Jeffrey L. Seglin's Blog, page 14

Should we know what our colleagues earn?

“We all got raises,” a former colleague recently told a reader we’re calling Maddie. The two of them had worked together at a business that had frozen salaries for many years. My reader had left the company but stayed in touch with many of her former colleagues.

“We all got raises, but they told us not to discuss how much the raises were with one another,” the former colleague told Maddie. Maddie told her former colleague that she thought this directive was inappropriate.

None of the salaries at her former place of employment were ever public, Maddie writes. As a result, employees never knew if what they made was comparable to what others made for similar work completed. They all did know, however, that salaries had been frozen and no raises were forthcoming for several years. That announcement was made to all employees at the company.

Maddie congratulated her former colleague on the long overdue salary raise, but told her that by not knowing what one another makes, none of them have any idea whether they are being compensated fairly in comparison to one another. That lack of transparency about salaries, Maddie argued, leaves everyone with a tinge of doubt that they are being paid less than the colleague in the cubicle next to them. “It hardly breeds goodwill,” Maddie wrote.

Maddie asked whether she was wrong to advise her former colleague that she and others would be wise to share their salary information. She also asked whether I believe her belief that sharing financial information crosses any ethical lines.

Maddie has every right to offer whatever opinion she wants to offer to former colleagues when it comes to how they share salary information. Her colleague has every right to embrace Maddie’s view or to disagree with her. Does sharing financial information cross ethical lines? As long as no one illegally snoops into someone else’s finances, if they want to share how much they earn, that should be up to them.

The challenge with the sharing being voluntary is that it is random. If only a handful of employees share information, Maddie’s former colleagues won’t likely end up with a complete picture of how salaries compare throughout the organization. She also will be relying on colleagues to be honest about how much they make rather than having an accurate source of such information.

If Maddie’s belief is that salaries at her former employer will only be fair if everyone knows how they stack up against one another, the right thing would be for Maddie to encourage her former colleagues to push back on their employer and ask for a full disclosure of salaries. That would be the only way for employees to gain a complete picture. While many government salaries are already made public and available to search on public databases, private and non-government operations don’t face the same obligation for full disclosure.

If Maddie’s former colleagues decide to go this route and their company complies with the request, they should be prepared to discover that they might actually make more than someone who does the same job as they do with the same level of experience. If that’s the case and their goal is for salaries to be equitable, the right thing would be to be as outraged as if they had discovered they made far less that the other person.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of "The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice," is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues. 

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com. 

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin

(c) 2023 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

 

Should reader accept credit for something she didn't do?

If offered credit for something you could have done, might have wanted to do, and would have benefited from, but that you didn’t do, should you take the credit? Does it matter that no one is likely to find out if you actually deserved that credit or not?

A reader we’re calling Minerva had taken an online course recently to keep up with the continuing education credits she needed to retain her professional license. Aside from learning what she was there to learn, one of the perks of taking the course was an offer from the course organizers of free attendance at an upcoming online course on a similar topic.

Minerva already had a commitment at the time the free course was to be offered, so she knew she would not be able to avail herself of the offer. Nevertheless, shortly after the free online course occurred, Minerva received an email confirming her attendance and informing her that as soon as she completed the evaluation for the course she would receive a certificate of completion and continuing education credits for the course.

“I could use the credits,” wrote Minerva. “But this doesn’t seem right.”

Minerva is correct. It is not OK to take credit for something you didn’t do. If the goal of the courses she takes are to add to her professional acumen, claiming credit could also result in misrepresenting herself to her clients or employers.

That no one would find out makes no difference. Fear of potentially having the course offerer later figure out the mistake that was made shouldn’t be the reason not to accept the unearned credit. It’s wrong to claim credit you didn’t earn regardless of who knows and whether or not you might be found out.

If Minerva did decide to accept the credit, she’d be compounding the lie by filling out an evaluation for a course she never took in order to get the credits. More lies told to protect the initial lie of claiming credit. But then it’s often the case the first lie is not the most challenging one to uphold. Instead it’s the subsequent lies told to cover for the initial lie, which might have seemed easy enough to commit at the time. When it comes to doing the right thing when faced with a circumstance like Minerva faced, a good rule of thumb is: Just don’t lie.

