Office Etiquette

Red alert, ladies. Making jokes about your ability at work is not funny particularly at board level. That’s the advice based on research carried out over 18 months in the UK by linguistics expert Dr Judith Baxter.

While knowing how to laugh at yourself is as Aussie as lamingtons – well it used to be – I reckon the UK research is relevant to our workplaces too.

Dr Baxter looked at the speech patterns of men and women at seven companies including two listed on the FTSE 100. Combing through 600,000 words uttered during 14 senior meetings led in equal numbers by women and men, Dr Baxter concluded that the jokes made by women fell flat.

Continue reading "If you want to get promoted, laugh at the boss’s jokes" »

I recently started a new job and at my very first team meeting, I was informed that I would be included in my new team’s Kris Kringle for the impending enforced Christmas “celebrations”.

As you would expect, yay. Is it possible to yay in an even lower case? yay. There you go.

Now, I know that this groan-inducing ritual must happen in offices all around the world (well, except for maybe the Middle East, India and most of Asia but lets not get pedantic) at this time of year – the exchanging of unwanted, thoughtless gifts between team-members who haven’t gotten to know each other well enough over the course of the year to know what to get each other.

Continue reading "For Kryin’ out loud, Kris Kringle is a Kolossal Kringe" »

By now you may be aware of the offensively Draconian nanny state mandate handed down this week to the fine employees of BHP Billiton.

The memo entitled, Mine Kampf: BHP’s Office Environment Standard And Glorious Five Year Plan, outlines a thousand and one workplace bugbears that the BHP politburo have declared no longer negotiable, punishable presumably, by pain of performance review.

It’s a grossly heavy-handed document, undermining the worth of the employees who deserve respect not only for making BHP the success story it is, but also just for being humble and honourable members of the human race. And it would be an indefensibly deplorable document of foolscap fascism, if it were not for one tiny problem: as a rule, you people are f#$king disgusting.

Continue reading "A dangerously unhinged lesson in office etiquette" »