4 The word from the water cooler

‘The Office in the twentieth century was becoming … as important as The Land in the Middle Ages or The Factory in the nineteenth century. Yet there had been no Office Dickens or Office Langland’

Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy¹

If workers are no longer to be chained to their desks, then they can hardly be criticised for getting up occasionally to have a natter with their colleagues. In the late 1990s, the British media identified a new phenomenon inspired by this habit: the ‘water-cooler moment’. The phrase seems to have originated among American television executives, who wanted their programmes to generate conversation the next day as workmates filled their little plastic cups at the office watering hole. The water cooler soon came to be seen as the office equivalent of the old parish pump or the tribal campfire: the place where vernacular knowledge, folklore and gossip were exchanged.

Water coolers have been around in American offices since the beginning of the twentieth century, early models using a big block of ice to cool the water. Firms have long been suspicious of the time that workers waste filling up from them. In Sinclair Lewis’s office-life novel, The Job (1917), an efficiency expert arranges to have office boys deliver glasses of water to work desks four times a day:

Thitherto, the stenographers had wasted a great deal of time in trotting to the battery of water-coolers, in actually being human and relaxed and gossipy for ten minutes a day. After the visitation of the expert the girls were so efficient that they never for a second stopped their work – except when one of them would explode in hysteria and be hurried off to the rest-room.²

The idea of water-cooler gossip has a long history: ‘scuttlebutt’ is an old nautical term for a cask of fresh water on deck from which crew members could drink, and it became a synonym for idle gossip in the US navy.³ As a metaphor for workplace tittle-tattle, however, ‘water-cooler moment’ is misleading. A water cooler is not a good place to gossip, because it tends to be placed in prominent areas like receptions or common rooms, and there is no excuse to stop and chat because you can fill up your cup quickly. The office gossip needs somewhere to pause, out of general earshot, in front of a noisy photocopier or over a boiling kettle in the staff kitchen. So how and why has this phrase become such a powerful cultural metaphor? In part, it is because of a shift in how workers have thought and felt about what their firms suspiciously call ‘non-productive working time’.

Traditional factory discipline in Britain clamped down on idle talk, limiting conversation among workers to fixed breaks. Up until the 1960s, the British equivalent of the water-cooler moment was the tea break, as dearly loved a national institution as the drink itself, immortalised in songs like ‘Everything stops for tea’ (1935) and ‘I like a nice cup of tea’ (1937). During the Second World War, the mass-observer Celia Fremlin provided a vivid account of the British attitude to tea breaks in her book War Factory (1943). Fremlin spent several months with women conscripted to do factory work in Wiltshire, where she discovered that her fellow workers were demoralised by long hours and tedious routines. Between three and five o’clock in the afternoon was the worst time for what managers called ‘lavatory-mongering’, when workers drifted off to the cloakroom, spending half an hour or more there, talking or just doing nothing. But after five o’clock, there was a marked improvement in morale, with the feeling that a tea break was imminent. Fremlin heard one worker console a newcomer during her first tea break: ‘You’ll be all right now, the time goes ever so quick after tea.’ ‘That’s right,’ her friend agreed. ‘It goes lovely after tea. Funny, isn’t it? It never drags, not after teatime.’⁴

In factories, the klaxon or foreman’s whistle gave the signal for workers to down tools for the tea break. Trade union tea-tasters would test the quality of the members’ tea before it could be distributed. If tea was served in the canteen, workers would be given a five or ten-minute allowance for ‘walking time’. There were frequent tea strikes in the 1950s and 1960s, Byzantine disputes about the timing of the break or the quality of the brew. For proto-Thatcherites, they symbolised how much British industry was enslaved to idle workers and bolshy unions. The genteel office version of the fixed break was the shout of ‘Trolley!’ which announced the arrival of the tea lady with elevenses or afternoon tea. In his touching memoir of 1950s office life, Exciting Times in the Accounts Department, Paul Vaughan remembers finding comfort in the clockwork regularity of these visits: at 10.30 a.m., a woman would wheel in a large trolley with tea and sandwiches, returning again at precisely 3.30 p.m. with tea and cakes.⁵ Higher-ups in offices would follow the same routine, but would receive their tea in china cups on a tray rather than a trolley. Whether you gave a chit to the trolley lady or had your secretary brew up for you, the tea break was a little encapsulation of office hierarchies.

