Maintaining workplace boundaries is not easy, especially when one’s co-workers don’t believe in doing so.
Professionalism at workplace is not restricted to efficiently completing the tasks at hand, but also in the way you deal with your colleagues. Be it a nosy co-worker, a colleague who is in the habit of dumping his/her work on you, dealing with people you work with on a daily basis is a tightrope walk. One has to be careful between bending over backward on one hand and tactfully dealing with a given situation on the other.
Offices generally do not have pre defined policies on maintaining workplace boundaries. So the onus of defining the kind of relationship you will have with your colleagues is an individual call.
For an employer, it’s not easy to monitor every single employee’s relation with his peers. The employer’s role is more reactive in such a scenario and they can only act to prevent such occurrences from repeating, reports The Times of India.
A lot of inter personal office relations differ in different industries. For instance, advertising and media agencies, in most cases, tend to have employee relations that are more personal due to the nature of the work and extended working hours.
However, this may not be the case in a consulting or banking setup. Hence, there is a large grey area and eventually it is up to the employee to discern and act if one feels that the boundaries between work and personal life are being merged. Some like it some don’t.
Having said this, if a colleague is persistent and really encroaching on another’s personal space, be it a senior or junior level employee, a formal complaint to the HR team should be made and that’s when the HR business partner needs to step in and counsel the employee who has been making the other uncomfortable.
