More and more companies are telling workers they have to return to the office, and that might mean trading in sweatpants and T-shirts for business attire and talking with co-workers in person — an activity that some remote workers may have all but left behind.
As these businesses make the transition to in-person work, they're starting to bring in etiquette professionals to help employees relearn how to act in the office. According to The Washington Post, the years spent apart from colleagues have rusted workers' social skills, and new ways of working have spawned a host of fresh etiquette issues.
"The problem is that even though the pandemic is behind us, there is still that shockwave, that ripple effect that carries on," Diane Gottsman, owner of The Protocol School of Texas, told Scripps News. "So I think that what happens is people are not familiar with what appropriate attire is or how to interact with peers or how you send an e-mail with a subject line and change that subject line per subject matter. So it's just tiny little details that add up to big dollars and cents issues."
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Gottsman's Protocol School of Texas specializes in professional etiquette training. She told Scripps News that a lack of etiquette can be detrimental to a person's career — and that many don't understand its importance.
"These are not manners," she said. "These are professional development skills that empower the individual and allow them to be comfortable and interact with everyone around them in that work environment."
Gen Z is the most glaring group struggling with this in the transition back to the office, but it doesn't just stop there, according to Gottsman.
"Everyone can benefit from fine-tuning, so there are executives who have been in the workforce for several years and they've gotten lax," she told Scripps News. "Or perhaps they just never really learned the art of networking, and now they're in a different position and they are having to take on different responsibilities and don't quite know how to jump into this new environment."
To hear the biggest mistakes Gottsman shared and how to improve your etiquette, watch the full interview above.
