When I was young and dinosaurs still roamed the earth, Human Resources departments were still called Personnel departments, and I naively thought they were there to help employees.
It was a bitter pill to swallow when I eventually figured out that HR’s primary responsibility is to the organization. The name itself gives it away: Human Resources. We are a resource. A cog in the wheel. Something the company uses and, when necessary, replaces with another resource.
This is one reason unions matter. An individual employee and an employer do not have equal power. Collective bargaining gives workers something they don’t have individually: the ability to speak with one voice and negotiate the rules under which they’re employed.
But even in union workplaces, employee handbooks, codes of conduct, policies, procedures, and workplace expectations frequently contain language that leaves an astonishing amount of room for interpretation.
And three little adjectives in particular bother the hell out of me:
Professional. Appropriate. Offensive.
These words aren’t meaningless. They have dictionary definitions. The problem is that their definitions don’t give an employee an objective, operational standard for determining what conduct the employer will consider acceptable.
Their application changes with culture, generation, workplace, profession, circumstances—and, most importantly, the person doing the judging.
Let’s look at them one by one, shall we?
Professional
A typical code of conduct might contain a sentence like:
All employees must behave in a professional manner.
Here, professional is an adjective. Look it up as an adjective and you’ll find definitions along these lines:
professional (adjective)
- Relating to or connected with a profession or occupation.
- Engaged in an activity as a paid occupation rather than as an amateur.
- Having or showing the skill, competence, or standards expected of a trained or qualified person.
- Appropriate to a workplace or profession, especially in conduct, appearance, or manner.
See? The word professional invokes a standard without defining the standard.
Granted, we all know what’s unprofessional out on the extreme edges. Most of us realize it would be wildly unprofessional to jump onto our desks, rip off our clothes, and start throwing our feces at our coworkers while singing “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.”
But move away from the feces-flinging end of the spectrum and things get a lot more fuzzy.
Is it professional to call your supervisor by her first name? Is there a required protocol for answering the phone? Are after-hours social gatherings truly optional? Who can you say no to, and how are you expected to say it?
Some organizations consider it unprofessional not to wear a suit. Others are perfectly happy with jeans. Still others require suits most of the week but declare Friday “casual,” so professionalism transforms itself overnight. How is that possible?
And what if you don’t want to participate in Casual Friday? Some people (who I will never understand), actually like wearing suits. Does that mean they’re not being a team player?
Without more specific guidance, professional tells you that there is a standard. It doesn’t tell you where its boundaries are.
And I particularly enjoy the fact that one definition of professional sends us straight into our second grenade:
Appropriate
This one is fun.
I tend to overshare. Some people find that inappropriate. Others don’t.
When I lived in the South, people tended to be all up in each other’s business—or, at minimum, seemed considerably less alarmed by personal disclosure. In the Pacific Northwest, sometimes you’d think I’d driven a hot poker into someone’s nether regions.
For the life of me, I have trouble understanding why someone would care that I’ve revealed something about myself. I can certainly understand being upset if I revealed something private about them.
But that’s Northwesterners for you. Skin as thin as a salmon.
Anyway, the definition:
appropriate (adjective)
- Suitable or proper in the circumstances.
- Fitting or suitable for a particular purpose, person, occasion, or situation.
- Conforming to what is considered suitable or acceptable in a particular context.
Which immediately raises some questions:
Appropriate according to whom?
Appropriate for which circumstances?
Judged according to what standard?
How many buttons can your shirt be unbuttoned before it becomes inappropriate? Do your shoes pass muster, or has everyone simply been too polite to tell you otherwise? If your coworker has body odor they apparently don’t know about, is it appropriate to tell them? If so, how?
Some things are easy. Sexual harassment is inappropriate. Threatening people is inappropriate. We can write actual rules prohibiting those things.
It’s the vast territory between obviously unacceptable and universally acceptable where things get interesting.
What’s safe for work anymore? Which jokes are okay? Which compliments? Can you hum while you work? Can you rock back and forth during a meeting? What if a nervous tic makes someone else uncomfortable? What if people dislike the amount of eye contact you give them?
