To have been told off by HR for this?

[Mhassy]

I asked a member of the HR team if they had children, in the context of discussing a flexible working request. This was in the small talk/intro part of the conversation, it wasn’t said to make a point or anything, or to bolster my request for flexible working. It was literally a polite back and forth before the actual meeting began, she asked how things were going with DD, I mentioned some new teething and it was all very chatty and I just asked - I thought politely! - if she had children. She told me she didn’t and the time had passed for her to now. We then moved onto the meeting itself.

Anyway, a day later I have a called from someone high up in HR to say I shouldn’t ask people if they have children and this is not an appropriate question in the workplace.

I do get that pregnancy etc can be a sensitive topic. I lost a baby a few years ago and it was and incredibly painful time at work and I felt triggered by any small talk about babies. However I would never have made an issue and I didn’t make an issue when the topic was raised.

AIBU to think this is a step too far to be policing this sort of conversation? I am recently a single parent and wouldn’t launch into being offended if I was asked if I had a partner? Where does it end? I was only making conversation!

If it happened as you reported, then I'd have pushed back on that. It was in context. Lots of people have reasons for working from home or working from the office, and you were just asking. I've no husband. Nobody's ever apologised for asking me ''are you married?'' and I just say ''no!'' and that's that. Imagine if I said nobody could ask anybody else if they were married.

So to clarify:

It's not ill- advised (to the point of reporting to HR) to ask someone in a work environment if they had a nice Christmas

@VitoCorleoneOfMNMafia hairs are being split. do you think it's wrong, in a work environment, to ask that or not? I don't agree it's wrong.

she asked how things were going with DD, I mentioned some new teething and it was all very chatty and I just asked - I thought politely! - if she had children. She told me she didn’t and the time had passed for her to now. We then moved onto the meeting itself.

Anyway, a day later I have a called from someone high up in HR to say I shouldn’t ask people if they have children and this is not an appropriate question in the workplace.

I’d ask to have a meeting with HR and say it’s not appropriate for them to ask how my dd is.

You were in the wrong. Perhaps inadvertently but nonetheless wrong. Potentially had a detrimental effect on the HR staff

VitoCorleoneOfMNMafia · Today 22:13

If the question doesn't matter, and the answer doesn't matter:

1. Communication is the transfer of information from one person to another. What information is actually conveyed in this interaction? It's not actually communication, is it, it's noise.
3. Why worsen the office signal-to-noise ratio by asking and expecting an answer?
5. Let's be honest here: amongst colleagues, this isn't genuine care for someone's wellbeing the way it would be if you were asking a friend. At work, it's virtue-signalling faux concern about someone who you don't care much about. Once you realise this, it becomes obvious that it's about the asker feeling good because "they bothered to ask". I object strongly to this kind of faux concern and find it very patronising. I'm not a supporting actor in the drama of anyone's life and I don't exist so that colleagues can pat themself on the back whilst pretending to care about me.

You are massively, massively overreacting here! It's a social convention, it's good manners!!

When someone comes back from annual leave, it's the done thing to ask if someone had a good break.

If someone comes back from a period of sick leave, you welcome them back and say you hope they are feeling better!

If someone has a bereavement, you acknowledge that on their return (if you haven't already interacted with them at the funeral for instance)

My team manager doesn't do any of this, and the team see it for what it is - fucking bad manners!! It's an acknowledgement, nothing more. But it shows a total lack of consideration not to do it!

@VitoCorleoneOfMNMafia that's also assuming the person you are asking is actually a victim of domestic violence which generally will not be the case. Please be fair with what you are quoting.

@HollyKnight - No Vito didn’t just share what works for them. They stated it as though it should be the norm for everyone and it’s bullying to ask someone how they Christmas was?! That poster obviously has a very specific situation which they’ve drip fed and then retrospectively gone back to posts before the drip feeds to make out the posters are targeting their autism and other life events were would need to be psychic to know. Their coping mechanisms are extreme and paranoid for people not In their very specific circumstances and to pretend otherwise is disingenuous as fuck.

I ask people if they have kids because it's rude not to if I've been talking about mine. 'my kid my kid blah blah blah ok see you later' is one sided and poor communication.

If someone answers with no, OF COURSE I don't follow it up with intrusive or personal questions, or mad comments.

Absolutely.

I'm asking the question did you have a nice Christmas the vast majority of people will not be putting a domestic violence victim in the position of saying what really happened over Christmas. That's my point.

MajorCleven · Today 21:21

@VitoCorleoneOfMNMafia it also sounds like you've had a really unfair experience with HR

With line management because HR's function is to advise.

I understand that it was probably a painful subject but she could have simply said “No I don’t” and moved the topic on. If you’d then said “Why is that?” I could understand the complaint.

I think it’s a very slippery slope introducing new policies regarding approved/banner topics of conversation in the workplace.

Surely that should be included in the work contract! How are you supposed to know what is and isn’t ok when it’s discussion of family life and isn’t racist, sexist, homophobic, ablist, political or about religion??! They cannot possibly have a go at you for talking about a subject you had no idea was off limits - in fact they would legally be in the wrong and you could probably build a very strong case if you were the sort to bother to go to a tribunal. It’s very thin ice for them anyway.

I agree with you. I'm a woman who's never had children. I've had long periods of being single as well. I was often asked if I was married or had a boyfriend or kids and it was often painful but I took responsibility for my own feelings and managed my responses. Life is painful at times. None of us can expect to get through without these kind of knocks.

You can't control the whole world: you can control your own feelings and response — which might include saying to the person who asks you if you have children 'No, I don't, and it's a very painful subject for me at the moment' but not weaponising your hurt by going to HR and complaining.

