how to make friends and influence ppl (without being a creep)

This is only acceptable if it is indeed a cool shirt.

Cool hygiene isnt, I'll give u that

Correct of course to note that disagreements about coolness of shirts etc is another minefield

XP to AF idk tho criticising the framing is more a technical complaint nest pas

shirts with slogans on are tricky because sometimes you can't read them without staring at somebody's chest so probably best avoided at work

also name tags with really small fonts

I mean there are so many variables. Lots of people work with family members, old friends...if you worked at a perfumerie it's fine to constantly tell people they smell nice. If you work in fashion you may discuss appearance. Some people are just choosing to be daft in order to pretend like past behavior may be ok.

i worked somewhere before where people would hug you when you came back from holiday, or i dunno, when you arrived hungover for a 6am shift or something. it prob sounds awful but we all really liked each other. it was a brilliant place to work. it wasn't like hugging was enforced or something, we all just spent a lot of time together in a high-pressure environment, and it was a well-functioning team working in kids' tv, which i guess is fun and nice subject matter.

colleagues can become friends. if the culture of a workplace is good then people complimenting each other can be fairly normal, though personally i'd tend to avoid it. i think "i like your shoes" or whatever is prob fine. but there's a time where a team gets to know each other and a lot of the rules go away, people become comfortable with each other, a few people leave, a few people join, it all resets again. i'd never comment on someone's physical appearance tho - i mean unless we'd become good friends or whatever (which has happened in workplaces, a lot - this thread seems to avoid that possibility - i've worked with people i liked enough to hang out with outside of work)

Team work is work is easy for me, because evidently I am not a human. Work robot.

People don't do cool things at work. Only time was when someone turned up wearing a t-shirt w/the hammer and sickle. One in a million and I was only amused (as I knew he took part in interesting activities when young). Even then I didn't say anything.

i had a colleague who used to whisper "you smell nice" to me, occasionally, in morning meetings - if the genders were reversed it'd be p creepy, but we were good friends and it made me laugh, the absurd delivery of it. i dunno, context too, it was obv meant to be funny and weird.

xpost if the rest of my life was like work i wouldn't have any problems.

something else to consider is a generational divide at work maybe? I'm 30 and have never worked a job for more than 2 years in a row, and most people my age or younger have more precarious work situations and aren't v likely to end up at the same place for long, building up solid work friendships or whatever. in that context the increasingly strict "don't comment on appearance at all ever in any circumstance" line makes sense to me

i think 2 years is quite a long time - i've been really close friends with colleagues in a job i was only in for 18 months. the older i get the more i tend to form friendships at work more quickly, in part due to being more calm about my ability, in part due to recognising the necessity of being friends with colleagues, regardless.

I had a super close relationship with my boss. So same sex complimenting/sharing of tampons/complaining about having to poop, we were both fine with after we had established our working relationship after a period of time.

i think 2 years is quite a long time

again, the *longest* I've worked at the same place. in my line of work, one-year contracts are the norm

Wait theres poop now!

When I've worked in places with a high churn of young staff that's where I've seen the most occurrence and inappropriateness level of interpersonal conduct. I'd tend towards thinking that age rather than length of term is a contributing factor.

Every corporate office I have worked in, people obsess about the bathroom.

I think we have threads tbh so I don't doubt u

the idea of wanting to making friends and (simultaneously) wanting to influence them is nagl tbh

personally i can pick up on this really quickly and i'm sure a lot of people can as well

it kind of makes you look psychotic or like a sociopath

I feel like the 'and' does not serve the simultaneous function but in any case this is merely a well-known phrase and not a parasol under which we all huddle

i mean it's a popular book on how to manipulate employees and customers

That is a certain fact

manipulate = being genuinely interested in people, smiling, remembering their name, being a good listener, talking about things that interest them and making them feel important? despicable.

Back to motive

Maybe a better way to frame the issue is to focus not on a set of behaviors, but on who in the workplace is expected to do the work of risk assessment and bear the consequences for any given office behavior, good or bad? Thinking aloud here, perhaps part of the problem is that men have historically be able to interact with women professionally without needing to spend much time considering the risks of their behavior towards women or worrying about any consequences from it, because that has fallen on the women involved. As a result, men don't see this as work that has to be done, an everyday task, while all the time women in professional spaces have been doing that work.

