Imagine a situation: you meet with a prospective service provider represented, at the familiarization meeting, by the head of a relevant department and an account manager who will, if you conclude a contract, manage your project. You notice that, while you talk, the head of department periodically addresses the account manager by a pet name. On the whole, the offered terms and conditions are to your liking. So why should you reject this provider?
Sometimes, people who work together have trouble telling friendliness from familiarity. What is good among friends and family is, most often, totally out of place in business. I will not now overall expand on politeness and being well-mannered. In this case, I will just explain why I do not especially like it when employees pet-name or honey-talk each other.
Do not get me wrong. A friendly atmosphere in a team is very important to me. Employees are daily engaged in a lot of difficult important work and they want to feel the support of their colleagues. Heads of departments and HR managers must create a maximally comfortable environment in every department. And yet, we try to stop coworkers from calling one another something like "honey" or "Billy".
It is not that this over-relaxes employees, disrupting business-like relations. Perhaps not even always. Perhaps it is not even that this may sound rude and impolite (like calling a chamber maid "my dear"). One of the worst problems of pet-naming is forcing a specific role in the team on a person. The role of a not fully grown, condescended to child. Letting others address him or her that way, an employee agrees to that role. Later, one may have a terrible problem shaking off this image. Quitting this team may be easier. Finding another one where this employee will not be looked on as "homey" or "Billy" but as a professional he or she is.
If an employee, once having accepted a role like this, lives with it, what does the company have? You guessed right: an infantile, irresponsible child. That child may be good doing his or her basic job but, should a problem arise, the "honey" will run to mama, or try and ignore the problem or make somebody else responsible. Do you need this kind of professionals?
Kurt Vonnegut wrote: "We are what we pretend to be". That is why one needs to be smart to pretend. And that is why I would not want my company to depend on an account manager who does not mind being talked to as a child.
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