Business etiquette classes boom as people relearn how to act at work

Since the end of last year, Daniel Post Senning — the great-great-grandson of American etiquette queen Emily Post and co-president of the Emily Post Institute — has been gobsmacked by the growing demand for his family’s services.

Senning had anticipated a boom in training requests as companies brought workers back to offices after the pandemic, but it didn’t happen right away. Instead, the wave of interest has come since the turn of the year, with growing numbers of big corporations and small family firms paying to send employees to courses such as “Manners at Work” and “Business Etiquette for Professionals.” He’s even seen an explosion of interest in learning to be an etiquette trainer.

More than two years after employers began urging white-collar workers back to offices, Americans are still reckoning with the ripple effects of pandemic-induced disruption when it comes to workplace behavior. The years spent apart from colleagues have rusted workers’ social skills, and new ways of working have spawned a host of fresh etiquette issues.

Meanwhile, younger workers are making up an increasing share of the workforce and bringing with them a preference for more-casual working environments, which is creating friction with older generations, experts say.

“People are asking: ‘What is business etiquette? Do I need etiquette training?’” said Senning. “And I don’t think it’s just younger employees or newer employees who are more challenged and stressed by this environment.”

Workers who had substantial professional experience before the pandemic, including managers and executives, still need help adapting to hybrid and remote work, Senning said. He has been coaching leaders on best practices for such things as communicating through your calendar and deciding whether to call, text, or use Slack to reach an employee.

Establishing etiquette for video meetings has also been a challenge for many firms, he notes. Bad behavior in virtual meetings has occasionally made headlines in recent years, such as the backlash against Vishal Garg, CEO of the mortgage lending firm Better.com, for announcing mass layoffs over Zoom ahead of the holidays in 2021.

“If I had a magic button that I could push that could get people to treat video meetings with 50% of the same level of professionalism they treat an in-person meeting, I would make a lot of HR, personnel managers, and executives very, very happy,” Senning said.

Tech companies also are paying for etiquette and professionalism training for their workers, especially if they’re bringing in employees who have never worked in person before, according to Crystal Bailey, director of the Etiquette Institute of Washington, who counts Amazon among her clients.

In her courses, Bailey coaches workers on a wide range of topics, such as making a good digital first impression and etiquette for interviewing and fine dining. One area that continues to evolve is dress codes, she notes, especially because of younger workers’ preference for more-casual styles.

“If you have a workplace with a broad range of generations, they’re going to have different expectations of what business attire is,” Bailey said.

The majority of U.S. workers dress casually on the job, according to data from Gallup last fall, with 7 in 10 reporting that their work attire is business casual or “more dressed-down, casual street clothes.” Just 3% said they typically wear “business professional” clothes.

Lisa Richey, founder of the American Academy of Etiquette, said her bookings for speaking engagements have quadrupled since last year. She's also been inundated with requests from professionals in human resources to help draft dress codes. Some shifts, like the incorporation of the sneaker into business-casual dress, were popularized by younger workers and have been embraced across generations. But Richey has been shocked at times by just how far younger workers are willing to push the limits, such as a young woman at one of her recent sessions who appeared to be wearing a tube top as a skirt.

“Companies have realized we’ve got to be a little more specific than saying you need to be professionally dressed,” Richey said.

Richey offers a variety of courses covering topics such as professional presence and business entertainment, but these days, dress code is “on just about everybody’s priority list,” she said. There has also been elevated demand for her session on “connecting across generations” at work.

For younger workers, the more traditional aspects of workplace etiquette are the toughest to navigate, experts say.

Richey, for instance, has noticed younger workers struggling with both verbal and nonverbal forms of communication, whether through eye contact, greetings, or basic conversation.

“This younger generation has been used to such an informal communication style with texting and social media,” Richey said. “It definitely has had an impact.”

Kelly Rownd, director for career readiness at North Carolina State University, said that young professionals today generally get more opportunities for skill-building than previous generations. But they’re not always experienced when it comes to the social elements: drafting emails, networking, knowing how to behave in a meeting vs. at a client dinner. Meanwhile, companies increasingly rely on colleges and universities to provide this instruction, she added.

"In conversations with employers, it's apparent that professionalism has been and continues to be an area of growth that's needed for career readiness," Rownd said. "They have voiced that students are well prepared from a technical standpoint, but they may struggle with soft skills."

Pamela Eyring, president of the Protocol School of Washington, said she has seen a notable surge in interest in training that’s geared toward younger professionals, with inquiries and bookings for courses rising 100% from last year.

Firms are especially eager for younger workers to get coaching on skills they weren’t able to develop during the pandemic, she notes, such as entertaining clients at business dinners.

“When you start working, it’s very difficult to learn these skills and practice them,” Eyring said. “A lot of these students are graduating from top colleges, but they’re not understanding what some of those business professionalism areas are, so now the companies have to educate them.”

She recently gave a course to young women working in financial services. They were eager to learn how to “power up their look and power up their skills,” Eyring said, but in hindsight their questions struck her as “pretty basic.”

“In reality, they may not have been taught these things, whereas older people had that experience already,” Eyring said.

That dynamic has shaped Teniola Ayoola’s early experiences in the workforce. A few years after graduation, she couldn’t understand why she had fallen behind her peers professionally. She had been an award-winning honors student as an undergrad at George Washington University and a master’s student at Harvard University, and she had completed internships with big outlets like the BBC. Yet her resume hadn’t translated into the kinds of real-world opportunities her classmates had locked down.

Now 29, Ayoola thinks back to the development courses she attended at Harvard, where C-suite leaders had preached about the importance of conveying “gravitas” and “executive presence” — concepts she understood in theory but found tricky to practice across different professional environments. Eventually, Ayoola concluded that what she lacked was networking skills. The reason: She had been actively avoiding opportunities to potentially advance her career because she was put off by how “fake” and “transactional” the process of building a professional network seemed.

“If you put me in a room and told me to work the room, I wouldn’t know what to do and who to talk to and what to talk about,” Ayoola said.

To conquer her discomfort, Ayoola, who lives in Virginia, took a course last month at the Etiquette Institute of Washington. It helped reframe networking as a chance to build "meaningful connections" and shored up her confidence in tackling challenges such as developing a personal "elevator pitch" and following up with people she meets. She hopes to take more professional etiquette courses.

“I feel like my idea of professionalism is always changing,” Ayoola said. “If you don’t have the proper training, you can develop negative habits that can hurt you later.”