can I tell employees not to bring partners on work trips, coworkers ostracizing a former friend, and more

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager .
It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…
1. Can I prohibit employees from bringing partners on work trips?
My team recently wrapped up a big project that included flying to another city for a week of meetings. One of my newer staff mentioned that they were going to bring their partner on the trip but their partner would pay their own way and do their own thing. It was less of an ask and more of them telling me. It raised a red flag for me but my original impression was that … well, I can’t really say no if this person is just making use of the hotel room and there’s no added expense to our organization.
Post-trip, their teammates reported that they were distracted during the week and the guest also ended up joining business meals even though I explicitly stated it as an example of something they could not do. In my industry, it is not welcome to have random people just join these types of meals. I was not there so I didn’t observe firsthand but several staff members have met with me privately to complain.
I will speak with the employee about the meals but all of this has got me wondering … Can I, as a manager, prohibit employees from bringing partners on work trips? I’m usually pretty hands off about what grown adults do in their free time on work trips but this one thing has become a distraction for our entire team and I don’t want any repeats of it on our next trip.
I think the issue is less that they brought a partner (something people occasionally do) and more that they were distracted during the week and brought the partner to business meals inappropriately . If they hadn’t done those two things, it wouldn’t have been inherently problematic for the partner to have stayed in the hotel room (assuming they were doing their own thing during the day and your employee wasn’t skipping work stuff to hurry back to join them).
You can have a blanket “no partners on work trips” policy — or simply a “we prefer people not bring partners because we’ve found it distracting” response if anyone asks to do it — but I’d rather see you just make it clear what the expectations are on work trips and address it if there are specific problems, because plenty of people do handle this appropriately. Ideally when your employee first mentioned bringing their partner, you would have made sure they understood the time commitments on the trip and that the partner would need to do their own thing during business meals. (I can see why you didn’t think you needed to … but I’m also guessing that the reason it seemed like a red flag to you in the first place was because you were already picking up on something that made you worry — which was then validated by what ended up happening.)
All that said, I do think it’s reasonable to ask this particular employee not to bring the partner again, since it caused problems on this trip.
2. My employee is being ostracized by her former friend group
I was just promoted to a management position a few months ago so all this is relatively new to me.
It’s no secret that employees form friendship groups at work, nothing you can do about it. Lately, though, one person who used to be included in a “work friends” group is being shunned/ostracized. I don’t believe they are actively harassing her, they’re just cold to her. She’s made a few small work mistakes, nothing that can’t be corrected/ forgiven, but her coworkers are no longer friendly to her (more chilly than openly rude). They have stopped inviting her to after-work drinks, and removed her from their “work” group chat. Both are things I can’t really do anything about because it’s outside of work but, obviously, the effects are permeating the workplace.
She’s come to me to let me know, and has also stated that she sometimes goes home crying and has considered quitting. I’m not sure I can, or want to, discipline the other employees just because they are no longer friendly, but I feel that it’s my responsibility to stick up for her even if she isn’t a perfect, model employee. I’d love for all of my employees to be best friends but that’s not how life goes. Any advice?
It really depends on exactly what “chilly” looks like. If they’re just not inviting her to drinks or chatting socially, that’s not something you can intervene on; people get to choose who they socialize with. But if they’re being rude or unpleasant to her or making a show of freezing her out, that’s not acceptable at work, and  you can and should intervene. They need to treat everyone they work with reasonably pleasantly.
I do wonder why “a few small work mistakes” would cause this response! People don’t usually get ostracized for work mistakes unless there’s more to it. Did the employee’s mistakes cause a lot of additional work for her coworkers? Did she try to blame someone else? Was there an ongoing pattern that they got fed up with? It’s worth looking into what’s at the root of the reaction, because there might be more going on that you need to address (either with her or with them).
3. Can my company tell me to remove a land acknowledgement from my email signature?
My ~65-person company does not have any policies regarding email signatures. I have had a land acknowledgement in my signature for the last two years. My CEO recently asked me to remove it from my signature, stating “he doesn’t want to be in the business of policing what is and is not allowed in email signatures, and doesn’t want statements to be made there, so he wants them to be strictly about work.”
Is this something he can ask with no clear policy violations?
Here is what I had in my email signature: “Writing to you from the stolen, occupied, and ancestral lands of the Arapaho, Cheyenne, Núu-agha-tʉvʉ-pʉ̱ (Ute), and Očhéthi Šakówiŋ peoples. The company is headquartered on land ceded by the Treaty of Fort Laramie 1851 .”
I run the company’s five-person DEI committee, which I started with the approval of the CEO when I noticed a growing trend of racial issues within the company (e.g., mistaking Asian coworkers for each other, calling Covid the Chinese flu in company communications, laying off mostly workers of color in a company that is 90+% white, and more).
When I first started the DEI committee and added the land acknowledgement to my email signature, the previous HR manager and legal counsel for the company were in favor and allowed me to have it. But she left recently, and my CEO is making this request, so I’m not sure if I’m able to push back.
Your employer does have the right to standardize email signatures and ask you not to make personal additions to them. (You can probably understand where he’s coming from if you consider the wide range of personal additions your company might end up having to field if they allow them.)
You can present an argument to him for reconsidering, of course, but legally he’s on solid ground in telling you no.
4. Will going down to part-time hurt me next time I’m job-searching?
I’ve been considering switching from full-time to part-time work at my company. I’ve been dealing with a lot of professional and personal stress the past few years, and now that a lot of the professional stress has been resolved, I’d like to move down to 36 or 32 hours a week to help with some of the burnout I’ve been feeling. I don’t have any concerns about making this change with my current company; they are very supportive of part-time work, including my department head who works part-time herself.
The thing I am concerned about is whether this will reflect poorly on me if I decide to switch jobs in the future. If I am working part-time and apply to full-time jobs, will I be taken less seriously? Do I even have to let them know I’m working part-time if I plan to work full-time for a new company? Another piece of background info is that I’m a woman that works in tech, which is a field that already tends to take women less seriously, and while my currently company is very supportive, I’m guessing that’s more the exception than the norm.
You don’t need to proactively disclose that a job is part-time. You shouldn’t misrepresent it if it comes up, of course, but it probably won’t even come up (and the difference between full-time and 36 hours is fairly de minimis anyway).
5. Should I leave a parting gift for my office when I resign?
I’m departing my first office job on good terms after 10 years. I have great respect and admiration for everyone on my team of about 20 people (we were a very traditional, old-fashioned office that pivoted to a fully remote team during the pandemic, so we’ve been through a lot together!). Would it be appropriate to leave a parting gift for the office, and if so, what would that be? (We already have a coffee maker, toaster oven, microwave, etc.)
Parting gifts aren’t traditional when someone leaves a job — if anything, offices are more likely to give the departing employee a gift than the other way around! If you happen to think of something absolutely perfect (like they all loved the obscure brand of coffee you brought in for yourself and so you leave them a huge bag of it), that’s a lovely gesture … but otherwise there’s no need!
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