Is touching co-workers OK?

Great Debates
481

No, not at all. Unless you poll people on every interaction–“Are you okay with my using sarcasm? Are you okay with my talking about children? Are you okay with my telling a story involving hospitals? Are you okay with my wishing happy holidays?”–then you’re taking the same sort of risk that I take: you’re engaging in a social interaction that may be annoying to the person with whom you’re interacting.

That’s a human risk to take. It’s up to us to minimize it within some sort of socially-determined parameters, but it’s also up to us to speak up if we have needs beyond those of the socially-determined parameters.

There’s no reason to single out touch from all other social interactions, especially the sort of touch I’m talking about here.

I mean, of course I could adapt, just as I could adapt to other arbitrary rules. I once had a boss who insisted we only call each other by last names, because the use of first names bred familiarity. That was dumb.

The “no touching” rule would be easier for me to adapt to than many of my co-workers, most likely; again, if my back’s up, it’s on behalf of a lot of my co-workers who touch a lot more than I do. But I’d want to know why the boss were putting it in place.

Does anyone have access to any employee manual that expressly forbids all touch? Sincerely, I’d be interested in seeing it. I’ve never seen, nor heard, of such a rule at a workplace.

This is super confusing. First, there’s the idea that someone who disagrees with you is doing so to be intentionally obtuse, which, I guess that’s a thing you can do, whatever. I’ve seen that same strategy used by a sedevacantist priest when I was 16 and a hardcore Leninist when I was 19, and I wasn’t impressed then either. It’s always come across as what a person says when they’re so convinced of their own righteousness that they can’t imagine honest disagreement.

That aside, either you’re addressing someone else in a way that doesn’t apply to me, or your point stands.

Yes, if when someone intentionally touches my arm, they’re running a risk. If they make a wry comment about not liking some new administrative initiative, they’re running the same sort of risk. If they ask after my family, or if notice a new hairstyle, or if tell a story about a medical incident, they’re running the same sort of risk.

Human interaction is risky. That doesn’t excuse shitty behavior outside of norms, and it doesn’t excuse an unwillingness to respect clear boundaries; but it does mean that folks should be clear with one another and gentle with one another, forgive honest within-norm mistakes, and not repeat those same mistakes once notified that they were mistakes.

What I’m skeptical of is the all-caps extreme positions that you and DrDeth both seem to be fond of.

482

Then why did you respond to this post by manson1972:

with this?

and when I backed manson up, answer me with this:

483

Can’t type fast enough to catch the edit window; so sorry if this is a double post.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen that as a written statement in a manual. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a written statement that said ‘don’t pour your coffee all over somebody else’s papers’, either. But in every meeting I’ve ever been in it’s been pretty much to as close to taken for granted.

Quite a few people have posted in this thread that in the workplaces we’ve been in it’s the norm for people to not touch each other. Do you think we’re all lying? Or are you just unable to accept that no, the norm wherever you’ve been working is not the norm for all of society?

484

Why do you say I am taking a extreme position? I agree some people don’t like to be touched, and that it is not a unreasonable position to take. I concur if someone asks not to be touched you should make every effort not to do so.

I am just saying that if someone taps you on the shoulder, you should ask him to stop before running to HR. is that unreasonable?

Be nice to people. Understand people are different. Some people like to hug- I am not a hugger but if they give me fair warning before closing in, I will go along with it to make them happy. I have never had anyone ask not to be touched, but oddly, despite the fact I am rather large, I walk softly, so one coworker did ask me not so “sneak up on her like that”, and I complied. Well. I messed up once but not on purpose. And now we’re friends.

485

I started out this debate as someone for whom touch is as much a part of me as breathing, but that maybe the polite thing to do was to refrain from touching out of an abundance of caution. But, I have to say that your (SmartAleq and others like you) insistance that I not touch anyone ever has convinced to join the other side.

Where to you get off telling me how to interact with anyone other than you? How do you not see that insisting that I adopt your value system is just as intrusive (maybe even more so) than touching someone.

