Workplace


MANAGEMENT


Zip It


Made a taboo comment at the office? It can happen to the best of us, especially these days. Here’s how to save face when your foot’s planted firmly in your mouth


THE MOOD WAS RELAXED and festive when Janet, a Toronto-based public relations professional at a national financial services firm, attended a colleague’s retirement party in Montreal. She welcomed the opportunity to bond with her faraway female coworkers over drinks and a few laughs, but when she pulled out her phone and showed them a candid shot of her current squeeze, things got awkward. “It was a photo of him in bed,” she


admits, quickly adding there was nothing about the picture that made it NSFW (not suitable for work, of course). Even so, the disapproval was swiſt. “They tsk-tsked me and said, ‘Wow, you really shouldn’t have shown us that.’”


16 | CPA MAGAZINE | FEBRUARY/MARCH 2018 Luckily, there was no lasting fallout


from the misstep since she saw the Montreal team so rarely, says Janet, who has since moved on to a different company. But broaching contentious topics — think sex, religion, race and politics — with coworkers at the watercooler or local watering hole aſter hours can be a risky endeavour with severe consequences. Indeed, the vast majority (83%) of


employees have witnessed a colleague say something that ended up having a catastrophic impact on his or her career, reputation or business, a 2016 poll by Utah-based corporate training company VitalSmarts finds, while 69% say they’ve made a “catastrophic comment”


themselves. One in five (20%) of these remarks were about race, sex, politics or religion, and the repercussions were serious: 31% lost a pay increase, promotion or job; 27% undercut or destroyed a working relationship; 11% ruined their reputation; 6% got a poor performance review; and 1% lost a client or partner. High-octane conversations in the


workplace can also affect productivity and a company’s bottom line, as an American Psychological Association survey conducted during the extremely contentious 2016 US presidential campaign indicates. At least one in ten US employees polled said they felt tense or stressed out (17%), were less productive (13%), had difficulty getting work done (10%), or their work quality suffered (10%) as a result of political discussions at work — and these figures were significantly higher for men and those under the age of 35. Of course, our southern neighbours


Jeannie Phan


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