THE ECONOMIST: Must-know tips on how to behave in office lifts

Congratulations on joining our internship programme. For most of you this is your first experience of the workplace, and with that in mind we have prepared a guide to office etiquette. Other chapters cover what to wear (more), when to use emojis (less) and when to speak in meetings (it depends).

The first chapter is on lifts. If this is your first job, you may have a vague idea that this is where people make elevator pitches.

Wrong.

However much time you spend in a lift, you will never hear anyone proposing ideas that will change the world or ignite their careers. Instead, you will be exposed to a mixture of disappointment, incompetence and awkwardness as you gradually make your way to your destination.

As a way of understanding what it’s like to be at work, in other words, it’s an ideal place to start. Here are a few basic tips.

When people are waiting for a lift, someone will stand right in front of the doors, so close that their breath mists the metal.

In the lift that is descending towards them, someone else will be standing as close as possible to their set of doors. When the doors open, these two individuals will be utterly shocked by the proximity of the other.

They will then perform an elaborate little dance, like bowerbirds ducking and bobbing in search of a mate, before moving out of the way. You should always stand well back and let people out first.

When you enter a ground-floor lift on your own, there will be an agonisingly long wait for the doors to close. This wait will be prolonged enough that you will assume the lift is broken. Do not do anything.

If you try to step out, the doors will start to close and you will curse and step back inside. When they finally start to shut again, someone unseen will put an arm into the gap, causing the doors to open once more. A body will eventually follow. This may well be repeated several times until you want to cry. If you are prone to stress, take the stairs or, if that is not feasible, listen to a meditation app.

When you are catching a lift back down, someone will come out of it on your floor while looking at their phone. They will eventually look up and realise that this is not where they were meant to get out.

They will emit a small, high-pitched noise and scurry back into the lift. They will then describe what has just happened, even though you were there.

“I thought that was the ground floor,” they will say.

When this happens you must laugh in a friendly way. It is an oddly disturbing experience for people to enter another company’s territory without permission, a bit like being parachuted behind enemy lines in error.

Deciding whether to start a conversation in a lift depends on three factors: familiarity, fullness and floor.

If you are in a lift with someone you don’t know, it’s very simple: say nothing, smile thinly and then look fixedly at the ceiling.

If you must, say “Good morning”, but nothing more. You cannot network or form friendships in a lift; you can only make strangers fear for their safety.

If you get in with someone you work with and know well, chat away. But if there are other people in there, tailor your behaviour to take account of who might be earwigging. Do not say “Isn’t Keith amazingly short?” when Keith’s friends might be in there with you. Or, buried deep among the crowd, Keith.

If you get in a lift with someone you know vaguely, you are in very tricky territory. A nod may suffice but you may have to speak to them. You must calibrate conversation to the length of the journey. If you have just two floors of ascent or descent together, do not ask for their views on the Geneva Convention. (Actually, no matter what the circumstances, don’t ask for their views on the Geneva Convention.)

Whenever a crowd is entering a lift, the person who has to exit first must stand at the very back. No one knows why this rule exists but it is crucial. So if you are getting out on the second floor, make sure to squeeze right in.

Offices are tribal places, and so are lifts. Entering a crowded lift on the way down is the equivalent of going into a saloon in a Western. No one is pleased to see you; the air crackles with hostility. Do not take it personally: just get in and take up as little space as possible. By the time someone on the next floor tries to enter, you will be part of the in-group and can glare at them.

There are other rules. That mirror is not actually for getting dressed. Reaching across someone to press the buttons requires extreme care. But these will do for starters. Let’s move on to tattoos.