By maintaining a degree of confidentiality about your private life, you have the opportunity to maintain a professional image, while cultivating and safeguarding relationships with colleagues. If you let your private life affect your job performance, you risk compromising the idea others have of you when you work. By setting very clear boundaries, maintaining self-control and keeping the professional and personal spheres separate, you will be able to preserve your private life without being considered cold and aloof in the workplace.
Steps
Part 1 of 3: Establishing Boundaries Between Work and Private Life
Step 1. Decide which topics to avoid
If you are trying to keep some discretion about your private life when you are at work, the first thing to do is to know exactly where you intend to draw a line. This speech can vary based on the person and the atmosphere in the workplace, but also on the type of balance you are trying to establish between work and family life. Whatever the rules in the office, you can still set your limits. Start by making a list of the topics you don't intend to discuss with your colleagues.
- The topics that you will probably want to exclude from conversations with colleagues could involve love life, health conditions, religion and political opinions.
- Think about topics that make you uncomfortable or that you don't care to explore with your co-workers.
- Try not to make your list public, but make sure you remember what you wrote so that if necessary you can escape the conversations you prefer to avoid.
Step 2. Know the questions the employer cannot ask
There are various questions that, by law, are prohibited to the employer. They relate to ethnic origin, as they could encourage discrimination against employees, the intimate and personal sphere, family status and possible disability. If someone asks you something like this in the workplace, it is your right not to answer. Here are other questions you don't need to answer:
- Are you an Italian citizen?
- Do you take drugs, smoke or drink?
- Which is your religion?
- You're pregnant?
- What is your ethnic origin?
Step 3. Avoid private phone calls when you are at work
If you are trying to keep your professional life separate from your private life, then you need to avoid bringing the latter into the office. Basically, you no longer have to make or receive personal phone calls and emails when you work. It's not a problem if you call from time to time to make an appointment at the hairdresser or dentist, but if you stay on the phone very often talking about confidential topics, not only is there a risk that your colleagues will hear you, but they may also ask you a few questions. on your telephone conversations.
- If you talk on the phone often, you also risk that your boss and colleagues who consider you a poor worker will show their disappointment.
- If you don't want to receive business phone calls at home, don't make a habit of making personal calls at work.
Step 4. Leave your private life at home
This is easier said than done, but you should try to detach yourself from family and personal issues as soon as you walk into the office. If you can draw a clear line between these two spheres every day, you will find it less difficult to achieve this goal. For example, taking four steps before and after working out could help you mentally separate these two areas.
- Consider commuting to work as a time to try to get away from home problems and focus on professional ones.
- Also, just like if you limit your personal calls to the office, if you show up for work every morning with a clear head without thinking or talking about your personal life, you won't entice your colleagues to ask you questions.
- If you look stressed or upset or walk around the office while on the phone with your partner, don't be surprised if your colleagues will try to find out about what happened later.
- Take the opportunity to find a balance between work and family life.
Part 2 of 3: Maintain Great Business Relationships
Step 1. Be friendly
Even if you don't want to talk about your private life with colleagues, you always have the opportunity to build good working relationships that make office hours more enjoyable and productive. It is not difficult to find conversation points to chat during your lunch break, without going into the most intimate details of your private life.
- If any colleague has no problem confiding in others or you find yourself in a conversation you don't intend to participate in, politely dismiss.
- Sports, television, and film are great topics for being polite and chatting with colleagues without talking about your family life.
Step 2. Try to be tactful
If during a conversation you find yourself making some hints about your personal life or a colleague asks you something about which you prefer to remain discreet, try to avoid the subject tactfully. Don't respond by saying, "I'm sorry, but it's none of your business." Instead, take it lightly by answering, for example, "You better not go on. It would be too boring" and change the subject by talking about something that doesn't embarrass you.
- These attention-diverting tricks allow you to maintain friendly relations by avoiding certain topics.
- If you manage to sidetrack the question and change the subject instead of ending the conversation, your interlocutor will most likely not even notice.
- If you bring the talk to your colleague, you will politely avoid his or her questions without sounding aloof and disinterested.
- You might say, "Nothing interesting is happening in my life, and yours?"
- If he insists on asking you personal questions, try setting a limit by telling him you prefer not to talk about it. You can answer: "I know you want to find out because you care about our relationship and I appreciate it very much, but I prefer to leave this kind of matter at home."
Step 3. Maintain some elasticity
While on the one hand it is important to remember the boundaries between family and professional life, on the other you should try to be flexible. Drawing a clear line between these two spheres does not mean avoiding any kind of interaction or completely isolating yourself from the work environment.
If co-workers invite you for a drink at 5pm, accept once in a while, limiting yourself to participating in discussions you feel comfortable in
Part 3 of 3: Keeping Your Virtual Life Confidential
Step 1. Be cautious on social networks
Often the biggest problem for people who prefer to keep work separate from private life is the spread of social networks. People share every aspect of their life, and sometimes they don't take into account how accessible all this information is to those who take the time to search for it. The first step in dealing with this problem is simply to be careful and think about how business on these sites might reveal scraps of your personal world that you intend to leave out of your business world.
- If you want to keep a professional image even in the virtual field and do not intend to provoke any kind of curiosity about your private life, avoid openly publishing anything that could threaten it.
- It applies to messages and comments, but also to photos. If you want to keep these two spheres of your life separate, you need to keep this in mind both inside and outside the office.
- Don't tweet or write comments about your work or colleagues in your virtual profiles.
- Try to consider creating more than one account to keep these two spheres of your life separate.
- Consider connecting with colleagues on professional sites like LinkedIn, and sharing personal events with friends and family on Facebook. This way you will be able to keep your professional and private life separate.
Step 2. Correct your privacy settings
If you want to use your virtual profile to keep in touch with friends, you can be active on social networks without blocking friend requests from your colleagues. Think about how you can adjust your privacy settings to limit what you can share with people in the office.
- You can control the publication of information about you and, to some extent, also who has access to it.
- However, keep in mind that whatever gets posted on the internet doesn't go away quickly.
Step 3. Use corporate email for work only
Since so much communication at work and in private life takes place via e-mail, it is often the case that personal and business e-mails are merged into a single address. If you are aware of this, run for cover to make sure you keep the two spheres separate. Always use your work email for professional matters and your personal email for everything else.
- Determine what time to stop checking work emails in the evening and stick to this decision.
- By maintaining these limits, you will avoid carrying work with you all the time.
- Based on your professional activity, you will need to develop a strategy to close all business communications once the day is over.
- In most cases, there is no right to privacy in business emails. Usually the boss is allowed to read whatever is sent or received in the corporate mail account. Therefore, remember to use your private e-mail for personal matters, avoiding communicating any kind of information that you would like to keep confidential through the work mail address.