In the 1960s, the fixed tea break began to be abolished and ‘free’ or flexible breaks introduced instead. The key catalyst for this change was the hot drinks vending machine, which arrived from America in the 1950s. After a tea strike at Ford’s Dagenham plant in 1962, Primapax’s general manager wrote to Ford, pointing out that his vending machines could help avoid future industrial strife.⁶ Vending machines could be placed throughout workplaces, dispensing with the mass trek to the canteen or the long wait for the tea trolley, and workers could refill according to their own unique ‘fatigue curve’. In 1960, fewer than 500 British factories had vending machines; by the end of 1966, 6,000 had them.⁷ Break times now had to be staggered because vending machines could not cope with a rush on their services in fixed breaks. The machines also helped to develop the public’s taste for instant coffee: stewed vending-machine tea was virtually undrinkable. There were some demonstrations against the substandard ‘robot cuppa’, though, and, as late as 1978, one firm’s employees queued up in protest every morning and afternoon to wait for their (non-existent) tea trolley after it was axed.⁸ Most workers were won over eventually, as trade unions negotiated days off work in lieu of the time saved from abolishing fixed breaks.

When offices began to go open-plan in the 1960s, space formerly given to cellular rooms and corridors made way for communal areas with comfy seating, vending machines and mini-kitchens. Robert Propst, the inventor of the Action Office, claimed that one of his aims was to make workers get up from their desks and interact: ‘It’s truly amazing the number of decisive events and critical dialogues that occur when people are out of their seated, stuffy contexts, and moving around chatting with each other.’⁹ The first automated photocopiers arrived in American and British offices in the 1960s, and they soon became havens for gossips – particularly since people had to wait for longer at the machines then, when copy speeds were slower and jams more frequent. Photocopiers also inspired a new sort of written gossip. Workers used them to reproduce cartoons, jokes and fake memos, giving rise to a genre of urban myth, ‘photocopylore’, first identified by an academic folklorist, Michael J. Preston, in 1974. As bits of paper got repeatedly copied and amended with crossings out, doodles and speech balloons, the myths changed subtly just as they did in oral retellings.¹⁰ Unlike official memos, which were attached to prestigious individuals within a company, photocopylore spread the common knowledge of office life. Two things made it possible: the anonymity of new technology, and the waning of the most obvious office hierarchies. By the 1970s, bosses and secretaries routinely addressed each other by their first names. There were fewer signs saying ‘Less talk, more work’, because work itself involved more talking. As the role of the typist-secretary declined, office workers had to leave their desks to photocopy, file papers or put letters in the post, making casual encounters with colleagues more likely. Breaks became briefer and less formal but more frequent.

By the early 1990s, most British offices had installed American-style water coolers, partly because of a small number of enterprising firms like Watersplash, which saw how popular they were in the US and spotted a marketing opportunity in the UK. These new-look water coolers were the product of a series of laws about accessibility and hygiene passed in America in the 1980s. Water coolers now had to be barrier-free, disabled-access units, with no traces of lead, which meant using plastic rather than metal. A whole industry sprang up to supply these designer water coolers, with one-touch plastic taps and upendable, blue-tinted refill bottles. Firms realised they were a cheap and cheerful way to smarten up the workplace and give waiting clients a general impression of a caring employer. ‘Water-cooler moment’ became a popular phrase not because people actually talk at water coolers, but because it captured the snatched, accidental nature of interaction in modern offices.

The changing nature of the work break also transformed the way that advertisers marketed drinks and snacks. Take ‘Hunk’, a celebrated TV commercial of the mid-1990s for Diet Coke. Over a steamy Etta James soundtrack, a group of women gather by the floor-to-ceiling window of an open-plan office for their ‘11.30 appointment’. They gaze longingly at the glistening bare torso of a hunky window cleaner as he drinks from an ice-cold Diet Coke. At the end of their break, the women all chorus, ‘Same time tomorrow, girls.’ The Diet Coke commercial inspired many imitators, all suggesting that work breaks were now fleeting but precious pauses to be exploited to the full. Numerous adverts used images of office workers, usually women, enjoying surreptitious pleasures like celebrity gossip magazines, luxury yoghurts or chocolate treats at their desks. In 2004, Nestlé briefly replaced its long-running slogan ‘Have a break, have a KitKat’ with the blander ‘Make the most of your break’, in response to market research about office breaks. Nestlé explained that ‘the workplace break is now less structured and formal’ but ‘even if it is for five minutes, you can maximise your enjoyment with a KitKat’.¹¹

This shift in the pattern of work breaks also altered the nature of workplace gossip – although such changes are difficult to analyse because gossip is simultaneously the most common and elusive of social habits. By its very nature, it leaves behind little in the way of evidence. Most surveys about gossip simply ask people when and where they gossip. According to one rather speculative study, based on a 47-week working year, the average office employee spends 24 days complaining about the boss, 21 days gossiping about colleagues and flirting with them, 19 days making personal phone calls, 14 days daydreaming and 8.8 days hiding in the toilets.¹² But gossip, which is conducted out of someone else’s earshot and tends to merge with other forms of conversation, is almost impossible to measure and define. People may not be fully conscious, or may be keen to deny, that they have been gossiping.