In this case, however, I would urge Minerva to go further than simply not accepting the credit for a course not taken. I’d encourage her to respond to the email by informing the course offerer of the mistake. If it was a one-off and Minerva was the only non-attendee made such an offer, there’s no harm if she refuses the credit. If the offer went out to many more non-attendees, the course offerer has the responsibility to correct its mistake and make sure it doesn’t happen again.

I suspect Minerva knew the right thing to do before writing me and was simply looking for confirmation. If her question can help others to veer toward doing the right thing and course offerer to fixing whatever went awry, all the better.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of "The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice," is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues. 

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com. 

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin

(c) 2023 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

If I don't like my boss, should I flee?

If I don’t like my boss, is it wrong not to quit?

In the wake of a record number of people quitting their jobs in 2022, it seems a reasonable questionable to ask. Could the roughly 50.5 million people who left their jobs in 2022, surpassing the previous record of 47.8 million people who left their jobs in 2021, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, be partly accounted for by those who had simply had it with working for a jerk?

With the unemployment rate hovering around 3.4%, the lowest in more than 50 years, perhaps employees are quitting because they are confident in finding a new job. It is conceivable that some employees who were willing to put up with an annoying boss when there were few other options available are now more willing to seek opportunities elsewhere than they would have been in January 2009, when the unemployment rate clocked in at 7.8%, more than double the current rate.

But these statistics don’t answer the question of whether it’s wrong to stay in a job where you are working for a boss you don’t like.

To answer that question, you’d have to determine just how much disliking your boss gets in the way of liking your job. It also depends on why you don’t like your boss.

Simply not liking your boss doesn’t strike me as reason enough to bolt, particularly if your able to do good work you enjoy doing. Because many people spend more of their week in the workplace than anyone else, it would be nice and perhaps more productive to be surrounded by people they like.

But there are times when each of us works for or with people who do something we simply don’t like. The boss may, for example, not offer enough praise to make an employee feel as valued as they want to feel. Even that guy in the shipping room who doesn’t always alert us about a package arrival as promptly as we’d like might regularly annoy us. Is it wrong to stay in the job because we find these and other behaviors annoying? No.

Of course, no one should have to work for a boss who is abusive and makes unreasonable demands of his, her or their employees. If the boss’ behavior gets in the way of being able to do your job that too seems a good reason to leave if options are available.

But it’s hard to make the case that we have an ethical responsibility to leave a job because we simply don’t like the boss. That’s particularly true if we respect certain aspects of the way the boss runs the company and treats employees and don’t like those one or two things they do that makes us believe how nice it would be if the boss would just disappear.

Ultimately, the right thing to do if you don’t like your boss is not to flee the premises in search of new opportunities – although that’s sometimes an option – but instead to ask ourselves just how much whatever we don’t like about the boss affects whether we can do the work we’d like to do on this job.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of "The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice," is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues. 

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com. 

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin

(c) 2023 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Gratitude after a terrible week

 “I had a terrible week,” an associate wrote me late last week explaining why some commitment would take a little longer to deliver. While my initial impulse may have been to respond by describing my own week, I simply expressed sympathy for whatever she had faced and asked if the commitment was still possible and if so by what revised date.

Rarely do we know what others are going through — what challenges they face, what mishaps they encounter, what hardships they endure, what tragedies fall in their paths. But I’ve long ago come to the realization that it’s not a competition. One person’s “terrible” is not diminished by another person’s worst week ever.

But I will share some of my week with you. There was the frozen cold water pipe leading to the kitchen sink during subzero temperatures in Boston that resulted in a half-hour perched in the basement on top of a plastic garden tool case so I can reach the pipe and heat it up with an electric heat gun trying very hard not to burn the house down. There was the moment when I check the Nest thermostat app on my phone to see if heat was still on in the house and getting a message that left me wondering if the heat was off or if Wi-Fi was out. (It was the Wi-Fi. The heat was fine.) There was the navigation system in the car turning off with the message that the temperature was too cold for it to operate, leaving me to wonder if I had the same option.