I get it. I live it too. In the past, I frequently cried on my way to work and had thoughts of driving off the bridge on my way home because I had been unable to cope with everyone else's lack of boundaries, and unprofessionalism, and my own inability to think fast enough to deal with it at the time. I learned to sit in silence while other people carry on, and joke, and bully, and ostracise the people who go against the accepted culture in the workplace. "Steve" likes to joke about people needing a good shag. He jokes about rape. He makes comments about people's bodies. He does this because people laugh. No one reports him because they think it must be their problem that they are uncomfortable with this. And it's hard to go against the masses. Especially when these are people you have to spend most of your week with.

So I just go in, do my job, block out the chatter, speak of nothing but work, then go home.

Unfortunately I’m going to go with YABU here.

HR meetings about flexible working requests relating to your own DC are probably the worst place to ask about the circumstances of your assessor. You never ever know whether they have fertility issues or otherwise and to be honest, your “do you have children” may have come across in completely the wrong way. You also don’t state how you responded to their negative response which may well be key to why they immediately felt uncomfortable.

not unreasonable in a convo about children to ask if she has any, would be insensitive to then ask why not or be all "so sorry about that" etc. Bit OTT to complain about a perfectly civil convo where nothing was said to imply "childless know it all" or similar.

All this is awful. I've worked in finance in London since I was 22, I've been on the other end of all of this sort of shite. But none of this is at all relevant to the OP so why are we arguing about it?

No, it's not a HRable act and shouldn't be. IMO HR should be for malicious acts or when you've been told repeatedly to stop doing something. But I personally wouldn't ask it in case the askee had spent Boxing Day in hospital and New Year in refuge. And I would recommend that others think carefully before asking it for the same reasons. Neurotypical people can apply decision criteria ("how well do I know this person?" "are they acting strangely?" etc) that I simply don't have but I would still recommend thinking before asking instead of assuming that it's OK.

I wouldn't want to risk putting a colleague in the lie-or-disclose bind at 9am on 3rd Jan when they've got to stay until 5pm and have a project meeting with me that afternoon. It's about trying to make the people I work with as comfortable as possible (bearing in mind that the baseline comfort for being around me is "oh no I have to have a meeting with that weird woman who doesn't make eye contact, fiddles with her jewellery, waves her hands all the time, and keeps interrupting then putting her hand over her mouth when she realises that she's interrupted" so it's already pretty shit for my colleagues without me asking invasive questions) whilst also protecting myself from being rebuked or worse.

Clearly you had no bad intent op. We can all understand the upset your colleague had because it is such a sensitive topic.

I suggest that you ask to speak to your line manager in confidence about "Steve" or his line manager if he's yours. It may be possible for him to be told to stop without your name being brought into it. A skilful manager will claim to have overheard the "jokes".

He's creating a hostile environment that could result in the company being taken to tribunal so it's in their interests to stop him.

@VitoCorleoneOfMNMafia so I don't essentially disagree but I think we lost the point of the thread way back. Op got called out by HR for something she shouldn't have been, that's the bottom line. I'll definitely take on board what you have said - as I mentioned as someone who has been on the other end of this stuff I don't mind in the slightest if people ask me what sort of Christmas I've had (now), I just have said it was fine or crap depending on how I feel at the time. Don't feel under pressure to share and certainly not complaining to HR about them asking - that would be a shitty thing to do to anyone . And I'm generally not going to stop asking my colleagues basic polite questions about their lives because that's just life, we need to work together and have a basic relationship on that level. However, I will think twice about what I ask on the basis of what you have said.

VitoCorleoneOfMNMafia · Today 22:22

Runnerinthenight · Today 22:05

VitoCorleoneOfMNMafia · Today 21:07

I would expect a higher awareness than I'm seeing of why Christmas is a traumatic hellscape for a lot of women.

You are being utterly unreasonable. Christmas is not a "traumatic landscape" for the majority of women. Or men, since you seem to be ignoring male DV.
It's traumatic enough for enough people. I may have only mentioned women but I didn't claim at any point that men cannot be victims and wouldn't claim that. My point is that asking the question is like betting on not drawing the jack of clubs and then repeatedly drawing cards from a deck: you may get away with it for a long time but sooner or later you will draw that card and lose. The smart option is not to place the wager in the first place.

Or should I have not asked my line manager to stop my team from making repeated jokes about the rape alarm they found when clearing a storeroom? After all, "only" a minority of women have been raped and they couldn't possibly have known that I am one of them and would find the repeated use of the word "rape" to be very unpleasant.

I can understand why this is triggering for you but the vast majority of us don't know someone who has been raped - thankfully.

The vast majority of us aren't going to be asking DV victims how their Christmas went! Thankfully more people don't experience this horrific situation than those who do!

Jokes about a rape alarm are just sick.

But asking if you had a good Christmas? Totally and utterly reasonable!!

Unfortunately our manager is part of the problem. She's one of those people who wants to be everyone's friend and therefore only sometimes pulls him up on what he says. An actual conversation went "Hey now, be careful, you don't know who is listening." Which he replied with "Someone needing a good shag I'm sure." Then everyone laughed.

It's a horrible environment, but only for those of us who aren't into that kind of thing. Everyone else thinks it's the funnest workplace ever.

That comment about the vast majority of us don't know someone who has been raped is one of the daftest comments I've seen on here.

The vast majority of us have no idea about the experiences of victims of rape and sexual assault, victims of both sexes, because so many victims don't ever talk about it.

So far as conversations about rape and rape alarms in a workplace, absent, police, social services, and the like, where it's part of the work, I can't really see any need to discuss it.