If it is hard to study gossip in the present, then it is harder still to uncover its history. Most academic studies of gossip have seen it as hardwired in our evolutionary psychology, and the eternal necessity for hunter-gatherers to be social animals. But clearly the subject matter of gossip changes over time – outside of its immediate time and place, it is likely to seem petty and insignificant. We don’t know whether workers talked about different things in their tea breaks in the 1940s, but a reasonable surmise (confirmed partly by Fremlin’s account of the ritual whingeing about supervisors in the Wiltshire factory) is that they gossiped more about their bosses and less about each other. Open-plan office space, first-name etiquette and relaxed dress codes may create a friendlier working environment, but they also mean that workers are less sure about their status and roles. In the modern office, hierarchies and rewards are fluid and uneven. The classic topics of modern office gossip emerge out of these anxieties: restructuring, redundancies, takeovers, favouritism, other people’s salaries and perks.

The word on gossip is that it is a disagreeable habit which does no one any good. In recent years, however, sociolinguists and social anthropologists have talked up its virtues. They argue that gossip is a vital means of sharing information, forming social alliances and oiling the wheels of office relationships so that we can deal with more serious issues when they arise. Most gossip, far from being idle tittle-tattle, is both true and useful. In the mid1990s, the anthropologist Robin Dunbar developed a much-discussed theory of gossip. Beginning with the observation that monkeys groom each other to consolidate alliances and hierarchies, Dunbar argued that gossip evolved as a sort of ‘vocal grooming’, suitable for the larger groups in which humans live. Around two-thirds of conversation is taken up not with intellectual or practical matters but with gossip about personal relationships, likes and dislikes and the behaviour of others.¹³ People who do not gossip, instead of being admired for their fine, upstanding characters, are seen as either aloof or insignificant by their peers.

According to the business ethnographer John Weeks, there is even a purpose to that unloved subset of office gossip, whingeing. In 1994, Weeks spent several months working in a leading British bank. He gave it a pseudonym (the British Armstrong Bank, or BritArm) for obvious reasons: this was a company about which nobody who worked for it had a good word to say. But Weeks argued that this culture of complaint was a form of ‘lay ethnography’, a way for people to make sense of their own lives.¹⁴ Moaning was a kind of melancholy amusement which allowed fellow moaners to join in a common vision and purpose without rocking the boat too much. Weeks distinguished between two types of complaint: deprecations and derogations. Deprecations genuinely solicited redress or change, but workers rarely voiced them because they raised difficult issues about power and resources. Derogations were simply insults or put-downs which signalled a fatalistic acceptance of the firm’s failings, a way of establishing empathy between the moaners rather than achieving a solution to the complaint.¹⁵

Surprisingly, Weeks found that the moaniest workers were also the most vociferous in defending their company against external criticism. Complaining about the bank’s culture was a way ‘to display affinity with it, not alienation from it. You must know the culture well and be a part of it to be able to complain about it and get away with it.’¹⁶ Weeks’s ethnography of whingeing cocks a snook at contemporary management theory, which makes such capital out of training and motivating workers to have a positive, can-do attitude. At BritArm, these happy-clappy training sessions just became another thing to moan about. Workplaces now have so many emptily ritualistic official communications that it is hardly surprising when workers come to prefer authorless, unofficial gossip.

