For Months, HR Asked Me to Sign a Confession. But They Wouldn’t Say for What!

Good Job is Slate’s advice column on work. Have a workplace problem big or small? Send it to Laura Helmuth and Doree Shafrir here. (It’s anonymous!)

Dear Good Job,

A little over a month ago, I got summoned to HR while at my regular work tasks. I was sat down, and told to sign a paper acknowledging responsibility for the “incident on June 15” and stating that I would “accept consequences thereof, including but not limited to remedial sensitivity training.” I had absolutely no idea what they were talking about. As far as I could remember, that was a normal workday where I logged in, did my duties as a bookkeeper, and went home.

I told them I wasn’t going to sign anything accepting responsibility when I haven’t the foggiest idea what this is even referring to. That seemed to make the HR reps even more hostile. Yes I had to sign it. No, they weren’t going to tell me what the incident was since I might retaliate, or who was making a complaint about me. I reiterated I wasn’t going to sign when I had no idea what I was even supposedly accepting responsibility for. After maybe half an hour, they told me to go back to my workstation.

That began a Kafkaesque situation. I’d get called to HR every day and repeatedly told to sign the paper. My boss would sometimes tell me I should too, but that it “wasn’t a directive.” Nobody would tell me what it was about. I consistently refused to sign anything when I was accepting responsibility for what amounted to a black box.

And then, this Tuesday, it all seems to have vanished like some bad dream. My boss is smiling when he sees me again, no more HR calls, and I got assigned a new, pretty high prestige project that comes with a temporary pay supplement as long as I’m working on it.

My annual review comes up at the end of the month. I’ve always gotten good reviews previously, but the whole experience has left me very confused as to where I now stand in the company. I’m not sure if I should be putting this all behind me, updating my resume and looking for work somewhere else, or if I should be demanding an explanation while I have some time with my boss in private. What do you think?

—Bewildered

Dear Bewildered,

I sometimes feel like people overuse the word “Kafkaesque,” but your situation does, indeed, seem Kafkaesque! I can’t begin to try to assume what this was about or why your employers behaved the way they did, but I reached out to South Florida-based employment lawyer Michelle Cohen Levy to get some clarity on your situation. (She made sure to give me the caveat that none of this should be considered legal advice.)

Levy was not optimistic that you’re going to get any real insight from your boss. “The boss is going to likely be evasive and tell them to move on or that it’s over. Plus, the boss is looking out for themselves and doesn’t want to get in trouble for disclosing something,” Levy said.

The good news, Levy said, is that you did the right thing by refusing to sign something with zero information. “When an employer mandates an employee to sign things like write ups or reviews that are incorrect or incomplete—or devoid of any facts like this one—employees should sign under protest by actually writing out ‘Jane Smith, signed under protest.’ This way if there is a dispute down the line, the employer doesn’t have a piece of paper that they can wave around and say ‘see, they signed it so they admitted it.’”

My personal takeaway from Levy’s advice and your situation is when it comes to your job, sleep with one eye open—and start looking for a new job.

—Doree

Classic Prudie

What’s the classiest way to say, “Really and truly, do not bring your kids into my house, no matter how cool or mature they are”? We have this problem where we throw nice grown-up parties and our friends bring kids. We’ve tried to be nice. First, we changed the names to identify the nature of the party—“Fancy Cocktail Hour,” “Wine & Dine,” et cetera. That helped but didn’t fix the problem.