Older employees who are disturbed by younger, more boisterous colleagues in the workplace are not victims of age harassment, an employment tribunal has ruled.
Employees in their 20s and 30s may annoy more mature co-workers by chatting, socialising and looking at their phones but they are not breaking workplace equality rules, the tribunal said.
The ruling came in the case of Catherine Ritchie, an administrator in her late 60s who took her bosses to an employment tribunal for grievances including the noisy fun her younger co-workers were having while she was trying to get on with her job.
Ritchie said she found it difficult to watch “extreme time wasting and low productivity” from “noisy and boisterous” younger colleagues and was left with a pounding headache and a hoarse voice from having to talk loudly to make herself heard.
The tribunal in Watford, Hertfordshire, heard that Ritchie was 66 when she began working for an electrical engineering company and was the oldest person there.
In its summary of the case, the tribunal said Ritchie found the office a very noisy environment and that this was distracting when she was trying to make calls.
It said: “She indicated that she found it unprofessional of colleagues to engage in personal conversations in the office, when they ought to be working. She referred to the fact that they were not paid to socialise and that she had difficulty in watching such time wasting and low productivity.”
She felt she was not respected when she asked for quiet and asked a manager if she could work from home but this was not allowed. Ritchie was told by one manager that she should concentrate on reaching her targets and not concern herself with what was going on around her.
The tribunal said what she experienced did not amount to harassment.
It concluded: “The tribunal accepted that the claimant took her work seriously and wished to remain professional at all times, but they considered that her projection of this standard to all those with whom she worked was not reasonable and resulted in her having unreasonable feelings of indignation about their behaviour when she did not have justifiable reason to do so.
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“The tribunal considered that the claimant’s perception of the noisy and disruptive behaviour as amounting to harassment was not reasonable.”