What is banter? Stella Chandler, director of development at Focal Point Training and Consultancy, which works with teams to create positive change in workplace behaviour, defines it in a previous Review article as discussions that are normally intended to “make people laugh together”.
Stella was talking about the difference between banter and bullying – a topic which the consultancy had recently conducted research on. The lines between the two are blurred, but it ultimately boils down to how it makes the recipient feel. A colleague making fun of your football team, or giving you a nickname based on a mistake you made in a presentation, or making a comment about your weight, could be perceived in completely different ways, depending on the context.
Tracy Powley, director of Focal Point Training, says: “It’s hard to articulate. It’s somewhere within those very grey areas where behaviour just starts to cross the line. Any comments, behaviour or tone that starts to make somebody else feel uncomfortable.”
“Bullying by a director led me to attempt suicide. I reported the conduct and it was later described as banter”
Focal Point has recently updated its research into the topic of banter at work, surveying respondents from around the UK. Key findings from the 700 respondents include that 97% have been made uncomfortable by banter at some point, with less than a third willing to call a colleague out when they see it happening. This in turn has an impact on productivity and turnover, with 33% admitting to looking for a new job because they feel uncomfortable with it, while 69% say it has led to them contributing less in meetings.
In terms of organisation size, banter doesn’t discriminate – from a private company of fewer than ten employees to international financial organisations, once banter has permeated a workplace, it’s there to stay – unless you do something about it. The problem is, while lots of organisations have policies in place to tackle issues like racism, sexism and homophobia, it’s much harder to stop toxic banter without knowing how someone is feeling.
What’s in a name?
Focal Point helps train team leaders and managers to stop friendly banter becoming toxic. The consultancy often starts by looking at nicknames within teams – one of the really key indicators of potentially toxic banter because, says Stella, “very few people give themselves a nickname”.
Stella recalls a visit to a client where she was introduced to ‘Little Chris’ and ‘Big Chris’. “I asked Little Chris, a man with a small physique, about his nickname and he said he absolutely hated it. Big Chris had a health condition he couldn’t do anything about. But it didn’t dawn on anyone because this differentiation felt very practical – and big and small aren’t necessarily offensive words,” she says.
Giving someone a nickname based on their stature might seem bad enough, but 29% of respondents in Focal Point Training’s survey claim to have had a “really bad experience”. These included fainting and having colleagues laugh and take photos, and senior team members dressing to imitate people of different religions. Most distressingly, someone recounted: “Bullying by a director led me to attempt suicide. I reported the conduct and it was later described as banter.”
The impact of remote and hybrid working
With the advent of widespread remote and hybrid working since the onset of the pandemic, we are now interacting more with colleagues over virtual platforms like Teams, Slack, Zoom – even WhatsApp. The past two years has also seen a rise in the number of tribunal claims relating to ‘banter’ in the workplace – from 67 in 2020 to 97 in 2021, a 45% increase – according to a post outlining research by GQ|Littler, the London office of global employment and labour law firm Littler.
The post suggests that this could be down to two factors: the informal nature of the messaging services and the fact that the messages are “nevertheless often preserved and can be used as evidence”. It explains further: “Messages or memes are often amusing to one person but can be offensive to others and the nuances of tone are often lost in written communication.”
Our physical surroundings have a part to play too, says Stella. “If you haven’t got a dedicated study and you’re working from your kitchen table, you might have just moved from putting a load of washing on to suddenly siting down to a meeting. All of those lines between work and home suddenly become very blurred.”
So, what can we do to improve workplace culture and help everyone feel safe?
Taking responsibility
Positive workplace behaviour stems from the top. If senior management isn’t on board, no one is going to change. But once senior management is on board, the day-to-day responsibility sits with the line managers, who may find it difficult to call out colleagues who think they’re simply joking around. But this doesn’t have to involve formal warnings and HR meetings, explains Stella. “It’s the famous ‘nip it in the bud’ phrase,” she says. “When a joke happens and it’s not incredibly offensive, and everyone has a bit of a laugh, we say that if it’s raised again the next day, that’s when it needs to be managed. In that moment, just say something like ‘That was yesterday’s joke; we’ll have a new one today’,” says Chandler. An act as small as that can make all the difference. By simply giving managers the tools to stop the humour at the point it could become offensive, it will stop conversations progressing into anything more than friendly banter.
‘That was yesterday’s joke; we’ll have a new one today’
But companies will usually only revert to seeking help once they’ve noticed they’re perpetuating a toxic environment. It’s still a reactive process. “We would want the pendulum to have swung a little bit further to organisations being more proactive,” explains Stella. “What tends to happen is that organisations come to us because it’s been triggered by an incident – either a complaint or grievance, formal or informal – and they’ve realised they need to do something about it. It would be delightful if we could move to the point where organisations were coming to us and saying, ‘We want to make sure people understand what we mean by these values, can you help us do that?’ So they’re doing the preventative bit, and we never get to the point where there are grievances and complaints. But we’re quite a way off that, and that’s worrying. For all the values that sit proudly on organisations’ websites, a lot of it is just paying lip service.”
But with many now returning to the office, organisations are seeing an opportunity to reset workplace culture, and with this comes a recognition of the importance to check in with colleagues about the way we interact with each other. This doesn’t require a ban on banter, but it does require that managers have the tools to recognise when it crosses a line and stop it before it starts creating a toxic culture. “It’s not stopping the fun,” says Chandler. “It’s stopping getting to the point where it stops being fun.”