Some apologists for office gossip suggest that it is becoming harder to talk casually in modern workplaces. Dunbar argues that much modern work involves tenuous connections with people on the other end of a telephone line or email server, and that the desire to cut occupancy costs encourages firms to get rid of communal spaces. This devalues the ‘chance encounters over the coffee machine, idle chatter around the photocopier’, where casual contacts can function ‘like a parallel-processing supercomputer’, generating ideas that individuals could never have on their own.¹⁷ Sociologists like Richard Sennett and Ray Pahl claim that flexible, insecure patterns of employment have created low-trust, rivalrous workplaces where friendships with colleagues are more difficult.¹⁸

But this pessimistic analysis is only part of the story. One of the aims of new office designers has been to distinguish between different types of office, which they call ‘cells’, ‘dens’ and ‘hives’ according to the different types of work that go on there. Cells are individual offices for people such as barristers or academics who need to work quietly on their own or have one-to-one meetings. Dens are bustling places where people need to exchange ideas, like newspaper offices or advertising agencies. Hives are places like call centres or data-entry offices, where employees are supposed to get on with their jobs like ‘busy worker bees’.¹⁹ In these low-status offices, employers control their workers closely, by monitoring toilet and smoking breaks, watching over them with video cameras, tracking the rate of their computer key strokes and arranging their desks in serried rows like the old-style bullpens. Unsurprisingly, the opportunities for idle chatter are rather limited.

In den-like offices, however, gossip is seen as a social good. The rationale goes like this: as companies use technology to automate their routine tasks, or farm them out to low-status workers in hive-like back offices, higher-status workers are left with more complex tasks that can only be conducted in teams.²⁰ A study by the London School of Economics found that, across a wide range of white-collar jobs, the time spent talking with colleagues and generally dealing with other people increased by about a third in the five years up to 1997.²¹ Many open-plan den offices now have ‘break-out areas’ with café-style tables, chairs and sofas, a decor and ambience clearly influenced by the cappuccino culture of the high street.

Not all workers are seen as worthy of access to this cappuccino culture, however. In December 1996, the London Underground almost shut down when maintenance workers demanded the right to a cappuccino break. Three years earlier, they had relinquished their twice-a-day, twenty-minute tea break in return for a free drinks vending machine. Keen to save money, LU management then withdrew the most popular but costly options, cappuccino and hot chocolate, before climbing down when threatened with a strike. The rail union’s general secretary, Jimmy Knapp, said, ‘Cappuccino might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but a deal is a deal.’²² In 2001, there was a fully-fledged strike on the Underground as train drivers’ unions demanded that water-boilers be supplied in their mess rooms, so they would not have to spend their breaks waiting for kettles to boil.²³ For much of the media, these strikes were simply a throwback to the bad old days of petty industrial disputes. But is any more time ‘wasted’ during tea breaks in messes than during coffee breaks in modern offices? White-collar professionals are supposed to be sufficiently self-motivated, and reliant on the creative exchange of ideas, to make time spent talking inherently useful. Semiotically, the tea break denotes relaxation, idling and switching off, while the coffee break denotes stimulation, sociability and conversation. Coffee has retained some of its traditional associations with metropolitan, middle-class sophistication, and its even older reputation as ‘the thinker’s drink’.²⁴

The downside of gossiping in coffee breaks in den-like offices is that work and leisure time blend into each other. It might be fun to spend the day exchanging information and bouncing ideas around with one’s colleagues. But workplace chatter is still work, albeit of a kind that is difficult to quantify. Much office conversation in open-plan spaces is spontaneous and unstructured. Research by the design consultancy Space Syntax suggests that around 80 per cent of work conversations happen when one person simply passes another’s desk.²⁵ An earlier MIT study conducted in the 1970s found that office workers are four times more likely to talk if they are sat six rather than sixty feet apart, and that people seated more than seventy-five feet apart hardly speak at all.²⁶ The informal nature of office encounters may be a source of uncertainty, since workers have to invent the rules as they go along. How much time should busy workers actually spend gossiping, and at what point should they extricate themselves from a corridor chat without seeming unfriendly? They may feel justified in cutting off a conversation because they have work to do, but gossiping has social and career benefits that are less tangible than making a deadline.

The way we gossip at work is an effect of the way we work. From tea breaks to water-cooler moments, gossip can only happen when office space is arranged in particular ways. The communal areas where workers congregate to talk – office designers call them ‘magnet facilities’ – have their own special rites and customs, not unlike those of shared student houses. Informal protocols and open-plan offices have only made these rites and customs more complicated. I once saw a handwritten sign in an office kitchen, stuck on the wall above the kettle: ‘Please do not fill this kettle with more water than you need. The planet is already weeping, people!’ Few workers would ever express an opinion about even the messiest desk of a colleague, let alone order them to tidy it. But in this no-man’s-land of the office, the staff kitchen, workers feel connected and implicated in each other’s lives. Not only do they gossip here, they also feel the need to communicate with their colleagues when they are not there. Even boiling a kettle is a political act. Office gossip is the daily habit most commonly derided for its triviality and gratuitousness. On the contrary, it seems to be both compulsive and compulsory.