8 simple things you can do at the office every day to build good relationships with your boss and coworkers
Navigating your professional relationships with your coworkers can be complicated.
Did you accidentally say the wrong thing? Overstep a boundary?
The good news is that some of the easiest things you can do to build and sustain solid relationships at work are pretty intuitive, according to Daniel Post Senning and Lizzie Post, etiquette experts with the Emily Post Institute.
"It's remarkable how durable the advice is when you get down to what our expectations are of each other on a very human level," Post Senning told Business Insider.
Their book, " Emily Post's Business Etiquette," went on sale May 20. It includes a list of eight daily office courtesies you can do to build and maintain goodwill with your boss and peers.
Here's the list from the book:
Show up ready for the day or your shift.
Acknowledge others and greet them with a smile.
If you can, make eye contact when speaking with others (for video calls, turn on your camera and face the lens).
Use the magic words in all your interactions, both verbal and digital. (The book lists as magic words: Please, thank you, you're welcome, excuse me, I'm sorry)
Use shared spaces appropriately, never leaving a mess or taking more than your share.
Decline to participate in office gossip.
Offer help to others or check in to see how their work is coming along.
Say goodbye to colleagues on your way out the door for the day.
These are simple "'gimme' social interactions," as Post Senning calls them.
"They cost you nothing, and done well, and repeatedly, they really forge important social bonds," he previously told BI. "They build a sense of connection and trust that is going to carry you through tense meetings, critical feedback, miscommunications, things like that later on."
At the end of the day, these small-but-mighty actions are about acknowledging each other, Post said.
"Acknowledgement is probably one of the most impactful daily practices that we can engage with in so many ways," she told BI. "Whether it's looking up and acknowledging your colleagues with a greeting or a goodbye, or it's acknowledging the work that they do and the participation that you see happening around you that facilitates your own work getting done."
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Business Insider
39 minutes ago
- Business Insider
TikTokers are proudly proclaiming nepo baby status in the latest viral trend
Descendants of wealthy families — or so they say — are flexing their lineage for millions of views. A slew of TikTok videos of people shouting out their family's involvement in industry giants have gone viral. This trend, known as the "holy airball," is set to rapper Jeezy's "Soul Survivor." "Told her my dad runs a makeup company," Dhruv Amin, the son of ELF Cosmetics CEO Tarang Amin, posted on TikTok, in one example. "She said, 'Oh like a boutique,'" the next slide read. Then the reveal, captioned: "HOLY AIRBALL." Some commenters immediately recognized the satirical videos as jokes, while others lamented over their wealthy status or called them a "nepo baby." "I'm afraid you win this trend," one commenter wrote under Amin's TikTok. Amin's father just closed a $1 billion deal with Hailey Bieber to acquire the beauty brand Rhode. ELF confirmed Amin's identity to Business Insider. Amin's post was a stunt to bring attention to his artificial intelligence startup, Create. Many of the other posts appear to be jokes. A TikToker with the last name Khan said her dad owns the study platform Khan Academy, though the company said it couldn't verify that claim, and her name doesn't match the one it has on file for founder Sal Khan's child. Dan Folger, a photographer, posted that his family was involved in the coffee business. Folger (the man) told BI that he has no connection to the Folgers coffee brand. Like other videos that follow the trend, Folger's starts with, "I told her my family was in the coffee business." On the next slide: "She replied 'aw like a little coffee shop?'" Then, he completes the trend with a photo of a Folgers factory and #holyfuckingairball — a basketball reference for when a shot widely misses the net. As of Thursday morning, Folger's video had 5.4 million views. Some TikTok users included photos to show their relationships with high-powered CEOs. James C. Fish is the CEO of Waste Management, which reported $22 billion in revenue for 2024. A woman with the last name Fish posted photos with him in a now-deleted TikTok video. Others claimed connections to General Mills-owned food brand Annie's Homegrown and the Bellagio Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas. BI contacted Annie's, Bellagio owner MGM Resorts, and Waste Management to confirm these users' identities and did not receive a response.
