The LA Times tells us today that we all forgot our social skills during the pandemic:
As companies increasingly recall workers to the office, employees and managers alike are finding that the pandemic made us all a little rusty with in-person conduct. Co-workers are too loud at their desks. People are on their phones during meetings. Shaking hands is no longer a given. Small talk at networking events is ... awkward.
Bosses’ solution to this stilted behavior? Charm school.
More than 6 in 10 companies will send their employees to office etiquette classes by 2024, according to a July survey of 1,548 business leaders by ResumeBuilder.com.
Oh come on. Does anyone seriously believe that we all forgot routine social behavior while we were working from home? Likewise, does anyone believe that 60% of all companies plan to send their workers to business etiquette classes this year? Here's what ResumeBuilder.com says these classes are going to teach people:
Uh huh. This is almost certainly just another press release survey of no value whatsoever. And even if it did have value, it tells us nothing about whether this changed during the pandemic. I can't think of anything that would, but here's my best try:
Google's Ngram viewer says that mentions of "business etiquette" peaked in 2011 and have been going down ever since. It only goes through 2019, so I used Google Trends to get more recent data. It confirms the downward slope, both before and after the pandemic.¹
Why are business writers such suckers for this kind of press release stuff? It's becoming one of my pet peeves. Do you really need to hang a 2,000 word story on this kind of nonsense?
¹Results are the same if you search for "office etiquette."
"Does anyone seriously believe that we all forgot routine social behavior while we were working from home? "
Maybe we just discovered how important it is.
Today’s meaningless survey of the tiny remaining sliver of Americans willing to “just answer a few questions” was brought to you by ResumeBuilder.com.
Precisely!
Why are business writers such suckers for this kind of press release stuff?
I suspect that, in general, the quality of journalism is decreasing in direct proportion with the decline in job security and employment prospects in that field. I'd imagine the instincts of many journalists and editors is to err on the side of "produce as much content as possible, especially if it attracts eyeballs, quality be damned."
Yes, and this is exacerbated by the increasing ability to measure clicks and time spent reading article by article, rather than sales of an entire newspaper. Reporters who once competed for front-page placement, or for prestigious awards, now get their value to the business tracked immediately. Thus stuff like the headline Kevin cites.
Hey, my first day back teaching classes in person after the pandemic, half of my high school students were wearing pajama bottoms. Of course, they'd been doing that for years...
If we're going to find The Single One Cause for anything, in this case, increased rudeness, then why pick Covid? It's more likely to be the nonstop, 24x7 media exposure to the frantic antics and attention-grabbing clownshow of the Rude Guy in Chief, who was, almost unimagineably, the current President of the United States.
A generation of our priceless youth saw an adult misbehave in public and be lauded, celebrated and rewarded for it. And it's still going on.
Talk to other people? In person? Eww
Effing millennials!
So how are we squaring this "did not rob us of social skills" (which I happen to believe) with all these baldfaced assertions that "remote work is too hard because people don't know how to interact unless they're in the office"?
"Why are business writers such suckers for this kind of press release stuff?"
Because promoting & discussing press releases is what business writers do to get paid.
My guess is that people got used to working from home where they didn't have to put up with co-workers. Now that they've returned to the office, they're complaining about rude interruptions, loud conversations and all the usual crap that one has to put up with in an office, especially an office where the boss cheaps out and provides cubicles or, worse, an open office layout.
Obviously, the problem isn't the typical office is hell and can make productivity impossible, but bosses want people in the office as a power move and to think that they are doing something as managers. People haven't forgotten how to behave, they've just started to complain more.