American career advice often says that about 85 percent of jobs are filled through networking. PayScale writes: “Some estimate that upwards of 85 percent of open positions are filled through networking.”
The figure is hard to trace. PayScale links it to a survey by LinkedIn and the Adler Group, with no sample or date. A 2023 article credits it to the job site Zippia.
“Bring your whole self to work” became a corporate catchphrase. Pamela Paul of The New York Times called it “a certified buzzphrase at Google.” One advocate, the author and speaker Mike Robbins, said that it “isn’t about over-sharing, complaining, or making excuses.”
In September 2022 Paul argued against it under the headline “Do Not Bring Your ‘Whole Self’ to Work.” “For some people, a private life is actually best when it’s private.” She proposed, “Let’s all bring only — or at least primarily — the worky parts.”
JobTIPS, an online guide to job skills, tells readers that “Small talk is a normal and expected thing that happens in almost every work environment.” Good topics include what you did over the weekend and television shows, movies or music.
Topics to avoid include politics, religion, salary, personal financial problems, personal questions about relationships and personal health issues.
The business writer Erin Meyer places the United States among the peach cultures described by Fons Trompenaars. In them people “share information about themselves, and ask personal questions of those they hardly know.” Further in, “you may suddenly get to the hard pit protecting someone’s real, or at least more private, self.”
MIT’s office for international students quotes the same image. Americans are “soft on the outside, easy to approach, but the pit is harder.”
The psychologist Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks of the University of Michigan studies what he calls Protestant Relational Ideology. He describes it as “a deep-seated belief that affective and relational concerns are considered inappropriate in work settings.” A university release summarized it as a “widespread American belief that personal relationships and emotions in the office are inappropriate and unprofessional.”
He traces the belief to the ascetic Protestants who founded early American communities. One of his chapters is subtitled “an American Anomaly.”
In September 2015 the psychologist Adam Grant wrote in The New York Times: “We’re social creatures outside work, yet the office interaction norm tends to be polite but impersonal.”
He reported that in 1985 about half of Americans said they had a close friend at work. By 2004 it was 30 percent. “Now, work is a more transactional place. We go to the office to be efficient, not to form bonds.”
Water cooler names the drinking water dispenser in an office, and also “the kind of informal conversation among office staff that takes place at such a dispenser.” People speak of water-cooler conversations and of a television show noteworthy enough to give office staff something to talk about as water-cooler television.
In 2005 Keith Ferrazzi and Tahl Raz published Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time. “The secret, master networker Keith Ferrazzi claims, is in reaching out to other people.” The book separates “genuine relationship-building” from what the description calls crude, desperate glad-handing.
Under the Americans with Disabilities Act, an employer may ask an employee about a disability only when it is job-related and a business necessity. In 2000 the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission listed questions that are not disability-related and are allowed.
These include “asking generally about an employee’s well being (e.g., How are you?),” “asking a pregnant employee how she is feeling or when her baby is due,” and asking how an employee is doing after a death in the family or the end of a marriage. Asking whether an employee takes prescription drugs is restricted.
Let’s do lunch. Let’s get coffee sometime. By 1985 a Los Angeles Times columnist was already joking about the first: “Let’s do lunch sometime, have your girl call my girl.”
MIT’s office for international students explains such invitations to new arrivals. An American writer on the page says that when people say “Let’s get lunch!” it “seems like they don’t really mean it.” If an American is serious, “they will propose a time and place.”