This Word of the Week thing has been going on long enough now that, like a pub singer who churns out the crowd pleasers every night, I’m beginning to tire of other people’s words and feel it’s time for a word of my own. So, ladies and gentlemen, I give you…
…Telebanter!
I’m surprised no-one has beaten me to this word. It’s very much a word for our time. It means, quite simply, banter at a distance – noun or verb – from the English ‘banter’, meaning ‘banter’, and the Greek ‘tele’, meaning ‘far off’ (though in the case of the Teletubbies, never far off enough).
You may have come across the word ‘telecommute’. To telecommute is to work from home, whether in inverted commas or otherwise. It’s an interesting example of how language evolves and mutates into new forms. We understand ‘commute’ to mean ‘travel to work’, so ‘to travel to work at a distance’ suggests a bizarre performance of trying to get to work but never actually managing to come close. You might refer to it as Southern Rail.
But commute didn’t originally mean to travel, it meant to change, as in commuting a prison sentence into something lighter. Commuters as we know them originated in the US as a nickname for folks holding a ‘commutation ticket’, or a season ticket, for getting the streetcar to work. This ticket took its name from the sense of changing one type of payment into another.
Anyway, for all the benefits of working from home – no stressful journeys, seeing more of the kids, keeping on top of the gardening etc – the downside is that you miss out on the office chat. Never underestimate the value of office chat. It bonds, it cheers, it inspires. A few years ago, irritatingly young Yahoo CEO Marissa Meyer banned her staff from working from home for that very reason. There weren’t enough ideas being exchanged over the water cooler and the jokes about Gordon from Accounts were drying up. There followed some notable improvements in Yahoo’s performance and the office jokes got measurably funnier.
But Meyer was swimming against the tide. Two thirds of the workforce now ‘work from home’ to some extent and none of them have expressed a desire to ‘put the lawnmower back in the shed’. So the problem facing modern day employers is not so much ‘Should I allow my staff to work from home?’ as ‘How will I make sure they maintain the office banter?’
Enter telebanter – the art of bantering from a distance.
Don’t get me wrong, I haven’t invented telebanter per se, I’ve just invented the word. I don’t even like it that much, to be honest. I just think it’s necessary. Like a feral cat that eats the scraps from your bins and coughs up fur balls on your slippers, Telebanter® has been around for too long without having a name. We’ve been doing it via email for years – usually with disastrous results – and now you’ve got WhatsApp to keep your employees bantering long after they’ve all gone home. With telebanter you never have to feel cut off from work again.
You have to be careful, though. I could tell you the story of R______, who got his WhatsApp groups muddled up recently and inadvertently sent a message to the entire office effectively telling the boss’s wife to get a move on on the toilet – only not in those words. Laugh? How we laughed! And the next day productivity increased by 2% and the office jokes were 7% funnier.
If you need a new word, ask Balance. We’ve got lots.
