I’d skip further discussion with him, or with colleagues who seem to be re-enacting a bad episode of “Mad Men.” Then go up the chain as high as you’re comfortable going, and make your concerns known. (Cite your company’s own E.E.O.C.-related policies, if applicable.) It sounds as if your goal isn’t to punish anybody for past crudeness but rather to bring it to an end. So be clear: This kind of discourse is having a negative effect on the workplace, and it needs to stop.

As a legal matter, a blunt complaint — again, depending on company size and location — can grant a kind of “protective status” to the person voicing it, Ms. Panarites notes, that would cast any subsequent adverse employment action against that person in a suspect light and could lead to a charge of retaliation. That said, a full-on lawsuit is no fun for anybody, and I’m not suggesting that this should be your ultimate goal.

It’s likely that the company would prefer to avoid it, too. You tried expressing your concerns informally and got a boys-will-be-boys answer. At this point, you can either go on the record to management — or start sending résumés to the 21st century.

Peer Review: Bonus Thinking

This is in reference to “Bucking the Bonus System” (Oct. 19) and to Lou, the questioner who wished that his firm’s bonus system extended beyond management to all workers. It isn’t common to have an all-employee bonus plan, as bonuses should be a reward for meeting specific objectives. But maybe the conundrum can be solved by recommending that Lou’s employer establish a “spot bonus” plan for employees who aren’t currently eligible for bonuses.

Such a plan would reward employees for going above and beyond their job responsibilities; it could be in the form of money or something else (like a gift certificate or a night on the town). These rewards should be granted in a timely fashion — say, if an employee went out of her way to provide stellar customer service to a client.

SHERRIE MATZA, SAN FRANCISCO

This strikes me as a creative addition to the discussion of how to think about bonus plans — and about Lou’s objection to a bonus scheme that rewards managers only.

Apart from sending two important signals — that a bonus should be tied to genuine achievement and that such rewards be available to all — this idea makes it easier to offer a timely extra payoff for a job particularly well done. A potential weakness of many traditional annual bonus setups is that the relationship between reward and performance can feel a little abstract.