And there were the moments I worried as much as I’ve ever been worried about anything whether my son would survive the heart attack he suffered and come off the ventilator he’d been on for a day-and-a-half that felt more like weeks. Because of the heroic efforts of my daughter-in-law closely following the 911 operator’s instructions about chest compressions, my youngest granddaughter directing the ambulance driver to the correct house, speedy work by the EMTs, the wisdom of the cardiologists, the kindness and attention of ICU nurses, and the throngs of support from friends and family, my son is now home and on the mend.

For all that, I along with many others whose lives he continues to touch, I am grateful. Gratitude strikes me as the right thing to hold in this moment.

He has no memory of this, but when he first regained consciousness after coming off the ventilator, I mentioned to him that I had given his youngest daughter some of his favorite poems to read to him as he recovered, including Seamus Heaney’s “Digging.” Almost before I got the title out, he said, “Between my finger and my thumb the squat pen rests; snug as a gun,” the first lines of the poem. My eyes welled up.

In Oliver Sacks' 2015 book “Gratitude,” which was released shortly after his death and that he had written knowing he was dying, he writes: “I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude.”

I had a terrible week last week. Yours may have had moments of terribleness as well. But especially given how things turned out, my predominant feeling is one of gratitude.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of "The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice," is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues. 

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com. 

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin

(c) 2023 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Just because you wear it doesn't mean you are it

How responsible are we for giving off an incorrect impression about who we are and what we’ve accomplished?

A reader we’re calling Prudence regularly watches the live feed of a radio program that features local experts on various topics ranging from world events and entertainment to sports and home cooking. On a recent episode, a local chef with whom Prudence was familiar was being interviewed about how to re-create in the home kitchen favorite dishes from area restaurants.

“He was wearing a college T-shirt from a college I know he didn’t go to,” wrote Prudence. “Isn’t that misrepresenting himself?”

My high school classmate Mark MacIntyre is fond of saying that we should “never underestimate the power of imprinted wearables.” But Prudence’s concern that the radio chef might be misrepresenting himself by the college T-shirt he chose to wear overestimates just how much that power can be. Simply donning the garb doesn’t translate into a self-declaration of a specific membership or any entitlements by garment association.

Many of us wear imprinted wearables from colleges or institutions. Sometimes these items represent places we attended, work for or buy stuff from. Sometimes they don’t. I alternate the baseball caps I wear between one from the University of Rhode Island (URI), where my youngest grandson is a senior, and one from the 4th Infantry Division of the U.S. Army, in which his older brother serves. I never attended URI, nor have I ever served in the 4th Infantry Division. I also occasionally wear a Stihl baseball cap when I use a battery-powered chainsaw to clear up fallen tree branches. Few people would assume I work for Stihl simply because I wear a cap with its name on it.

Don’t get me wrong. It is wrong to misrepresent yourself. Claiming to have earned a degree from a college when you’ve only completed a one-week executive education course, for example, is wrong. Listing jobs on your resume you never held falls into the category of lying and is not good. Posting a 20-year-old photo of yourself on a dating app that asks for a recent photo? Totally misleading and certainly bad form.

But wearing a T-shirt from a college you didn’t go to? There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. In fact, many colleges have a side hustle selling imprinted wearables for all to wear regardless of their affiliation. At a store near the university where I teach, you can even purchase T-shirts with names of the various sports teams. My youngest granddaughter wears a Harvard field hockey shirt that we sent her because she’s a field hockey goalie at her high school. To my knowledge, she hasn’t once pretended to be a member of the Harvard field hockey team, nor has anyone asked her if she was.

When it comes to stuff like this, the right thing is to not assume someone is claiming to be something they’re not simply because they wear affiliated imprinted wearables. They may or may not have an affiliation. When my oldest granddaughter graduated high school last year, we gave her a baseball cap from the college she was planning to attend. It’s bright red with bold letters. A handsome cap. We bought one to wear ourselves.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of "The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice," is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues. 

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com. 

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin

(c) 2023 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

It's your turn to fill the silence. I'm listening.

“[S]ilence is the weapon, silence and people’s need to fill it — as long as the person isn’t you,” wrote Robert Caro in his book Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing. Caro is the author of a four-volume (so far) biography of U.S. President Lyndon Johnson. In Working, he wrote about how to interview people successfully. His advice about silence, however, is something each of us might find useful in our relationships and conversations with other people.

