I’m a woman who owns a very small company and rent time/space in a shared environment with many other small business owners.
We are all there whenever we are — first come, first served. Open space, open territory, sometimes sharing space. The only person I oversee is my employee, I have no authority over anyone else.
My employee is amazing! She truly makes work a joy and is really helping my business.
The problem is the other renters/companies. My employee is very beautiful. Several men from the other companies have developed crushes on her. They aren’t crossing the line with inappropriate behavior or comments. They’re just too persistently goofy. Really. She lets them know she has a boyfriend or that she’s busy/not interested, but it takes a day or two for the message to get through. They sort of dance around the situation because of the goofy crush and they know she’s not interested or available. They just make up excuses to be around her. And she’s uncomfortable with it. It does go away since they are all good people.
And, they are truly not being gross — just too uncomfortably goofy. It’s like having Giselle or George Clooney or Beyonce working with you … really just goofy momentary crush stuff that I’d like to help my employee navigate.
Is there just a way to cut this off more quickly?
First and foremost: Ask her what would be most helpful to her. Give her some options, too, because she might not know what she could reasonably ask for. For example, you could offer to interrupt the conversations yourself, speak to people privately to tell them to stop, speak to their companies, make sure she knows she can tell people to leave her work area because she’s busy, experiment with whether wearing headphones cut down on the interruptions, maybe even try a sign that says “on deadline / please don’t interrupt” … See what she’d like, because she should have as much agency as possible here.
Some people in her situation will discourage you from doing anything, because they’ll feel awkward asking for/accepting help or will worry they’re making too big deal of it (especially if she’s been dealing with her whole life, which she probably has). If you sense that’s going on here, you could say, “My sense is you don’t want to make a big deal out of it, but it’s really important to me that your work environment is comfortable for you. You deserve to be able to focus like anyone else. If nothing else, how about I make a point of cutting in with work topics when I see it happening?”
#employee #deal #men #constantly #crushes #Manager
