I manage the internship program at my job. We have six and twelve month internships. This post is about a woman (22) in the program, I’ll call her Hester.
I noticed Hester hugged her colleagues a lot. It was something I brought up in our One on Ones because it seemed excessive. She didn’t seem to like that feedback but didn’t say anything.
Around December she tried to hug me at a company function. Her review was the next day so I brought it up again.
Saying she needed to keep her hands to herself, that this was a work place and not a social club, and reminded her that a lot of people, including myself, do not like being hugged.
She argued with me and said it was how she greeted people and shared a connection with them. I told her she needed to find another way of doing so.
She got sulky and I don’t feel like we came to much of an understanding, despite my efforts to talk through it. I told her that this would be the last time I would be willing to have this conversation with her.
A new intern program joined us a couple weeks ago. On Monday, two of them came into my office and wanted to talk about Hester.
Apparently, she had been constantly hugging on them, despite them both telling her to stop. I apologized to them and also had some conversations with the teams the interns worked with and this had been an ongoing problem.
Wednesday I brought Hester into my office and told her that she could no longer be part of the program. I explained that we had talked about this twice before, that she was making people uncomfortable, and she appeared to not be picking up on work place norms.
She was not happy about this and ended up needing to be escorted out. Yesterday and today I’ve been getting calls from her parents saying she needs this internship and that they don’t think it’s a big deal and I shouldn’t have fired her for it.