If your argument was that you and a non-insignificant percentage of people in the workplace do not like touch, any touch, and that maybe a good personal policy for everyone involved would be to assume someone falls into that category until you are sure otherwise, I (and I’m pretty sure all but the most trollish) would be fine with that. But your insistence of “DON’T TOUCH. DON’T TOUCH. DON’T TOUCH. DON’T TOUCH. DON’T TOUCH. DON’T TOUCH. DON’T TOUCH. DON’T TOUCH. DON’T TOUCH. DON’T TOUCH. DON’T TOUCH. DON’T TOUCH” is way out of bounds.

Speak up, speak up, speak up, speak up, speak up. . . .See how easy that is? Just. Speak. Up. The vast majority of people have no problem with touch and you may from time to time experience it, and all you have to do is speak up and and let others no you dont like it.

See? there you go. I can just as easily tell you how you should handle your personal interactions as you can tell me, and neither of us would be in the right.

I’ve been a supervisor at a goodly number of companies and that has absolutely NEVER been the rule and I have NEVER seen anyone ushered out the door for innocent touching. As long as we’re going down the personal anecdote route; at my place of business not only is there not “a no touching, ever” rule; touching is absolutely rampant. There’s bro hugs and air kisses, high fives and congratulatory back pats, attention getting wrist touches and friendly hair tousles. And there are also autistic persons and germaphobes and people with strict religious prohibitions against touching. And we all get along just fine and dandy, thankyouverymuch. because we all pay attention to each other and treat each other as individuals and respect each other. Maybe at YOUR place of work, for YOU, it’s no touching ever, but it is not the general rule. Which I’m also sure you know but are being intentionally obtuse for reasons known only to yourself.

mc

486

…if the boss gave a reason that you disagreed with: would it change how you would choose to react?

Just from a quick google search:

Nothing unreasonable there at all IMHO. Essentially its SmartAleq’s rule: DON’T TOUCH. And its in the education sector as well, so very relevant to what you do.

487

Is there anyone in this thread arguing that they should be able to touch someone they know doesn’t want to be touched?

488

I agree there’s nothing unreasonable in there. But you’ll notice that the rules don’t outright prohibit touching and I can tell you that tapping someone on the shoulder to get their attention isn’t going to constitute harassment in most situations. But if the employee had made it clear that any touching is unwelcome and the toucher continues with their behavior then we’ve entered into the realm of harassment.

489

…it actually has nothing to do with you. That’s the point. It has everything to do with the person you are interacting with.

Don’t touch really should be the default for any social interaction. Its a shame that more and more businesses and workplaces have to codify this: but unfortunately people with attitudes like yours have made it a necessity.

You sound like the kind of person who would be pointing and yelling at victims of Harvey Weinstein and say “Just say no! Just say no! See how easy that is?”

Because speaking up is easy for a some. But its really fucking difficult for many.

Cite please.

Do you see the word I bolded there? “Interaction is a kind of action that occur as two or more objects have an effect upon one another.” This isn’t about you. This is about the person or people you interact with.

How do you determine whether or not to give someone a “friendly hair tousle?” You do realize how horrific that could beforsome people and cultures?

From one of the articles:

“Once, a white coworker touched my braids the same day I debuted them at work. It happened so quickly that I couldn’t react. I was stunned.”

If you touched a woman’s braids and she didn’t respond at all: would you take that as “she didn’t speak up”, giving you licence to give her a “friendly hair tousle” whenever you feel like? I’m genuinely interested in how you determine this.

I’m thinking about my own afro and I’m just cringing at the thought. Please tell me that you’ve never done this.

Are you talking about yourself?

490

…I suspect you would not last long at Massey University. The code of conduct seem pretty clear to me.

The employee “making it clear” and the “toucher continuing regardless” are two conditions that are explicitly **not **in the code of conduct. Because neither of those two things are required in order for there to be a breach. The employee has no obligation to tell “the toucher” that touch is unwelcome. The rules surrounding touching are made explicit in the code of conduct. The code was issued in 2008. It was reviewed in 2018, it will be reviewed again in 2020. Massey is a public institution, if this policy was in any way controversial we would have heard about it by now.

