What I realized about greeting co-workers in the morning

For someone with a great deal of social anxiety, saying hi to co-workers can seem like a stomach sickening task. Such that the thought of coming into work early just to avoid having to say it first would be really attractive as opposed to well… being normal.

I know this, because I used to be like that.

Just writing this out actually sounds ridiculous. Because really what’s there to fear about saying hello? The reason for social anxiety probably stems deeper and for the longest time I’ve had an issue with that. In fact it was so bad when I was younger that a mother of a friend told me off for never saying hello back to her (I was 10 years old I think). I’ve probably had social anxiety for the majority of my life. I hated initiating contact with others and as a result I retreated into games (especially single player games).

So when I started my first job as a software developer (4 years ago) and I was going into an office with about 70 people in it, I knew I had to do something about it. I summoned all my willpower and forced myself to say ‘good morning’ and smile to everyone. I thought it would get easier as I did this and for a long time it didn’t. Still got the butterflies in my stomach when I entered work and still felt very conscious about people who didn’t say it back.

It wasn’t until after forcibly saying it to everyone for the next few months of working at this company that I started to really understand the value of social greetings.

As I continued the habit of overriding my desire to silently sneak into my corner of the office, and forget saying hello to everyone, I realized a few things.

Some people didn’t like saying hi back and at first this kind of stung. It was like I was making myself vulnerable and I reached out and then I got ignored. But after thinking about this from the opposite perspective I knew that most people would return a greeting if they were aware of it and it was directed at them. And the only reason someone wouldn’t, would be because they really didn’t like me.

Which means they likely didn’t hear me, they were busy / focused (totally good reasons) or didn’t feel the greeting was personalized towards them.

You can see here on this thread the OP is perplexed by the lack of return greetings and one of the top answers is quoted below.

Some are clearly on the autism spectrum, some may have social anxiety or similar, some are simply a bit “awkward” or “strange”.

That’s probably true. But I tested out my theory and when I made eye contact and said hello to the specific people who typically didn’t return a greeting, I got one back. These people clearly didn’t have a problem with me and my fears of being snubbed were based on paranoia stemming from social anxiety.

In any case, I didn’t write this article just so I could explain my embarrassing fear and how I overcame it with willpower. I realized after saying hello to co-workers every day for 3 months straight I was beginning to learn something I couldn’t anticipate.

I was learning to read people.

Every day in the morning, I was building an intuition of sorts. I started understanding everyone’s baseline response. If I decided to be more social and ask how they were going, I gleaned more information about that person. I started to understand based on their tone of voice, their answer and their body language what they were feeling and whether or not it was good to press on with questions or to quickly eject. It was the start of my people reading skills and I was learning it for the first time properly.

I used to think the question “how are you doing?” was totally unnecessary because almost like reading off a script people would reply “I’m good thanks and how are you?“. But even with the same reply, the tone and body language could infer more detail and lead to more useful followup questions.

I’m sure every manager or social person knows what I’ve said is true. But for those of us with social anxiety it probably needs to be explained explicitely.

There was also a secondary benefit in that people were just nicer to me than they were to a co-worker who really didn’t like saying hi. And I could tell people were just more comfortable with me as a result of all those repeated greetings. Like an invisible social bridge. People were more willing to approach me for queries and would side step those they hadn’t built familiarity. I guess that’s just the nature of social play but it was something I didn’t learn at school that I probably should’ve.

To this day I still feel anxiety before social greetings but overriding it is simple because of the benefits I know I’ll get by doing it. It means I can navigate people’s moods, ask for things at the right time, anticipate a problem if there is one from team members. I can tell when someone is not having a good start and I can help by being more accommodating.

The benefits of the simple greeting in the morning extend way beyond the simple social courtesy it appears to be. It initializes social bonding and allows for temperature reads of the people involved which then opens doors for future collaboration.