Here’s a familiar scene from the workplace before email and instant messaging services arrived with all of their savage efficiencies:
You get up from your cubicle to walk to the little break room where there is a pot of coffee still stewing from the morning (this scene takes place in a time before the invention of the Keurig) and, you hope, a slice or two of the cake from yesterday’s joyless celebration of Carol from financial planning’s birthday. (Everyone hates Carol; she had to order her own cake.)
As you approach the break room, you hear voices, low voices, urgent voices, the kind people use when they’re too excited and animated to whisper, the kind of voices people make when they’re talking trash about someone. You hear laughter. And then you walk into the room to see four or five of your colleagues gathered around in a conspiratorial huddle, and the moment they see you, they fall silent.
Because they were talking about you. And you know this because of the guilty looks and awkward smiles. If they were talking about Carol, they would have welcomed you into the conversation, and you would have happily joined them because, as noted previously, everyone hates Carol. The group disperses quickly. It includes some co-workers who you had categorized, only moments before, as friends.
In the workplace of today, that same moment takes place online, with its brutality and cruelty unmitigated. You simply log onto one of the company’s Slack channels, or perhaps are alerted to the presence of a group chat, and right there in undeniable text is a cascade of messages from co-workers gleefully discussing how much they hate you and how appalling you are to them.
There are no hushed or indistinct voices. Everyone’s name is right there in bold font. There are no guilty looks or shameful scuttles out of the break room. Instead, clearly identifiable co-workers are openly exchanging cruel insights about your work, your politics, your clothes, and your career. In the modern open-plan office, you can hear your colleagues, safely encased in their cubicles, click-clacking away on their keyboards, and you can know for a fact that some of those click-clacks are instant messages about your outfit.
When Bari Weiss resigned from the New York Times editorial board a few weeks ago, she cited the bullying messages about her and her political views on the company’s Slack channel as a big reason why she could no longer work there. When the CEO of luggage company Away Travel stepped down recently, the nastiness of the company’s culture, as evidenced by its internal communication channels, was made embarrassingly public.
And when North Korean hackers broke into the computer servers of Sony Pictures a few years ago, batches of emails were released showing people making the biggest fundamental mistake of the digital age: telling the truth to each other in unvarnished language. Indelibly. And in the worst possible way: email, which both records everything forever in a searchable format and is permanently saved somewhere in the cloud.
Let’s be honest: People can be mean. This is not to excuse the McCarthyism at the New York Times nor to diminish the sheer nastiness of the company culture at Away Travel. But in any enterprise, there will be Carols and break room trash-talking. There will always be moments when you hear whispers and know that the whispers are about you.
Get enough people together in a business setting, and there will be Carols and break room witches and unsuspecting coffee-getters. Most of us, over the course of our careers, will eventually play all three roles.
So, if you’ve ever been tempted to have a direct and frank and maybe slightly rowdy exchange over electronic channels, I’d like to introduce four words to your vocabulary. They were taught to me by my attorney, who is both wise and expensive. Here they are:
Call me to discuss.
Someone wants to vent or trash talk or find out what’s really going on in a company or with a star employee, and they Slack you with something brassy and direct. Something like: WTH? Or: u know wat is happning?
You simply respond to this request with the four words of 2020:
Call me to discuss.
On a call, you get to say stuff that’s true or mean or funny or vicious or — hell, why not? — even nice and deny it later if you have to. With no searchable text files floating around the company servers, if there’s trouble later, you’ll be in the clear.
Deniability, when you think about it, is the essential lubrication that makes the corporate machine work. And there’s never been a moment in business history that didn’t require lubrication because, in every business transaction, there’s someone who needs it.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
