Keep Your Personal Life Private at Work

Keeping your private life private can help you present a professional image while still enabling you to develop and maintain good working relationships with your colleagues. Allowing your private life to have too big an impact on your job conduct can harm perceptions of you at work. By establishing some sensible boundaries, exercising self-control, and separating your work and home worlds you can keep your private life private without being considered aloof at work.

Steps

Drawing Boundaries Between Work and Life

1. Decide what not to talk about. The first thing to do if you are trying to keep your private life private at work is to determine where exactly you want to draw the line. This will vary from person to person and according to the particular culture at your workplace, as well as what kind of balance between work and home life you are looking for. Whatever the norm is in your office, you can still draw up your own boundaries. Start by making a list of the things you don't want to discuss with your colleagues.
   • This might include things such as your love life, any medical conditions, religion and political views.
   • Think about what things you are not comfortable with or just not interested in discussing with your colleagues.
   • Don't publicise your list, but keep it as a mental reminder to yourself so you can excuse yourself from conversations you would rather avoid.
2. Know what employers cannot ask you. There are a number of questions that, by law, your employers cannot ask you about. These are questions about your background and life which could lead to discrimination. For example, your employer cannot ask you how old you are, whether you have any disabilities, or whether you are married or not. If someone does ask you these questions at work, it is your right not to answer them. Other questions you don't have to answer are:
   • Are you a US citizen?
   • Do you take drugs, smoke or drink?
   • What is your religion?
   • Are you pregnant?
   • What is your race?
3. Cut out personal calls at work. If you are trying to keep your work and private life separate then you need to avoid bringing your private life into the office with you. This means cutting downs on private calls and emails from the office. Occasional calls to make an appointment with the hairdresser or dentist are fine, but if you are frequently heard on the phone talking about your private life, not only will your colleagues most likely overhear you, but they may ask you about the conversation.
   • Excessive personal calls may also displease your boss and colleagues who think you are not working hard enough.
   • If you don't want to receive work calls at home, don't get into the habit of making personal calls at work.
4. Leave domestic affairs at home. It can be easier said than done, but you should try to leave your home life at home and switch to the strictly professional version of you at work. You might find that getting a routine or daily habit to mark the transition between work and home life will help you to do this. For example, a short walk before and after work could have you mentally separate these two spheres of your life.
   • Your commute could be a time in which you try to switch your thoughts from home life to work.
   • Just like limiting personal calls at work, if you walk in each morning with a clear mind not thinking or talking about your personal life you will not invite questions from colleagues.
   • If you look stressed or upset, or you walk into the office while on the phone to your partner, don't be surprised if your colleagues ask you about it.
   • Think of this as actively managing your relationship between work life and home life.

Maintaining Good Professional Work Relationships

1. Be friendly. Even if you don't want to discuss your private life with your colleagues, you can still develop good working relationships that make your time at work more enjoyable and productive. It's easy to find topics of conversation for lunchtime small talk that don't involve you talking about any intimate details of your private life.
   • If there is somebody at work who talks about their private life a lot, or there is a conversation that you don't want to be involved in, politely excuse yourself.
   • Talking about things such as sports, TV and film can be good ways to be friendly and chat to colleagues without bringing up your home life.
2. Use tact. If you find yourself in a conversation that is turning to your personal life, or a colleague has asked you about something that you would rather keep private, it's a good idea to tactfully sway out of the way of the question. Try to avoid saying something like "Sorry, but that's none of your business". Instead, make light of it and say something more like "Oh, you don't want to know about that. It's boring" and then change the subject to something you are more comfortable with.
   • These deflecting techniques can help you to maintain friendly relationships while avoiding certain topics of conversation.
   • If you sway away from the question and change the subject, rather than just ending the conversation, your colleague will probably not think too much of it.
   • If you switch the conservation back to your colleague you will politely avoid their questions without seeming aloof or disinterested.
   • You could say, "Nothing interesting is going on in my life, what about you?"
   • If coworkers are persistent in asking about your personal life, you can set a boundary letting them know that you would rather not discuss it. You can say, “I know you guys really care about me to ask about my life, and I appreciate that about you, but I’d really like to leave that stuff at home.”
3. Maintain some flexibility. While it is important that you have an idea in your head about the boundaries you have set between home life and work life, you should try to keep some flexibility. Having good boundaries needn't translate into you always shunning certain interactions, or isolating yourself away from your colleagues entirely.
   • If your colleagues invite you for a 5pm drink, go along every now and again but stick to conversation topics you are comfortable with.

Keeping Your Online Life Private

1. Be aware of your social media activity. Increasingly the biggest problem for those who would rather keep their work and private lives separate is the proliferation of social media. People record all aspects of their lives and sometimes don't fully comprehend how accessible all of this information is to anybody who cares to look for it. The first step to tackling this problem is simply being aware of it and thinking about how your social media activity could reveal parts of your private life you'd rather keep out of the office.
   • If you want to maintain a professional image online and don't want to invite questions about your private life, avoid posting anything openly that could threaten this.
   • This includes text and comments as well as photos. If you want to keep the two elements of your life separate you need to do this outside of the office as well as inside it.
   • Don't tweet or comment about your job or your colleagues in your social media accounts.
   • You might consider setting up multiple social media accounts to keep the two areas of your life separate.
   • Consider connecting with work colleagues on professional sites such as LinkedIn, and reserve things like Facebook for personal friends and family. This will help you keep these arenas separate.
2. Adjust your privacy settings. It is possible to be active on social media without blocking your colleagues' friends requests, if you just want to use your online profile to keep in touch with friends. Think about how you can adjust your privacy settings so that you limit the amount of material you share with your colleagues.
   • You can control the amount of information about you that goes online and you can, to some extent, control who has access to it.
   • But be aware that once something is on the internet it is not likely to disappear quickly.
3. Only use your work email for work. So much communication in our working lives and our lives outside work is conducted through email, that it can be easy for your work email and personal email to blend into one. You should be conscious of this and take steps to make sure you keep the two separate. Always use your work email for work and your personal email for everything else.
   • Set a time when you will stop looking at your work email in the evening and stick to it.
   • Keeping these email boundaries will help you to avoid carrying your work around with you.
   • Depending on your place of work you will have to develop a strategy for cutting off work communications that fits in with your job.
   • In most cases, you do not have a right to privacy in your work email. Your boss is usually legally able to read anything sent or received in work email accounts. Keep your personal matters in your personal email to avoid any sharing of information you want to keep private.

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Sources and Citations

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