It was reassuring to read Caro’s words when his book came out four years ago since I’ve long advised students in the writing classes I teach to avoid trying to fill any awkward silences when they were interviewing someone for a piece they were writing. Be patient and let the other person fill that silence first, I advised, and they will often find that some of the most forthcoming responses result. I have given similar advice to people going for job interviews. I also once told a crowd of high school students about to be interviewed by college professors for a potential scholarship that they’d be wise to get their professor interviewers filling as much of the silence in the interview as possible.

Caro recounted techniques used to fight the urge to fill every silence. Mystery writer Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret would clean his pipe while waiting for a suspect to talk. John le Carre’s George Smiley would use his necktie to clean his eyeglasses that he held in his hand. Caro himself wrote that he writes “SU” regularly in his interview notes to remind himself to shut up.

Silence indeed can feel uncomfortable. But rather than rush to hear our own voices to alleviate that discomfort, we’d all do better to have the patience to listen to what others have to say.

For almost 25 years, I’ve written some version of “The Right Thing” column in which I try to address ethical issues people face or ethical choices they have to make. While I often rely on email from readers to provide grist for the column, the column itself is pretty much me talking to you about whatever issue is the focus on the column that week. Sometimes readers respond to a column with their own takes on the topic, to express agreement, or to tell me how wrong they believe my take was. But mostly it’s me filling the silence.

As I’ve done from time to time over the years, I’m inviting you to fill that silence.

Email me (jeffreyseglin@gmail.com) your stories of an ethical challenge you faced, what you did in response, and why. Share an episode you witnessed of others around you choosing to do the right thing when they could have done otherwise. Let me know who or what influences your decisions when it comes to doing the right thing. If a book, movie, television show, piece of art or some other work has been influential in shaping how you look at challenging choices, send the details along.

If ethics is indeed “how we behave when we decide we belong together,” as Margaret Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers wrote in their book, A Simpler Way, then here’s the opportunity to share some of your stories about how you or those around you have behaved together. Here’s the opportunity to share your stories about how you’ve chosen to do the right thing. I’m listening.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of "The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice," is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues. 

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com. 

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin

(c) 2023 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Must I want to buy to get the prize offered?

I’m not fond of getting in between a couple arguing about an issue, but I’ve come to realize that often doing so is the nature of the column I write. Here’s the latest.

Often when they are on a vacation trip, a reader we’re calling Gregory tells me that he and his partner, whom we’re calling Stacy, find offers to view a timeshare or other real estate offering in exchange for some sort of voucher for their time. Stacy is, according to Gregory, always eager to take advantage of such offers. Over the years, they’ve had several lovely dinners mostly paid for with the vouchers they got for spending an hour or so touring a property.

The thing is, according to Gregory, they have never had any intention of purchasing a share in any of the properties they’ve agreed to tour. “We do it for the vouchers,” wrote Gregory, who insists they still have no intention of ever making a purchase.

For years, Gregory felt he and Stacy were wrong to express an interest when they each knew they were only in it for the vouchers. Stacy disagrees. According to Gregory, she believes that if the company makes a no-obligation-to-buy offer, all she and her partner are doing is agreeing to spend some of their vacation time making the tour in exchange for the reward offered.

Gregory wants to know if they were wrong to continue to present themselves as interested parties when they are clearly only interested in the vouchers.

I’m going to have to side with Stacy on this one. If the only stipulation the company makes is that the prospective voucher awardees commit their time, then the only obligation Gregory and Stacy have is to commit their time. It’s not without cost, after all. Spending an hour trying to be sold a property eats into otherwise relaxing vacation time. But even if either of them finds it relaxing to take such tours, they are still meeting their end of the obligation.

If the company asked the couple outright if they had any intention of making a purchase, Gregory and Stacy would be wrong to lie simply to get a free voucher. So far, however, Gregory indicated that that’s never been asked. Just time on the tour in exchange for the voucher. If Stacy wants to continue taking such tours and Gregory agrees to tag along, it’s OK to do so as long as they don’t misrepresent themselves to the companies making the offers.