Fast Company
an hour ago
- Fast Company
Why digital-native publishers like Business Insider are most exposed in the AI era
For the past year and a half, there's been a simmering concern over what AI is going to do to the workforce. Last week, that concern boiled over in a big way following back-to-back news stories: First, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei set off alarm bells by predicting that AI would wipe out half of entry-level jobs and massively drive up unemployment. As if on cue, Business Insider announced it was laying off 21% of its staff. While the two obviously aren't directly related, the one-two punch landed hard in the media business, which faces an existential threat to its business model (in a nutshell, AI answers mean less traffic than search). But like all demographics, it's important to remember that the media isn't a monolith. While AI summaries mean rapidly changing audience habits for all publishers, BI 's move emphasizes that digital-native brands are particularly vulnerable. In her memo to BI staff, CEO Barbara Peng said the company was 'going all-in on AI,' explaining that the layoffs were part of a broader strategic shift and that, going forward, the publication would need to reduce its dependence on traffic in general. In addition to cutting click-dependent areas like its commerce business, BI would launch live journalism events, double down on subscriptions, and encourage all its journalists to embrace AI tools. This is far from the publication's first move on this course. Not long ago, the company had ambitions to become a general interest brand, but after changing its name to Insider in 2021, it switched back to Business Insider less than three years later. Since then, the publication has been investing more in unique voices and talent instead of the volume content that fueled the company's rise in the 2010s, when media brands like Vice, Quartz, and Buzzfeed were dominant. The old media playbook meets a new world The thing about BI, though, is that it was one of the few success stories to come out of that era. The publication sold to Axel Springer for $343 million dollars back in 2015, just before the bottom fell out of the scale media market. Perhaps that's why it took BI so long to adapt. It's been shedding its workforce for a couple of years—now roughly half the size of its 2022 peak of 1,000 people, according to Press Gazette. Now AI is forcing the issue. Peng's memo says that 70% of BI 's business suffers from 'traffic sensitivity,' a euphemism for content designed to attract eyeballs on the open web by appearing in search, social, or feeds. Who are those people? How do you keep them coming back or transacting with your brand? In the media model BI was built for, it didn't matter—it only mattered how big the number was on any given day. Now BI is doing exactly what any media consultant would recommend: adopting tactics like paywalled subscriptions, events, newsletters, and first-party data. It's the right strategy, but for BI the moves are reactive retreats rather than proactive bets. That doesn't mean they're bad ideas, but BI 's DNA was born out of a different era. It has a brand, but is it strong enough to make the transition that AI demands? I don't mean to pick on BI, but I do think it exemplifies why digital media companies from the 2010s are likely going to have the hardest time in the AI era. Legacy mainstream outlets like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have built moats with their strong journalism and diverse revenue streams. On the other end, smaller digital upstarts like 404 Media, The Ankler, and The Free Press are finding success by cultivating talent, getting scoops, and offering unique perspectives. It's the brands in between—the ones that followed the same playbook as BI —now scrambling to re-architect themselves to meet this moment. Ziff Davis (owner of PCMag, Mashable, and IGN) is similarly feeling pressure, as seen in its lawsuit against OpenAI, arguing that its strategy of publishing evergreen, free content on the internet to maximize clicks has made it particularly vulnerable to substitution by AI. Experimentation isn't transformation As evidence of the BI 's all-in bet on AI, Peng talked about AI-powered features like its site search and dynamic paywall. She also mentioned that 75% of the staff were now using AI tools, specifically ChatGPT Enterprise, with the aim to get the figure to 100%. The note encourages 'bold experimentation,' and says they're building prompt libraries and sharing everyday AI use cases among staff. However, this description of AI initiatives, while directionally solid, sounds like it's still in the early stages. Contrast that with an AI-forward newsroom like Reuters, which has built modular tooling tailored to newsroom workflows, under a clear 'reduce, augment, transform' framework. It's great that they're moving forward, but without a focus on systems, transformation will be piecemeal. And while the choice of ChatGPT is expected given the company's partnership with OpenAI, pushing a single AI model over all the others is inherently limiting. For other digital media brands who fear death or downsizing, BI 's approach is instructive. It's urgent to rethink dependency on traffic, and even the lens of measuring success through traffic. Certainly, ad impressions are the KPI driving all this, and it's not going to go away overnight (or ever, really). But a long decline seems inevitable. Shifting focus from traffic to metrics that measure impact, engagement, and loyalty is step one. That's the path to cultivating direct reader relationships—essential to building media brands that are sustainable in the AI era. BI 's shift is a step in the right direction, but survival won't come from cost-cutting or tool adoption alone. The digital media brands that make it through this next wave will be the ones that know who they're for and what makes them worth returning to. That means being willing to rethink how things get made in the first place—and why.
