Do You Want to Know Why I’m Missing Work?

A few weeks ago, a colleague took time away from work for a personal issue. This person (let’s call them Sam) told their manager, who mentioned it to me (the manager’s manager). This was (and is) all fine, and happens all the time.

The next week, I had my regular meeting with Sam, who asked me whether I wanted to know what was going on that caused them to miss work. 

I gave Sam a quick answer (something about not wanting to pry), and the conversation moved on, but privately I’ve been struggling with my answer to this question for well over a week. 

The idea of ‘bringing your whole self to work’ has been ubiquitous and cliché enough to inspire snark for a while now, but the importance of empathy, humanity, and creating safe spaces is something that I really buy into. Still, as a manager sometimes the ‘right’ thing to do in this regard can be terribly difficult to figure out.

In general, I would invite anyone on my team to share as much about themselves as they feel comfortable sharing. And maybe that’s the right way to create the environment that I want to create. Maybe Sam wants to talk about it. Maybe they feel constrained by a vision of professionalism, and don’t want to be the first to broach personal topics of a certain sensitivity.

On the other hand, I’ve seen managers push employees to share more about their personal situations than the employees feel comfortable with. And Sam’s hesitancy might not be signaling a desire to talk about what’s going on; it might signal a feeling of obligation. Does Sam feel obligated to justify being out of the office? Or do they think they need to model extroversion and candidness with me (a notoriously candid extrovert) in order to advance in their career? I don’t know. The space of potential motivations is vast. 

The idea of not wanting to share a piece of one’s life with work also resonates with me. A long time ago, I had to miss work for a personal issue that I very much didn’t want to talk about with my coworkers. That company was not a ‘bring your whole self to work’ kind of company, which I appreciated in this specific instance.

So what should I do next time? What’s the action item coming out of this retro? I think writing this post, in and of itself, is one.

The other is to ask more questions. My gut reaction to ‘Do you want to know why I’m missing work?’ is really ‘do you want me to know?’ but that isn’t the right framing, really. After some thought, it’s closer to ‘Would you prefer to talk about it with me, or would it help you more not to talk about it with me?’ 

This, I think, is what I’ll ask next time.