update: my employee was excluded from a team-building event because of their weight — how do I make this right?

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager .
Welcome to the mid-year “where are you now?” event at Ask a Manager! All this week and next, I’ll be running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past.
Remember the letter-writer whose employee was excluded from a team-building event (zip-lining) because of their weight ? Here’s the update.
I wasn’t able to comment in the comments the day that my letter was published but I did read a lot of the comments and I appreciate the advice that you gave as well as some of the comments.
A lot of the commenters seemed to assume that Chris was secretly against the event and that it’s the only team building we do. Chris has, historically, been the biggest proponent of this specific event. They have, many times, requested that we do that event and events like it more often and even brought it up in their review last year as something they wished we did more often. Going to the adventure center is currently the only weekend event we do, but we do lunches and the occasional after hours event throughout the year. I appreciate that at many companies opting out of an event like this takes political capital, but that is not the case at my company or on my team; people are free to opt out of any and all non-work activities without any repercussions and frequently do.
Some commenters worried that when we realized that Chris couldn’t participate, we just shrugged and went “sucks to be them” and just went anyway. That is not what happened. When we realized that Chris wasn’t coming back (they took them to a different room to step on the scale and then just didn’t say anything to us), we stopped and talked about what we should do and then I ultimately called Chris, who insisted that we should go without them. No one on the team thought that what had happened was okay, but we knew Chris well enough to know that they would have been more upset if we decided not to listen to what they were saying. I realize that that part may not have been clear in my letter. I do wish that I had said something to the adventure center in the moment but I was unsure of how to handle it.
Now for the update. I caught up with Chris a few days after it happened to check in on them and see how they were doing. They were understandably shaken by what happened but were putting it behind them. They let me know that they knew what the weight limit was before we went and that they were a couple of pounds over the limit. They had hoped that, since it had never been questioned in the past, that it wouldn’t be this year either. I told them that I didn’t agree with how it was handled at all and apologized for what happened. They said that they don’t blame any of us and reiterated that they would not have wanted us to not go because of them. They preferred to have some alone time to process what had happened anyway.
I did follow your advice and reached out to the adventure center to give feedback on how they handled it and I, unfortunately, never got a response. In the past few months, Chris has again mentioned going back to the same place this fall for the team building, in a way that indicated that they were looking forward to it. They have typically brought it up in group discussions but the last time it came up we were alone so I directly asked if they wanted to do it again this year and they stated that they absolutely want to go again and that they enjoy the other activities that we do throughout the day and would do a different activity during the zip-lining portion.
Ultimately, I am not sure what we will end up doing this fall. I am still uncomfortable with how the whole thing was handled on the adventure center’s end. Thankfully I have a few more months to figure out what we’re going to do. But all in all Chris is still happy at our company — I am confident in this as they are not afraid to tell me when they aren’t, does not blame me for the incident, and still loves team-building events.
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