In these broken times, it’s not easy to spare a thought for the plight of the humble civil servant. But bear with me and open your heart. Last week, it emerged that the Cabinet Office has brought in new rules for civil servants about the types of meetings they can hold. Anything that constitutes a “networking meeting” now has to be held outside working hours. And if it’s a networking “event”, it has to be signed off by a senior civil servant.
Alex Thomas, a programme director at the Institute for Government, said the new rules were “reasonably proportionate as most meetings take place after work or in lunchtimes anyway”, and that “reminding civil servants that they are primarily there to do their core jobs is not a bad thing”.
In the grand scheme of things, this is not the most terrible thing ever. But I have sympathy for the backlash, which has been as muted and discreet as Sir Humphrey Appleby of Yes Minister fame himself. As a civil services union source put it – one likes to think in sotto voce – this move “risks staff feeling under attack at a time when once again they are being asked to do more with less”. Can you picture Sir Humphrey’s tight smile at the end of these words?
Of course, this is a storm in an office-issued plastic cup of cold tea consumed surreptitiously at a rescheduled hybrid Teams meeting. And, yes, you can understand – especially as memories of Partygate and the wheely suitcases of booze are still fresh – that anyone anywhere near government needs clarity about what constitutes professionalism and what needs to happen on and off the clock. However, this feels like yet another excuse to make working life even more proscriptive, rigid and rule-bound than it already is.
It pains me to speak up in favour of “networking” – a horrible word that really simply means “talking to other people”. But it seems to me that, if anything, we need regulations forcing us all to get to know each other in greater depth, not lesser. When things are difficult and you feel stressed because of work, who do you turn to? Your colleagues. Why do people meet to network? They do it because they don’t have a chance to talk about the things that really matter inside sanctioned meetings. They do it because not every single part of us can fit within the confines of a working day, let alone the screen-based confines that now frame most people’s working days. They do it because they are human.
Regulations that discourage people getting to know each other also overlook the great unspoken truth of working life: most official meetings are inefficient unless the people in them know each other well, ideally very well. The real work gets done outside the official meetings: the messy, slow and invisible business of persuading people of things one-to-one, canvassing support, building trust, forging alliances, swapping stories, all the seemingly pointless encounters that eventually and sometimes almost accidentally create some kind of meaning or progress. Of course, people have to conduct these encounters in a way that has boundaries in place. But it does seem rather offensive to the civil service that they need babying with these rules, like someone has to explain to them that they shouldn’t be getting completely wasted, talking rubbish and photocopying their arses. (“But I thought it was in the job description?”)
Nigel Hawthorne as Sir Humphrey (right) with Derek Fowlds and Paul Eddington in Yes Minister. Photograph: PA
It’s the feeling of being patronised, mistrusted and taken for granted that feels like an attack. The quietly disgruntled source speaks for many, including outside the civil service. After all, this is surely how most working people feel now: sick of “once again being asked to do more with less”. The Health and Safety Executive’s 2024 report found that 79% of UK workers experience stress regularly, and that 17.1m working days are lost annually to work-related stress, depression and anxiety. I’m sure those days are not all attributable to the civil service, although it would make a good reality TV documentary if they were. Forget Ferris Bueller. I want to see Sir Humphrey’s Day Off.
On the other hand, maybe this move is exactly the rebrand “networking meetings” need. Everyone hates the idea of networking and most people will do anything to avoid it. But if networking is “banned” – cancelled, even? – perhaps this is the one way to make it cool and radical. Stick it to the man by networking hard outside office hours! Be a maverick and talk to your workmates about items that are not on the agenda! Ask about their hobbies! This is surely how revolutions begin.
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