All social interaction involves mediation, and even the most comprehensive set of guidelines for office behavior will always require interpretation. Both of those things are ongoing labor that needs to be done, and the issue is who in the office is expected to do it. Focusing on an ideal set of guidelines that always lies just beyond the horizon is a way to avoid accepting that the work involved to solve this problem is ongoing, and in the meantime the status quo remains... women are doing most of this work.

In that sense, it's odd that men would demand a comprehensive set of guidelines for such labor before engaging with gender equality, when women have been expected to perform that labor without any guidelines from the moment they entered the workplace. And it isn't like men don't do this labor in other contexts; a lot of them have been managers and understand the work involved in supervising hierarchies and conflicts, or even just navigating complex social spaces they move through outside of work that have rules almost entirely unwritten.

So I guess there are men saying "come up with a set of rules I can follow at work, and I'll do the work of following them" while women are saying "coming up with the rules IS the work, and we would love it if you would at least do that work for your own behavior, especially *before* you decide to act". It's not about finding answers to scenarios that the rules don't cover. It's thinking, before you proceed in such a scenario, "The outcome here is simply not predictable. How will this affect my co-workers? Am I, myself, willing to accept the risk associated with this situation having an unknowable outcome? Will I own the consequences of what happened? Is it better to just shut up right now and avoid creating a lot of hassle for someone? Yeah, it probably is."

otm

So I guess there are men saying "come up with a set of rules I can follow at work, and I'll do the work of following them" while women are saying "coming up with the rules IS the work, and we would love it if you would at least do that work for your own behavior, especially *before* you decide to act".

this is exactly why i found the disingenuousness of the original question extremely off-putting
don't pretend you don't know how to not-harass people and then make me come up with ways a phantom clueless person can avoid harassing their coworkers
thanks f hazel

additionally, if it's about compliments, a compliment is a reflection of what you see and value about the person

A: You do good work
vs
B: Nice shoes

what does person A see? good work
what does person B see? shoes

Was person B wearing nice shoes
Is it one or the other
Is this the only thing you ever say to person B
Has person B done good work today
Is it your role to note person B's good work, if you even know of it

Etc

#teamWorkIsWork #teamLanaDelRay

^^^OTM xpost a couple of people. I have even been telling this to my mother about how she interacts with my very young nieces. Please stop complimenting them on how pretty or cute they are are and start telling them they are smart or said something interesting or funny. There are so many other things to praise people on other than how they look. Everyone knows this but people are lazy in how they interact.

So I guess there are men saying "come up with a set of rules I can follow at work, and I'll do the work of following them" while women are saying "coming up with the rules IS the work, and we would love it if you would at least do that work for your own behavior, especially *before* you decide to act". It's not about finding answers to scenarios that the rules don't cover. It's thinking, before you proceed in such a scenario, "The outcome here is simply not predictable. How will this affect my co-workers? Am I, myself, willing to accept the risk associated with this situation having an unknowable outcome? Will I own the consequences of what happened? Is it better to just shut up right now and avoid creating a lot of hassle for someone? Yeah, it probably is."

― erry red flag (f. hazel), Monday, January 8, 2018 1:55 PM (thirty-nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is so on-point, I'm not sure what even needs to be said beyond it. so much of the hand-wringing you see about "rules" involves creating just another kind of imaginary boogeyman like the welfare queen or the Girl Who Cried Rape. like any guy is going to work with a woman, develop a pleasant professional level of banter with her, and then one day compliment her shoes or outfit and she's going to fly off the handle, report you to HR for sexual harassment and ruin your life. navigating this terrain seriously does not require more than a sliver of common sense. like, maybe don't make reference to a woman's appearance in a professional setting if it's the first time you've met her. but if you've worked with a woman for two years, five years, whatever, and you're on friendly terms, and one morning you say "that's a nice dress," I THINK you're gonna be just fine.

and yeah, obviously, I'm working on the presumption here that you actually have conversations with these women and don't just lob sporadic compliments at them out of the blue.

