It strikes
me more and more that the work world has become a ’brave new world’. The future
is now, is upon us. A myriad of changes sneaked up on us and suddenly were
there. But they weren’t just small changes; they were life-changing and
workplace-changing changes. Those of us who have been in the work world for a
while are a bit more observant of these changes; or perhaps we feel the effects
of this brave new world a bit more intensely than those just starting out. In
any case, I’ve had the past two years to muse upon all of the changes, and I
must say that they herald a new world of work that we can no longer deny has in
reality arrived.
Open
landscapes, shared jobs, home offices, flexible time, team projects, and group
thinking are just a few of those changes. But perhaps the biggest change in the
past five years alone has been the move toward selling yourself as a worker. It
is no longer possible to ignore this fact—that marketing yourself and your
capabilities, selling yourself to a potential employer, has become de rigueur for average employees. It
is no longer a matter of choice. Even headhunting agencies will tell you that
now. It started with posting personal photos on resumes. That was never done
when I was starting out in the work world; it is very common now. It moved on
to the use of social media to establish your online presence; that has become
very important. LinkedIn, Facebook, Google +, Twitter, and a myriad of other
online social spaces help present you to a potential employer. The more hits
you have on Google, the better. Of course they have to be the right kind of
hits; it won’t do for an employer, potential or not, to find your drunken party
photos on Facebook. But it strikes me that a potential employer might even
overlook this if they see that you have a huge number of friends or followers.
Because this is the age of networking. The more networks you have, the better.
It shows presumably that you are a social person, friendly, capable of
teamwork, of sharing, of listening, of communicating. It may be to your
detriment not to have an online social presence these days. I cannot say for
sure, but I have a very strong feeling that this is the case. And if it is, is
this the right way to be doing things? It’s too soon to say, but for those
people who are professionally competent yet introverted or even shy about ‘getting
themselves out there’; it must be a nightmare to maneuver through this brave
new world. How do you explain to a potential employer that you are fully
competent to do the job but a bit shy about promoting yourself? And if your job
doesn’t involve sales or marketing, why is it necessary to have to market yourself to an employer? Why isn’t an interview
about your skills and competence enough to get you hired? But it’s not anymore.
I think that some of this new emphasis on selling yourself is going to backfire.
An employer may be impressed by a potential employee who has hundreds or
thousands of friends on Facebook; the employer may even think that this means
that if this person is hired that he or she will be good at teamwork and group
thinking. But not all jobs need this or require it. It won’t do to hire a
scientist with hundreds or thousands of friends on Facebook if he or she can’t
survive the loneliness of lab life. The life of a scientist is often lonely. If
you are hired as a scientist, it is expected that you can tolerate alone time—in
your office writing articles or grants, or alone in the lab doing experiments
until all hours of the evening. And being social online doesn’t necessarily translate
to being a better communicator or better networker in the workplace. I’ve seen
that more times than I can count.
I couldn’t
even imagine how awful it must be to work in an open landscape, to not have my
own office or even to share an office but to be able to close the door on the
rest of the workplace at times. I cannot imagine what it must be like to talk
on the phone with no hope of privacy whatsoever, whether it be a work-related
or personal call. I couldn’t stand the idea that I was to be monitored at all
times. I also don’t like the idea of shared jobs; I don’t think it is right to
hire a person to do a job and then to hire one or two more people to do the
same job, so that all of them are sharing that job at the same time. I can
understand sharing a job if one person does it 50% of the time and the other
person has the other 50%--I call that splitting a job. The trend that I have
seen recently is that one or two people are working simultaneously on the same
project or job and are mostly just competing with each other instead of working
effectively. I don’t get it in any case. I know a few people who have
complained to me about this—that they don’t have their individual projects in
the lab but instead are working on the same project as a co-worker, or that
they really don’t know what is expected of them, or they don’t know what they’re
really doing. That sense of vagueness that hangs over everything—the veil of
vagueness, I call it. Who is my boss, what is my job, what is expected of me,
am I doing a good job, what is a good job? The same vagueness is involved in
group thinking—is this really the way we want to go in the workplace? Forcing
people to brainstorm together in the same room for hours at a time won’t
necessarily lead to new creative ideas; it may rather lead to boredom and
inertia. Home office days work for me, so that is a change I like personally,
but I know many people who dread this because of the lack of structure and
discipline that the workplace provides for them.
This has
been a long post, but one that I have been thinking about for quite a while. I
will be writing more about the brave new work world in future posts. I am
figuring it out as I go along, but I must say I am ever so glad to be closer to
the end of my work life than to the start of it.
