I was talking to my 18-year-old daughter and her friend recently. We were speaking about music and how it was different when I was younger. They could not get their heads around the fact that we used to have to wait to listen to a song (if we didn’t own the vinyl record). We were lucky to hear it on the radio (and I remember waiting patiently for a song to come on and quickly hitting the “record” button on my boom box). About the same time, I received an email that I subscribe to from Home, this one with the headline “Strange Workplace Etiquette of the 1960s.” If my daughter’s mind was blown by the fact that we couldn’t listen to every song in the world whenever we wanted, imagine how she would feel about smoking cigarettes in the office.

Smoking in the office was common as recently as the 1990s (and in some offices, even into the early 2000s). In decades prior, smoking was ubiquitous in the office. In the 1960s, about 42% of American adults were smokers. In 1964, the U.S. Surgeon General released its first report on smoking and health, definitively linking cigarette smoke with dangerous health problems. Still, I remember visiting my mom at work — she worked at a high-end department store for Estee Lauder and she (and many of her co-workers) smoked at the counter. So did customers. It is hard to imagine smoking in offices today.

Drinking on the job was also common. Many in the younger generation think the drinking depicted in the hit TV series “Mad Men” was fiction, but it wasn’t. It was relatively common to see stocked bars and booze bottles tucked in desk drawers. Executives commonly had drinks at lunch, returned to work and later went out for drinks after work. I remember a few of the older, more “seasoned” reporters early in my career that still had fifths of whiskey in their desk drawers. Parties around the holidays were ragers more akin to “Office Christmas Party” than a professional gathering you’d find today. Sure, some people still party after work, but you’d be fired from most jobs for bringing your own bottle.

People dressed up to go to work. When I first started my career, men had to wear shirts and ties (at a minimum), with the understanding that you would wear a suit or suit coat if you were meeting with someone or attending an outside meeting. Men dressed in suits and ties and most women wore dresses and skirts with stockings. Home explains how the idea of “casual Friday” took hold: It had its roots in the 1960s workplace. “In Hawaii, the president of the Hawaiian Fashion Guild encouraged state politicians to wear Hawaiian shirts to work as a way to promote the local garment industry. The ‘Aloha Friday’ trend had taken off in the state by the late 1960s, but trickled into the U.S. mainland more slowly, gaining widespread adoption in the 1990s.” Casual Friday is everyday now. Since the pandemic and hybrid work trends emerged, the office has become even more casual.

Offices were more traditional and office hierarchy mattered. Bosses really were bossy back then. You referred to them as “Mr. Smith” or “Mr. Wilson” (there were very few women bosses at that time). Offices were real offices (with smoking and booze, as we’ve mentioned before) with real walls and real doors. Virtually no one casually walked into the bosses’ office without an appointment. In fact, the average office worker at a large corporation in the ‘60s or ‘70s probably never met or knew the leaders of the company. Today, many executives sit among their employees and know them by name.

I’m not outlining these differences out of nostalgia. In fact, I see all of these as improvements over the offices of old. But to young people, these differences are nearly unimaginable.