Work advice: Coworker uses team chat as his personal platform

Reader: I work in a partially remote group of a dozen or so people. One employee greatly abuses our chat site and uses it like his own social media site. There’s no filter or attempt to keep it focused on work.

For example, he overshares personal information such as what he just had done at the dentist or doctor’s office; pest control problems at his home; memes he thinks are funny; the oddball diet he’s on and how anyone eating anything else is horrible; and endless detailed complaints about minor workday annoyances that we all experience but keep to ourselves.

His work is generally good, but he’s not very nice and I don’t like him. Most of the time, everyone ignores him. Occasionally he might get a “thumbs up” from a manager when he posts something work-related.

He doesn’t get the hint that no one is responding, and I’m so worn out. Occasionally I’ll say: “That’s more detail than I wanted to know.” But that doesn’t seem to slow it down. Management doesn’t say a word about the oversharing.

He says he’s staying at this job until he retires, 10 or more years from now. Any advice for me?

Karla: To summarize: You’re depleted and disgusted by incessant exposure to the banal, unseemly, judgmental blathering of someone who isn’t very nice and whom you don’t like. And no one’s shutting him up, so you’re stuck with him until he supposedly leaves the job some years from now.

I think many of us can identify with that.

The good news is that your guy seems to have little to no authority over anyone else. Your managers’ tepid acknowledgment of his sporadic on-point contributions is hardly an endorsement. It sounds as if you can safely deny him space in your brain without worrying about any actual damage he might do. He’s all prattle, no power.

Technology might offer you solutions to the very problem it’s enabling. Most chat platforms let you prioritize and de-prioritize messages based on subject, sender and other parameters. If you don’t have a help desk or tech-savvy colleague available, an internet search for how to sort messages on your platform should turn up some instructions. An “out of sight, out of mind” filter would probably ease 90 percent of your frustration.

Of course, you risk missing an actual work-related message if everything coming from this co-worker gets muted or flagged as spam. But I would see that as an opportunity to request some tech usage policies from management to prevent future misconnections. Is the chat platform meant to allow everyone to socialize even while working remotely - in which case you can tune it out at will? Or is it primarily a productivity tool that needs to be kept clear of nonwork content?

Aside from technology, I recommend you follow everyone else’s lead in dealing with this living spambot: Stop responding to him.

For some people, “that is more detail than I wanted to know” is sufficient notice that they need to drop the subject. Or they might just think you’re wryly amused. Others might not be wired to process a message subtler than: “Please stop talking about that; it’s tiresome/irrelevant/disgusting/inappropriate for work.” And, of course, there are the antisocial types who take any direct protest as an invitation to double down on whatever disturbance they are causing.

If you’re in a position or an environment where you can get away with being blunt, or if you suspect your colleague falls into the socially-clueless-but-not-antagonistic category of person, you might have nothing to lose by saying in private that you find his personal monologues disruptive and would appreciate if he could limit his postings to work matters. But then, if that were a viable option for you, I assume you would already have tried it.

In the end, if you can’t block him out with technology or shut him down with social cues, and you want to continue working with this group, you’re going to have to find some way to condition yourself to be less reactive to his nonstop inanities. Pity him as lonely and desperate for connection. Dismiss him as weird but harmless. Write him into a book in which you finish him off any way you please. Remind yourself of the blessing of having a bigger inner life than he’s revealing to everyone.

Incidentally, if he crosses any lines that could be HR trip wires, such as sharing racist or sexist memes or prying into others’ medical status, the appropriate approach is neither technological nor psychological, but organizational: Document and report your concerns to management and HR. Those enforcement systems aren’t perfect, but they have the means and mandate to deal with bad behavior that goes beyond annoying to actionable.

Karla L. Miller offers weekly advice on workplace dramas and traumas. You can send her questions at karla.miller@washpost.com.