Whenever I
look at the statistics for the blog posts I’ve written, I find that posts about
modern workplaces are among the most popular. I guess this shouldn’t surprise
me, because we spend a good portion of our lives in our workplaces, so it’s not
strange that we want to both understand and feel a part of them. I’ve spoken to
many different people lately, both here in Norway and in the USA, and the thoughts,
complaints, and experiences they share mirror my own. There have been huge
changes in our workplaces just during the past ten years. It seems to me as
though they have happened gradually, but the overall effect has been jarring. And
if I am honest, I know that with each change that occurs in my own workplace, I
am pushed out of my comfort zone yet again. The time allotted for engaging in
and experiencing a new comfort zone gets shorter and shorter. The idea I
suppose is that we’re not supposed to ‘get comfortable’—the new way of thinking
is that it’s bad for productivity and efficiency. Modern workplaces are about
change—change at any cost, change for change’s sake, change for the sake of
modernization, change to meet the needs of the future, change to improve the
quality of workplace life for employees, change to deal with an aging employee population—there
may be many reasons for change. After having been pushed and prodded for the
past several years, I am finally awake to what is going on around me, and I find
that I am beginning to get some kind of overview, a bird’s eye view as it were,
on the whole thing. But I am a long way from understanding it.
What I can
surmise from all the changes is that many of them are about control—controlling huge organizations,
be they universities, hospitals, corporations—it doesn’t matter. The growth of
administration to effect this control has led to micromanagement and dissection
of all that we took for granted before, all that functioned without us really
knowing how or why. And since it functioned, we really didn’t have to know how or why it did. We
trusted that this or that particular system (ordering, accounting, invoicing,
archiving) was run by people who knew what they were doing, just as we knew
what we were doing in our own spheres. It was fine to ‘take each other for
granted’, respect each other’s differences, and go on about our daily work lives.
Since the ultra-business people with their new management trends have taken
over, we are forced to acknowledge
their presence, forced to interact with them on a daily basis. They want us to know they are there—not that
they are there to serve us; rather that we are there to serve them. They want
to be acknowledged for all they do and they want us to know that they are in
charge. So now we know. Now we know the answer to the old joke—how many people
does it take to screw in a light bulb? How many people does it take to order a
computer, or three items needed for work, or to create an invoice, or to create
and fill out a work order so that eventual work can be planned? An easy answer
is now six or more people, if you’re lucky. Administration grows exponentially.
I’m guessing that the jobs of the future are in business administration. Young
people should take notice.
Many of the
changes are also about creating a lack of
accountability. What do I mean by this? You can no longer relate personally
to one individual who might be able to help you. The impersonal shield as I
call it goes up the minute you ask to speak to one person who might know the
answer to your question. You must rather deal with six or more people whose
names you will never remember. And that’s the point. Or if you get an email
from one of the six, it is with a cc: to the other five, so that you will never
know with certainty that the person who wrote to you is the person you should
deal with in the future. In this way, no one person is accountable; no one
person can be blamed if a problem should arise. But this also means that no one
person can receive the honor for a job well-done. They must all share it
communally, like it and keep quiet if they don’t.
This lack
of accountability is also part of what I call the dilution effect. Call it spreading out the blame, the praise, the
responsibility, the actual job tasks—whatever may be involved. No one person
can be responsible for one specific job anymore—that would be tantamount to
giving full control to one individual, and that cannot be tolerated in modern
workplaces, because that would give one person autonomy and a sense of
well-being. So the job is diluted out, which leads to a thinning-out of its
effectiveness, much like what happens if you dilute the concentration of a
medicine that might help you—if it’s too dilute, it loses its effectiveness. I
don’t blame the people who sit in these positions—they are told what to do by
their superiors. But it’s a sorry state of affairs we’ve reached when high levels
of competence and expertise are no longer encouraged. What’s rather encouraged
is team-playing , sharing the expertise and diluting out one’s competence and
accepting that it should be this way. What happens to a company or to a society
when competence is diluted out in this way? Can we trust that teams of people
with limited information about their individual jobs can fly, drive or manage
the planes, trains, or companies of the future, respectively? Personally, I want
to fly in a plane that I know is in the hands of fully-competent individuals,
so that if something happened to two of the three pilots, the remaining one
would be fully-competent to tackle the situation alone. Ditto for a train.
Ditto for a company.
What is our
role in creating the current situation? I wonder. The old adage ‘be careful
what you wish for, you might get it’ comes to mind. Have we wished for some of
this? I think the answer is yes. I think unwittingly, every time we said that
we wished there was a more defined system for this or that, every time we
worshipped on the altars of productivity and efficiency, every time we wanted
to give up some autonomy because it was too tiring to think or do for
ourselves---we were wishing for someone to come along and take control for us.
Call it a collective wishing. We may have bought into the business philosophies
that talked about how much more effective everything would be after a huge
merger. We wished for that effectiveness. It seemed like a real solution, even
when we were already productive—we wanted more. But nothing that gets to be the
size of a bloated whale or a huge lumbering dinosaur can be effective. Bigger
is not always better. Is it always wanting more, better, bigger that will destroy
us? Or turn us into bloated whales and lumbering dinosaurs? We are not meeting
the needs of the future in this format, that’s for sure.