Our office has a yearly "most cheerful staff member" award that always seems to go to a female member of staff. We complain about it every year

many xps but lol u woz robbed

xps sorry LL I was hopping on a bus and have gotten that example backasswards I think

"this is so on-point, I'm not sure what even needs to be said beyond it."

Do you very often win hearts and minds with this type of rhetoric I dunno

absolutely booming post f. hazel

can't see your shoes soz

Everyone otm about fhaz being otm. Nice work, everyone!

If there's a consensus on this thread, its that the sensitive souls of ILX have long concluded, probably long before Weinstein et al broke, that flirting at the job entails so much risk of embarrassment or miscommunication that we just don't. Prior to our current moment, workplace flirtation was increasingly limited to the insensitive and imprudent, ie, creeps. I expect Weinstein et al will accelerate this.

Maybe balancing all interests, that's the sort of world we want. One where only creeps flirt in the workplace, and hence anyone who is discomfited feels safe to immediately seek redress for their behavior. I still think its disingenuous to deny that this may have its own costs.

http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2014/09/ST-2014-09-24-never-married-01.png

what are those costs?

Ogmor:

I don't think there is a clear distinction between career jobs and paying the bills jobs, or that it matters much in terms of whats appropriate.

I mean, if we're talking about the end of the behavioural spectrum where the absolute awful stuff happens - sexual assault, violence, etc - yeah I agree. The particular workplace in question doesn't make a difference there.

But man oh man. I've never really managed to get a 'career' of any sort going; with a couple of exceptions I've mostly worked insecure jobs in a selection of north west england's bargain basement call centres. No guarantee you'll still have a job on monday; the idea of career progression being just laughable; no-one working there because they want to; nothing enjoyable or exciting or creative, or even respectable, about the work. The framework of 'Appropriate professional conduct towards colleagues', that officialese which people often use in discussions like this thread, to try and parse rights and wrongs in the workplace ... it speaks to a different world entirely.

If there's a consensus on this thread, its that the sensitive souls of ILX have long concluded, probably long before Weinstein et al broke, that flirting at the job entails so much risk of embarrassment or miscommunication that we just don't. Prior to our current moment, workplace flirtation was increasingly limited to the insensitive and imprudent, ie, creeps. I expect Weinstein et al will accelerate this.

― Sanpaku, Monday, January 8, 2018 4:13 PM (fifteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that is not what 'the sensitive souls of ILX' have long concluded in this thread, not at all. this is being disingenuous.

This is a good article about the labor of managing unwanted comments or looks in the workplace. It's annoying and tiring. Also if your dating field is restricted to your workplace, try match.com.

https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-MeToo-Movement-Isn-t/242179

xp to self

To put all of that more succinctly: 'Professional conduct' is a stick that only works if there's a carrot, and most people work in a job where there is no carrot; that is, it's a stick that only works on valued personnel who are pursuing good, rewarding careers. We need a different framework for shit jobs.

Wha? People in shit jobs should also treat one another respectfully. Indeed perhaps moreso. WTF?

Like "being a decent human" is a pretty succulent carrot IMO

All the sensitive men who cannot possibly manage their workplace without the entitlement of being able to freely bestow a compliment on a woman's appearance. The struggle is real.

xps Oh yeah I don't say there's no need to treat one another respectfully. I just mean we should assert that need (necessity) using a framework that takes into account how real people actually feel, rather than what a professional ought to do?

Also, importantly, I realise my post there may look as if I'm arguing for employers not to have standards of professional conduct. I'm definitely not arguing that, I'm talking about how we parse this stuff and what language we use to do so

professionalism is a ruse in respectable environments though. people are shitty everywhere

that's in response to cardamon, even when the "carrot" is there, it doesn't change people's inherent shittiness

To all those who work in harsh "survival of the shittiest" type environments, where continuity of work is precarious at best and the pay is shit. I salute you, and try not to let the rotten game change you - even though it inevitably does :(

I'm confused about what point you're making cardamon, I'm thinking now I got the wrong end of the stick but I'm still not sure in what way