dealing with IRL humans in the IRL (or virtual) workplace? How can we actually use it? Is there any way to get the Dwight of your office to…. just not?
I moved to Europe in 2018 and began working in the Dutch office of a global startup. Within one month of moving, I had two experiences that well-capture the spectrum of humans at work.
Example one: lunchtime 🥙
Everyone in this office ate lunch together. Not to say that everyone ate lunch at the same time, but when they stopped to eat lunch, they did so at a table where other people were eating. During this time, they caught up on work things and life things, like an ongoing saga of roof repairs and the difficulty finding a contractor (in Amsterdam? Nigh impossible). Excitement about the kids going back to school, as well as updates from our coworker’s recent visit to Portugal (his Google Maps of good restaurants already prepped and shared).
To the American who was eating lunch at her desk while answering emails - this was weird. A week in, one of my colleagues escorted me to the lunch table, saying “We weren’t sure you knew that you could eat lunch with us.” I knew I *could*, I just didn’t think I should (Remember: Take your breaks), and more truthfully: I didn’t want to?
In my experience at work until that point, social breaks were a time for someone to word-vomit their stresses, problems, and other overly personal information on you. In a word: Not relaxing. But in this case, lunch was a nice touch point for us to catch up and know each other as humans. I started taking a proper lunch break, and the relationships I built in doing so remain to this day.
But it is worth noting that good news and bad news could (and did) come to this table. That’s important to know as we look at the next example.
Example two: Therapy-as-calls 🫠
Now that I was on a closer time-zone to many of my colleagues, my department could collaborate more easily with other people. Which meant more phone calls. And with that came more calls that should have been emails.
There was a particular weekly standing call that, every time my manager and I left it, we messaged each other saying we should send our colleague a bill for the therapy. They were emotionally exhausting. This colleague was complaining about work (which is a drag all its own), but also all of the ways in which work was affecting their life (Medical? Yep. Relationships? Yep. General malaise and pessimism about the world? Definitely yep).
If you have to swim in a pool of negative and overly personal information for an hour once a week, even the strongest swimmer will catch the cold. I started to feel very “bleh” myself, and it was only after they left the company that the feeling started to subside.
These calls had a massively negative impact on the workplace, compared to even the worst news shared around the lunch table. Why?
If you’re aiming to be a nice human (at work, and otherwise), you care about the lived experiences of other humans.
But when those humans don’t provide you a choice of whether to take on that experience, that’s when work just…sucks.
We said last week that:
In theory, a rational and respectful workplace should work well. But one of the areas where humans diverge in their opinion of what’s rational is in the personal! Personal information of all kinds, really, is a minefield to navigate at work with respect and boundaries, because it is different for everyone in terms of what’s appropriate and normal.
Since we’re here to improve ourselves & our workplaces, not to just observe what other humans do at work - we propose three rules for how we deal with the personal.
Rule one: Personal lives are, by default, private.
The lunchtime table worked well because if you didn’t want to share, you didn’t have to. You could eat lunch in peace, and even sit somewhere else if you wanted to. No one took offense.
While it is nice to get to know our fellow work humans as humans, remember what they owe to us. Not listed there: The uncensored story of their weekend, or a full accounting of their emotional state. Which means you also don’t owe them one. Here are some phrases to practice if someone is asking for personal information you don’t want to give:
“Thanks for asking - my weekend was nice. Nothing new to report!”
“I’m not comfortable talking about (family, medical issue, legal issues, neighbor disputes, etc.) right now. Can we change the subject?”
This rule also means that we should keep in mind that our personal lives are our personal information alone, and if someone wants to know it, they’ll ask. Which brings us to rule two.
Rule two: Personal information sharing requires the enthusiastic consent of all parties.
At the lunch table, you can leave at any time, especially if you didn’t like the conversation. More to the point, the table was governed by an unspoken rule - do not use this time to dump problems on your colleagues when they’re just trying to take a break! This is a form of consent. By sitting at the table, you consented to hearing small talk, but you didn’t have to stick around for it.
When we talk about consent, we have to talk about power dynamics. Can this human properly consent? That includes whether they can say, “I don’t like hearing about your medical procedure,” without being penalised, implicitly or explicitly, by you.
Yes, this means if you’re the human-in-charge, you have a higher standard to hold yourself to. You can’t share personal information unless you’re 110% certain you have consent, and I’d question whether that’s ever possible unless it is proactively asked about (but remembering rule one: you don’t have to share it, either).
When we’re talking about our peers, we still need to keep in mind consequences. First, is it a work conversation? If not, can this human walk away from this conversation if they’re uncomfortable? If yes, will I be upset with them if they do so? And if I’m upset, am I showing it and is it contributing to a less respectful workplace? Entirely possible.
All in all: Make sure you get consent, and be honest about it.
Rule three: Personal information should be shared properly.
This is a combo rule of the above, but it captures the last “meta” piece of how to properly share personal information at work, which is to read the room. If you’re sharing, are you 100% certain you have full, enthusiastic consent? If it does, are you sharing it at the right time, and in the right medium? If it is during work time (i.e., not a break), is it relevant to the work at hand?
That’s what we struggled with during calls with our melancholy colleague. We had one hour to discuss big projects, and inevitably half of it was lost every single week to venting about problems neither me or my manager could fix. But it wasn’t a call either of us could leave. So it kept on, every week, bringing us all down, until that colleague left.
Sharing of personal information is all about choice. You have a choice about what you share, and you should have a choice about what you receive, too.
The summer I moved to Europe, I faced one more obstacle: The attack of the cookies. Namely, GDPR.
GPDR is Europe’s far-ranging personal data privacy law which governs the privacy of information. How to collect it, how to store it, how to request it, and how to delete it.
Which means that every website, now noticing I was pinging in from the Netherlands, asked me for cookie permissions. And not with an easy opt-in/opt-out button, either - these were long forms with multiple toggle buttons so I could precisely consent to what kind of information tracking they could do. Truly amazing, except when you’re in a rush and just need the recipe which is already at the bottom of the page. 🫠
Some sites didn’t let me in at all, saying they couldn’t serve users from the EU due to the regulations. Frustrating, but a good example of boundaries, so I’ll allow it.
While it necessitated a change to how I used the web, GDPR had a clear benefit here. It made it clear that personal information, like my browsing history, is by default private. If it is to be shared, it should be done so properly - and with consent.
I venture that’s all we really want at work. To have the power to decide whether we want to engage privately and/or personally with our colleagues, in an environment where we can offer or withdraw consent to do so, freely and without punishment.
Brb, writing to the Commission.
Set those boundaries this week!
Rachel
✨ PS. Did you like the scenarios we tackled above? Paid subscribers get a bonus edition of this newsletter later this week that will dive deep into more of these sticky situations, as well as an extra segment of the Nice Work advice column at the end of the month. See you there!