Tea Breaks

Office life can be quite strange sometimes.  When I was Julie's age, working in temporary posts, some offices were great fun, some offices were dire.  You never stayed in one place long enough to find out what the feuds were about.  It was all just a great game.

I'm older now, been in my current role for quite a while, and I have a team of people reporting to me.  It's a quiet office: everyone is very good at what they do, resources are tight, and there's more work than we can possibly handle, but we all care about our work, so we all work very hard.  A lot of people in the team have heavy family commitments outside work, and tight schedules.  They have to leave work on time: to collect small children, take elderly parents to clinics, or in my case, sort out something to do with Julie.  It can lead to a lot of tensions, and occasional frayed tempers.

All of us understood the risk of working as hard as this - most of the team have been in the business for years - and at one time we all made a concerted attempt to socialise and defuse tensions - fundamentally, we all like one another, and have no reason to fall out.  But the pressures are so intense, that our attempts slowly fell by the wayside.  And then recently I realised that one of the younger members of the team had become seriously depressed. She came to work, she said good morning, she sat at her desk and worked through her mountain of work.  When she asked for help, she got brusque replies, and sometimes none-too-positive feedback.  At the end of the day, she said good night, and went home.  The one member of the team without dependents, she found it hard to understand why we were all so strained all the time.

I'm ashamed to admit that at first I tried to deal with it in my usual office manner.  I know perfectly well what depression feels like, but I would hurriedly take her aside to ask her how she was feeling, allowing her perhaps no more than 5 minutes to discuss her problem.  My goal was, I think - and the fact I had a goal at all speaks volumes - to solve the problem and move on.  I didn't mean to be unkind, I just found it very hard to switch gear from the fast pace of our technical discussions to the much slower pace of normal human conversation.

Eventually I paid attention and pulled myself up short.  I blocked out a morning in my diary, the two of us had a good long talk, and I really listened properly.  I knew I couldn't solve her problems - there was a huge amount there, of which work was only one part - but we could look at what we could do in the office to improve the atmosphere.

So began the tea breaks.  Every day in the middle of the afternoon, if I'm not in the middle of a meeting, I grab my mug, announce that I'm going to the kitchen, and encourage my team to come with me.  Sometimes they do, sometimes they can't spare the time.  But when they do, they talk and relax, and those brief conversations make a huge difference to the rest of the day.   I can see what a difference it makes to the wellbeing and confidence of my younger colleague, and I have to admit, it improves life for me too.