Business Insider
an hour ago
- Business Insider
'SF, we're coming for you:' We went to NYC Tech Week, where everyone is saying the city is the land of opportunity
One of the clearest takeaways from New York's Andreessen Horowitz-sponsored Tech Week — a decentralized sprawl of happy hours with panoramic rooftop views, panels, and, this year, pickleball matches — was this: When it comes to building startups from AI to consumer to deep tech, New York is no longer playing catch up to attract startup interest. It might just be pulling ahead. "People don't come to New York to live in a group house and code all night and never see anyone else," said Julie Samuels, the president and CEO of Tech:NYC, an organization that promotes tech founders and entrepreneurship in the city, at a panel on Monday focused on AI startup innovation. Samules added that New York is the place to be for any founders eager to move fast on product and head count. "New Yorkers hire," she said. "People want to live here, have always wanted and will continue to want to live here." Getting into Tech Week wasn't exactly easy: Many events were full or required pre-approval on Partiful, the Andreessen-backed invite platform of choice. Still, Business Insider managed to drop in on a few of the week's activities, like a boozy happy hour on the rooftop of IBM's sleek Manhattan headquarters and Gen Z founders hobnobbing at a cosmetics store, to see what all the hype was about. NY is going all in on AI San Francisco has long reigned supreme as home to the industry's hottest AI startups: big-name LLM developers like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Claude are all headquartered there, along with numerous other young companies at the app and infrastructure layer. One of the biggest themes at New York's tech week events, however, is that the Big Apple isn't just ready to welcome an AI startup here and there. The city's tech community is pushing to become a destination for all things AI. "The entire AI stack is in New York — you have ecosystems, agents, apps," said Emily Fontaine, IBM's global head of venture capital, during a panel discussion at the company's Madison Avenue headquarters early in the week. "When you come to New York, you have the whole spectrum to invest in," she said. "These are all companies that are well developed, have a product, and are starting to get revenue." Fontaine added that in New York, "compared to SF, you have strong founders who are actually driving revenue who are excited to go to market with us." At a power walk to kick off the event, most founders couldn't stop talking about AI. They spanned industries and geographies, but one told BI he was determined to make New York City the country's startup capital. "It's the second best. I want to make it the biggest startup ecosystem in the world," Somya Gupta, who cofounded an AI education startup, said. "SF, we're coming for you!" Founder Ben Spray said his next venture is an AI-powered IT department, but that the AI component is a marketing strategy, given how hot the technology is. "It's a little bit of a branding move," he told BI. "I mean, take my AI IT department — it's really just an IT department built from the ground up to fit into the AI world." Even local and state politicians are getting in on the AI push. At an Axios panel on Tuesday, New York Governor Kathy Hochul said she's keen on using AI to train 100,000 state employees in offices like the DMV. "I'm not looking to eliminate their jobs," she said. "I see great potential here, and I leaned hard into this." Defense and hardware head East Science, defense, and hardware-oriented startups, known as deep tech companies, are a red-hot sector on the West Coast, though the New York scene is finally heating up. One standout was the rooftop party in SoHo hosted by Haus, a deep tech public relations and communications firm, and Stonegardens Advisory, a consultancy that advises startups breaking into defense. With swanky cocktails and cheese boards piled high, panelists dished out how to win key government contracts early. "The end goal was ultimately to help people who are building the space understand what it means to work with the Department of Defense, which is increasingly opening itself up to startups and learning how to work with these more early-stage companies," Daniel Oberhaus, who founded Haus, told BI in an interview. (Last week, the Pentagon launched a program to back college-founded startups that serve both commercial and government customers.) Deep tech may not be as big of a thing in New York as it is in El Segundo, Calif., a nucleus of aerospace, defense, and energy companies, Oberhaus admitted. But Newlab, a warehouse and startup space in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, thinks that New York's software chops and engineering talent will make the city's hardware companies rival the West Coast. Newlab is tricked out with offices and labs, which have attracted early-stage deep tech startups. A hub for consumer apps and Gen Z founders Consumer startups — especially those built for or by Gen Z — are also having a moment in the city that never sleeps. At one happy hour on Wednesday, founders of consumer startups mingled over drinks to talk about the apps they're building. Naturally, the event (which was cohosted by Consumer Club, a Discord community for consumer founders, and Superwall, a paywall tool for apps) took place at coworking space and consumer startup hub Verci. Some startups in the crowd included BePresent, a screen time control app that works out of the Verci space. A16z's Speedrun startup school also had a presence there, with an investor and recent alumni, like Waveful, a social network that was part of the most recent Speedrun cohort. Lekondo, a visual search engine for fashion, told us they were recently accepted into Speedrun's upcoming cohort. That same night, we also stopped by another mixer for Gen Z founders and creators, put together by Natalie Neptune, founder of GenZtea, an IRL events business that aims to connect brands with Gen Z, at skincare brand Kiehl's. Nathaneo Johnson, a Yale student who cofounded the buzzy professional networking startup Series, was among the Gen Z founders in the crowd. "You're seeing an increase of these AI-powered social networks," said Neptune. The NY vs. SF debate rages on Wherever we went, the techies were ready to socialize — perhaps markedly different from the builder culture vibe in San Francisco. Loosened up by seemingly endless trays of spicy margaritas and champagne at yet another rooftop party, this one at IBM, the crowd was lively and relaxed. Attendees, wearing button-downs rumpled from a day's work, didn't just talk business: Conversations evolved into debates on everything from global politics to the misfortunes of dating in New York City. "Tech Week has proven NYC is a mainstay and a competitive market for tech," Molly O'Shea, founder of venture-focused newsletter Sourcery, told BI in a text. O'Shea moderated two panels at Tech Week. "I'm sure many visitors (like me) are contemplating moving here to get some of this energy."
