#workplace behavior

By Amy Dickinson

November 17, 2017

Dear Amy: I am currently a first semester student at a highly selective professional school. Because of the public nature of our future occupation(s), as students we are insanely private in terms of our personal conduct and on social media. Still, friendships have developed within the group.

Seven of us are completing an externship together, and I have bonded with a male colleague who shares a similar schedule. Sometimes, our conversation could be considered casual flirtation, but this is generally harmless and friendly banter.

Recently, we discussed the Weinstein scandal during lunch break, and he vocalized the fear that being a straight male in a public profession will affect his personal life. He emphasized that he fears intentions or comments may be misinterpreted in ways that could harm his career.

Part of me wonders if he hasn’t initiated more overt flirtation with me due to his fear of sexual harassment or sacrificing our professional relationship. I have never actively dated before, and this adds another dimension for me; I feel this raises the stakes.

How can I value his reservations, express my interest, and make my friend feel comfortable if he is not interested? In this case, how can I make the first move without being viewed as aggressive or at the least unprofessional?

— Need Advice

Dear Need Advice: Your colleague’s reservations about appropriate workplace behavior are intriguing.

I would answer his concerns by letting him know that it is actually easy to avoid harassment charges. I think back to the scores of men I have worked for and alongside in four decades of working in various professions. Almost every single one of them managed not to harass women, and I don’t think it was a hugely heavy lift. They simply respected colleagues’ abilities and autonomy, didn’t engage in sexual banter, and didn’t behave in a sexual way, a physically threatening manner, or an inappropriate fashion. I developed many important and abiding relationships and friendships with these colleagues that extended beyond the workplace.

Your colleague’s choice to act threatened, as if he is practicing his own victimhood, is curious — and also unappealing (at least to me).

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For the 10th year, April is the national observance month for workplace violence awareness. As a law enforcement professional and organization facilitator on the topic, I want to share with you the preventable nature of most workplace violence incidents by providing an analysis of how to Identify, respond to, and prevent workplace violence. Supplementing the study is a video summarizing the areas covered.

In this study, several publications were analyzed, defining a spectrum of behaviors associated with workplace violence that threaten the physical, psychological, and emotional well-being of employees in the workplace. The spectrum includes a wide range of perpetrators of such conduct including co-workers, supervisors, customers, clients, and those who may not have a direct affiliation with the organization but seek to do harm motivated by an ideology. While discrimination and harassment may be the most common forms of abusive conduct employers recognize and set policies to expressly prohibit, other forms of inappropriate behaviors exist that employees should be protected from, or at a minimum employers should take proactive measures to discourage or prevent. Education and awareness are key to such measures. In this review, four themes emerged: The perception of workplace violence, reporting, strategies, and workplace culture.

Findings indicate there are both finite and broad ways of how workplace violence is defined that are dependent upon the entity governing the rules prohibiting such behavior, the type of workplace violence that is of concern in the occupation that is being focused on, and how the perception of what constitutes violence. This in part leads to a lack of reporting of such conduct which is pervasive. Strategies to combat workplace violence exist but are not shared across all workforces. Cultural differences may hinder workplace civility for all workforces.

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I’m simply in awe at the numbers of folks who do not grasp this or who…