“Invisible Furniture”: What Are the Unwritten Rules In Your Office?
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Everyone who takes a new job finds there are unwritten rules in the office or workplace — let's discuss them today!
I recently heard the phrase “invisible furniture” used to describe the unwritten rules in your office or workplace, in that you may be “bumping into a lot of it in your first few months on your job.”
It's a great phrase, and it's so true — every workplace definitely has its own unwritten rules! What are the unwritten rules in YOUR office — and in what ways do you see people bump into those rules when they're new?
To back up a bit: There was a great Twitter thread recently with advice for new appointees in the Biden administration from Dr. Tamara Cofman Wittes, current senior fellow for the Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings and the founder of The Leadership Council for Women in National Security. Her thread included some great advice, such as:
- Take your ethics undertakings seriously.
- “Your job is to help your team succeed. That means help your boss, help your peers, and help your employees. If they rise, you rise. If they fail, you have failed. So start by figuring out who they are, what they need, and what you can offer.”
- If you're dealing with someone who is a bit “world-weary in the face of your enthusiasm… connect them to your mission & help them see how their work matters to policy & real-world outcomes.”
Such great advice! I was particularly interested in this tweet, where she noted:
Every workplace has unwritten rules, too: what I call “invisible furniture.” You will be bumping into a lot of it in your first months on the job. Make a point of learning it, & remember that it’s never dumb to admit what you don’t know—it’s the quickest way to learn.
So let's discuss — what are some of the unwritten rules in the office that you've learned in your workplace?
For my $.02, some of these unwritten rules in my previous offices come to mind:
- access to colleagues and bosses — Several of my previous workplaces (especially in the magazine world, but the legal world also) have had a lot of unwritten rules around access to bosses. It was often considered an honor even to be CC:ed on an email involving the Big Boss, and certainly to be invited to a meeting, and there were a lot of unwritten rules about how to conduct yourself when you were invited.
- support staff priorities — In my law firm (where generally four lawyers shared one administrative assistant), there were absolutely unwritten rules about what order the assistant was expected to do things in. There were also unwritten etiquette rules around what work should be given to your administrative assistant versus work that should/could be given to another department (such as Steno).
- face time — This is a huge one that varies widely from office to office. At my law firm, they didn't care if you showed up at noon and worked until midnight; as long as you had checked your email and voice mail in the morning, there was generally no requirement that you be in the office. Another boss took it as a grave sign of disrespect if I came in at 9:10.
- Similarly, lunch — one of my old offices had a culture of everyone eating lunch at around the same time, at the same conference table.
- the closed office door — Every office I've been in had unwritten rules about when your office door was allowed to be closed, or when you were allowed to or expected to or pushing it to take a conference room to work in by yourself.
Readers, how about you — what are the unwritten rules in your office? What did you learn the hard way, and in what way do you think new hires “bump into” that invisible furniture?
Stock photo (empty conference room) via Stencil.
Oh my god, this stuff can be such a pain. I remember a former manager (who was very bad at her job) accused me of not being friendly with my coworkers because I sometimes didn’t eat with others at lunch and she thought that was indicative of me being a poor team player. Like wtf? I ate lunch when I felt like it; sometimes there were other staff in the lunch room with me and sometimes there weren’t. Nobody else had a problem with it and I got along with everyone I worked with! I offered to document all the times I interacted with my coworkers and she backed off after that but it was so bizarre.
I actually started a new job at the beginning of the month and not dealing with in-office politics is one of the huge perks of WFH.
OMG this kind of thing drives me nuts. Some time ago one of my colleagues, whom I considered a good work friend, actually GAVE ME THE SILENT TREATMENT (snubbed me in the parking lot when I said “good morning”) because she thought (mistakently, not that it mattered), that I had gone to lunch with some other colleagues without her. Just, no. I told her I was her friend but I obviously reserved the right to have lunch with whoever I damn well pleased, and that oh by the way I do not tolerate the silent treatment from anyone. We made up but it’s never been the same.
I tend to take lunch later than many of my colleagues for multiple reasons, which means in the Before Times, I was often alone in the lunch room. The number of people who felt the need to comment on me eating lunch alone was maddening.
It does not mean I’m unfriendly. It does not mean I dislike my coworkers. It does not mean I’m depressed and need the number of the EAP. It definitely does not mean one needs to comment on my “lack of friends” every time one sees me eating alone (which is, again, almost every day).
Hot take but “unwritten rules” bug the ish out of me. I understand about protecting access to higher-ups, but the stuff about lunch and the assistant/department division needs to be explicitly stated. How can a new person succeed in the office if no one is telling them these things? Unless you work for a psychic hotline, no one can read your mind.
Me too. This is the type of stuff that gets you labeled and branded out of the gate, and it’s completely unfair and arbitrary. I’m a total rule follower yet struggled mightily early in my career when I couldn’t decode this stuff … because nobody felt it necessary to clue me in! Just observing was not enough.
Right there with you. I think the lunch stuff isn’t stated outright because it’s…illegal? to dictate when/where employees can take their break, but it’s all in the spirit of Mean Girls anyway. I’ve never had a higher-up chastise me for being cordial – it’s always the office gossip who pulls you aside to “inform” you you’re “not allowed” to speak to Mr. Renholm.
