My boss reprimanded me and some of my other coworkers for avoiding a smelly coworker.

[joel666]

I am a 34 year old male and i work as a web developer. I am fairly good at it my work and get along with most other coworkers.

But there is this one coworker that started 2 months ago. I will refer to him as tom.

Tom is good at his job but there is problem with him.

Ever since i met him for the first time, he always had a strong stench to him. His odor is a mix of weed and unwashed body odor and on top of that, his breath smells really bad.

But i always tried being polite but me and some of my other coworkers who also noticed how bad he smells avoid him but we tried not to be rude about it.

For examples. When tom would sit near us, my coworkers and me would tell each other "why don't we go seat over there. This table is a lot cleaner. Why don't we use this computer instead. This one is kinda slow. When you come back from the bathroom, join us on that other table next to the window.

And when we would be in the lunch break room, we would stand there, wait and see where tom would sit and we would make sure not to sit next to him.

But on the bad luck that he would sit right in front of us, i would cover my nose with my hand. And my other coworkers would do the same.

But again we try not to show our disgusts. We don't gag or make any disgusted facial expressions.

But just a week ago, our bosse called me into his office and he tells me that tom feels excluded and me and the other coworkers are creating a toxic work environment and my clique attitude will nog be tolerated.

I admitted to my boss why we avoid him. I told him that i cannot stand the stench coming off tom.

My boss argued and said this is disrespectful and he could very well have a health condition that causes him to smell unpleasant.

My other coworkers later told me that they also got reprimanded.

How would you deal with this ? Health or not, i cannot stand smelly people. I try not to be rude but when someone smells bad my first instinct is to avoid them.

Well you are being rude when you all decide to move desks etc. I know it’s not pleasant but what I’ve done in the past in similar circumstances is to spray a tissue with a body spray and use it to casually ‘wipe’ my nose. It doesn’t look odd if done discreetly and no one knows I’ve put a nice smell on it.

I do a club with someone that has seriously awful breath, like gone off milk. I dread being partnered with him so I understand what you're saying OP.

Some people genuinely just don't consider personal hygiene a daily necessity.

But, you really are being unkind excluding your co-worker.

Many years ago in an open plan office with about 8 people to a table...15 tables...computer processing work, a young man started. He was a nice young lad and always dressed fine, etc, but he had a smell, like a mix of BO and cooking and grease. Our managers noticed it too. We didn't avoid him or move or anything. But one day we all got taken into the chief managers office one by one for a personal hygiene talk. Basically they told us all that there has been an noticeable odour and if possible as we were all working in close proximity to others, could we think about our personal hygiene. Obviously we all knew who it was about, but it didn't look suspicious as we were all spoken to.

If he has a medical condition I assume he would have disclosed it as part of the recruitment process and recorded somewhere.

My old boss stank. He clearly only washed on a Sunday and as the week went on the smell would get worse and worse. Not just BO, much worse than that. He was also very overweight and had few clothes so didn’t change.
His boss would do nothing about it. He was a horrible human being and absolutely would have put a complaint in if anyone mentioned it so he told us to cope. People would reorganise their work so they could be out of the office when it was particularly bad.

You see, comments like this is how everyone on this post has sussed you as a bully.
you’ve disregarded the very legit reasons for the odour and concluded that Tom opts to not to the uncomplicated act of showering.
how do you know he doesn’t do it frequently? And don’t reply because he smells, tell us another way

The boss needs to deal with Mr Stinky, we have one at our place. Our complaints were ignored as he may have a medical issue/ can't be seen to bully. . After customers complained, the boss had a discreet word, turned out he's just a dirty, skank, doesn't wash, picks up dirty clothes off the floor to wear.
He now sprays liberal lynx over the top. 🤢

He looks and smells revolting. his mum and gf must have very poor standards.

Another difficulty may be that yes it is asked at onboarding/recruitment stage, but no reasonable manager would disclose it without consent.

So even if in OPs case it is medical, and has been recorded, the manager isn’t going to tell them that without Toms permission. Which in his position, I wouldn’t give.

Do what my bf said to one of his colleagues recently. He does have adhd though and is very front about things. He told a worker on his words "lad you stink of weed if I can smell it so can the boss be careful" simple done.

I get it op. There was a very obese woman who worked as a children's counsellor at my old place and she had absolutely horrific stale sweat odour. It was like sticking your face into a mouldy shoe. You couldn't be around her for long without rushing for fresh air. The poor children had to sit in a tiny office with her.

At another job, there was a client you could smell coming. Very very strong onion smell preceeded him.by a corridor and lasted the rest of the morning.

And another tale, sitting at a comedy show, man next to us had very strong poo breath and every time he laughed it made me and the person next to me, gag. When he got up in the interval we asked his companion to switch with him.

Yeah yeah, poor them etc, but it is unbearable. Before your boss disciplines you, he needs to sit in a room.with this guy (partly to experience him himself) and politely discuss the issue.

