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During 23 years with the BBC, reporting with ITV, a freelance agency and on the South Wales Echo (SWE), our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry, has always worked in an office, where many story ideas came out of ‘water cooler moments’ (a machine much-needed now!), but a new poll suggests that a lot of people want to work from home (as he does on The Eye today)…
I am always asked ‘where do the story ideas come from?’.
The answer is pretty mundane – I read research, look at the papers, I am contacted by sources.
However when I was in a big organisation (such as at the BBC), a lot of story ideas came from ‘water cooler moments’, when people were gathered together relaxing, and talking about things that were seen or heard.
Now though, new details have emerged which show that a lot of people in offices apparently don’t speak to each other AT ALL!
A poll of 2,000 UK office workers by the training platform Kahoot! reveals that 17 per cent didn’t talk to a colleague.
Other information is similarly disturbing, and may also undermine the concept of finding stories for a journalist, when people actually SPOKE to each other in the office.
Apparently 52 per cent of people message co-workers even if they’re IN THE SAME ROOM!
40 per cent say they are lonely (I’m not surprised!), and a lot said they would rather work from home (as I do).
It seems to me that people are missing out if there is no physical interaction or ‘water cooler moments’.
I only work from home now because I have to (it’s no panacea), where I am contacted by sources, so I can still cause trouble on The Eye!
Furthemore I was in offices for many years, so we would often gather round the water cooler to slag off colleagues, and that’s where many of our best stories came from.
It seems it may not happen as much now…
Details of Phil’s extraordinary award-winning career (when stories often came out of ‘water cooler moments’) as he was gripped by the rare and incurable neurological disease Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order it now.
