should I tell my employee she needs to give a clearer “no” to a client who’s interested in her? — Ask a Manager

It’s “where are you now?” month at Ask a Manager, and all December I’m running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past.

There will be more posts than usual this week, so keep checking back throughout the day.

Remember the letter-writer asking whether to tell an employee she needed to give a clearer “no” to a client who was interested in her? Here’s the update.

Many thanks to you and all the commenters who weighed in on my letter! I feel like I gained valuable insight from all the personal anecdotes. To clarify some speculation: I am a woman; I have been hit on before by men; thankfully, I have never encountered violence as a response to my rejection. I am saddened that so many folks could easily offer up bad lived experiences.

The first thing I did was I spoke to Ryan privately and told him clearly that he needed to 1) delete Emma’s number from his phone and stop contacting her on social media and 2) not ask out folks who are at work. I could see the realizations dawning as I was speaking to him, and he was appropriately embarrassed and apologetic. He pulled out his phone in front of me to delete all her info. He asked if he should apologize to Emma directly, but I told him that was unnecessary–that I would pass along his apology to her. A few weeks after I addressed this with him, he initiated another private conversation with me. He wanted to thank me for my clear and direct delivery; he was also very honest and self-reflective that the episode had prompted him to reconsider how he was meeting people, how to be more purposeful with that, and to generally branch out more and seek more friendships. He is still a happy customer.

Emma and I kept in touch throughout and I followed up afterwards to let her know I had spoken to Ryan, he had deleted her info, and he sent his apologies. She was satisfied with that and remains a solid member of my team. She did not lose wages or shifts due to the reschedule.

Emma also granted me permission to speak about the episode at our upcoming all-staff meeting (without mentioning her specifically.) Several useful comments from your readers helped me realize that I could do more to clarify behavior expectations for both my customers and my team. But I kept circling back to this thought: what good is any sort of non-fraternization policy if I don’t properly train my team on how to respond if / when someone pushes that boundary?

I wanted my team to know that they had my support when facing tricky situations, and felt I could also do more to encourage them to step into their own authority to handle those episodes. I offered scripted language they could use, talked through best and worst case scenarios, and laid out an important baseline: that I would back them up in whatever way they needed to handle the situation in the moment, but what I also needed from them was to keep me in the loop when something happens. This is part of what initially frustrated me with the situation with Ryan and Emma; I felt like I was late to the issue. I would have preferred to hear from Emma the very first time Ryan made her feel uncomfortable, at the initial ask for her number; then we may have been able to avoid altogether the unwanted text messages, social media follows, etc. Talking through all this with my team was productive.

On a personal note, the episode and especially all the comments yielded very interesting conversations with my family. I especially appreciated hearing perspective from my college-age nephew about how he has seen it go well–and poorly–when asking a girl out. I do think we have new norms that are not always immediately obvious to people, so I am grateful for the opportunity to learn and grow from this. Many thanks to you and your readers!