Young chatty workers disturbing older colleagues 'not age harassment'

Young chatty workers disturbing older colleagues 'not age harassment'(theguardian.com)

7 points by stringsandchars 275 days ago | 3 comments

It's not harassment, but damn if it's not a great description of how much it sucks to work in an open office environment:

> In its summary of the case, the tribunal said Ritchie found the office a very noisy environment and that this was distracting when she was trying to make calls.

> She felt she was not respected when she asked for quiet and asked a manager if she could work from home but this was not allowed. Ritchie was told by one manager that she should concentrate on reaching her targets and not concern herself with what was going on around her.

I will say, though, that I don't have a ton of empathy for this bit:

> “She indicated that she found it unprofessional of colleagues to engage in personal conversations in the office, when they ought to be working. She referred to the fact that they were not paid to socialise and that she had difficulty in watching such time wasting and low productivity.”

Seems like a keep-to-your-own-knitting situation.

benoau 275 days ago |

Worst desk I ever had was in a corner with a constant stream of chatty colleagues passing both behind and beside me. It might not be harassment but it severely undermined my ability to focus on complex tasks.

pavel_lishin 275 days ago | |

When I first started at a previous employer, we had an open office plan with rows of desks. I was on a software eng team, building $PRODUCT with about four other people. The next two rows, for some unfathomable reason, was completely filled with sales people whose job was to be on the phone talking loudly to potential customers all day.

It was ... unpleasant, trying to focus on work while simultaneously hearing a dozen one-sided conversations at a time, plus phones ringing with incoming calls.

Eventually they moved them to an area with other people doing similar work - which I'm sure sucked for them, too. But at that point, I'd already developed the habit of having my headphones on all the time, and even today it's hard to concentrate without feeling the hug of headphones on my head.