Tea monitor station
© Claire LimTea monitors should ensure that office staff
use urns rather than kettles
Someone always does, says Stephen Armstrong - it's the mark of the office devil

News that the quango Envirowise is calling on employers to appoint a "tea monitor" to make sure staff don't overfill the office kettle should have George Orwell's grave turning green with envy, to mix a metaphor.

Damn, the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four will be cursing in his celestial attic, why didn't I think to have Big Brother spy on Winston Smith's tea?

Envirowise, which is funded by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, estimates that more than 30 billion cups of water are needlessly boiled each year in British offices. It has advised that companies re-introduce tea urns and encourage staff to brew collectively, in tea pots.

Every workplace has one person who will be rubbing their hands at all this. They are the office devils, those self-appointed busybodies who look at their watch when you come in five minutes late, and remind you to turn off your out-of-office message the second you're back from holiday.

There are websites devoted to ranting about office devils: www.passiveaggressivenotes.com records their crimes in minute detail, such as the office microwave in Belfast labelled: "Property of general services/accounts receivable. If you wish to contribute to the cost and upkeep, please contact general services before using."

One proud busybody, who worked for a travel company in Newcastle, was fond of sending missives reminding colleagues about his stationery drives ("This week, the focus is on recycling paper clips").

Occasionally, the calls to return unwanted elastic bands came with the instruction: "Please put a reminder in your diaries to sort".

His finest hour, however, was banning all toasters from the building, putting up signs in capital letters that read: "Toasters are now banned due to the fire brigade being called to a burnt-toast incident."

"It was the perfect example of management dronespeak," says Adam Harries, who suffered at this office devil's hands. "He also insisted on doing a health and safety announcement at our staff party, showing a load of drunks where the fire exits were."

Those higher up can be just as jobsworthy. Take the managing director of an advertising agency who filled the fridge with free cans of Coke for his staff, then sent out weekly office-wide emails listing how many each employee had taken.

Recruitment specialist Matthew Hodkinson saw the full fury of the office devil in action at a catering firm. "We used to have a corner of the room with a couple of sofas and a table with a stack of magazines for people to read when they took a tea break," he explains.

"If my boss came into the room and saw magazines even slightly askew, he would pick the whole pile up above his head and bring it crashing down on the table with a growl. Then he'd storm off to his desk and you wouldn't get a word out of him all afternoon."

Professor Ben Fletcher, head of psychology at Hertfordshire University and a specialist in workplace psychology, warns that petty micro-managing can damage morale and productivity.

"You get the best out of people if you give them autonomy," he says. "People need to understand why they are being told to do something. If they think it's pointless, they'll hate the task and the environment and everything will suffer."

You can't stop the office devil doing their worst, but friendly person-to-person contact now and again may buy some time before the next missive. What he doesn't advise is the strategy used by a young staffer at a big-name women's magazine.

"The fashion editor used to make us meditate for an hour at the start of each day," says one journalist who begged to remain anonymous. "Maybe one other person was into it. The rest of us had to sit there with our eyes closed because if we opened them she'd be watching and we'd get the worst chores of the day.

"There was a girl who worked opposite her and she used to make her cups of tea all day. We used to think she was sucking up, until we found out she was stirring peanut butter into the drink to make her fat."