Work events

Is every conversation at work important for your career? Some people think so. Voicenote clips I think you have to be able to be very confident and be able to show off a little bit like 'This is what I do, this is why I'm good at it and this is why we should work together.' Small talk is great in the way that it breaks the ice before you can find something interesting to talk about with the other person.

In this episode of Office English, we're finding out how to be professional at work events and master the art of small talk, which is what we call talking about unimportant things.

Welcome to Office English from BBC Learning English, your podcast guide to the language of the workplace. I'm Phil.

And I'm Pippa. In this podcast we talk about the words and phrases that can help you through even the most stressful situations at work. And today we're talking about work events. Maybe it's a festive work party, maybe you're at a conference or award ceremony, or maybe you just need something to talk about with your colleagues over lunch.

Yes, there are lots of times when we might need to speak in English at work when we're not even doing work at all. And when we use these opportunities to improve our professional relationships this is called networking. Are you any good at networking, Pippa?

I'm not sure, really. I think I'm probably quite bad at networking when I don't know somebody because I get really nervous. I'm maybe a bit better once I start to know someone better. So, with colleagues at work I think I'm a little bit better at developing good relationships. What about you, Phil?

I think it depends on the situation because there are some situations where it's like everyone's there to network. So, because it's kind of accepted that you're going to be doing networking, I can make myself do it. But where I'm not so good at it is in... when I'm in a much more social situation where perhaps there isn't that expectation and I'm not the sort of person who's going to jump up and get out my business card and give people a long speech on what I do and how I could make them loads of money. Yeah, that feels a bit uncomfortable to me.

In this episode, we'll guide you through these informal work settings from small talk to networking so that you can make the most of your conversations at work.

So let's start with how to open a conversation. Imagine you're at a work event, maybe a conference, and you want to talk to somebody important. How can we start the conversation, Pippa?

Well, if we know who the person is, but we don't know them, we could engage them with a compliment. So if we were at a conference and we'd seen them speak, we could say I was really impressed by your talk or we could say I heard about your company and I really like the work you do or we could say something like I read your report about this thing and I'd really like to speak about it. So people always love a compliment, I find.

Yes and also, as well as these being good compliments, they're kind of getting to the point of why you're interested in them, why you're interested in that company and that kind of leads on to what you might have to offer, because you're probably looking for opportunities to work together at some point in the future. So yeah, I think that's a really good way to… to break the ice, to start a conversation.

Mmm, yeah. Some people prefer to talk about non-work things at the beginning and we'll talk a bit more later in the episode about how to do that. But I find it easier to kind of go in almost straight... straight in and just talk about something that they've done that's impressive because that's usually a good way to talk about work. If we don't know them, we can just introduce ourselves. That's a good way to start a conversation and then you want to kind of open up the conversation. So ask quite an open question, something like How are you finding the conference? or you could say something like What line of work are you in?

That's a great expression there. What line of work are you in? And yeah it just means what do you do, what's your job?

Yeah, so you're opening up the conversation. You always want to keep the conversation moving like that. So, what next? How can we move things onto work, if we didn't start on work, or... or maybe just keep the conversation going?

OK, so maybe asking interesting questions could be key. So things like What do you think is next... for the industry, How did you become interested in... a particular subject, What do you think about... any industry news or the event that you're at or maybe another event that is really important in your industry. These are all nice open questions. It's not just a 'yes' or 'no and you kind of get to know what the person thinks about these subjects as well, which I think can be important.

Yeah. There's two really great things about that. The first is if you ask a 'yes' or 'no' question, so something like 'Are you having a good time?' Somebody might just say 'yes' or even worse 'no'. And then what do you say to that? That makes it really difficult to keep the conversation going. And another thing about asking questions like What do you think is next for the industry? is hopefully that person will then talk for a long time and you don't have to do all the work in the conversation and you can kind of listen to what they're saying and respond to what they're saying rather than having to kind of keep things moving and say your opinions all the time. Anything else you'd do, Phil?

