“Derek, not OK, mate.”
Banter is, by nature, often deliberately close to the knuckle. In some industries, the new person being gently taken apart for the first few weeks is practically a rite of passage.
“She can take a joke” is high praise. “He’s got no sense of humour” sits somewhere down there with people who don’t like kittens.
I get it.
I admire quick wit.
I love irreverence. I am on the naughty side of most things.
But I do think we would lose a lot of what makes people want to go to work if we are terrified of saying anything remotely funny.
Taking the Michael is one of our national sports, and most of us think we are Premier League-level.
But there is a line somewhere between good banter and Sarah from HR ending up with her head in her hands.
*‘Oh Derek, for God’s sake’.
We often start workshops asking people to think of any comments they might have heard that might be problematic around menopause.
“Bit rosy there, love”, was a stonking example we got recently. Someone was presenting to a senior team, while having the mother of hot flushes when someone interrupted her with it. She said: “at that point - my chill had quite literally left the building”, and it ended up in an argument she had never wanted to have.
For context, she is objectively the most gregarious, otherwise laid-back woman in the room.
We have a very effective exercise in the workshop, no spoilers, that shows just how superhuman you have to be to access your British bants absorption reserves in the middle of a hot flush.
The point is that not every clumsy comment is malicious. But one person’s bants can be another person’s genuinely painful insult, particularly when they are already using all available bandwidth to perform under difficult conditionsm, whilst preserving their dignity.
Intent matters - of course it does. There is a world of difference between someone trying to humiliate a colleague and misjudging a joke they thought would diffuse a situation.
Just to broadly brush an entire generation, if you’ll allow - a lot of the women most likely to be dealing with menopause symptoms right now are Gen X.
This is not a generation generally famous for needing the room to be made emotionally safer for them. Resilience, sarcasm, being a laugh, getting on with it and not making too much fuss tend to sit fairly comfortably in their cultural furniture.
Many of them will also have raised Gen Z children, who have grown up with a rather different vocabulary around boundaries, feelings and what is or isn’t OK.
Which is partly why it is so easy to misread what is happening. If a woman who has spent forty or fifty years happily taking a personal jibe suddenly says, “Nah. Not having that,” take note.
She may be dealing with symptoms that, at another stage of life, we would treat as legitimate medical issues, often several at once, while still being expected to keep them discreet and carry on.
Add decades of work, family, responsibility and experience, alongside a culture that normalises treating midlife women as less relevant and ideally less visible – certainly in their natural state.
This is less likely to be a sense-of-humour issue, but an increasing, hormone-adjacent unwillingness to put up with something that was never that funny in the first place.
So what do we do with all that?
Ban banter.
Never.
I don’t suggest we sterilise workplaces of humour, just in case. It’s one of the main things that makes them bearable.
But good banter needs more than intent. It needs judgement.
Who is the butt of the joke?
What could already be happening for that person?
What is the relationship between you?
Is everyone genuinely in on it?
Is this a shared, bonding, mood-enhancing thing?
Is someone just showing off at someone else’s expense?
And if there’s a “well, this is awkward” moment when someone gets it wrong, handling it properly means it doesn’t have to turn into a crisis.
With the right training, another colleague may already have stopped them in their tracks before they make a bigger prat of themselves.
“Derek, not OK, mate.”
Sheepish apology, moment over, lesson learned.
Sarah gets to go home at five.
If you want your people better equipped for moments like this, that’s exactly what our Menopause at Work workshop is designed for.