Kiss twice or shake hands? The dilemma of how to greet people at work.

BarcelonaA manager enters a meeting room, and everyone stands up to greet her. The man next to her shakes her hand. The woman on her other side kisses her twice. Two of the older attendees greet her from a distance and sit back down. The man in front of her approaches and hugs her briefly: "Was your vacation good?" he asks. At the back of the room, the young intern looks down at the notebook on his knees. He hasn't stood up or said anything. What was he supposed to do?

"The best way to greet a colleague is based on the relationship we have," says Teresa Baró, author of The great guide to nonverbal language and a professional communications consultant. According to the expert, protocol dictates that the way to greet employees is with a handshake or a verbal greeting without touching. "Normally, the most important person, whether due to their position or age, is the one who chooses the type of greeting," she adds. If we're greeting a colleague we haven't seen in a while and with whom we have a close relationship, we can greet each other with a hug or two kisses. "A gesture that wouldn't be appropriate when you don't know the person and they're just introducing you," Baró confirms.

Kisses, outside the office

According to protocol experts, greetings in the workplace in Spain are a unique case. When women began entering the workforce and holding positions of responsibility, doubts arose. Should they kiss twice as is customary? Or should they follow European tradition and shake hands? Ultimately, the decision was made to behave as in the social sphere when women were involved, a habit that has been called into question due to the pandemic and generational differences in companies.

"Since I started working, I think things have changed. I feel like it used to be much more common to greet both men and women with two kisses, but lately there's been an effort to make greetings more like, for example, shaking hands," explains Laura, who has been working in academia for over a decade. "I confess that I've sometimes jumped the gun and, when I've clearly seen that someone is getting too close to give me two kisses, I'll go straight to shake their hand. Sometimes it creates an awkward situation, a kind of dance in which that person still ends up giving me two kisses as if they didn't interpret or want to interpret what I intended."

Greeting each other with two kisses is a custom that, like many others, had to disappear with the pandemic. "Please don't return the two kisses to women in the professional field," wrote journalist Laura Alzola Kirschgens in a 2021 article. tweet that would go viral. "I've even asked the university in writing to incorporate equal treatment as a protocol, so that women don't have to kiss everyone while men comply with a handshake!" one Twitter user responded to the post.

However, Baró's perception is that this habit hasn't been lost, and five years after the outbreak of COVID-19, we've returned to our old routines. According to the professional communication expert, although most people aren't aware of it, greeting women differently than men constitutes discrimination. "There's no reason to give women two kisses instead of shaking their hands, the usual greeting in the business world. What happens is that there's a tradition, and some people don't consider it and do the same thing as if they were colleagues in a group of friends or family. They transfer the same actions they would do in the private sphere to the workplace."

Cultural differences

The American anthropologist Edward T. Hall developed the concept of proxemics, a discipline that refers to the human use and perception of their physical space and personal privacy. From this, Hall establishes four categories for delimiting personal space. Minimum distance (between 15 and 45 centimeters) is reserved for family, friends, and partners; personal distance (from 46 centimeters to 1.20 meters) for coworkers and acquaintances; social distance (from 1.20 to 3.60 meters) for strangers; and public distance (more than 3.60 meters) for public speaking or addressing a large group of people.

Hall concluded that the personal space an individual needs to feel comfortable varies from culture to culture and should also be taken into account. For example, people from Latin American cultures feel more comfortable standing upright and close to each other. But in English-speaking countries, they prefer personal distance. "There is no universal way of greeting people. The most common one in Western culture and in the business world is the handshake. But it doesn't work in Arab countries or Japan, for example," Baró asserts.

If you work around the world, experts recommend learning about a country's cultural specifics to improve professional communication between people of different backgrounds. It also helps eliminate potential discomfort caused by a lack of awareness of each person's personal space needs.