When the rule is simply BE APPROPRIATE, an employee still has to figure out what somebody else believes appropriate means.
Which brings us to my personal favorite grenade, if such a thing can be said to exist:
Offensive
Consider a workplace rule along these lines:
Employees must not use insulting, threatening, or otherwise offensive language when communicating withcoworkers, or the public.
The first two categories give us a lot more to work with.
Don’t threaten people.
Don’t call people insulting names.
Great. I can work with that.
It’s “otherwise offensive” that sends you into the minefield.
Again, let’s consult the dictionary.
offensive (adjective)
Relevant senses include:
- Causing someone to feel resentful, upset, annoyed, or insulted.
- Objectionable or unacceptable because it is insulting, unpleasant, or morally objectionable.
- Giving offense; displeasing or disagreeable to someone.
And here we encounter a peculiar problem.
Offensive can describe, at least partly, someone else’s reaction to something you said or did.
And you can’t completely control someone else’s reaction.
I once worked with someone who found the word toilet offensive. She preferred the word commode.
Given that we were not living in the Antebellum South, I frequently forgot this rule, and since our toilet was frequently backing up, I’d say as much, and offend her.
The interesting thing was that it apparently never occurred to her that I found her objection to my perfectly ordinary word for a perfectly ordinary plumbing fixture rather irritating, too.
Would she have preferred that I let her discover the problem on her own?
As you can see, the phrase “Otherwise offensive language” can leave a vast, poorly marked territory between:
DON’T THREATEN YOUR SUPERVISOR
and
ETHEL THINKS “TOILET” IS VULGAR.
Has any HR department in the history of the world handed every employee a comprehensive glossary of everything every coworker might conceivably find offensive?
I’m fairly confident the answer is:
Fuck no.
And here’s why this matters to me beyond ordinary workplace griping.
“For many autistic people, including me, that kind of ambiguity is not a minor issue. I am a literal person. I need reasonably concrete expectations in order to know what the rules are so that I can follow them.
That’s the problem with these three words.
Professional. Appropriate. Offensive.
They have definitions.
What they don’t automatically provide are concrete boundaries.
One person can consider something perfectly appropriate that another considers offensive. One supervisor may consider behavior professional that another considers unprofessional. Standards can vary across people, workplaces, generations, cultures, professions, and circumstances.
That’s difficult for anybody trying to follow the rules. But for many autistic people, it can be considerably more difficult.
A lot of workplace culture depends on unwritten social rules: reading between the lines, recognizing expectations nobody has actually stated, interpreting tone and body language, figuring out what somebody really meant instead of what they actually said, and adjusting your behavior according to social cues that everyone else apparently received a fucking handbook for.
No one ever bothers to give me the handbook..
I’m a literal person. If you tell me the rule, I will make a sincere effort to follow the rule. If you tell me not to threaten, insult, harass, or mistreat people, we’re good. I understand those instructions.
But “Be appropriate” isn’t an instruction of the same kind.
Neither is “Be professional.”
And “Don’t be offensive” can become downright impossible if offensive ultimately means don’t say anything another person might take offense at.
That doesn’t mean autistic employees should be excused from reasonable standards of workplace behavior. Of course we shouldn’t. It means that we’ll only have a fair chance of meeting those standards if you make them clear.
Clear expectations protect everybody, but they are especially important for people who don’t instinctively perceive unwritten social rules.
If a behavior is prohibited, describe the behavior.
If certain language is prohibited, identify it as specifically as possible.
If there’s a boundary that matters enough that crossing it can threaten someone’s livelihood, make that boundary as concrete as you can, because, just like you, we need our jobs.
Don’t make employees reverse-engineer the rule from somebody else’s reaction after they’ve already broken it. Because if the rule is essentially, “You’ll know it when you see it,” some of us genuinely won’t.
And then one day we’ll be sitting there, happily plugging away at our jobs, thinking everything is fine, and then we’ll hear this odd whistling hum, and…
INCOMING!!!!
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