Smiles Apart: The Distance We Keep at Work

by

Michael Driver

If Mother Nature can be relied upon for a means of attraction among people, she can also provide a way to keep them apart. Ironically, it’s all the same method. Nothing works better than a smile both to bring people together and keep them separated.

It all depends on how it’s delivered. Accompanied by variable eyeworks and other body language, a smile can be portrayed with appeal or etched in ice. It can mean “come hither” or “go to hell.” But we’re not going either of those places because our smiles are intended exclusively for the workplace.

And in the workplace you’ll find every kind of smile between those two extremes (and sometimes those, too, but, again, we’re not going there). Context is everything. Meaning is invariably clear. Smiles are an easy, quick way to exchange communication while keeping distance between smilers and smilees.

Distance is the reason smiles in the workplace were designed. They enable all sorts of meaning: approval/objection, appreciation/disdain, acceptance/rejection and all of this imparted without the need for connection.

Smiles allow coworkers to transmit an infinite amount of understanding without actual interaction. This is especially helpful when those associates want to maintain a strong working relationship without risking the distractions that result from personal involvement. It is not necessary or desirable for everyone in the workplace to know everyone else intimately, only to work well together. Smiles help make that possible.

Even in those circumstances where workers do not like each other, smiles serve to frost the coolness with an agreeably low temperature coating of tolerance. Likewise, a worker can also use a smile to lance another coworker in a brutal attack with a wound so deep that it devastates the coworker who is nevertheless unable to complain. About what? A smile?

Managers know all of this, too, and use it to great effect, making smiles an integral part of their repertoire of control mechanisms. Smiles usually works well for managers regardless of how they view employees, as dogs, children, imbeciles, beasts or even human beings.

Of course, some managers prefer to use scowls instead of smiles. As occasional reproof, scowls can be effective, but the manager must remember to direct them only to the retrograde target, lest a productive citizen of the workforce catch a glimpse and become unprofitably offended.

Unfortunately, a few managers scowl perpetually at everyone under all circumstances. These are the thoroughgoing jerks who range about under the mistaken notion that in order to be effective, managers need to be feared and disliked by everyone. What they don’t realize is that they would be disliked widely enough even without the scowls.

Employees have adapted smiles to restrain their dislike of managers, thereby lubricating themselves to slip through otherwise obnoxious relationships with bosses. Some employees, in fact, hate bosses so much that they overdo smiles to the point that coworkers think they are brown-nosing, when actually, they hate the boss so much only forcing a smile prevents them from putting their fist into his pearly whites.

Smiles in the workplace perform well on numerous levels to maintain distance among coworkers and are likely to function effectively as along as there are workplaces. Robotics labs indicate that once artificial intelligence is introduced, smiles will continue to be helpful.

Meanwhile, to abuse Robert Frost, we have smiles to go before we part. And when you think about it, there’s no better way to end the day, leave a job or conclude a career than with a smile, along with all the distance it imparts.

Copyright © 2015 by Michael Driver

Follow on Twitter: @mdMichaelDriver

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