491

I probably wouldn’t have a problem. I can’t remember the last time I touched a coworker without asking for permission. I’m actually rather touch averse myself.

What constitutes a violation of policy and what legally constitutes harassment are two different things. But we must note that the policy does not actually ban touching. Can anyone point to a company with a no touching policy?

492

…I think, as worded, the Massey University document is as close to a “ban on touching” as you are going to get. It would have been drafted and reviewed by lawyers after all, so expecting a document to echo what “someone says on the internet” simply isn’t going to happen. The easiest way not to run afoul of the code of conduct is to adopt the rule “don’t touch.”

493

That’s a pretty silly example, I trust you can see that. No workplace allows that behavior; plenty of workplaces allow shoulder-taps.

Surely you can see what I’m saying by now? I’ve repeated it ad infinitum. Of course I don’t think you’re lying about the norm in your workplace. My wife reports that it’s the norm in hers. That’s got nothing to do with what I’m saying.

Look, I think you’re being reasonable here. I think several other people are. I think there are a crapload of people being Internet Extremists as well.

I’m going to go forward assuming that if you’re not responding directly to me, you’re not including me in any generalization about this thread that you make, because doing otherwise seems to be wrong more often than right. I’ll do the same for you, i.e., not include you in any generalization I make.

And I’m going to try to tune out the extremists, because they just make me pissy, and I don’t need to be pissy.

494

Of course. News flash: people react differently to edicts they disagree with than to edicts they agree with.

That’s not essentially SmarAleq’s rule, and if that’s the best cite you can find, cool beans.
Edit:

Here’s a different cite request, then, which should be easier: if you think this is “don’t touch”, can you point to any cited case where someone was disciplined for a single shoulder-tap to get someone’s attention, not knowing the person objected? To keep it simple, I’d love a cite from any English-speaking country, from the last forty years. One.

495

Banquet Bear, I can’t tell if you’re being intentionally obtuse or your reading comprehension is poor. If you choose to pick apart one sentence at a time you can make any argument seem poor. But if you read my whole post and consider what was said as a whole then your response makes no sense at all. which seems to be your forte.

Neither I nor any one else in this thread is suggesting that we should be allowed to touch whomever, whenever, and however we wish.

I am saying that a policy of NO TOUCH EVER is not only unreasonable and impractical it is actually offensive. It takes the interpersonal responsibility away from the individual. There are two people in every interaction. We both need to remember that the other might not share our respective sensibilities. If i was to just meet you in a business setting I may offer my handshake but wouldnt insist on it. I wouldnt bro hug you or air kiss you or tousle your hair if i wasnt confident it was acceptable. There are people at my work who I know for a fact are good with all those things and they know it of me. And I will oppose to my dying breath any policy which forbids me from interacting with my cooworkers in a way that is acceptable to us just because it is unacceptable to you.

When somebody tells me (and I realize SmartAleq was speaking directly to me) “DON’T TOUCH. DON’T TOUCH. DON’T TOUCH. DON’T TOUCH. DON’T TOUCH. DON’T TOUCH. DON’T TOUCH. DON’T TOUCH. DON’T TOUCH. DON’T TOUCH. DON’T TOUCH. DON’T TOUCH. . .” then it is about me.

mc

496

…and how would you react? Would you protest now? Refuse to comply?

What the fuck weirdness is this, SmartAleq’s spells their name correctly, and you type it misspelling it?

I never claimed it was “the best I could find.” I stated it was from “a quick google search.” I could spend a few hours refining that google search: but **you **asked the question. I was helping you out. You could, you know, look for yourself. It took me less than a minute.

And if you are expecting to find a rule that explicitly echos SmartAleq’s you are going to be shit-out-of-luck. Because SmartAleq isn’t defining a “rule”. SmartAleq is strongly advocating for a change in behaviour.

