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Good morning. This is Laura.

Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast.

Today's tip is to smile at anyone in your orbit when you are within 10 feet of them and to greet anyone within 5 feet.

This rule of thumb can prompt you to be friendly without having to overthink what is appropriate.

Today's tip, like some others recently, comes from Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao's book, The Friction Project.

In this book, they share a tip from the non-profit health system, Oxner Health. According to the authors at Oxner Health, employees are expected to make eye contact and smile at a colleague or patient

anytime they are within 10 feet of each other, and to say hello to anyone within five feet. Now, when I first heard all this,

I found it a little strange. Does anyone really need a company policy that is so specific?

But I know that a lot of organizations expect staff to be friendly to colleagues and customers, but don't spell out what that means.

We all come to work with different backgrounds and different temperaments and different expectations.

Giving a general guideline means that people don't have to guess what being friendly would look like.

As long as no one goes overboard about this, like I sincerely hope people aren't being disciplined for not smiling until eight feet or something like that.

A rule of thumb like this can be helpful.

You might consider adopting such a rule of thumb in your own life, too.

I know I spend an unfortunate amount of bandwidth when I am out running or walking,

wondering when it is appropriate to wave to a fellow jogger, and then maybe

doing it too early, and they miss it, and then I either have to do it again or they think

I'm being rude, and you can see why I sometimes wind up on the treadmill out of sheer

awkwardness. But a rule like this takes the guesswork out of sheer awkwardness.

But a rule like this takes the guesswork out of these things.

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