Work Tribes

Paula Varjack / Emma Jacobs and Andrew Hill

Work Tribes is a new series in the Financial Times about the people who populate our modern workplaces, from Millennial managers and Mompreneurs to the professional conference-goer and the long-distance commuter. It’s a fictional column, but the characters and workplace dynamics it describes are informed by Emma and Andrew’s observations and experience in their career covering business life and management.

Paula brought these characters to life in a series of vignettes. She approached the pieces with the idea of providing “an alien point of view into a foreign world…Finance as something very public but also very exclusive/private/closed off”.

End of day 4 at @batterseaartscentre devising performance based on the @financialtimes work tribes column as part of #contemporarynarratives @peoplespalaceprojects #worktribes scratch tomorrow afternoon , talk about process on Monday. Front image features (from left to right) the management guru, the mum-preneur , the ambitious intern and the worried worker. 2nd image features the millennial manager

A post shared by Paula Varjack (@paulavarjack) on Jun 28, 2018 at 11:39am PDT

Paula Varjack is a writer, filmmaker and performance maker. Her work explores identity, the unsaid, and making the invisible visible. Trained in stage management, filmmaking and performance, she enjoys working across and combining disciplines; performance, theatre, documentary and spoken word.

Andrew Hill is an associate editor and the management editor of the FT. He is a former City editor, financial editor and comment and analysis editor. ‘Leadership in the Headlines’, a collection of his columns was published in 2016. He joined the FT in 1988 and has also worked as New York bureau chief, foreign news editor and correspondent in Brussels and Milan.