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

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

I mean I'm not making much more than a pedantic point (and making it late in the thread too). The sort of judgments we make about what good and bad workplace behaviour is, should take into account the sharp differences between, say, working as a barrister and working in burger king - 'the workplace' is not just one type of place. But temper that with some behaviours being always wrong.

I think you all look really hot today btw

it doesn't seem that, say, the acceptability of flirting will depend on the workplace so much as the individual, unless we're going to say "toughen up, this is burger king!"

Sure. And 'toughen up, this is burger king' is like the worst result we could get here.

I would say re: flirting that in call-centres, my experience is that the youngsters will: clock off, go on their break, head to break room or smoking area and engage in extremely crude ritual (that it's a ritual is key) flirting banter. Tits and dicks and shagging. Booming laughter. This is not always very nice to overhear. Some of what gets said is pretty concerning. Had anyone come out with it at one of my more 'professional' jobs I might even have complained ... It's just that also there's this dose of human warmth/relief mixed in there as well - to a large extent it feels justified by the crudity and aggression of the customers (who blast themselves into your ear one after another) and as a relief from the awfulness of the job in general.

So there's a tentative feeling that some things might more or less 'go' in some workplaces, and more or less not 'go' in others - but not to the extent of hand-waving toxic bad behaviour or bullying or harassment in a job just because a job is shit

Again, as well as that kind of flirting banter or whatever we want to call it being ritualised (and so having less implication that this person is actually intending to have sex with this other person) it's also a joke that everybody's in on, taking us back to the idea that it's largely to do with individuals and what those individuals are comfortable with

cardamon i relate to the work experience you mentioned in xp

last job i worked mostly with males and there was high turn over. We rarely hired women because some of the guys were such pigs that they openly admitted it would be problematic if women heard the dirty banter that was going on. Any woman that was hired was deemed to have been okay to handle that type of shit, which was truly awful. as cardamon says my colleagues felt like their bad behavior was justified by the stress of dealing with asshole clients.

i tried to stay away from it mostly, iirc one guy jokingly called me a feminist

When you're young, it's all about keeping up with the guy with the biggest mouth, whether you agree with him or not. It's only when you're older that you start to realise ignoring him and staying the hell away was an option all along.

Although in the example I'm thinking of these are young women as well as young men - but indeed there is the question (that I can't answer because not a woman) how really okay the women are with it

Thankyou, f.hazel for highlighting the role of emotional labor in all this. Yes yes yes. Why do we always have to do all the work here?

Also sanpaku why did you post that graph about less adults marrying? What the feck has that to do with workplace appropriate behaviours?

If this current public attention to acceptable and unacceptable behavior results in a clearer framework, then good. If it just makes social connection more vexing, we'll learn about it from the tallies of solitary never marrieds, birthrates, and suicides.

― Sanpaku, Sunday, 7 January 2018 00:40 (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Righto. Though he posted the graph after saying "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."

It felt vaguely MGTOW and that shit I will not stand for.

not disagreeing

also agree per f hazel's post that in sanpaku's desire for a "framework" there is a bit of "somebody needs to sort this out *taps large pile of toxic paperwork on desk with forefinger* - sensitive souls? i'm looking at you here"

lol so men will "go their own way" (i looked it up) and society will cease to flourish? is this a joke?

yeah idg that logic at all O_o

Haha sadly no.

We have to bargain with our humanity ladies. Do we want to be respected in the workplace or do we want civilization to end?

i find myself wondering who would care if a portion of toxic men unwilling to stop imposing their will on others floated away on a river of tears to the childless island of their choice
if this is the terrifying new math, i'm willing to risk it. bye felicias! (pardon my glibness)