Dear Miss Manners: Is it OK to send a sympathy card to someone at the office? How do you acknowledge the passing of a co-worker’s loved one? Or do you at all?
I heard from a friend that a former co-worker’s mom passed, and I sent a card to her at the office. It’s a very small, family-like organization and I didn’t think much about it.
Then, a current co-worker’s sister died, and I wasn’t sure what to do. We live in different states and he wasn’t in the office anyway. I had his home address from the staff directory, but that seemed creepy. I ended up offering condolences at the end of an email when he returned to work. (I’m cringing thinking about it.) Are any of these things OK?
How to acknowledge the death of someone who is important to a co-worker is an easy question to answer: Write a letter.
The purpose of such communications is to acknowledge the significance of the person’s loss, to demonstrate sympathy and to express a desire to ease their burden.
Store-bought cards with preprinted sentiments, signed by a crowd, require such minimal effort that they are unlikely to provide real comfort. They exist, Miss Manners suspects, because no one wants to write those letters, yet no one has the confidence that anyone else is writing, either.
Yet those who sign such cards appreciate, as they should, how it would feel to lose someone close to you and hear nothing from the organization where you spend most of your waking hours.
Letters, then, are the answer -- but who should write them? In a company that actually cares about its employees, everyone should be confident that the first letter will come from the boss -- and possibly the second from the boss’s boss. Co-workers can then write, or not, depending on their closeness to the mourner.
And for all the bosses who are recoiling in horror, Miss Manners coldly points out that this simple act of compassion is more likely to win workers over than truckloads of doughnuts from human resources around the holidays.
Dear Miss Manners: We have a group of people who play mah jongg online. We use videoconferencing, too, so that we can talk. Often there are nine people playing.
Two of the people have allergies, and continually sniff during the game. Two others have allergies, but use a tissue and don’t sniff. Is there a way to tactically ask the sniffers to use tissues? We’ve even asked if they need a tissue, and they say “no.” It’s very annoying.
New technology so often introduces new manners challenges that it pleases Miss Manners when it can instead be used to solve old manners problems -- tactfully, as well as tactically.
You cannot correct other people’s hygiene unless it can be separated from correcting their manners. Correcting their technical difficulties is comparatively easy: “Discover” that when their microphones are left on, others hear (unspecified) background noise, and ask that they mute themselves when not speaking.
New Miss Manners columns are posted Monday through Saturday on washingtonpost.com/advice. You can send questions to Miss Manners at her website, missmanners.com. You can also follow her @RealMissManners.
2021, by Judith Martin
"colleague" - Google News
August 16, 2021 at 02:00PM
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Perspective | Miss Manners: Expressing sympathy for a colleague's loss - The Washington Post
"colleague" - Google News
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