So what constitutes professionalism at work? Proper attire? Proper language? How about name calling? Is there a big fat yellow line drawn between joking around in the office and being unprofessional? I was caught in the debate recently at work. My team is a fun team and we joke around a lot. We “diss” each other and call each other “stupid” and “loser” all the time. But one person in the team felt that name calling is unprofessional and snapped at me once or twice for it. Should we stop joking around because one person is uncomfortable with it? Or is it just a personal issue for him?
Tough call with that one… joking around in the office is great because it promotes bonding and encourages team spirit. But namecalling, I would have to say, falls on the side of unprofessional and juvenile.
Humour is teh awesome, because it makes coworkers friends; but there’s plenty of humour to be had outside of ‘dissing’ people. Maybe your uptight team member is sensitive and needs a hug.
I’d agree… professionalism is hard to define outside of a particular context. In my office, for example, we dress über-casually (one girl often wears sweatpant gauchos), joke around with each other, come and go as we please, and swear like sailors. But are we unprofessional? I don’t think so. When dealing with clients, we’re businesslike and nothing short of polite, and we even dress up when meeting with someone in person. And our work always reflects high standards. In a more formal office setting, however, our sweatpants and swearwords would likely get us fired regardless of the quality of our work and our client interactions.
I guess my point is that you really have to tailor your behaviour to the setting. Unless everyone is okay with the name-calling as if you were all buddies, maybe you could scale it back a little bit. I wouldn’t dare say that you should all sit quietly at your desk all day and not have any fun, but it might be better to draw the line at what makes this person uncomfortable, at least where he is involved. If the rest of you want to call each other “loser,” that’s great. But it’s probably best to leave the uptight coworker out of it.
(I have a psych degree that’s collecting dust. Thanks for letting me drag it out and make some use of it.)
Maybe I should clairfy a little. Everyone on my team calls each other names. Even my team lead called me a loser many times. We are just joking around. Everyone knows that. Except for this one guy of course. We know that he’s a, for the lack of a better word, tightass and we never joke around with him ever. But he still manages to yell at us calling us unprofessional because we joke around. I guess my point is, when does it become unacceptable at work? When one person complains? When 10 people complain?
Is calling each other losers all the time really that much of a laugh? I’d find it more irritating than unprofessional, but, hey, I’m not chummy like that I guess. That aside, though, this dude is clearly a tight-ass. Don’t share any of the office sugar cubes with him.
I say if you’re not involving this guy in the name-calling, and it doesn’t affect his work, he can suck it up. Really, I might find it irritating when the boss’s kid and his buddies are giggling away in another part of the office, but it doesn’t affect my work, so they can have at it.
And don’t worry, Winnie, we understood that you all were joking around with the name-calling.
For the final answer of how many people have to complain before behaviour becomes unprofessional, I think the answer might be ‘One, a tattletale,’ because while I was working for a bank in 2001 a coworker dyed her hair pink. She didn’t interact with the public except by phone, so she didn’t ‘look’ unprofessional, but somebody narked to one of the higher-ups on the 12th floor and my pink-haired coworker was called in for a ‘chat’ with human resources. She came back to our cubicle farm clutching a handful of pamphlets about professionalism and employee counselling, plus the bank’s mission statement and goals in a neatly bound booklet. Weird but true. It only takes one tightass. :-S