The Signal in Small Talk

If you asked me a few years ago to chose between having small talk with someone at a party or having a conversation with myself in my head, I would have chosen to stay at home and have the latter. I love philosophical discussions and using my dangerously hyperactive mind to tackle 600 things at once. Meanwhile, small talk has always felt like the opposite of that, and I’ve often found myself standing in a conversation waiting for it to be over.

That is until I moved to live on a farm where I realized that small talk about the weather with my landlord serves two important “functions”.

1. Despite living in two completely different worlds in relation to our work and interests, talking about the weather connects us as people by focusing on an experience that we share. Complaining about the lack of rain allows my landlord and I to find similarities and co-exist in a shared psychological and sociological space.

2. Weather is to farming what the market is to a trader. By taking time to chat, I’m accidentally creating a space to acknowledge any emotions, frustrations or “wins” in his current work life, forming a foundation of mutual respect for the next time I need to air some grievances about the heating not working.

   
   

Beyond my own anecdotes, the importance of small talk has been a subject of research in organizational psychology and linguistic studies for some time now. Small talk in organizational systems usually happens around the edges of work, before meetings start, during breaks, in the hallway, or when shifting topics. While small talk feels trivial to many of us, myself previously included, it plays an important role in building trust, easing tension, and keeping everyday interactions running smoothly. Similarly, humor is often used unconsciously to soften difficult messages, make leadership feel more approachable, and create space to question decisions without open conflict.

So, small talk in organizational teams is like a social lubricant or, in my case, it keeps me and my conservative-farmer-landlord from getting into BIG talk that could divide us.

That said, if you’re a leader in your organization, beyond encouraging small talk, you should also study it, because the small talk in your workplace can tell you a lot about the bigger (culturally coded) discourse, and the values and power dynamics at play.

Discourses are culturally available repertoires (or you can think of it as a set of words or pages in a dictionary) that structure what we can say, think, feel and do. The pages that you collectively use in your workspace inform the selection of what people have available to them. Therefore, discourse(s) have important subjective and affective effects that, in turn, open up or close down possibilities for action.

Let’s contextualize this with an example. Imagine you’re at work and you walk past Sam, the new hire talking to Sandra in the hallway…

Sam: Do you want to grab lunch later?

Sandra: Oh, I’m going to eat lunch at my desk so I can bang out some emails.

Sam: At my previous job, I had a 45 minute block for emails once a day so I can have some time to focus and recover.

Sandra: I could never get away with that, I have too many emails to reply to coming at me all day and all these tabs open, no, I‘m too busy to do that.

Later that day you see Sam talking with Chris…

Sam: Hey, how’s it going?

Chris: I’m swamped, I barely have a minute to run to the bathroom between calls. Sam: Same, I had to skip lunch, there’s never enough time in February!

Do you have any ideas about what that small talk can tell us about what’s discursively available to the employees at this startup?

Well, for one, the language that’s being used to communicate in this workplace is all just synonyms of being busy. There’s no mention of what actual “performance” looks like, or better yet, “sustainable success”; based on the choice of pages from this discursive dictionary, “work” is being equated with being too busy to have time for anything.

Now, I’m not trying to come at those of you who eat lunch at their desk because that’s literally me 90% of the time. I simply want to make you aware of what saying these things could mean for someone else.

Let’s re-visit the first scenario, but imagine we could look into Sam’s mind…

Sam: Do you want to grab lunch later?

Sandra: Oh I’m going to each lunch at my desk so I can bang out some emails.

Sam: Wait, am I going to get in trouble if I eat lunch? Maybe I’ll explain that I also do my emails but in organized blocks, so Sandra can join me next time for lunch.

Sam: At my previous job I had a 45 minute block for emails once a day so I can have some time to focus and recover.

Sandra: I could never get away with that, I have too many emails to reply to coming at me all day and all these tabs open, no, I‘m too busy to do that.

Sam: Does she get more emails than me? Am I not working enough?

Then later, with Chris, you overhear Sam talking about barely having time for lunch. In this extreme example, we can see how small talk with Sandra has affected Sam’s small talk with Chris, and ultimately his future behavior and lunch breaks.

Now this is just one cliche case, but it’s meant to demonstrate that language we use around the way we work matters and affects the possibilities of what other people who want to fit in, and want to be part of that social lubricant, can or will say. That’s the power of discourse.

In addition to the pages of our dictionary we can reference, the way we say things can tell us a lot about the dynamics of a workplace. For example:

• Those in a position of power are often the ones asking the most questions in meetings that those with less power must answer to or justify.

• Turn taking in conversations can also uncover a lot about power - are people with seniority constantly interrupting juniors?

• The tone with which people speak can demonstrate that they may be uncertain about what is expected, play confident despite fear, be subdued by power, or, as mentioned above, that they are trying to use humor or sarcasm to diffuse tensions.

• The frequency of which some themes are repeated can demonstrate how important/central those themes are to the discourse, like in the example above with the “busy” theme.

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Ultimately, it’s a really complex and layered area of study, and although we are barely scratching the surface here, there’s two things I hope you take from this blog post:

ONE, stop resisting small talk, embrace it, and explore how you can use it to lubricate social contexts to your advantage.

TWO, if you’re trying to understand what’s really going on in your workplace, look to small talk as a signalling tool for the values and cultural artifacts of your workplace beyond the inspirational quotes you have written on your walls.

Thoughts about the weather these days? Reach out :)

Studies referenced:

Maynard, D. W., & Hudak, P. L. (2008). Small talk, high stakes: Interactional disattentiveness in the context of prosocial doctor-patient interaction. Language in society, 37(5), 661-688.

Holmes, J. (2000). Politeness, power and provocation: How humour functions in the workplace. Discourse studies, 2(2), 159-185.

Wetherell, M. (2013). Affect and discourse–What’s the problem? From affect as excess to affective/discursive practice. Subjectivity, 6(4), 349-368.