Over the last 50 years, office culture has evolved beyond all recognition. Profanity, bottom-pinching, and unrestrained boozing have all been vanquished from the workplace by the trusty HR departments of corporate America, and just as well. I could handle the swearing, but my liver and my bottom had had enough already.

Among the many changes that have taken place, the biggest and least charming concerns interpersonal communication—by which I mean the total absence thereof. Workers across the globe now spend their days in charmless monastic seclusion lost in a cloud of emails, to mention nothing of wasting eons of company time updating their Facebook pages with frolicsome, sun-blistered Cancún vacation snaps. Reintroducing charm into this drab, Orwellian environment will take commitment and verve; so stiffen the sinews and summon the Spanx, and let’s get on with it.

We’ll start by confronting the elephant in the typing pool, the total lack of face-to-face communication. There’s only one way to address this issue: a short, brutal course in exposure therapy. Take my hand, and let’s walk together into the lion’s den, aka another person’s office.

Start by wordlessly alighting in the doorway of the targeted office. Extend your right arm into the air in a circular motion and grab the door frame, as high up as possible. This will attenuate your physique and make you appear lithe and attractive. Place your left hand on your hip and smile, and wait. As soon as your colleague clocks your presence, drop your arm, glide forward, and park one previously pinched buttock insouciantly on the colleague’s desk corner.

Imagine you are encountering a feral toddler. Remember that your visitee has probably not had any direct contact with another colleague in months, if not years. Start with a compliment or two. Next, why not share a few lighthearted observations about current affairs? But nothing too controversial. Follow this with a little badinage and dollop of persiflage. Do not expect much in the way of a response, and don’t exhaust your visitee by overstaying your welcome. Little and often. Now slither off the desk and reverse charmingly and mysteriously through the aperture whence you came.

Once you have broken the ice and are on speaking terms with your colleagues, the real charm offensive can begin. My approach is unapologetically retro: In order to put the charm back into America’s offices, I believe we must revive certain dusty office conventions of the 1950s. There are kernels of reverse-chic wisdom in that Mad Men office etiquette—those pre-computer conventions and mores—that will soon have your entire organization vibrating with charm.

Let’s start by bringing back formality. In the late ’60s, my first U.K. retail job was in the John Lewis department store chain (where the motto was Never Knowingly Undersold and none of us knew what it meant), and we employees addressed each other as Mr. and Miss and Mrs. like on the Brit comedy series Are You Being Served? Reviving this convention, especially if the location were in a youth-centric hipster startup Brooklyn or Silicon Valley milieu, would be unexpected and undeniably charming: “Oh. Mr. Roberts, we are running out of cash to fund the office cold-press juice bar. Grab Mr. Welch and Miss. Dingle and Mrs. Davenport and let’s go out for another round of financing.”