Agony Aunt

A reader writes:

I have a new employee on my team. This is her first full-time office job, which is common for employees at my company. I’ve recently heard from other managers that she’s primarily working from a nest of blankets and pillows she built on her office floor. We are a very casual office and she’s getting her work done, but this is still weird. I’d like to address it with her before we move another new hire into her shared office area next month.

My first step is to stop by her office a couple of times to verify the hearsay, but overall how do I address this with her? We have a company policy handbook but it is pretty vague (to the point of tongue in cheek) about “professional” behavior.

I admit my first reaction was to laugh, and my second was to think about whether I would like to work from a blanket/pillow nest of my own.

But yeah, in most offices this is going to stand out as really odd — hence the comments you’re getting about it.

There is a larger philosophical question about why “odd” is bad, and whether it needs to be bad. If she’s comfortable working like that and she’s getting her work done well, should anyone care? Personally, if I were creating work norms from scratch on a new planet where they didn’t yet exist, I would be pro-pillow-fort. Why not? Some people work well from a desk, some work well from a couch, some apparently work well from a nest of blankets and pillows. It shouldn’t matter.

And yet, in the world we live in, not the hypothetical one I’m creating on a distant planet, it will matter. Something this far out of the norm — and so associated with “bed”— is going to read strangely in most offices and raise concerns. That goes doubly, if not triply, when the employee is very junior and hasn’t established a reputation for herself yet.

If she were more senior and known to be very good at what she did … well, it still wouldn’t fly in a lot of offices! But in others she could get away with it; it could be an idiosyncrasy people accepted because her work was great. But when you are entry-level, you don’t have nearly the same freedom to flout norms; instead, it’s likely to become the thing she’s known for — along with connotations like “immature” or “unprofessional” — and could end up holding her back significantly. I’m not defending that, but it’s the reality of it. It’s sort of like showing up to work in pajamas — it won’t affect the quality of your work, but in most offices it would impact the way people see you. (Caveat: different industries have different norms. This could go over far more easily in some parts of tech, for example, and apparently at NPR. But it sounds like your office isn’t one of those, since you’re getting the comments about it.)

When you have enough capital built up to push back on these norms, you can! But since she’s a junior employee at her first job, it’s more likely that it would take your capital, as her manager, to fight this battle on her behalf and I’m guessing it’s not something you want to spend your own capital on. If I’m wrong about that, by all means, spend capital on it. It helps nearly everyone if we revisit our definitions of “professional.” But otherwise, here we are.

So … start by asking her about it before you do anything else. Who knows, maybe there’s some reason for it that you’d want to know, like that something about her desk or chair is uncomfortable and she needs a more ergonomic set-up. But then it’s reasonable to explain that generally in your office people are expected to work at their desks and that, rightly or wrongly, working from a nest of blankets and pillows will read as not terribly office-appropriate, and risks becoming the thing she’s known for right as she’s trying to establish a professional reputation for herself … and that especially with a new hire about to move into the space with her, sadly the blanket/pillow nest must go.

RIP pillow fort.

(https://www.askamanager.org/2022/08/my-new-hire-built-a-blanket-nest-in-her-office.html)