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Well not a great situation as you can imagine. Some members of staff (not in my department) have taken to spoiling the plot of the latest Star Wars film, upsetting other members of the company. This manifests by people writing notes with plot details an sticking them around the office/gents. How can you deal with this behaviour?
NB. I haven't seen the film yet so no spoilers please!!
Does being deliberately obnoxious in such fashion count as unprofessional behaviour? I think it does. Have any of the managers noticed? If any are as annoyed as you your problem will go away quickly.
In the meantime you can send a group email asking them politely to stop, 'them' being the 'unnamed perpetrators', I wouldn't name anyone specifically at this point.
Hello everyone, a number of our colleagues have noticed post-its with Star Wars spoilers in the gent's. Some of us who haven't seen the movie yet would rather not have it spoiled to us. Please consider not doing that anymore.
Whether or not the email actually makes them stop is mostly irrelevant because it's a shot across the bow. What you're doing is establishing a grievance on which to base possible further action. May the force be with you.
To be quite honest, its a little shocking that people would even go that far in the workplace. It is ofcourse unprofessional and unacceptable at the same time.
You should have a word with these perpetrators (if you want) and otherwise escalate this to your/their management. This is making the workplace less comfortable and friendly for colleagues who like star wars for no discernible reason.
There are two problem-sides to this argument.
The people who react. Nobody likes a movie to be spoiled but once it's done, it's done. The only thing you can do is mark the person in your mind as a [unpleasant person] and move on - while avoiding them for the foreseeable future. Throwing a fit about it is a problem.
The people who are trying to get a reaction. How they go about it is irrelevant, not being respectful of others' wishes can be a problem when it doesn't interfere with their work, and especially if it's something they shouldn't be spending their time on anyway. Depending on the workplace culture, posting sticky notes in certain places could be a problem as well.
Some members of staff (not in my department) have taken to spoiling the plot of the latest Star Wars film, upsetting other members of the company... How can you deal with this behaviour?
Largely, it depends on how your company would normally handle complaints with certain individuals and whether you, yourself are being complained to, (or have a complaint). Because, if not, I would recommend you to get over it and move on - or to tell your own staff the same so long as it isn't already disrupting normal business activity.
But, if it is disrupting normal workplace activity (and you're not the only one whose team it is affecting) If you know who it is, and know their Manager, it could be best to relay the complaints to their Manager and work out some way where both of you can continue without needing to address this ever again.
If you're legitimately worried about reputation in reporting any issue to somebody such as your manager or another manager, you can always go to HR with it. I would highly advise against sounding like you are "tattling". Just let them know what's going on and how it is affecting your, or your team's, normal work. But keep in mind that if the issue shouldn't be affecting your work, it would still reflect poorly on you.
Well it is obvious that you need to have a group meeting maybe every 2-4 weeks to discuss the upcoming movie schedule. If you have a large team I would make sure this is at least 4 hours. You will need to go over:
Important movies for the group.
Group member's schedules to see the movies coming up.
Acceptable conversations that can happen about each movie before the cut-off date.
Way for an employee to file a movie extension if they can't meet the cut-off date.
So there you go - this would be how you handle spoilers.
But I hope you can tell I was being sarcastic - this is the dumbest thing ever.
How do you handle it? The same way you handle an employee talking about how their shit went in the bathroom - try not to listen or remember it.
What can managers do? Nothing. I don't have time to deal with this crap. This is 2nd grade stuff.
What would I do as a manager? If I saw this happening on my own, I would tell the Dark Side to calm down and hit the Dark Side with a mountain of work. They weren't really doing anything "actionable" but I can give them tons of work as retribution.
What would I do if an employee came to me complaining? Have same reaction to Dark Side but then I would know that the good guys are a bunch of complainers that can't handle anything on their own - and quite frankly they are more worried about their movie getting spoiled than working which is really sad. It wouldn't be a good move career wise to tattle on these employees at all.
Why are these guys acting like this? Because they think they are cool because they got Star Wars tickets before others. How do you keep this from happening? (the first word of the 2nd movie)
Posting spoilers in the workplace is an attention-seeking behavior, and any attempt to stop them will feed their egos.
I suggest having some of the Star Wars fans get together and create the wildest, most creative, most contradictory collection of spoilers they can, without regard to accuracy. The true spoilers will disappear in a flood of spoilers that cannot all be correct, but people who have not seen the movie will have no idea which ones to believe.
You need to approach this as an issue about putting up unauthorized notes and not about specifically putting up spoilers for a movie. Many places have an approval process to post anything on a public bulletin board and limit all postings to that area. You could institute something like this to be able to handle all inappropriate postings. But I would avoid approaching management and complaining that someone "spoiled Star Wars" for you. This would come across as incredibly childish to most people with the authority to do anything about it.
Beware of the dark side. Anger, fear, aggression; the dark side of the Force are they. Easily they flow, quick to join you in a fight. If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will.