BBC LEARNING ENGLISH

Office English
Work events
This is a transcript of a spoken conversation and is not a word-for-word script.

Phil
Is every conversation at work important for your career? Some people think so.

Voicenote clips
I think you have to be able to be very confident and be able to show off a little bit
like 'This is what I do, this is why I'm good at it and this is why we should work
together.'

Small talk is great in the way that it breaks the ice before you can find something
interesting to talk about with the other person.

Pippa
In this episode of Office English, we're finding out how to be professional at work
events and master the art of small talk, which is what we call talking about
unimportant things.

Phil
Welcome to Office English from BBC Learning English, your podcast guide to the
language of the workplace. I'm Phil.

Pippa
And I'm Pippa. In this podcast we talk about the words and phrases that can help
you through even the most stressful situations at work. And today we're talking
about work events. Maybe it's a festive work party, maybe you're at a conference
or award ceremony, or maybe you just need something to talk about with your
colleagues over lunch.

Phil
Yes, there are lots of times when we might need to speak in English at work when
we're not even doing work at all. And when we use these opportunities to improve
our professional relationships this is called networking. Are you any good
at networking, Pippa?

Pippa
I'm not sure, really. I think I'm probably quite bad at networking when I don't
know somebody because I get really nervous. I'm maybe a bit better once I start

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to know someone better. So, with colleagues at work I think I'm a little bit better
at developing good relationships. What about you, Phil?

Phil
I think it depends on the situation because there are some situations where it's
like everyone's there to network. So, because it's kind of accepted that you're
going to be doing networking, I can make myself do it. But where I'm not so good
at it is in... when I'm in a much more social situation where perhaps there isn't that
expectation and I'm not the sort of person who's going to jump up and get out my
business card and give people a long speech on what I do and how I could make
them loads of money. Yeah, that feels a bit uncomfortable to me.

Pippa
In this episode, we'll guide you through these informal work settings from small
talk to networking so that you can make the most of your conversations at work.

Phil
So let's start with how to open a conversation. Imagine you're at a work event,
maybe a conference, and you want to talk to somebody important. How can we
start the conversation, Pippa?

Pippa
Well, if we know who the person is, but we don't know them, we could engage
them with a compliment. So if we were at a conference and we'd seen them speak,
we could say I was really impressed by your talk or we could say I heard about
your company and I really like the work you do or we could say something like I
read your report about this thing and I'd really like to speak about it. So people
always love a compliment, I find.

Phil
Yes and also, as well as these being good compliments, they're kind of getting to
the point of why you're interested in them, why you're interested in that company
and that kind of leads on to what you might have to offer, because you're
probably looking for opportunities to work together at some point in the future.
So yeah, I think that's a really good way to… to break the ice, to start a
conversation.

Pippa
Mmm, yeah. Some people prefer to talk about non-work things at the beginning
and we'll talk a bit more later in the episode about how to do that. But I find it
easier to kind of go in almost straight... straight in and just talk about something
that they've done that's impressive because that's usually a good way to talk
about work. If we don't know them, we can just introduce ourselves. That's a good

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way to start a conversation and then you want to kind of open up the
conversation. So ask quite an open question, something like How are you finding
the conference? or you could say something like What line of work are you in?

Phil
That's a great expression there. What line of work are you in? And yeah it just
means what do you do, what's your job?

Pippa
Yeah, so you're opening up the conversation. You always want to keep the
conversation moving like that.

So, what next? How can we move things onto work, if we didn't start on work, or...
or maybe just keep the conversation going?

Phil
OK, so maybe asking interesting questions could be key. So things like What do
you think is next... for the industry, How did you become interested in... a
particular subject, What do you think about... any industry news or the event that
you're at or maybe another event that is really important in your industry.

These are all nice open questions. It's not just a 'yes' or 'no and you kind of get to
know what the person thinks about these subjects as well, which I think can be
important.

Pippa
Yeah. There's two really great things about that. The first is if you ask a 'yes' or
'no' question, so something like 'Are you having a good time?' Somebody might
just say 'yes' or even worse 'no'. And then what do you say to that? That makes it
really difficult to keep the conversation going.

And another thing about asking questions like What do you think is next for the
industry? is hopefully that person will then talk for a long time and you don't
have to do all the work in the conversation and you can kind of listen to what
they're saying and respond to what they're saying rather than having to kind of
keep things moving and say your opinions all the time. Anything else you'd do,
Phil?