Well, maybe you want to prepare some opinions or have some talking points depending on what's important in your industry. So you might say I'm fascinated by... how artificial intelligence will change our industry, it means we can do work much faster, or maybe you want to talk about the problems with it, I don't know.

Yeah. So this is really good if you're nervous to speak. You could have a think about some opinions or some questions or some interesting things to talk about with people. You might be confident just to have a natural conversation but if you're not so confident, preparing a couple of thoughts is always useful.

OK so, if we've got this far, we're doing well. But how do we get onto networking? What phrases can we use, Pippa?

Yeah so, networking is kind of where we use this relationship that we've started and we use it for our career. So we could start by saying something like I'd really love to talk more about my ideas for... modernising the industry. So you can offer them something. You could say Can we grab a coffee some time? or Can I get your contact details? So you show that you want to continue this really interesting conversation that hopefully you've just had with them and you're giving them something. You just... You don't just want something from them.

Yes, this idea of sitting down for a coffee, it's great, it's kind of a great way of saying 'Yeah, I wanna talk about the work you do, the work I do and find the ways that we can work together', but it's getting a coffee and it, kind of particularly in these kind of networking contexts, it's like everyone knows what that means.

Mmm, yeah. And maybe you might be at a virtual event so saying Can I get your email? is a good way to be able to follow up with, contact somebody later, and then you can... you can ask them more questions because yeah we don't always meet in person these days. You might not be able to go for a real coffee, but you might be able to go for a virtual coffee. Another thing you could say is I would be interested to work with you on a project or I would love to show you around my office or I'd love to show you around my company. This will depend on.. on whether you can show them round your office and you might not feel that the first time you meet someone you could say this. It's really a judgement. But you might want to think about, you know, a potential future professional relationship with this person.

Yeah, think about the things that you want to get out of it. What are the things are important for you from a work point of view?

And we can often be really embarrassed about the fact that we kind of want something from someone in a networking context, but actually sometimes it's easier just to ask, you know, rather than being nice to someone just because you want an opportunity. If you're clear that you'd really like to work with them then that's good and they might respond well to that.

And remember they're probably at this thing because they're looking for people to work with as well. So they're probably interested to hear what you've got to say. Remember networking can be difficult for native speakers too. Let's hear again from our BBC Learning English colleagues. Voicenote clips I think you have to be able to be very confident and be able to show off a little bit like 'this is what I do this is why I'm good at it and this is why we should work together'. Small talk is great in the way that it breaks the ice before you can find something interesting to talk about with the other person.

So, Jiaying talked about using small talk to break the ice, to get a conversation moving. So small talk is what we call chatting about unimportant things, talking about small things. And that's a good way to get a conversation going before we talk about the work that we want to talk about.

Yes and, certainly in the UK, most work conversations contain some small talk. A really common one is talking about the weather, it's a really easy one. Of course, in the UK the weather changes so often there's always something worth talking about, even if it's just a complaint.

Also you could talk about recent events or observations. So if you're at a conference or a party, you could make some observation about what's going on. It can feel really strange and really silly to talk about what we might think are boring things as a way to start a conversation, but it just can sometimes just loosen somebody up, which means just relax them so they're ready to talk.

I think with small talk often we're trying to find things that we have in common with people, aren't we? So it might be at an event you're often asking about things related to the event. So it might not be the weather, it might be how you got there, there might be something that happened, there might have been a really interesting talk that everyone's talking about and so that might be the thing that you ask or you're trying to find out what someone thinks. And then, what's really... what will really help you build a relationship is if you're showing genuine interest in the other person, that really helps build that relationship so then you can take it to other places afterwards and you can start asking the more networky questions.

And lots of networking is about developing relationships as we've said, and so working on your conversational English is really important. And you can find loads of programmes and courses to help with this on our website. That's

And that's it for this episode of Office English. Next time, we'll be talking about the phrases used to give bad news at work. Join us, then. Bye!

Bye!