I headed to the office where my favourite desk was available, hot desk girlies will know…”
“I actually located a box that was missing in our post room for two weeks, so that was a slay!”
“Walking up the steps as always because office girlies know you’ve got to get them steps in.”
Welcome to the eerily dystopian world of what I’m going to dub OfficeTok – TikTok videos glamourising the bog-standard act of working a 9-to-5 office job.
I suppose it was inevitable. There is barely a corner of modern life that social media has not infiltrated and rebranded as some kind of aspirational “aesthetic”, from simply drinking water (here’s looking at you, Stanley Cup) to the humble act of putting groceries in the fridge (restocking videos are one of the unlikelier trends to have emerged in the past couple of years). Nothing is safe from being transformed into content.
Now, it’s the turn of the white-collar working day. Videos abound on TikTok of young women showing off a “day in the life” as a “corporate girlie” working in the big city. These clips contain all the hallmarks of the influencer lifestyle – early morning skincare and workout routines, overnight oats at the desk, regular hydration, lunchtime visits to Space NK, matcha lattes on the coffee break and mid-afternoon kombuchas for a daily pick-me-up – typically accompanied by a softly spoken voiceover, calmer than any office worker I’ve ever crossed paths with.
“Welcome back to another day in the life of a PR and social girlie living in London,” says Cherise Silavant, 23, in one of her several posts detailing the day-to-day grind of her junior job in public relations. “Most of my corporate ‘day in the life’s are my top-viewed content, and I’ve actually gained more followers because of them,” she recently told The Times. “I feel like there was this whole boom on TikTok of this ‘corporate girl’ aesthetic.”
She’s not wrong. There are currently 1.7 million videos on TikTok with the hashtag #OfficeLife, and 880,000 with the hashtag #CorporateLife. Clouds Joo, a self-described “1st gen corporate girly” in her mid-twenties who recently switched from consulting to working in tech, has more than 400,000 followers across all social media platforms thanks to her posts lifting the lid on desk-life. “People really do enjoy seeing the office, maybe because they’re able to relate to it … maybe because they want to see more of what a corporate lifestyle looks like,” she said.
Such fascination from a younger generation could be, in part, because so many of them missed out on getting a taste of the real thing due to Covid. Plenty of Gen Z went straight from virtual lectures at university to a graduate job working from home during lockdown. Five years on, that’s still the reality for some of them as 16 per cent of the UK’s workforce remain fully remote. At 28 per cent, nearly a third are doing a hybrid mix of WFH and working from the office.
In this context, then, perhaps it does make sense that the idea of being a “9-5 office girlie” would gain a certain cachet or lustre. The life they promise is the kind of shiny, high-flying image of corporate careering touted by shows like Ally McBeal and Suits in the Nineties and Noughties (and, more recently, Industry and The Bold Type).
The big corporations, never one to miss a trick, are starting to harness the trend and use it to their advantage. Deloitte and Unilever, for example, now have their own “in-house influencers” in order to expand their visibility on social media, attract talent and plug their company culture online.
That strategy goes hand-in-hand with the steadily growing policy of businesses, including Amazon, Barclays and JPMorgan Chase, pushing employees back into the office full-time – whether they want to or not. Those companies are fighting an uphill battle. Nearly half (48 per cent) of workers said they would consider handing in their notice if forced to return to the office five days a week, according to a new survey. In the wrong hands, then, OfficeTok might be used as a much needed and effective propaganda tool. “Come and work for us in the office every day, kids!” the multinationals beckon enticingly, turmeric lattes in hand. “It’s chic! It’s sexy! It’s fun! You’ll love it!”
As a former 9-to-5, five-days-a-week “office girlie” myself, I must advise any young person pursuing this corporate dream sold on social media to proceed with caution. A 90-second video, peppered liberally with bubble tea breaks and lunch hour errands that definitely take longer than an hour, are not really telling the full story.
Take it from an office vet who’s now 16 years into this game – however much someone bandies around the terms “girlies”, “slay” or “corporate baddies” during their double-speed voiceover, the whole thing is usually about as far from “glamorous” as it gets.
What the social media videos are so apt to gloss over is the sinfully dull, minute-by-minute reality of the daily grind: the hours spent staring at a screen while deepening your frown lines in concentration; asking anyone if they have paracetamol to alleviate the headache you’ve developed from the overhead strip lighting; wandering aimlessly over to the kitchen to fill up your giant water bottle (and wishing you’d bought a smaller one so that you had reason to wander over more frequently). There’s the unnecessary trips to the loo just for a change of scenery, and the fact you’ll plan your entire afternoon around precisely when you can crack open your refrigerated Diet Coke can – the true highlight of an office day.
In fact, peel back the glossy social media-ness of it all – the Insta-friendly protein breakfast bowls, afternoon snacks and lunch break trips to buy flowers – and these OfficeTok videos actually do portray the tedious status quo pretty accurately. In one of Joo’s posts, beneath a voiceover about landing her dream job in the unattainable corporate world, her actual caption neatly sums it up: “9am commute; 9.30am realise I forgot my pass; 9.32 wait for a temporary pass; 9.40 make tea; 9.48 lock-in; 5pm back-to-back meetings; 6.30pm log out.” Yep, that’s about the size of it. She can dress it up all she wants – “I love showing you guys my life as a corporate baddie, because back when I was a student, I had no idea this was possible!” finishes the voiceover – but she can’t fool me. That is a standard, bland-as-they-come day at the office coal face.
It’s a similar story with Silavant; in between her aspirational morning and evening routines, all barre classes and pilates and seven-step skin routines, lies the mainly banal truth. “It was a pretty admin-heavy day,” as she puts it in one post. “It was time to respond to all my flagged emails and do my main coverage checks. My main task for the day was building a database for a new seeding campaign.” It’s like a magic eye picture that flips from all-out technicolour to 50 shades of boring once you refocus your eyes: once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
Office life isn’t all bad, of course. But what these TikToks doing their level best to romanticise the un-romanticisable completely fail to recognise is the one true benefit of office life: other people. Amid all the tedium and the trips back and forth to the communal kettle are the micro-interactions that make your day – a joke about a manager’s mad Slack energy; a surprisingly deep and meaningful conversation about a colleague’s first date after a break-up; a lively debate over which White Lotus character is the most heinous. Anecdotes and interjections and ideas and laughter – these are the intangible, unquantifiable things that make going into an office worthwhile.
My best career advice? If you’re considering an office job, forget the “glam” OfficeTok of it all and focus on finding a team you vibe with. Sure, it might not make for great content – but it does make for a bearable 9-to-5.
#Dont #fooled #Gen #working #office #isnt #glamorous #TikTok #tells
