A good attitude in the workplace is essential for keeping your staff motivated and engaged at work. Treating everyone with respect is vital. Read the story to know what happened in this workplace and let us know how you would deal with such a situation.
Source: Reddit
Background: I (26f) just started my first job after finishing my masters, and work in a dept with another colleague (27f, Thea) who joined the company 2 months before me. She is currently in graduate school, and I’m amazed at how she is very efficient and fast in her tasks.
I noticed that Thea is always assigned complicated tasks despite being new to the company, and I wanted to join the projects that she’s in so I can learn from her. Initially, Thea was fine with it, and I learned that she is someone who will implement very strict timelines in order to get things done. I had trouble keeping up because I wasn’t used to having such deadlines, but she would just tell me to be faster next time and move on.
Recently, she put up a huge whiteboard at her desk which detailed all her meetings and tasks for the month. I was very impressed with the set-up, and asked her what the tasks on her board meant. She became very irritated when I asked if there was room for one more teammate, and she finally snapped and said ‘not everything with my name needs you involved.’
I was surprised at her hostility, but just thought she was having a bad day. But ever since then, she’s been very distant and just generally difficult to work with. She wouldn’t be as helpful as before when it came to retrieving documents that I need, implemented tougher deadlines, and would just avoid me by going home earlier.
I felt that she was creating an overly hostile work environment that was affecting my productivity, and felt like the right thing to do was to report her to HR. I did so, after collecting some evidence, and HR said that they would talk to her. Well, the talk didn’t seem to go well because now our boss has told me to just stay out of her way, and removed me from all projects that involve her. Thea has even been moved to another section in the office, closer to our seniors, who I’ve heard have been trying to placate her to stop her from leaving.
I’m conflicted as I don’t want to ruin my workplace relationships. But it was very difficult to work with her, and I did what I thought was the right thing to advocate for myself. Am I Wrong For Reporting Her Behaviour to HR?
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