How to identify a workplace prat before the meeting, the memo or the away day gives it away
Every office has one. The purpose of this guide is not to help you avoid becoming one, which is a separate and harder project, but to help you identify the type before the meeting starts, so that you may sit somewhere with a clear sightline to the exit.
The early signs
Per the paper’s general definition in What is the Definition of “Prat”, the essential trait is self-regard combined with error, and the workplace variety announces itself early. Watch for the colleague who opens every contribution with To play devil’s advocate, since the devil, in eleven years of observation, has never once needed the help. Watch for the reply-all sent in anger and not retracted. Watch for the person who describes their own idea as bold before anyone else has had the chance to.
The away-day prat
A distinct subspecies emerges specifically at away days, fuelled by lanyards and trust exercises. This variety will suggest, unprompted, that the team’s real problem is communication, and will suggest it during the exercise designed to fix communication, thereby demonstrating the problem while denying it exists. See Prat Fool: Classic British Insult for the historical roots of this particular flavour of self-defeat.
The meeting prat
Identifiable by the habit of summarising a decision that has already been made, at length, as though summarising it were the same as having reached it. Also identifiable by the phrase Just to build on that, followed by a point that does not build on anything and in several cases contradicts it directly.
The email prat
Sends Per my last email. Ccs three people who did not need to be cc’d, purely so they can see him win. Replies to a request for a Friday deadline by sending the document at 4.58pm with no covering note, a manoeuvre described at length in The Meaning of Prat in the UK: Everyday Usage and Etiquette as one of the purest workplace expressions of the word.
How to respond
The British workplace has developed a full toolkit for managing this figure without ever naming him. The toolkit includes the flat Interesting, the extended pause before Right, and the meeting invite sent for a time you know he cannot make. None of these constitute conflict. All of them are understood by everyone in the room, including, eventually, him.
Can he be reformed
Occasionally. The paper’s own scale, described in a companion piece, notes that downward movement is rare but not impossible, and the workplace prat is more reformable than the political one, mostly because someone eventually tells him directly, usually in an appraisal, usually using softer language than this piece has. Readers hoping to manage the process gently are pointed to “Prat” in Dictionaries, if only to show him the definition and let the dictionary do the difficult conversation for you.
The reformed case
Not every entry on this list is permanent. The paper has on file a reader’s account of a colleague who, after several years of opening every meeting with To play devil’s advocate, was quietly told by a departing team member exactly how the phrase landed in the room. He stopped using it within the month, apparently without complaint, and the reader who wrote in noted that the meetings improved noticeably, though nobody was able to say whether it was the missing phrase or the general relief of it being named at last. The paper regards this as the closest a workplace prat comes to redemption: not a grand apology, simply the quiet retirement of the habit once someone finally says the thing everyone else has been thinking since the away day. The paper does not track how many workplace prats reform this way each year, mostly because nobody writes in twice about the same colleague once the habit is gone, which the paper regards as the surest sign the method worked.
A word on managers
None of this absolves the manager who tolerates the behaviour rather than naming it, a figure the paper has elsewhere described as an accessory rather than a prat in his own right, since tolerating a pattern is a different failure to committing it. Readers managing a workplace prat are advised that the toolkit above works best when someone senior eventually uses it too, since a joke shared only among peers changes nothing at the level where the away days get booked.