And yet another excuse as to why you are right and the majority of people in this thread are wrong.

he may have been offended but you could do it in such a way that is considerate and understanding - well I say that, from your posts I don’t believe you to be capable.

as I said too late now and if you continue this behaviour you and your cronies will end up with a grievance and some form of written warning.

and as a union representative I’d tell you so if you came to me for advice.

communicate like a considerate and empathetic human being stop with the things over your nose, I imagine the eye rolls, snarky comments etc. because I imagine he will be documenting the lot now.

No, of course I wouldn't. I once worked near a lovely lady who had been in hospital for a while and, when she came back, there was a strong odour of healing flesh that she obviously couldn't help as a result of her illness and treatment. It definitely wasn't a smell of neglectful personal hygiene or illegal drugs; so we accepted the smell and put up with it.

A bit like if somebody wants to take their dog to work, that's usually an inappropriate and selfish thing to do - and makes it difficult for colleagues with allergies or fears - but if somebody needs their guide dog with them, their need clearly takes full priority, and their colleagues have to adapt.

If Tom does indeed have a medical issue that can't be mitigated, then they probably just have to live with it. However, in the vast majority of cases, strong body odour is simply because of people not washing - and a weed habit may be related to neglectful personal hygiene.

I think it's the manager's job to raise this with Tom and establish whether it is medical - and if anything can be done to mitigate the smell. For example, somebody might have a medical issue that causes excessive sweating - but they would surely realise that they needed to shower more frequently than the average person.

The same as somebody with diabetes has to monitor their food intake much more carefully than people who don't have the condition; and somebody with mobility issues has to allow significantly more time to get somewhere than a fully able-bodied person; unfortunately, that's just the way it is.

Otherwise, he needs to be told in no uncertain terms and have good personal hygiene added to his key urgent goals, or whatever it takes to get him to start washing and stop stinking. Quitting the weed habit would help in several ways too.

I'm not even convinced it is weed. The boss would have reacted differently if someone stank of weed at work.
Let's just hope this thread doesn't end up in the daily mail for this poor man and the victims o @Carouselfish s mean post to see.

Edit

Oh come on! He has a REALLY pungent smell and he can’t smell it? I don’t think so! Not unless he has totally lost his sense of smell himself! He doesn’t just ‘niff a bit’, he actually stinks so badly that people feel like retching

I think some people aren’t actually able to smell their own BO. But even if this is the case with this guy, his boss needs to make it clear he literally needs to clean his act up

The office is one thing but it’s up to you who you take your breaks with - I’d go out for a walk or to a cafe if you can or sit in your car if you drive. No one can insist on sharing your free time - your boss needs to step up and have a difficult conversation with your co worker.

It’s not about wanting them unemployed. But recognising that if someone has a disability the employer has a duty to make reasonable adjustments to support them. Rightly so. However the employer also has a duty to provide a safe and tolerable working environment for all its other staff too. If there were no reasonable adjustments that could be made to support the disabled employee whilst also complying with that duty to all staff, then ultimately yes it could lead to the disabled employee being legally dismissed. One wouldl hope it wouldn’t come to that and adjustments like rejigging the workspace, allowing some home working, etc may help. But yes it most certainly could in theory.

Disabled employees rightly enjoy significant legal protection, but they are not untouchable.

Your boss should be addressing this with your co-worker. It's not fair to expect people to work closely around someone with smell issues. Is he addressing it?

Wanting to work in an environment that doesn’t stink is not spite. Persistent smells that are strong enough to create a hostile environment that causes employees to resign can become the basis of constructive dismissal claims.

The company needs to deal with the issue sensitively but it does need to deal with it (just as it needed to deal with OP and his colleagues excluding Tom) not just tell people to suck it up, regardless of the reason for the smell.

No, but not using their words to the boss and dealing with it all like malicious teenagers is.

You can't discriminate against someone for having poor hygiene, just like you can't discriminate against someone for being rude and nasty. If people choose to stink, the consequence of that is that people aren't going to want to spend time in close proximity to you. I think OP is silly for making far-fetched excuses for moving away though, I would just leave his presence if not directly required by work activities, and explain why if asked, the same as I would if I had a collegue who was insisting on being unpleasant and rude. And really, it is unpleasant and rude to force your presence on others while knowing you are disgusting and dirty, and then have the temerity to complain to your boss when they don't want to socialise with you. For all those claiming OP is childish, so is his collegue for tattling to his boss because someone doesn't want to be friends with him.

No, it’s not spite. It’s very poor behaviour. Immature and unprofessional. But to be spiteful, the intention would have to have been to hurt Tom. It wasn’t. The intention was simply to get away from a smell they hated.

In the most embarrassing way possible.

There is no obligation to disclose a disability to an employer and they are not allowed to ask, even if the disability is obvious.

I didn’t say it did and qualified this in a later post. It speaks to reasonable adjustment and that can’t always be made - ‘reasonable’ being the key.

Employers are absolutely not allowed to ask about disability at any stage of the recruitment process, even if evidence of it is staring them in the face.