Generally, after such tours, the company representative typically sits with the tour takers to try to sell them on the benefits of making a purchase. That’s OK too, as long as the company delivers on its promise to give whatever it promised upon the tour’s completion. I’m not sure that’s the way I would want to spend my vacation when I could be taking a stroll or reading a good book, but then I’m not Gregory and Stacy.

The right thing is for Gregory and Stacy and any companies offering vouchers for tours to be clear on what the agreement is that they are entering into and then for each to honor the commitment they made. If Stacy secretly would like to own one of the timeshares they visit and hasn’t told Gregory, that’s a different conundrum for another vacation — and perhaps another column.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of "The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice," is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues. 

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com. 

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin

(c) 2023 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

The output you submit should be your own

There has been quite a bit of buzz about ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot that was launched in November 2022 by OpenAI LP, a for-profit offshoot of the not-for-profit OpenAI Inc. After typing in a prompt, the chatbot spits out a readable essay, memo, email, piece of code, poem or other piece of writing the user asks for.

Often the results are remarkably readable and coherent, though not flawless. One former student, for example, sent me the results of their request to ChatGPT to “write an op-ed about Professor Jeffrey Seglin.” ChatGPT spit out a coherent six-paragraph column broadly capturing some things about me, but the resulting essay also got wrong the titles of two of the books I have written.

There were some accurate details in the essay: my name, what I write about and where I work. What ChatGPT got wrong: what it is I teach at the place it has me working. As a result, it misrepresented how influential I had been in certain fields of study without offering any research or detail to support its claims.

Given the factual errors in it and the lack of evidence and support for claims, it would have received a poor grade had it been turned in as an assignment. But if I hadn’t been told by the former student, I’m not sure I would have known for certain that the op-ed column had been generated by an AI chatbot.

Admission application essays are typically short and broadly stated responses to some prompt given to all applicants to the college or university. It is harder to verify the facts applicants write about themselves than it is to verify the title or author of a book or what someone teaches at a particular university. Can, for example, the reader of an application really verify how involved an applicant was in their community cleanup campaign?

Nevertheless, asking ChatGPT to respond to an application essay prompt is simple, and the results get spit out in seconds. It might seem a tempting shortcut. So why not do it?

Because just as hiring someone to write an application essay is dishonest and doesn’t reflect the work of the applicant, so too does farming the work out to an AI chatbot. Although someone somewhere might get away with using an AI chatbot to complete their homework without getting caught, the student will not learn how to think through and do the work themselves.

There might always be people who try to cheat. There might also be those who simply want to get through a course without having to do all of the thinking and work themselves. It should be made clear to applicants or students why trying to pass off an AI chatbot’s output as their own doesn’t result in them learning what they are presumably there to learn.

Although AI chatbot detectors are likely to be developed just as plagiarism detectors developed, the main reason not to pass off a chatbot’s work as our own is that it’s dishonest. Until we start admitting AI chatbots as students, the right thing is for each of us to do our own work even if we might not get caught having someone or something else do it for us. And if we didn’t contribute to that community cleanup effort, we shouldn’t claim we did — though there’s likely still time to pick up after ourselves.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of "The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice," is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues. 

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com. 

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin

(c) 2023 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Looking back at another year of doing the right thing

A year ago, at the end of 2021, after looking at the analytics for the website where The Right Thing column gets posted after it has run in publications, it was clear readers were drawn most to columns that touched on job searches, neighbor relationships and learning to listen to others. Those results were decidedly different from 2020, when many columns were related to the pandemic and the most readers were drawn to columns focusing on kindness, remembering those we’ve lost and thankfulness.

Just as in 2021, none of the most-viewed columns in 2022 focused directly on pandemic-related issues. Instead, the top five focused on neighborly activity, appropriate levels of criticism and paying college students for the work they do. Readers again seemed interested in those issues that attracted them in pre-pandemic times.

The fifth-most-viewed column, “Should neighbor report landscaper’s suspicious activity?” ran in early June. It focused on a neighbor who noticed that a landscaper working on a house up the street was connecting a hose to a city fire hydrant to water a newly sodded lawn. Some readers pointed out that the landscaper may have had permission. I advised the reader to let the city know about her concerns.

