One long scream

Some people will assume that this is a Covid-19 post because of the title, but it’s not. The pandemic is a part of what I write about, but it’s not the sole focus. One long scream has been building for years in many workplaces, not just mine. But during the past decade, life in my workplace changed irrevocably for many. As in, there was no going back to what was, only moving forward to what could be. The focus became the future. The past was never talked about; the history of my department, how it came to be the way it was, was unimportant. Those of us old enough to remember the past, or who had worked there long enough to know about it, were told that it wasn’t important; no one wanted to hear about it. The present was just ignored in favor of the future. But the present was what needed to be dealt with, except that no one knew how to deal with it or wanted to deal with it because the problems were too many. So it was ignored in favor of all the fancy buzzwords, slogans and catch phrases that would create the future that ‘everyone wanted’ or said was important to have for the sake of productivity and effectiveness. When we were children that was called ‘let’s pretend’.

I don’t mind playing let’s pretend. It’s just that let’s pretend has gone on for many years, and has worn down those employees who tried as hard as they could to implement the many changes and trends that were laid on the table and prioritized. The problem was that there were too many changes and trends, and one could never be certain which change or trend was the one to be prioritized, since priorities shifted on a monthly basis. Courses in how to lead were important, but they didn’t produce better leaders. They produced leaders who were only interested in forcing their employees to adapt to change for change’s sake. There were never good explanations for why this or that change or trend was important. Employees who were resistant or critical were pushed aside, and are still pushed aside, in favor of those who are receptive to every change or trend that gets suggested. It doesn’t matter if the changes or trends cause a lot of upheaval, waste time, are ineffective, or lead to demotivated employees. The leaders and their loyal employees continue on, while those who are critical find it harder and harder with each change to start over and plod on, dreading the next major change, the next trend to attack the workplace that its leaders will embrace warmly and force down the throats of their employees. The pandemic has brought to light how stupid some of these trends that workplaces adopted without question actually are. One of them is packing as many employees as possible into tiny offices, with little room to move or to spread out. Another stupid trend is open office landscapes—placing an entire workforce into one large room, no individual offices, no dividers, no cubicles, no privacy, no quiet time, constant distractions, and a lot of noise. The party line was that open office landscapes were conducive to interaction, communication and collaboration. Employees should embrace them without question. The reality was something else entirely. Most employees want and need some private time, some quiet time, at work. That’s the purpose of offices—one can close a door and shut out the noise if one needs time to think. But that was no longer ‘allowed’. The reason for open office landscapes, as we all know if we cut through the piles of bullshit that have built up, is to save money. Workplaces save money by forcing their employees to sit in one large room together. The pandemic however, has shown just how stupid this trend is. Suddenly the hunt is on to find new solutions for dealing with this problem—the spread of Covid-19 (or any virus for that matter)—in an open office landscape setting. So the solution has been to tell employees to work from home if they can. That must really rub some leaders the wrong way; after all, they lose the ability to totally control their employees. I’ve seen other solutions that have to do with erecting Plexiglas dividers between adjacent desks, or enclosing individual desks in Plexiglas cubicles. It seems to be a return to some kind of individual office thinking. Dare one hope? Can one dream?

I’ve come to the conclusion that leaders and employees who can shift from one change to the next, from one trend to the next, without problems, are surface skaters. They are not interested in depth; it’s unclear what they are really interested in except control. They should be interested in depth; they should be listening to their employees. Because not to do so is simply to invite trouble. Some few do at present. But most do not. They have their visions and preferred ways of doing things, and they simply expect employees to fall in line. After a decade of multiple leaders, multiple leadership styles, fragmentary visions, shifting priorities, stupid changes, stupid trends, wasted time, wasted breath, useless meetings, endless budget cuts (to no avail), poor strategies, poor planning, yet more meetings to undo what was decided upon two or three years ago that took up valuable employee time—some employees experience only one feeling—the desire to scream into the wind, into the boundless future that was promised them, the golden land of promise and opportunity, the utopian landscape, where all workplaces are effective and productive, where all work output can be measured and controlled, where all employees can be controlled. It’s one long scream, a primal scream, a plea really for a return to sanity and to peace, a plea for a return to a time when freedom from control was still to be found in a workplace.

Brave new work world

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.