Coworker Wants Me to Keep a Secret!!

Hi friends,

             My friend was working at a company for 1 year. It’s a small company with a very emotional owner. She was hired to replace a sales representative who had worked with her for 10 years. They had become close friends, but the manager fired her unexpectedly at the end of 2008 and never talked to her again.

              The ex-employee is now working for another company. The owner of my company used to be good friends with the owners of the company she works for. For some reason, he no longer talks to these people either.

             One of my friend's coworkers and the ex-employee are very good friends. The ex-employee has been invited to attend a trade show where we will be staffing our company’s booth. However, her new employers cannot pay for her hotel costs. My friend's coworker offered to let her stay at our hotel, sharing her room. They have asked me to keep it a secret from my employer.

            They made it clear that my friend can say no to this if she is uncomfortable, but she do feel pressure to say that she will not tell her employer.

          She know that she do not want to stay at this company for long, but it still seems wrong to do this. Unfortunately, it’s a small company and she travel with this one coworker 5 times a year. She do feel disappointed if she don’t go along.

           In general, there’s nothing inherently wrong with offering to let someone stay in your company-paid hotel room.

          There appears to be bad blood between your boss and the former employee, and between your boss and the employee’s new company. Offering your boss’s enemies a resource that your boss paid for to assist them isn’t the smartest move, nor is it ethical. (Enemy may be too strong a word, but the concept stands.) It’s true that allowing her to share the room won’t cost your boss additional money, but it comes across as disloyal — and when you throw secrecy in on top of that, it forms a pretty toxic combination.

You’d be better off doing one of two things:

1. Remove the secrecy and say it’s fine with you as long as the boss knows. If the boss hasn’t shown open hostility to this ex-employee, why not just say, “Hey, she asked if she can room with us at the trade show. Any reason we should say no?”

or

2. Just tell your coworker you’re not comfortable with it. Explain that you wouldn’t feel right keeping a secret from your boss, that you can’t be in that position, and that you hope she understands.