In this paper, we will examine language use at a small-sized service-oriented Belgian company that operates globally. More specifically, we focus on the role and importance of small talk during performance appraisal interviews which are conducted online in English as a lingua franca between managers at the headquarters in Belgium and sales agents who work for the company virtually from a multitude of places around the world. In the corporate communicative contexts of job interviews and other types of workplace discourse, previous research has shown that workplace talk often involves sequences that are not relevant to main purpose of these interactions, also referred to as 'small talk' (see for example Holmes 2000; Komter 1991; Köster 2004). However, the occurrence of such sequences has yet to be examined in the context of performance appraisal interviews.
The dataset consists of 14 video-recorded performance appraisal interviews which took place online between sales agents who work for the company remotely across the globe and managers based at the HQ in Belgium. Additionally, two playback interviews were conducted with the managers involved in the performance appraisal process. These two types of data then guide us in examining how and why off-topic 'small talk' occurs during these types of interactions. On the basis of a turn-by-turn analysis of the interviews, we shed a new light on the role and value of small talk in the performance appraisal interviews at this company. As the interlocutors lack a physical shared workspace and only interact virtually, the analysis shows that small talk comprises of a number of different topics which are discussed both before, during and after the evaluation itself, and that it functions as a means to establish rapport, to get to know the agent and to help construct a shared implicit understanding of the company's norms, values and corporate culture. As such, small talk is not considered optional at this globalized company, but rather forms an integral part of the genre of the performance appraisal interview which helps the managers to 'talk the institution into being' (Heritage 1984) in a virtual workspace, thereby "creating and maintaining a specific institutional reality" beyond the physical reality of a shared office (Van De Mieroop and Schnurr 2017: 88).
References
Heritage, John. 1984. Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Holmes, Janet. 2000. Doing collegiality and keeping control at work: Small talk in government departments. In Justine Coupland (ed.), Small Talk, 32-61. New York: Routledge.
Komter, Martha L. 1991. Conflict and Cooperation in Job Interviews: A Study of Talk, Tasks and Ideas. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Köster, Almut. 2004. Relational sequences in workplace genres. Journal of Pragmatics 36. 1405-1428.
Van De Mieroop, Dorien & Stephanie Schnurr. 2017. 'Doing evaluation' in the modern workplace: Negotiating the identity of 'model employee' in performance appraisal interviews. In Jo Angouri, Meredith Marra & Janet Holmes (eds.), Negotiating Boundaries at Work: Talking and Transitions, 87-109. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