497

ok dude

498

It was meant to be a silly example; because it was meant to point out that it would be equally silly for workplaces to have written manuals prohibiting other behavior they assume isn’t going to happen anyway.

I apparently don’t see what you’re saying; because I can’t see why you’re asking for cites that workplaces have written policies banning touching if you recognize that in many workplaces not touching is the norm. It reads to me that you’re asking people to prove that such workplaces exist.

Is that a response to my asking why, if you do see a streak of the conduct described running through the thread, you said that you didn’t?

Have we got a confusion about what “a streak running through the thread” means? “A streak running through something” means it’s not the whole thing, and probably not the majority of it, but a fairly consistent part of it. – but no, it’s not that, because you used the same phrasing yourself in post #453, and seemed to be using the same meaning of it.

In any case, I clearly said in post #451 that I didn’t mean everybody in the thread; so I think characterizing that, if that’s what you’re doing, as a “generalization about the thread” is inaccurate. I’ve been trying my best not to make generalizations about the thread, because there are indeed a wide variety of viewpoints here.

499

…is this a default behaviour, accusing people who disagree with you of being “intentionally obtuse”? My reading comprehension is perfectly fine-thank-you-very-much.

I could (if I had the time) pick apart the entirety of that sentence. But life’s too fucking short.

So why don’t we focus on the bit that I cherry picked. Hair tousling. Is that really a thing you do in the workplace? How do you determine whether or not someone wants to have their hair tousled?

But if someone “doesn’t speak up” do you consider that explicit consent to touch in the future?

And to think: its the people who are advocating “no touching” that got called “snowflakes” in this thread. Huh.

How are you making this determination? Why are you so confident? Do you “bro hug” woman, and if not why not, and do you consider that discriminatory behaviour?

So if your workplace were to introduce a policy that forbade touching (except, maybe for health and safety exceptions) rather than comply with the policy you would rather die? That seems to be a bit over-the-top.

The conscious decision to touch someone else is not all about you. This is what the debate is all about. When you make it all about you, when you get angry because “its all about you”, when decide to adopt a position because its “all about you” then it makes it crystal clear that you’ve contextualised the debate entirely about you.

But this isn’t all about you. Its about the people you interact with. I’ll be brutally honest. #metoo rocked me. I knew that things were bad for women in the workplace, but I honestly had no fucking idea how bad it really was. I never thought about this as much as I do now. I’m self-employed in an industry with a history and a reputation for being handsy. So I’ve made an explicit decision to firstly 1) Change my own behaviour, 2) codify behaviour in our code of conduct and 3) advocate for change in the industry.

Our policy isn’t “no touch ever”. Because part of the job for some of my crew is to be applying hair and make-up to other people. Any touching that happens in my workspace is all explicitly required due to the nature of the job, but they must only happen with the consent of both parties.

So our policy is explicitly framed around “affirmative consent”, along with exceptions in regards to health and safety. If my assistant needs to adjust something on a model they will always ask permission first. We even talk through consent issues if we are working with two or more models, and how they interact with each other.

Change starts by accepting that “this isn’t all about me.” Change starts by considering “hey, maybe some of those things I’ve always accepted as true maybe aren’t as true as I thought.” Maybe the idea that “the vast majority of people have no problem with touch” isn’t as true as I imagined. And if I have to weigh up the potential upsides and downsides of having a “no touch” or an “affirmative consent” workplace the upsides outweigh the downsides substantially IMHO.

500

see now you’re making sense. I agree with almost everything you said in the quoted section. As I’ve said all along; even tho I have no qualms whatsoever about touching of any kind, I recognize that my value system is not the same as everyone else’s. and, like you with the #metoo, the realization that it was more than just a few who were not ok with touching rocked my world. and I am fine with the change in attitude in the workplace and I agree the permissiveness of the past should be a thing of the past. maybe I and others should have known better all along. But swinging too far in the other direction is, imho, just as big a mistake, as not changing at all. If we are to progress as a society we have to make it acceptable for all people. Those who do not wished to be touched should feel safe in the workplace. and those who are ok with touch should also feel safe.

mc