We Taught Young People to Ask for What They Need. That Doesn’t Always Work at the Office.

Work Workplaces Have Really Embraced Employee Accommodations Recently. But These Take It a Little Too Far. One guy just wanted to be surrounded by candles. Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by rh2010/Adobe Stock, 06photo/Adobe Stock, and m-gucci/Getty Images Plus. Few people are as knee-deep in our work-related anxieties and sticky office politics as Alison Green, who has been fielding workplace questions for a decade now on her website Ask a Manager. In Direct Report, she spotlights themes from her inbox that help explain the modern workplace and how we could be navigating it better. If you’ve paid attention to workplace culture in the past few years, you might have watched it move toward the idea that employees should be able to work in the ways that work best for them, as long as they’re getting their jobs done and aren’t preventing their co-workers from doing theirs. There’s been a broader acceptance of things that once might have been viewed as unprofessional, like using fidget toys to focus, wearing headphones, or moving around during meetings. If you’re still completing your duties and not bothering others, the thinking increasingly goes, why should anyone care? But as these norms change, people don’t always know where the boundaries are. That’s particularly true of younger workers and people new to the workforce who have absorbed the idea of “work in the way that works best for you” without understanding the constraints that still come with having a job. In some cases this manifests in things like thinking they should be able to work from home every day in a job where that’s not practical. In other cases, it can be more extreme. My all-time favorite example of this is from a manager who wrote to me a couple of years ago, concerned because her new hire had erected a blanket fort in her office and was working from it: I have a new employee on my team. This is her first full-time office job. I’ve recently heard from other managers that she’s primarily working from a nest of blankets and pillows she built on her office floor. We are a very casual office and she’s getting her work done, but this is still weird. In fairness, why shouldn’t we all be able to work from blanket forts? I’ve kind of wanted one myself ever since reading that letter. But the problem, of course, is that when you’re in a workplace with other people, there are limits to how far you can stretch office norms in pursuit of your own personal comfort, and limits to what a workplace will accommodate. Another manager wrote to me about a new employee who preferred to keep his office pitch-black, despite needing the space to feel welcoming to patrons: We recently hired a new team member, John, who went into his office and immediately turned off all the overhead lights and closed all the blinds on the windows. The only source of faint illumination was his computer, which he had set to dark mode. He did leave his door open, but he was not visible in the darkness. I told him he needed to have more light in his office so that patrons could see him, and he reluctantly agreed to turn on the overhead lights. Later in the week, I came in to work and saw that John’s office was again pitch black, but this time with what looked like flickering candlelight. Yes, he had lit candles, and I patiently explained all the safety issues involved with live flame. He asked if he could bring in lamps from home for illumination, and I said yes, so long as he also kept the blinds open for natural light. He complied for a bit, but relapsed by closing all the blinds and just having dim lamps on. I noticed that he would barely crack open one set of blinds whenever he had an in-person appointment. Needless to say, the number of drop-ins he receives is significantly lower than his peers. Recently I fielded a complaint from a patron who balked at making an appointment with “that guy in the creepy dark office.” Another manager is struggling with an employee who wants to wear enormous over-the-ear headphones in a job where customers need to approach her with questions regularly: I’ve said that I don’t mind discreet in-ear headphones, but I draw the line at big over-ear headphones. It’s a customer-facing role and you have to be visibly available to any customers who might approach the desk. My feeling is that obvious headphones indicate that you are not available to customers. And this worker is dealing with young colleagues who flatly refuse to talk on the phone: The two youngest staff members on my team refuse to use the phone. We get a lot of calls from customers and they never answer their phones or return voicemails. (I don’t think they even check their voicemails.) They both say they’re not comfortable on the phone and they prefer to use email. We’ve told them that talking to customers on the phone is part of the job but they don’t want to do it and they just … don’t. They say they like email better. Well, so do I! But you use the communication method that the customer wants. However, it’s not gotten through and my manager is too passive to push the issue beyond what we’ve already tried. Part of how we’ve gotten here may be that younger workers have grown up in schools with a greater awareness of mental illness, neurodivergence, and physical disabilities, and a broader understanding that different students may need different things in order to learn and participate. Accommodations that would have seemed unusual to previous generations are now more commonplace and students learn from an early age that it’s normal for a person to, for example, need extra time, have a quiet place to work, or to get additional support from a teacher. That’s a welcome and needed lesson, since the conditions that allow one person to function well may not be the same as those that work for someone else. But while a school’s job is, in large part, to figure out what support will allow a student to access their education, a workplace also has to consider the requirements of the job, the needs of the team, and what’s actually practical in that environment. Someone who has grown up in a system where accommodations are normal may reasonably—but not always accurately—carry that expectation into their first job. They may not realize that workplaces operate under different constraints and may not have a sense of when an individual’s preferred way of working interferes with the actual requirements of the job. It’s easy to read stories like the ones above and conclude that young people are too demanding or out of touch with basic office norms. But it’s a good thing to question what “professionalism” really needs to look like, rather than assuming that the way it has traditionally been is the way it needs to stay. And as we understand more about disability, neurodivergence, mental health, and differences in how people function best, some of those old expectations look increasingly arbitrary. Recognizing that is an improvement. It’s also true that the more autonomy employers offer—like the ability to work remotely—the more they need to articulate the actual boundaries of the job rather than leaving employees to work that out for themselves. How available do you need to be to colleagues? Are you expected to respond within a certain amount of time? Be physically present for certain things? Without clear boundaries, employees are left trying to infer the rules—and younger employees in particular may infer that the rules are much looser than their bosses intended. None of this means workplaces should go back to demanding that everyone work in exactly the same way, or that discomfort is somehow evidence of professionalism. There are plenty of good reasons to give people more autonomy over how they work (like boosting overall productivity and job satisfaction). But a workplace is still a workplace: You’re part of a team, you have responsibilities to other people, and some aspects of a job are determined by what the work requires rather than by what would be most comfortable for you personally, even if a blanket fort does sound fantastic. Workplace Direct Report Jobs Millennials Gen Z