I would hate to be in human resources at the moment. Admittedly, as someone with no discernible people skills, I would always hate it, but I\u2019ve been imagining the awkward HR meetings behind the scenes of the recent wave of \u201cwhat is acceptable workplace behaviour\u201d rulings from UK employment tribunals recently, and \u2026 oof!<\/p>\n
I\u2019m thinking, particularly, of last week\u2019s ruling on whether younger chatty workers disturbing an older colleague<\/a> constitutes age discrimination (it didn\u2019t), but there are many more. Comparing a colleague to Darth Vader<\/a> in an online personality test resulted in a \u00a330,000 compensation award. Leaving someone out of the tea round<\/a> could contribute to unfair constructive dismissal. Sighing at a colleague<\/a> could be discriminatory. An air kiss<\/a> wasn\u2019t harassment and neither was telling a manager his work was messy<\/a>. Allocating a senior employee a \u201clow-status desk<\/a>\u201d can be seen as a demotion.<\/p>\n Of course, any acrimonious departure is about more than one thing. These are mostly cherrypicked contributory factors; easy headlines about situations that surely involved a complex brew of circumstances and personalities. But it does look like more cases considering how we should behave at work in quite granular ways are reaching tribunals. So, what\u2019s going on?<\/p>\n For a start, is workplace behaviour getting worse? That old \u201cCovid meant we forgot our manners\u201d cliche is certainly applied to workplaces \u2013 the idea being that too much time in slippers and sweats made us ruder and more self-centred, and we are now bringing rather too much of our unpalatable \u201cwhole selves\u201d to work. But as a veteran of a variety of office environments, 1997-2010, I doubt this is the explanation. From flying office equipment to heavy lunchtime drinking and a litany of extremely off-colour personal comments, I witnessed some truly lawless behaviour (including from lawyers). People have never needed the excuse of a global pandemic to hang their sweaty shorts on the office door knob or make each other cry \u2013 there\u2019s a reason I was congratulated by LinkedIn recently on my many years of self-employment. (OK, the reason is I was made redundant after writing about my colleagues on my blog \u2013 I didn\u2019t say I was immune to behaving badly \u2013 but the stuff I saw certainly made me less keen to find another office-based job.)<\/p>\n Actually, I suspect shifting mores (plus decades of anti-discrimination legislation) mean behaviour in most British workplaces is far better than it used to be. So, are we getting less tolerant of co-workers and the minor irritations sharing a workplace inevitably involve? These rulings are often framed as either \u201cGen Z are oversensitive snowflakes\u201d or \u201ctoday\u2019s workers are lazy, cynical outrage-mongers looking for a payout\u201d. On the former, there probably is a degree of generational friction \u2013 we have a highly intergenerational workforce (51% of businesses employ three or more generations<\/a>) and surveys suggest that has meant more age-based conflicts around communication style and working methods<\/a> (it\u2019s also something you often hear anecdotally). But most of these cases don\u2019t even involve gen Z workers. The second complaint feels like a riff on the age-old, always fallacious \u201cnobody wants to work<\/a>\u201d discourse, rehashed back through the 19th century and beyond (surely one day we\u2019ll discover a Mesopotamian tablet on which someone has chiselled this exact complaint).<\/p>\n People do want (and need) to work \u2013 just differently. Covid didn\u2019t make us feral slobs, but it was an inflection point, showing that work need not be business as usual. Employees regularly express a desire for more work-life balance<\/a> and flexibility, but instead, many employers are hustling them back on site<\/a>, and an expanding culture of workplace surveillance (HSBC is the latest employer to go down this unpopular route according to a Reuters\u2019 recent report<\/a>) further erodes trust and goodwill. Meanwhile, jobs that were traditionally vocations \u2013 teaching, healing, caring \u2013 are made harder and less rewarding every year by hollowed-out budgets. When you are not particularly happy at work \u2013 only one in three workers report they\u2019re thriving and employee wellbeing is declining<\/a> according to recent Gallup research \u2013 small grievances and annoyances become harder to overlook: the microwave smells worse; being left off the team bowling invitation rankles more; the no-headphones calls in the open plan office seem louder and longer. Unless and until things change, I bet the HR headaches continue.<\/p>\n Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I would hate to be in human resources at the moment. 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