SCRIPTS
How to Confront a Colleague About Inappropriate Comments or Jokes
A script for dealing with an offensive coworker
Everyone, at one point or another, has been in that uncomfortable gray area: Your coworker makes a crack about a client looking hungover at a morning meeting, or tosses off a comment poking fun at the intern’s voice. You can tell they expect laughter, but instead, all you can do is cringe. It doesn’t seem like a fireable offense. At the same time, it’s clearly out of line, and you’re not sure what to do about it.
An inappropriate joke or comment at work isn’t just unfunny. “It affects the morale of the office, and it also probably affects productivity, because people spend a lot of time worrying or managing around the regular joker,” says Darcey McAllister, principal consultant at the human resources firm HRT Northwest.
According to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, “offensive conduct” can include “offensive jokes, slurs, epithets or name calling, physical assaults or threats, intimidation, ridicule or mockery, insults or put-downs, offensive objects or pictures, and interference with work performance.” That conduct rises to the level of illegal harassment when it’s “severe or pervasive enough to create a work environment that a reasonable person would…
