Dignity in a Co-Working place

What are your core values? I know one of mine is dignity.

I happen to work in a coworking spot. It’s all the rage these days. A bunch of male dominated start ups sharing a space to keep the cost of overhead lower, sounds like a great idea. Your potential customers have a professional place they can visit, and you can have a meeting; again, great idea. There are a few phone booths and some high top and picnic benches, people from different companies mix and discuss the struggles of entrepreneurship. There is a pull up bar and some bros at the ping pong table so you don’t feel as though it’s all seriousness.

In practice, the place our company uses is great. People are generally polite and we can usually get a phone booth, or conference room for important meetings. You can even have a conversation with someone at the coffee bar, as I had done this last week.

I met a young designer who was recently hired and she mentioned that she was looking at schools for extra education. The place she was looking at happened to be my sister’s alma mater and so, I became more interested and started asking more questions. She was very nice and I was excited for her in starting a new job but also looking at new opportunities that are out there. Why wouldn’t you?

Fast forward to the end of the week, in fact a Thursday. And there at mid-day, she was walked to one of the high top tables in an open area and summarily dismissed. It was clear she was being let go. And while, we have no idea for what reason she was being let go, we all realized she was being let go.

In the following hour, while she packed her belongings and closed out whatever it was that she needed to, her now former co-workers, including the boss who just let her go began to play ping pong.

I became aware of this when she came over to say goodbye. With tears in her eyes, fighting to not cry, she told me today was her last day and she thanked me for our conversation. I told her it was going to be ok — which to be honest, I have no idea what her situation was. I handed her my business card and said that I would try to connect her with anyone I knew in the design world. And as she left, she had to walk by her former co-workers playing ping-pong.

I don’t have anything against ping-pong per se. I thought it was great to see in Forrest Gump — and the fact that there is a table in our office which gets a lot of use doesn’t bother me too much. I like to compete, and being active can definitely change your brain function. I guess it was this particular situation that has me, well, bummed.

There is incomplete information on my part for the reason for this young designer’s dismissal. In fact, I have no idea under what pretense she was hired, was it a trial period? was it for one job? was it for the week? It’s unclear at best.

What I do know is that she was clearly hurt. And the optics of the situation said she was let go in public, and to add insult to injury, her male coworkers were seen as burning off energy after a “stressful” day. It is no wonder that people think that the tech scene is a chauvinistic and misogynistic world.

I know that Intel recently released a report on their hiring of minorities and women which shows they are behind. Most other Silicon Valley firms likely have statistics on this as well, though they are less forthcoming than Intel. And I can only think that this situation, along with many other start up, and coworking spaces, doesn’t go into any report. And so that saddens me.

That being said, I don’t think these guys are chauvinists. I really think they are just clueless. Clueless as to how to treat people. Simple dignity would have been easy to do in this case. Booking an office to have a private conversation, taking her to coffee and telling her there would both be strategies for ameliorating this awkward public display of firing. But definitely waiting until she’s left the building before taking the time to “blow off steam” would really have gone along way to not injure her further.

When relating this story to my boss who missed the incident, he responded in the best way possible, “that’s why human dignity is one of our core values.” That’s why I’m glad to be working for who I work for.