TL;DR: Told two coworkers to stop chatting within earshot of their team members, got told off for “public shaming.” AITA?

For context, my work environment is VERY busy and fast-paced. People work towards very stressful deadlines, and if you’re contributing as you should, there is almost zero downtime. This day, I had a very intense workload, as did the 5-person team I supervise. We were all stressed.

Enter two coworkers, I’ll call them Rima and Lucy. Both are women in their mid-20s. I am not their supervisor, but was well-within earshot of them, as we have one of those terrible open office spaces. Their supervisor was leaving in two weeks and very much checked-out. 

Rima (who has put in her notice) and Lucy, are  junior, hourly employees who have been chatting nonstop for about an hour. I know it’s not work related based on some words I pick up. For several minutes, I wait for their supervisor or another senior employee on their team to intervene, but none of them do. Most of the managers at my company are young, and many of them are very non-confrontational. I’m getting increasingly frustrated.

I use the internal chat system to message a senior staff member in their row who ignores me. At one point, I go to the kitchen to get a snack, and another junior employee on their team complains to me that he can’t do his work because of the talking. 

At that point, I go up to them in their row and say: “guys, the chatting has to stop. This is a common working environment.” They have guilty looks on their faces and stop talking, and I go back to my work. I told them off within earshot of their row, but with a normal speaking voice. Ie. Not excessively loudly. 

The next day, I find out that Rima complained to the department manager, feeling like she was disrespected because she was “publicly shamed.” The manager tells me off about it, and tells me I should have brought them into another room and talked to them privately. I apologize for creating a situation my manager had to deal with, but told her I was on fundamental disagreement with her point of view.  

My opinion is that the burden of expectations should be on staff to act professionally, not for managers to disrupt their work flow to walk on eggshells around disrespectful employees. Besides, pulling them into a separate room would have been just as conspicuous given the office layout. 

I was certain I was in the right but when I vented about it privately to a friend of mine in the office also told me I was in the wrong. His opinion also bothers me, as he told me that I should have “used the opportunity to act as a female mentor to young women instead of berate them.” I find this attitude to be paternalistic (shouldn’t women my age be expected to be as professional as everyone else?), and puts an extra expectation of emotional labor on me, who already has a team to manage. I also have an odd sense that there is a gender dimension to this as I frequently tell the male members of the tech team to lower their voices when they’re talking about memes, but nobody has ever taken issue with that. 

AITA? 


