our office banned couches, axe-throwing at the company holiday party, and more

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

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…

1. We can’t have couches anymore

I work as a staff member at a college. The other day, the HR director told us he is getting rid of all of the couches around administrative offices and lobbies. When asked why, he said, “Title IX. We want people to remain upright.”

I have no idea what this means. I have never had a student or colleague try to lay down on these 3.5-foot couches. I looked briefly at Title IX documentation, but could not find anything on seating. These campus-approved couches are utilitarian at best: uncomfortable, wrapped in ugly, fire-retardant patterns and just long enough to fit two people reasonably without touching. They are in glass-walled, visible offices and public waiting areas. We were told the two-person couches would be replaced with two chairs instead. Which would be right next to each other.

I am not sure what could happen on a couch — hanky panky? Or unwanted touching? Do you have any thoughts on whether “Title IX” is a reason to remove couches? I don’t really care what people sit on while they are waiting to meet with administrators, I just want to know if this absurd reason is actually real.

Title IX is the law that makes it illegal to discriminate on the basis of sex, which can include sexual harassment and sexual coercion. Your HR director is saying, “We don’t want to make it easy for sexual contact to occur in our work settings, and we think the presence of couches may do that.”

It’s a bit silly to think that someone who wants to have sex in an office would require a couch to do it, but that’s what he’s referencing. And I wouldn’t be surprised if there was An Incident that led to the change — but if there was, it’s pretty likely that it would have happened with or without the presence of a couch.

2. Coworker offered to use food stamps for our holiday party

During the lead-up to our holiday party, a younger coworker offered to use their extra food stamps to get food for the team. They explained that they weren’t planning to use the stamps for themselves and wanted to contribute to the celebration. They went around and asked everyone for their requests.

While their offer was generous and clearly well-intentioned, it made some of my coworkers uncomfortable. No one knew quite how to navigate this. Some were unsure if it was appropriate to accept, given the purpose of food stamps. Others didn’t want to hurt the coworker’s feelings by declining.

It was a one-time occurrence, and I’d love your thoughts on how you would have navigated this as a coworker. It doesn’t feel right to escalate it to HR and even saying something to this employee, I believe, would cause them to feel a ton of shame and embarrassment.

You’re right that it wouldn’t be appropriate to use food stamps to fund a company party — and it would violate the terms of the benefit.

So: “You’re kind to offer, but we couldn’t accept that.” Or, “You’re kind to offer, but I don’t think they’re allowed to be transferred so we couldn’t accept that.”

3. We can’t use holiday party leave to do axe-throwing as a group

My manager is a good guy but a bit of a pushover. We are at an office with very few perks, but every year at the holidays we are allowed half a day of leave to attend an office holiday party.

This year my boss asked us if we would be interested in going to a local axe-throwing place (and paying our own way) during the workday as an office party. It is not mandatory, but we would be allowed to charge our “holiday party leave” time to attend. A sufficient number of people were interested so the party was booked.

Now my boss’s boss has told us we can still attend the party but we would have to charge PTO as we are going someplace with “weapons” involved. As far as I know, this isn’t an office-wide policy, she just made it up this year for this particular event. She also complained that she wouldn’t be able to attend the party anyway because someone has to be in the office.

We are all pretty bummed, but the bigger implication is she is just arbitrarily taking away our job benefits and we don’t think it’s fair. Do we have any recourse here? Should we throw axes in defiance of her edict?

Eh. I see why it grates, but it’s also not inherently outrageous to say that the office won’t sponsor parties centered around weapons. And while you’re paying your own way, they’d be sponsoring it in the sense of giving you party leave to attend … which might be making her worried about issues of liability if something goes wrong. (Of course, something could just as easily go wrong if you went zip-lining or any number of the other off-site activities some offices choose. Axe-throwing just makes the risk feel more obvious.)

You can certainly try to push back as a group on this type of thing, but ultimately it’s her call to make.

4. How to end a conversation after giving negative feedback

I just gave some negative feedback to one of my direct reports, but I struggled with how to end the conversation. Basically, she failed to do a follow-up task as per procedure because she was too busy, and that resulted with some employees not getting a recognition in due time and in our org, those recognitions are very important. I told her it was unacceptable and to ask for help if she is overloaded. I was able to use an example of someone close to her to drive home the importance of not letting such things slip.

She apologized and accepted the feedback and after that I had no idea how to close the conversation. Yes, I was not happy but it was not a life-or-death situation and other then her agreeing not to do it again in the future, there was no reason for me to prolong the conversation beyond that. The exchange was happening on a Teams chat. I had to pull away for a few moments to deal with an email, but after that I was able to come up with this: “I understand that you’ve been very busy while Varys is absent, but I cannot take action to help you out if I am not aware of what is going on. What is important going forward is that this doesn’t happen again. I will send the scrolls to the Wall via Raven.”

Is there a general script that I can use to close such conversations? I didn’t want to harp on the issue but I didn’t want to close it by softening the message after she apologized with an “It’s ok” as I would if it was a minor issue.

You’re overthinking it! It’s enough to just say, “Thank you.”

When you’re delivering critical feedback, once it’s clear the person gets it (and, if relevant, is taking whatever action you need them to take), you don’t need to reiterate the message again … and in some cases, doing that can come across as berating them. In your mind you’re summing up the main takeaways, but to the person being criticized, hearing it repeated can feel like you’re hammering it in when they’ve already made it clear that they get it.

That’s not a hard and fast rule; sometimes something is so serious that reiterating it in a summary at the end makes sense. But in this case, it sounds like you were really just looking for a way to close the conversation, and “thank you” (or “I appreciate it” or “I think we’re on the same page now, so thank you” or “sounds good, thank you” or similar) is a perfectly fine (and lower key) way to do that.

Related:
how to criticize someone’s work without making it awkward

5. Why did this rejection bother to say the job was already slated for someone else?

I’ve been casually looking for a new job for the past year or more, and I encountered this line in what was otherwise a fairly standard “we’ll keep your info on file, please search our site for other positions” email response: “This role was specifically intended for transitioning one of our temporary contract employees into a full-time position at Company.”

Is there a reason they would need to send this? I hadn’t interviewed or anything so it felt odd that they went into detail like that. I’ve certainly gotten enough “thanks, we’re going a different direction” messages that this one stuck out.

Transparency! They didn’t have to offer it, but they did. They’re letting you know that the rejection wasn’t about your qualifications, but simply that they’d already selected someone for the position. (And yes, it’s a problem that they even bothered to post the job if people didn’t have a real shot at it, but some companies’ internal rules require them to do that … even though this is very much not in the spirit of said rule.)