The fourth-most-viewed column, “Casting unsupported aspersions may shut down conversations,” ran in early January. It referred to the backlash the singer Bette Midler received after Tweeting a disparaging comment about West Virginians in response to an action taken by Sen. Joe Manchin. I believed and still do that Midler deserved the criticism for her comments but suggested her action could serve as a reminder that each of us might do well to knock it off with the name-calling and instead focus on learning to argue strongly while still listening openly to those with whom we disagree.

My April 24 column, “Stop unpaid college internships now,” made the case for employers to pay college students for the work they do on internships. While it’s true the students gain experience, employers benefit from their work. If internships are unpaid, then lower-income students are too often excluded from the opportunity. If colleges offer credit for internships, they should work to make sure those internships are paid.

Jan. 23’s column, “Should I negatively review a typically reliable service company?” reassured a reader that she had no obligation to leave a negative review simply because of one bad experience. Instead, I advised, she might want to contact the service provider directly to let them know how out of character the service was in an effort to avoid it happening to her or others in the future.

Finally, by far the most viewed column of the year was April's “Seek the choice that gives you that peaceful easyfeeling.” It outpaced its nearest competitor by almost 1,900 views. In it I reminded readers that just because we disagree with someone doesn’t mean the other person has behaved unethically. Sometimes we simply disagree with someone else’s viewpoint. That disagreement doesn’t make them any less ethical than we are.

Thank you, as always, for continuing to email your questions, stories and reactions for The Right Thing column. May your year continue to be full of doing the right thing while surrounded by those in your life who choose to do the same.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of "The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice," is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues. 

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com. 

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin

(c) 2023 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Keep some room in your heart for those around you

Almost every one of my jacket pockets contains a face mask. As I am writing this column, if I look behind me, I count seven stacked boxes with rapid COVID tests. Starting two years ago, a fresh box of Mucinex tablets and a bottle of extra-strength Tylenol became staples in the upstairs medicine cabinet and remain so. Daily, I learn of someone else who has tested positive for COVID. Made-up names like “Paxlovid” now seem as familiar as words like “lozenge” or “steam.”

Many of us returned to work in person more than a year ago. Some of us never had the luxury of working remotely, but we returned with far more caution than prior to the pandemic. When I first returned to work in person and took the subway to work, everyone was required to wear a mask. As masks moved from required to highly suggested, about three-quarters of passengers continued to mask up. Now, it’s less than half.

Even as restrictions have lifted and the number of COVID cases and deaths no longer stream across the television news channels or arrive as nightly alerts in our inboxes, the detritus of the pandemic remains. So too do cases of COVID and resulting deaths. Many of us remain concerned about getting COVID and passing it on to others.

What, then, is the right thing to do now that mandates and restrictions have largely been lifted?

While it might seem it is time for each of us to make our own choices about how to go forth in a world where many have decided COVID no longer presents a risk, for many at-risk people, this is simply not a valid approach. Certainly we have to make our own decisions about whether to mask or not, but to do so ethically requires us to think carefully about the effects our decisions could have on others.

If a store or business or hospital or other outfit posts signs indicating that masks are required, then we should wear a mask. If we are invited to a gathering with people and want to know if everyone will have been vaccinated or tested prior to going, it’s OK to ask. We should not hesitate refusing invitations to such events if we’re not comfortable attending. Our questions shouldn’t be interpreted as judging a host’s decisions. The hosts shouldn’t judge our comfort level. They too should keep in mind the health risks for every one of their invitees.

So too should our places of employment. Eliminating unnecessary group meetings is always a good idea, even more so now. Providing the option of remote meetings may continue to be wise.

Signs on the subway platform recommend but don’t require masking up. Many at-risk people may choose to avoid public transportation now that masking isn’t optional. But given that some have no choice but to use public transportation, we should keep them in mind.

I do not know when things will get back to the normal that existed prior to the pandemic’s arrival in March 2020. It might seem unimaginable to some that they ever will. “Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable,” Mary Oliver wrote in her poem “Evidence.” In the meantime, the right thing is to continue to keep some room in our hearts for those around us as we all navigate our way around.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of "The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice," is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues. 

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com. 

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin

(c) 2023 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.