Work Advice: How to deal with a customer’s abusive online messages (original) (raw)

Reader: I’m on the customer support team for a website. One individual in our online community habitually insults us. None of his comments use racial slurs, make explicit sexual comments or post spam, which are approved reasons for removing a user. They are just insulting, like going to someone else’s question and posting a comment like: “A competent employee would fix this, but instead the company hired you, so nothing will happen.”

The company is big enough that we have a small HR department, but small enough that the founder can overrule any decision he disagrees with. He also promotes libertarian politics, and what I’ve heard about a prior incident makes me believe he would rather have the staff insulted than lose a customer. My question is: Does letting a customer insult your staff constitute a hostile work environment?

Karla: I’m not sure what your founder’s politics have to do with allowing a troll to squat on his virtual premises and belch insults at his employees. Surely even the most ardent defenders of individual liberty understand that freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences.

You’re right that business owners, even those who believe the customer is always right, have obligations to provide a safe and discrimination-free work environment for their employees, including in interactions with customers. But for your local troll’s behavior to meet the standards of contributing to a legally actionable hostile work environment, he would have to be targeting individuals on the basis of a protected class — sex, gender, faith, age, disability, national origin, etc. Since he’s just clever enough to avoid crossing certain lines, my guess is that your employer is not legally required to do anything about him.

Then again, your founder is willing to remove users for posting spam — presumably not because of legal liability, but because it’s disruptive, interferes with other users’ experience and pollutes your online community. So your company already has a precedent for banning certain kinds of discourse for reasons other than illegal discrimination and harassment. It would be simple enough to add “bullying” or “personal attacks” to the list of types of speech that will not be tolerated in your company’s discussion boards and to at least allow the removal of those remarks, if not the users making them.

The question is whether your founder is willing to draw that line. Perhaps he believes all engagement, even nongermane and negative commentary, means more eyeballs on his website and more value for his brand, regardless of the psychological and emotional cost to his employees and other users who just want to share product reviews or troubleshoot a technical problem. (Ask the owner of social media site X how that philosophy is panning out as users flee to other sites promising more restrictions on bots and trolls.)

But maybe your founder is simply unaware of the toll your troll is taking on his employees’ well-being. If you and colleagues band together to collect and present all instances of the troll’s abusive comments, you may be able to persuade your founder to add anti-bullying restrictions and enforcement measures to your website’s terms of service. Whether you engage HR in this effort is up to you; they may side with the founder, or they could be valuable allies in helping convince him that backing his people on this issue is important to his business goals.

If this collective effort fails, the standard way to deal with trolls who can’t be externally blocked or removed is to leave their comments unaddressed, hanging in the ether like errant spitballs. Know that they’re the offerings of someone with mental and emotional deficiencies — which have nothing to do with you or your performance.

Reader query: It’s almost time for the year-end Work Advice roundup! If you have had a question answered in the column, we’d all love to hear how your situation turned out. Did you take the advice given, or take a different route? How did it go? Let me know at karla.miller@washpost.com.