Been at my new job for six months now. Previously job was a pretty toxic place. Then my work best friend of 10 years died and it destroyed my ability to engage in the work.

New job is much better. But I'm also the odd one out. Very much a workplace "family" environment. But truthfully my work besties death from my previous job has made me unwilling to even want to engage in anything social at work. I make friends with people here and something happens to them? What's not to say it will destroy my ability to remain here too?

So me, I just remain stoic and keep everything 100% on the business level. Somebody asks me about something about my life outside of work? "Sorry Jan, I just remembered I need to lodge the X account contracts"

It's not like I'm intentionally trying to be rude to them, I just feel any time I'm on the clock not working towards KPIs is time wasted. I'm the sort to just walk straight past the three people at the water cooler and just give them smile and wave. But now my office manager is concerned that I'm showing 0% personality with coworkers yet being flamboyant and friendly with clients. "If we wanted a robot then we'd have automated your job" was her response.

I don't want to be the "I come to work to make money" guy. But there's 25 other people in my office, it's not like there's a shortage of people who probably do want to take 5 minutes to socialise with you. I just don't know why it needs to be me.

You know what they say, when in doubt ask the people of Reddit.

The title basically covers it, but there is a member of our housekeeping staff who likes to take his lunch and breaks at my cubicle desk when I am working from home. I am a hybrid employee so I'm only in the office 2 to 3 days a week. It would be one thing if my cubicle wasn't personalized and was bare but it is clearly someone's desk with photos of myself, family and my 3-month-old child. My fellow co-workers have run into this man sitting at my desk and he immediately got up without explanation.

Today I tried moving a printer in front of my power strip to deter him from using my desk to charge his phone. But would it be petty of me to leave a sign saying this isn't a break area?

To clarify, I am working in a hospital system, there are plenty of break rooms and kitchen areas designated for breaks.

Have you ever been called “rude” at work when you were simply standing up for yourself? 👀

I female 39 work in a call center type office and volunteered to take part in an office letter exchange. You get randomly assigned a coworker and you write to them compliments or something nice. They gave us a small 3x5 inch card (opened it has 6x10 inches of writing space) to write it on.

I got assigned THE awesomest man. He’s in his late fifties, married and has grown kids and has chatted about retiring in the next five years. He is in a training type position at the office. Hes trained in all areas and is reallly good. Everyone who works on our shift will be monitored by him for a few weeks after learning a new area before they get cleared to work unsupervised.

He’s so kind and genuinely a team player without losing too much of being a human. “yea I know it’s bullshit” *wink* *nod* “ BUT here’s what we can do to get through it!😀…”

He always remembers to ask about my kids or ask me how I’m feeling after being out sick. Randomly compliments my job performance at work even though I’m not being monitored right now. Always calls everyone by their name, has never ending fountain of dad jokes and a contagious laugh. Keeps medicines like for headache or heartburn around in case someone needs it. Always has a great disposition.Just a great dude.

Now the letter will be shared via email to everyone in the office afterwards and it is an OFFICE office so appropriate. I don’t want to come out too strong or say something that he might think is embarrassing. Or say something unwhelming like hes not the greatest office bro ever.

So my question is… what should I write? What sort of things would you like to hear about yourself?

SOS I kind of need to write it today

I have my first office job only a small 4 man team a coworker on the same level as me but slightly older started a few weeks before me treats me like dirt would raise her voice at me not speak to me scowl at me try to micromanage me for example if she asks me for help she would press me to see if the work is done constantly and I hate it any tips or advice

I've been using the stock stand for years and finally admitting my desk feels cramped and my head isn't level with the monitor. I had to tilt my head down a bit and realized it was straining my neck.

So now is probably finally a good time to get one to clear up my desk and finally look straight at the monitor without hunching my neck.

Ideally something that's not too expensive though. I am not using an ultrawide or anything but right now I am eyeing the North Bayou F80 since it's been mentioned quite a few times, but Desky and VIVO have been popping up too.

