It’s kipper season for our social lives

A London cabbie told me this week that he’s “in the kippers”.

It’s a period, traditionally January and February, when taxi takings are so rubbish that cabbies used to get by on kippers because they were cheap and in season.

This year, he reckons it’s run through March.

What an expression 💥

And one I only stumbled across because I made small talk with the man driving me, and my suitcase, to an event at the Tracey Emin exhibition at the Tate last week. Bloody, raw, mesmerising… definitely not for the faint-hearted.

Small talk. Something we’ve have got worse at.

The data is brutal:

• In-person socialising: from 80–90 minutes a day (1987) to 31 minutes today

• Words spoken daily: from 16,000 (2005) to around 13,000 now

• Club memberships: down 75% since the 1970s

• Pubs: down by a third since 2000, closing faster than ever

• Nightclubs: disappearing even faster…at this rate, gone by 2030

Meanwhile:

• Time online: from 1 hour a day (2005) to 4.5 hours now

• People with no close friends: up from 5% to 11% in 15 years

• People living alone: from 3.4 million (1971) to 8.4 million now

We’re in the kippers socially.

And it’s showing up at work. Every interview I do points to less socialising, fewer friendships, and overwhelming digital incoming.

In every room I speak in, there’s a line that everyone relates to. It’s a quote of someone complaining they can only watch online training at 1.75x speed because the company has maxed it out there. We’re all bored and saddened by one-way talk.

I never thought stuffy days in flip-charted offices in Slough, with a corporate trainer older than my dad, would feel like the good old days. But somehow they do.

Fixing it isn’t easy. However many times people ask me if they can’t just “get everyone back five days” (you can but it causes other problems, one for another day).

So one small thing we’re exploring in this week’s vlog is how to give people the space to actually finish a thought. Which sounds soooo simple. Trivial even. But very hard. So much so that a client asked just today if they could do it for a third of the time proposed. But it’s very hard.

Yet exhilarating when you do it. Just like running. But on the upside, it doesn’t bugger your knees.

We’re doing a lot of work helping teams reconnect: for performance, culture, client relationships and simply to feel more human again. If that’s on your agenda this year, drop me a line.

In the meantime, tell me what great new expressions you’ve heard recently.

Christine