Phil
Well, maybe you want to prepare some opinions or have some talking points
depending on what's important in your industry. So you might say I'm fascinated
by... how artificial intelligence will change our industry, it means we can do work
much faster, or maybe you want to talk about the problems with it, I don't know.

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Pippa
Yeah. So this is really good if you're nervous to speak. You could have a think
about some opinions or some questions or some interesting things to talk about
with people. You might be confident just to have a natural conversation but if
you're not so confident, preparing a couple of thoughts is always useful.

Phil
OK so, if we've got this far, we're doing well. But how do we get onto networking?
What phrases can we use, Pippa?

Pippa
Yeah so, networking is kind of where we use this relationship that we've started
and we use it for our career. So we could start by saying something like I'd really
love to talk more about my ideas for... modernising the industry. So you can offer
them something. You could say Can we grab a coffee some time? or Can I get
your contact details? So you show that you want to continue this really
interesting conversation that hopefully you've just had with them and you're
giving them something. You just... You don't just want something from them.

Phil
Yes, this idea of sitting down for a coffee, it's great, it's kind of a great way of
saying 'Yeah, I wanna talk about the work you do, the work I do and find the ways
that we can work together', but it's getting a coffee and it, kind of particularly in
these kind of networking contexts, it's like everyone knows what that means.

Pippa
Mmm, yeah. And maybe you might be at a virtual event so saying Can I get your
email? is a good way to be able to follow up with, contact somebody later, and
then you can... you can ask them more questions because yeah we don't always
meet in person these days. You might not be able to go for a real coffee, but you
might be able to go for a virtual coffee.

Another thing you could say is I would be interested to work with you on a
project or I would love to show you around my office or I'd love to show you
around my company. This will depend on.. on whether you can show them round
your office and you might not feel that the first time you meet someone you
could say this. It's really a judgement. But you might want to think about, you
know, a potential future professional relationship with this person.

Phil
Yeah, think about the things that you want to get out of it. What are the things
are important for you from a work point of view?

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Pippa
And we can often be really embarrassed about the fact that we kind of want
something from someone in a networking context, but actually sometimes it's
easier just to ask, you know, rather than being nice to someone just because you
want an opportunity. If you're clear that you'd really like to work with them then
that's good and they might respond well to that.

Phil
And remember they're probably at this thing because they're looking for people
to work with as well. So they're probably interested to hear what you've got to
say.

Remember networking can be difficult for native speakers too. Let's hear again
from our BBC Learning English colleagues.

Voicenote clips
I think you have to be able to be very confident and be able to show off a little bit
like 'this is what I do this is why I'm good at it and this is why we should work
together'.

Small talk is great in the way that it breaks the ice before you can find something
interesting to talk about with the other person.

Pippa
So, Jiaying talked about using small talk to break the ice, to get a conversation
moving. So small talk is what we call chatting about unimportant things, talking
about small things. And that's a good way to get a conversation going before we
talk about the work that we want to talk about.

Phil
Yes and, certainly in the UK, most work conversations contain some small talk. A
really common one is talking about the weather, it's a really easy one. Of course,
in the UK the weather changes so often there's always something worth talking
about, even if it's just a complaint.

Pippa
Also you could talk about recent events or observations. So if you're at a
conference or a party, you could make some observation about what's going on. It
can feel really strange and really silly to talk about what we might think are
boring things as a way to start a conversation, but it just can sometimes
just loosen somebody up, which means just relax them so they're ready to talk.

Phil
I think with small talk often we're trying to find things that we have in common

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with people, aren't we? So it might be at an event you're often asking about
things related to the event. So it might not be the weather, it might be how you
got there, there might be something that happened, there might have been a
really interesting talk that everyone's talking about and so that might be the
thing that you ask or you're trying to find out what someone thinks.

And then, what's really... what will really help you build a relationship is if you're
showing genuine interest in the other person, that really helps build that
relationship so then you can take it to other places afterwards and you can start
asking the more networky questions.

Pippa
And lots of networking is about developing relationships as we've said, and so
working on your conversational English is really important. And you can find
loads of programmes and courses to help with this on our website. That's
bbclearningenglish.com.

Phil
And that's it for this episode of Office English. Next time, we'll be talking about
the phrases used to give bad news at work. Join us, then. Bye!

Pippa
Bye!

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