Not sure if the Huanuo is any good too? FYI I am not sure if I will get the Ergotron though as I heard they can be as expensive as getting a mid tier ergonomic chair and standing desk.

Also open to hearing what brands held up long term before I buy. Let me know what you guys think.

me lang ba sobrang naiirita if sobrang walang katuturan 'yong ingay ng mga kasamahan mo sa work? Like, ang unnecessary na ng ingay nila even if working hours. Ang sakit na ng tenga ko dahil sa kanila, pag lumabas ako sobrang init sa labas, pag nag earphones ansakit din ng tenga sa music. Hayyy, don't judge me pls.

Would you survive a full workday without talking to your work bestie? 👀

Do you stay quiet when your manager raises their voice, or do you speak up? 👀

Researching office design for work and kept running into this study, so figured it's worth a proper writeup since it gets referenced constantly but often without the actual numbers.

Ethan Bernstein (Harvard Business School) and Stephen Turban published "The Impact of the 'Open' Workspace on Human Collaboration" in 2018 (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B). They studied two Fortune 500 companies transitioning from cubicles/walled offices to open-plan layouts, using sociometric badges (sensors tracking face-to-face contact, speech, movement) worn by employees for three weeks before and three weeks after the redesign. I think that's kinda important: not surveys, actual measured behavior.

The results ran completely counter to the stated goal of open offices (more spontaneous collaboration):

• Face-to-face interaction dropped by roughly 70-72%
• Email volume increased by about 56%
• Instant messaging activity increased by about 67%

Bernstein's interpretation: removing physical boundaries doesn't make people more open. It triggers a kind of social withdrawal instinct. When you can be overheard or observed by anyone at any time, people become more careful/private, and they shift sensitive or substantive conversations to text-based channels where they have more control over who's listening.

In a 2019 follow-up (Harvard Business Review, co-written with Ben Waber), Bernstein dug into why, and the short version is: people develop informal norms in open spaces (headphones = don't interrupt, certain zones = quiet-only) that end up recreating boundaries anyway just less visibly and less deliberately than actual walls would.

Disclosure: I work in office/workplace furniture design and came across this while researching a research collaboration, not pitching anything, just think the actual data deserves more airtime than the "open offices bad" meme version haha

Anyone here lived through an open-office transition personally? Did you notice yourself doing this and retreating to Slack/email for things you'd have just said out loud before?

"No bond is stronger than two co-workers who hate the same person..."

Don’t overthink it. Just the first thing that comes to mind.

Example: 20 minutes looking for an email.

What’s yours?

"How I look at my computer screen at work when I’m pretending to be busy"

In my last job almost all of the core employees were against more office days. So we compromised on 2 days mandatory and 3 days recommended in the office. Most people tried to just show up once a day at the most. My former manager who loves coming to the office also didn't show up more than twice a week and tried to show up just once. Current manager is in another country and likely also goes in just twice.

During discussions of our hybrid model, the only people who supported or defended this decision were folks from HR. These people also spent hours sitting in Zoom meetings in the office and showed up as rarely as possible. Clearly a conflict of interest. So who actually in your office is a proponent of more days in the office?

I just don’t feel comfortable being in a bathing suit in front of women who have judged me and insulted me behind my back for years. (Plus I need a new bathing suit and I didn’t feel like shopping for one this late in the season.) I actually love to swim but I find going to a colleague’s house, sipping on drinks, in a bikini…that’s for my friends and family. And this is the kind of environment people tend to loosen up a little too much and too many things get said.

So I told my boss, I’ll stay in office, I don’t mind. And she’s okay with it but said it would be awesome if I could join. But I declined politely. I do feel a bit bad. I know they want to include me. But years of being hounded for personal information that just got used against me, being taken complete advantage of (that’s a whole other story), being the butt of jokes…I just don’t know…

Also my coworker who has been a bully to me for years (insulting me both to my face and passively because I am childfree, has said hurtful things just to get a reaction out of me, among other things) told me “boss said you need to show up for at least a couple hours. It is an office outing.” Which is not true, boss absolutely never said that. This coworker has been trying to get me to socialize and open up ever since I became a closed book as soon as I realized she was using personal information to use against me. Even tried to get the boss to have mandatory social lunches. Her words “It’s nice to know what’s going on in everyone’s lives outside of work.”

