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FT editor Roula Khalaf selects her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Soon, Amazon’s white-collar workers will begin a new chapter: commuting to the office five days a week. Don’t worry. I am not going to repeat the debate about possible productivity losses or mandatory yield gains. I will also not dwell on the disgruntled staff at the online retailer who are reportedly “angryly apply” to jobs elsewhere, possibly playing on management’s desire to cut their workforce.
Rather, the point of laying out Amazon’s 2025 policy is to highlight enduring interest in the office. Did I think that in March 2020, when the world went into lockdown and white-collar workers marveled at the novelty of being moved en masse to their dormitories, we’d still be talking about it almost five years later? I did not. Every time a boss issues a new edict requiring his staff to join, my heart sinks because it will reignite the discussion about the merits of the position. Readers comment and tell each other whether it is brilliant or disastrous. Politicians, business leaders and commentators are also trapped.
I have been surprised at how often the topic has come up during the holiday season. So much discussion about a place where people eat sandwiches at their desk (or a steak if you’re Kemi Badenoch, leader of the UK Conservative Party), type on laptops and watch PowerPoint presentations.
Now, however, I’ve come to see office chat as a gift and not a waste of time. It allows white-collar workers to talk about their nine-to-five lives in a way that would be intelligible to someone outside their field. When friends I’ve known for decades post on LinkedIn, I’m struck not only by how level-headed and coherent they seem, but how different they are from the person I knew as a child. But also that I’m not entirely sure what exactly they do.
The inscrutability of administrative roles was exemplified by the fictional Chandler Bing, played by the late Matthew Perry, in the American sitcom. Friends. When asked in a game to name her job, Monica says, “Something to do with numbers and processing.” “He’s carrying a briefcase,” Rachel guesses, before landing on “a transponder.” Not even a word, much less a job. That ended two decades ago. I suspect inscrutability has only increased since then.
Could AI intensify that trend? Perhaps, if workers are freed from technology and encouraged to delve deeper into the rabbit hole of their own experience.
The jargon only adds to the confusion. As advertising supremo David Ogilvy once said: “Our business is infested with idiots trying to impress using pretentious jargon.” A feeling supported by a study finding that insecure people were more likely to “use slang in their communications and conversations.”
With all this complexity and corporate nature, it’s no wonder we talk about time in the office when we try to find common ground. Oh, I know people will say that work is boring, that our work shouldn’t define us, that we shouldn’t spend more time on it than the hours we’re paid for, and instead look for other topics to discuss, like literature. , hobbies or political agitation in other parts of the world.
But it seems a shame to completely avoid something that demands so much of our time. In his next book, Talk: The science of conversation and the art of being ourselvesAlison Wood Brooks describes that when she became a professor at Harvard Business School, teaching a course on negotiation, she discovered that “so-called ‘difficult conversations’ . . . They weren’t the only interactions that tripped people up. “People also struggle with seemingly easy conversations.” While we are conditioned to think that small talk is boring, his opinion is that it is worth persevering as it can be a “springboard to bigger, better, more interesting conversations.” Or, as Atlantic columnist James Parker put it, it has the ability to “hurl you headlong into the burning void” of another person’s soul.
Maybe that’s how you talk about the office? An icebreaker that allows people to discuss unintelligible work in a way that is not bragging about successes and can take you in unexpected directions. Yes, it’s the place where your coworker drives you crazy with their loud breathing or their petty insistence on using their favorite mug. But it’s also about autonomy versus control, career dramas, dreams thwarted and realized, and workplace friction.
What do we talk about when we talk about the office? Much more than shared desks and cubicles.