I agree. It’s such a waste of time and resources. Imagine how much more efficient the workplace would be if employees didn’t need to devote any brainpower to these mostly arbitrary rules.
Exactly.
Moreover, if someone can’t be bothered to explicitly state something, I have no desire to waste energy believing that it is important.
This is honestly one of my least favorite things about my law firm job and working in an office in general. As a lateral, this stuff is really difficult to learn. I also frankly have less patience for some of it than I would have fresh out of law school.
I am sure I’m violating a ton of unwritten rules that I have no idea exist. Ugh. It’s stressful and annoying and makes me want to run away.
This one is really silly — I work in a small department, fewer than 10 people. We used to go out to lunch as a department for each person’s birthday. Someone would always pick up the check for the birthday person. I’d been working here almost a year and still hadn’t gotten to pick up someone’s tab. So I finally did. Then, after we got back to the office, everyone was emailing me asking how much they owed me. It turns out, the whole time everyone had been splitting the bill for the birthday person and chipping in $2 in cash each time, rather than taking turns paying the whole thing. So I had gone the whole year not paying my “share” of anyone’s bday lunch. I was mortified. But no one ever told me!!
Also, the office/big cube/small cube politics are *intense*. I was put in a small cube when I first started working here, because there was not an office available yet, and people were falling all over themselves to apologize about how HORRIBLE it was to demean me by making me work in a small cube. Didn’t bother me.
Oof! The lunch thing is mortifying and hilarious. I guess the remedy would have been to pay for the whole thing that time and then chip in going forward.
That’s exactly what I did, as well as apologizing to everyone! I wouldn’t have thought too much about it except at the time a couple of my coworkers were very passive aggressive, would never tell you you were doing something wrong, but would talk about you behind your back. They’ve retired now, sadly.
“Sadly.” Heh.
OMG – I had a workplace where you got one chair if you were a manager, two if you were a director and a bookshelf too! The colors of the upholstery on the chairs was different but otherwise they were the same chair. I would swap out the chairs of the guy that sat in the office next to me just to drive him crazy… I think it was good hearted:)
“ That means help your boss, help your peers, and help your employees. If they rise, you rise. If they fail, you have failed.”
This is so good.
I have worked in way too many cultures where people see it as a zero sum game. If someone else succeeds, then they failed.
I believe a rising tide lifts all boats. If I hire and train an incredibly talented person, I’m not going to keep a brick on their head to keep them from growing. I’m going to take them to meetings with me, I’m going to let them present in situations where I would ordinarily present. I’m not going to take their work and present it as my own while keeping them hidden at the cube farm. If they succeed so well they eventually become my boss, awesome. I have a great boss.
I’m a civilian in a mostly civilian workplace but the top boss is uniformed and we work closely with many uniformed personnel. Some of the biggest invisible furniture is who to call sir/ma’am/by rank and when.
I worked for a brief period of time as a contractor in a military office. I didn’t really mind calling the more senior uniformed personnel sir or ma’am, but it was calling certain senior civilians by Mr. So-and-so that I really couldn’t abide and never did. Like, I haven’t called anyone Mr. or Ms. Whatever since high school (when I was literally a CHILD talking to adults) and I wasn’t about to start doing it again a decade later.
Even in college, some profs insisted we call them by their first names and others were known as Dr. or Professor Whatever because it just fit them better. It was also much more normal to refer to profs by their last names, a la “do you have Blankenship or Cohen for econ next semester?”
Seriously? I have 20+ years experience in law and there are still people I call Mr. or Ms. – even putting aside people with other titles like judges. At this point it is mostly very senior people (for example we have a client who is the CEO of a Fortune 500 company and is old enough to be my father; he is very nice but he is definitely “Mr.” and one of the named partners in my firm – pushing 80 and mostly retired – is quite decidedly “Mr. Named Partner” when spoken or referred to by anyone, including the other named partners.
I can still remember my first legal job saying something to the associate general counsel about “Bob” (the GC) and being told kindly but firmly that “we give him the respect of calling him Mr. Smith.”
So if you are late 20s, or even late 30s, and want to keep you job I strongly recommend following the example of other people in your workplace around your level or even slightly junior. It is not a sign or a child talking to an adult. It is a sign of respect. And this goes double or even triple if you are involved with the military or in the South.
Yup, seriously. Haven’t called anyone Mr. or Ms. since high school. Not about to start now. The current and former CEOs in my company are widely known by their first names, as are all of the other leaders in the company. I can sort of theoretically get behind calling your 80 year old fatherly named partner Mr. Whatever, but I can’t get behind calling a mid-50s civilian Mr. Whatever just because he gets an ego boost from it.
YES I’m still working this out at the public agency I work at. I can sometimes ask assistants how people prefer to be addressed, but I wish we had some internal guide for those of us new to working with safety/fire/other officers.
Use their titles if you know them. If their prefer first names, they will let you know. If you are not sure of their title, you can ask them (they do not expect civilians to know) but it is a good idea to download the rank insignia of whatever services you work with and memorizing them. And if you know who they are in advance, it is not hard to look up.