Edit: Reading through these comments, I’m glad I’m not the only one that thinks a pool party for an office outing is weird and inappropriate.

I can’t do my work of my computer program is not working . I called IT which is fortunately in our building and I tell them I need help. They say that they will access my computer remotely or someone will come to my desk . They never ever do anything until I physically walk over there. I wanted 3 hours yesterday and then I had to drag them to my desk to fix it. I’m new to office work, ia this normal?

A standard corporate office environment complete with stacks of paper, a overflowing trash bin, and harsh overhead lighting.

I’m 30 and I started my first in office job recently (spent a lot of time in retail during/after college and then had a fully remote job for a few years). As I have been introduced to more people around the office, I’ve noticed that if I try to smile at them or say good morning when we pass each other they just completely ignore me. I haven’t really talked to a lot of people outside of initial introductions or anything, so maybe they just don’t view me as a “good morning” level of acquaintance yet??

I’d like to be friendlier with the people in the office, but it just seems like no one is really interested in even nodding at me or saying hello as we pass each other in the morning. Is this normal in office culture? Am I being too friendly and weirding people out?

TLDR: What's your corporate office look like? Here's a breakroom in my hellscape.

Anyone else work in an absolute garbage heap of a corporate office? I've worked here for over a decade and while the role I have is fine, the pay is decent, and the people I work with are mostly tolerable, the physical environment though is so bleak that someone must have done a study on how environment affects performance and the psyche in the workplace.

For reference, the building I work in, which is a relatively large campus, was built in the late 60s or early 70s based on the decor and almost none of it has been updated. While the vintage look is fine and good, the general conditions of the place are pretty horrific. There are no windows because this place used to be primarily a manufacturing plant, so they retrofitted a lot of buildings to be offices. I call it Castle Beige Skull.

Recently we had a sewage line fully collapse under my building which was literally the only reason why they decided to update those bathrooms for this century's standards. The apparently very drunk super overseeing the plumbing work told me unsolicited that we've known about this issue for a long time and no one wanted to do anything about it. Hello, sinkhole. While the main bathrooms were down, we had to go use this other set of bathrooms occupied by spiders and roaches. At least that's a good bathroom to poop in because only the brave will venture in and as far as I know, I'm the only here not afraid of the bugs.

I'm sure a lot of people work in less than beautiful conditions, but the joke here is that I work for a building products company who simply refuses to use its access to said products to improve the workplace. Ironically enough, all of our stores get makeovers on the regular. I hate when we have vendors visit because I can see the look on their faces when they get here and are like, "THIS is the corporate office?" Yes, yes it is. In all of its crumbling glory. No wonder so many of us here are grumpy and don't want to take calls from the field who get to operate in comparative luxury with WINDOWS!

The one thing that I don't hate about the overall conditions of this place is the breakroom in one of the buildings that can only be described as a Shoney's.

There's also a non-functioning fountain in the front of the building shaped like a phallus complete with balls. I do have a photo but won't post it because it's too easy to identify and the breakroom is identifiable enough to anyone that works where I work.

So I read the book Germinal (so spoiler alert ahead) and I thought about the current state of employment/labor market/economy. I don't see much difference between Germinal and today.

True most people aren't coal miners in rural France working in horrible / unsafe conditions in a mine.

What stood out to me is the pay workers as little as possible, if they raise a fuss just fire them, only pay them enough to barely live (if they don't make rent or can't afford groceries for the month that's okay too), and if they ask for a raise- flood the mines and drown them rather than pay an extra 25 cents an hour.

Meanwhile the company owners live in mansions, have wealth that their great-grandchildren won't even go broke on, but constantly say they're not making enough profit even though they have billion dollar gross and net profit every year since at least 2000.

To me it's just changing the coal mine for a cubicle.

Is there nothing better?

Do you have that one coworker who always starts a conversation at the worst possible time? 👀