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Maintaining professional boundaries

November 10, 2008

Sometimes it is truly very hard to set your personal and professional life apart, especially in the work place. As professionals, we are required to set boundaries for ourselves, setting these ethical boundaries when in a work situation will keep our integrity as professionals. Whatever those boundaries were, our main goal is to maintain our integrity and keep the respect of our colleagues and clients. The following are just few of the situations that were observed in the work place.

Married Couples (Use of endearments in the office premises) - The use of endearments (“mama”, “daddy”, etc.)  between married couples who work in the same company/office when calling the attention of their other half while inside the office premises. I’m sure you agree that this is highly improper and inappropriate even for a boss and most especially for a boss to do in the presence of subordinates.

Close relationships/friendship (Acting and speaking unprofessionaly while in a formal setting)  - In some cases, when a relationship between two individual is more than just work colleagues (close friends or maybe more) they tend to lose their ability to conduct themselves appropriately. Admit it, if we are in a formal setting (classroom, meeting, lecture, etc) and we saw professionals behaving in the most inappropriate way, like for instance acting like children in front of clients or audience (btw,is this normal? can’t remember doing that myself though), our respect for those people will instantly go downhill, and likewise they will lose the respect of their audience/clients. Who would ever believe what you were saying then if you act or talk so unbecomingly for a professional? To make the atmosphere light, jestings between colleagues or between speaker and audience are quite normal and acceptable, so long as those boundaries were observed to keep your social and professional relationships apart. So let’s act accordingly…  lets think, talk, and act our age and profession, not our shoe size, that shouldn’t be too hard, eh? 

Bringing personal/family problems to work - One situation that seems to be very common in a work place is bringing our personal or family problems to work. The boundary should be clearly drawn here and the right time for work and right time for dealing our personal issues be clearly defined. In my work place for instance, most of us here unfortunately were not able to develop these ethical lines which admittedly affected our work performance and working relationships. It became a part of our daily life here at work to hear about so and so’s problem. That’s a part of “humanness” I guess, quite understandable but hardly an acceptable reason for doing so. A very sound advice from David Bohl, we should do everyone a favor and adopt this mantra “what happens at home, stays at home”.

Opinion lang po. :D

Posted by dumanay at 2:48 pm | permalink

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