By far one of my most embarrassing professional moments was I was at a panel with military members and wanted to use the right terminology when I spoke to one of them, a colonel, afterward (about something related to my job that I liked that they said). Panic texted my former boss, a veteran, and asked what I should say. “Colonel or sir is OK.” Great. I can do that.
Yeah so I got flustered and called him cur and then sernel and then said “I liked the words you said” and ran out. Absolutely mortifying. My former boss asked how it went when I saw him at an event later that week and two friends I was at the event with started laughing, I’d told them right after it happened. I tried to dodge out of the details and finally told him after they would not stop laughing so he knew something was up. He did his absolute best to not laugh, tried valiantly, but about five minutes later I look over and he’s laughing so hard he’s crying while saying “sernel” to himself. I shot him a “ha ha so funny definitely not laughing” look and he said “sorry, sorry, oh god….cur.” I adore him but it was absolutely the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever done.
My firm assigns every new associate a mentor and I view part of that job to be explaining the unwritten rules. We have SO MANY. They include:
– Email partners, never just stop by their offices. But they can stop by your office and associates can stop by someone else’s office. Also, a closed door (for an associate or paralegal) does not mean you cannot knock and come in. If you need to be undisturbed, put a post-it on your door.
– If you are a junior associate, never go to the partner first with a question. Go to the senior associate on the file. If you are given an assignment by a senior associate, return it to that person. Do not copy the partner. We are big on chain of command.
– Email staff do not call them. Our staff is in cubicles and telephone calls are distracting.
– When sending a firm-wide email, have yourself as the sole addresses and bcc the entire firm to cut down on “reply all” issues. (This was actually written down years ago but of course people who were not at the firm at the time have to be told.)
– [Pre-pandemic] They do not care if you work from home or even if you take an unscheduled day off, but forward your calls to your cell phone and check your email. Being unavailable during work hours unless you are in court/ deposition/
medical office is unacceptable.
– “Out of office” is for formal leave or if you are in the hospital. Any other time (including vacations) you need to return calls and respond to emails. The only thing that makes this ok is that the partners mostly do not abuse it. And it is perfectly OK to respond internally with “I am in Cancun. Back on Monday. Do you need this before then?”
– Secretaries do not make copies unless you are a partner. Asking will get you labeled as difficult. If it is a big job or need special handling, we have a department for that and you need to ask the day before. If it is a small job, do it yourself.
– We have a group of staff who are untouchable. Do NOT ever complain about them. Do what they tell you. Bring them coffee.
Nobody cares who you go to lunch with.
And yet at my prior firm, attorneys were NEVER to be seen at the copier/printer or touching a physical file. That work was all to be done by admin staff and if you needed something you were supposed to ask for it not go get it. The physical file sort of makes sense where we were mostly electronic. They didn’t want anyone messing it up. But yeah, the printer/copier one was really annoying.
Oof, this stresses me out just reading it. No thank you.
My first day at my company, I was passed a “going away” card for a co-worker that was leaving. It was filled with cash and it was expected to contribute. Apparently, they did this for birthdays, weddings, babies, retirements and those leaving for other jobs. I was completely caught off guard. It was 22 years ago and I still won’t forget that “WTF” moment.
When I was brand new at my first professional job, I was assigned to go around collecting $20 from each of my coworkers for flowers for Secretaries Day (which is what it was called back then) and one guy said no, he would only put in $5. I honestly didn’t know what to do so I put in $35 total to cover the rest of his share. I was the newest and lowest paid person in the office – in fact, the secretaries we were celebrating made more than I did! – and later found out that it was just expected that this guy would never throw in any money and the budget for gifts was built around that. I wish I had been bold enough to ask questions!
Early in my career, I got transferred to a new office in a different city. Every day my peers would go out to lunch and they never invited me. I would eat alone at my desk and wonder wtf. One day, I was in the bathroom, and two of the women came in. One of them said something like, “Can you believe she never wants to go out to lunch with us? I guess she’s too good for us.” Of course I was flabbergasted. Ever since, I always enthusiastically invite myself to join people. Ifigure I’ll get the message if they don’t want me.
I’d also add when and who to copy on emails. Some bosses want to see lots of things but some see it only as tattling.
I’m also neurodivergent (aka, autistic) so sometimes it feels like my whole life is watching out for invisible furniture everyone else can see. So with new jobs or new team members I often just let them know, “I’m a pretty literal person and I don’t always get subtext… If you aren’t blunt with me then I probably won’t get the message.” This has also led to people filling me in on the unspoken rules that someone like me would not even realize I was trampling on without help so it’s been very appreciated.
Who gets to sit at the table in a conference room, and who sits in the chairs against the wall with no table. When I was an intern – easy: perimeter (though there were other interns and junior people who didn’t pick up on that rule, and got perceived as having a big ego). Now that I’m more senior: table, most of the time. For several years in between, very tricky, and often I’d have to switch from one to the other as I saw who else was coming into the room and where I ranked among them. (I’m in government).