Office Survival

Forget Love: the modern office is a battlefield, a gauntlet to be navigated with extreme caution and prudence.  To approach your daily corporate meanderings with a casual and lackadaisical strut leaves you open to myriad horrors.

A lack of attention to detail will ensure at least one incorrect guess at the sex of a colleague’s baby, a wrongful enquiry into the current health of another’s beloved and recently departed Bichon Frisé and, cardinal of all sins, entering the office’s lone toilet cubicle, realising a co-worker is already in there, and taking an unusually long time to leave.

There is an art to negotiating your workmates personalities while still maintaining a true sense of your own self. Therefore, let us remind ourselves what attributes we should exhibit day by day to ensure successful interactions. Ignore at your own peril!

1. Never make an enemy of the receptionist, not unless you want to find your mail laid out in vignettes of the seven deadly sins. You may not choose to indulge in a weekly fix of NW magazine but judge not, if you’re ever in need of a quiz night team member who specialises in Kardashian General Knowledge, you know who to ask.

2. Don’t lurk at people’s desks, generally they are working, even if they have the Maggi Food in a Minute website open on their desktop. Unless you are discussing a shared project or challenge, it is a good idea to keep “at desk” conversations brief – save it for lunch. If you happen to have lunch with the Maggi enthusiast, they’ll likely be eating something that contains baked beans, hash browns and chopped spring onions.

3. An office is still an enclosed space no matter how excellent the air conditioning, consequently it is advisable to keep your desk and immediate area a low emission zone, in accordance with the company’s Environmental Policy. You don’t want to be the reason that Rentokil were called because an ongoing aroma has alerted maintenance staff to a possible deceased rodent in the air-con ducts.

4. Embrace your creativity to its zenith, but do resist the urge to make your workstation look like two boxes of highlighters, a glitter pen and Quentin Tarantino fell into a shredder and recreated the opening scene to Saving Private Ryan. Think Hugo Boss, not Stabilo Boss.

5. Despite what the Beastie Boys say, you have no license to ill. Don’t be Germie McGermerton and come to work coughing and sneezing on all public surfaces. Please! Stay home, you’re not doing anyone any favours by turning up and being grim and spreading a plague around. People will actually cease to like you.

6. It is no longer necessary to speak on a mobile phone as if the person you are talking to is deaf and/or foreign, especially if you have a penchant for pacing in front of a colleague’s desk while conducting your calls. It’s unnerving and unnecessary and I’m pretty sure there is no such thing as phone swag anymore.

These guidelines are not meant to cramp your own personal work style, however if you heed them you are sure to garner much success in the workplace.