When and why it's ok to ghost people at work 👻

Here we are - the best part of the month! It’s the Nice Work advice column on all things colleagues & work dynamics. Which means, yes, you can expect hot takes like:

Yes, you should walk away from that weird conversation in the break room because no one has time to hear about that grisly injury (unless you want to? I guess?)

Gross ER stories are okay with clear consent.

No, you definitely don’t have to share what you got up to this weekend - unless you want to, of course, and you’re pretty sure THEY want to hear it.

Channel your inner Lucille Bluth next time someone asks you *way too much* about your holiday.

And most of all: You're allowed to be a human with a life-life, not just a work-life. It’s ok if you only want to be in this escape room for 40 hours a week - and live it up the rest of time with stories that don’t make it to the Monday morning meeting.

To summarise, though, before we jump into all of the specifics: You owe your colleagues your working self. And that working self both owes, and is owed, the same respect from others. 🙏

Q: I am facing a situation where the work division in my department doesn’t seem fair. Some colleagues have a much heavier workload than others. How can I address this issue without causing any resentment?

In the edition of what we owe our colleagues, we talked about teamwork and reasonable timelines. At work, we are working together to achieve a goal. While our colleagues (and our humans-in-charge) should keep a close eye on workloads in order to make sure the goal IS achievable, it isn’t likely that the work will be fairly distributed every time. That’s because we’re all human. As humans, we won’t make the right decisions every time - nor will we ever have all the information at hand.

Keeping both facts in mind as you bring the data to your manager is the way to avoid an issue. When you do, reiterate that you wanted to share this information for their benefit, not to judge or criticise their planning. And note that you yourself may not have the full picture. The workload might look unbalanced to you, but based on the skillsets of the team, it might be just right.