From ‘OOO’ to touching grass: Age is no barrier to finding connections in the office

The e-mail read, “Sorry for the late response, I have been OOO!”

What did this person, whom I have never met or spoken to, mean? Why is she making “ooo” sounds at me?

Or is this a cry for help?

Like my battery is 0 per cent? And 0 is repeated thrice for emphasis!

I finally decided to ask my Gen Z colleagues, who told me “OOO!” means out of office, and they often add an exclamation mark to their messages to signal friendliness and excitement.

As they pointed out to me, “OOO” is not even a Gen Z term, but has been around for ages.

A few days later, I received another e-mail, from yet another communications professional whom I have never met, who said she is out touching grass. 

A-ha, this time I’m smarter! (By the way, A-ha is a pop band in the 1980s, not a Gen Z word.)

Using my actual intelligence and with no help from AI, I figured out touching grass has something to do with being on vacation, smelling the roses or essentially – OOO.  

In Gen Z speak, touching grass means to get offline and reconnect with the physical world.

Two years after a Gen Z colleague told me to pop off, I’m still kind of baffled by Gen Z speak.

ICYMI (in case you missed it), “pop off” is a way of complimenting someone in Gen Z lingo. For example, “Theresa, you have lost weight. Pop off!”

But what I have learnt is that the Gen Zs like to abbreviate many of their phrases.

NGL (not gonna lie), IDK (I don’t know) what you are talking about.

IYKYK (if you know, you know). 

I have also learnt to include exclamation marks in my text messages to signal I’m friendly, and not act like some Gen X dinosaur who can’t get on with the times.

I belong to the generation called X, which refers to those born between 1965 and 1980, according to the Pew Research Center. Millennials are born between 1981 and 1996, while Gen Zs are born between 1997 and 2012.

But this got me thinking: Has office speak become less formal over time with all the millennial and Gen Z lingo and emojis creeping into text messages and e-mails?

A 2023 poll of more than 2,000 people in the United Kingdom found that 71 per cent of respondents feel that younger workers are changing the formality of workplace language.

Traditional sign-offs such as “Yours truly” and “Yours sincerely” and salutations like “To whom it may concern” could disappear within the next decade, with many seeing them as old-fashioned, the poll by an initiative of British bank Barclays found. 

The survey had found that almost half of the respondents use more casual sign-offs such as “Thanks!” and “Thanks so much” instead.

Experts interviewed by the British and American media say workers have traditionally been expected to conform to communication norms set by older leaders. 

But the younger generations, having grown up in the age of social media where informality is the norm, tend to place a higher value on authenticity and self-expression.

While this shift has at times caused tensions between workers of different generations, it has also contributed to a gradual easing of formality when it comes to workplace communication.

Is the generation divide a myth?

A book I read recently – Generations: Does When You’re Born Shape Who You Are? – also made me rethink the magnitude of the generational divides.

Citing research encapsulating a host of issues such as climate change, marriage and employment, Bobby Duffy argued that the gaps between the young and most of the other generations are not as large or unusual as they are often portrayed to be.

For example, the younger generations are often stereotyped as job hoppers who change jobs more frequently than the older generations do.

But decades of American labour data shows that millennials and Gen Zs today stay for roughly about the same length of time at each job as the baby boomers (those born between 1946 and 1964) did when they were the same age in the 1980s. 

However, there are just three explanations for how all attitudes, beliefs and behaviour change over time, said Duffy, a professor of public policy at King’s College London.

The first is the period effect, where a major event such as war, a pandemic or an economic crisis affects everyone.

Then there is the life cycle effect, where people change as they age or go through some major life event, such as having a child or retirement.

Finally, there is the cohort effect, where a generation shares particular attitudes, beliefs and behaviour as they are socialised in a different environment from the other generations.

Duffy said: “It highlights the basic problem with generational analysis: Assuming when a person is born explains all their attitudes and behaviour relies solely on the cohort effect.”

In reality, changes in attitudes, beliefs and behaviour are often a result of one effect, or a combination of all three effects, he said.

Duffy, who has been studying generational issues for around 20 years, called for greater intergenerational connections as there are significant benefits to doing so.

My younger self used to think it was hard to make friends with someone from the other generations. I was too sold on the idea of a generational divide: that people of a certain generation think, speak and behave in a certain way. And the gaps are too vast to bridge across the generations.

But over the years, I have met people from my generation with whom I have nothing in common.

And I have become friends with millennials and Gen Zs who are 10 to 20 years younger.

It turns out that what matters is not the generation you are from, but whether you share common interests, beliefs and values. And if you click!

While my OOO message may just read “I’m on leave”, while my Gen Z friends say they are out touching grass, we can still connect IRL (in real life). FR (for real)! When that happens, age is no divide.