I have
written a lot of posts about the modern-day workplace over the past year and a
half in an attempt to understand my own workplace and all
the changes that have occurred there during this period of time. I follow the
news in both the USA and Norway and whenever there is news about what is going
on in modern workplaces, I sit up and take notice. It interests me almost as
much as science news. I’m not necessarily talking about business news in
general; more about organizational behavior in businesses. Why do companies
behave as they do toward their employees? What are the different management
philosophies that dominate workplaces and how do they affect employees? Why did
they arise in the first place? Who is responsible for their implementation in
the workplace? When did modern workplaces become research laboratories? By that
I mean, when did it become kosher to ‘experiment’ on employees by foisting
different trendy management philosophies on them? Because it is an experiment
to do this to a workplace—to force a workplace to adopt new strategies and ways
of managing people in the name of cost-effectiveness, productivity and
innovation. And before one experiment is finished, before data can be analyzed
and conclusions drawn, another experiment is undertaken in the name of some
other wonderful ideal that is usually impossible to live up to. It is impossible
to draw any conclusion whatsoever without careful study and analysis of data
that has been carefully collected from carefully-designed experiments. Do any
of the workplace experiments meet the stringent criteria required for
performing such experiments? I sincerely doubt it, based on what I have been
witness to in my own workplace.
I get the
impression that this type of ‘experimental’ approach occurs in the classroom as
well. Education seems to have been invaded by the same types of people who are
responsible for the major changes in the workplace. There seems to be an inordinate
amount of experimentation in the classroom, whether in grammar schools or high
schools. I don’t get it. What are the experiments trying to prove? I have listened
to frustrated parents talk about their children, who are now young adults and
who are struggling to find meaning in their lives. These are children who grew
up in the 1990s and during the early part of this century, who were told that
they could plan their own curriculum in schools, choose their own course of
study, and so forth. What they weren’t told was how they were to follow that self-chosen road to its end. They
weren’t taught discipline and focus and the value of hard work and homework;
they weren’t told about failing and rising again after failing. They were only
told to believe in themselves. Some of them do, but many of them don’t. It’s a
vague concept for a child to ‘believe’ in himself or herself. When you’re
young, you don’t think that way. You think rather—‘I’m scared to give this talk
in front of the class. I don’t want to be the center of attention or the butt
of the jokes or the nerd’. But there’s often no one to talk to about these
things. And you would much rather get concrete help on how to talk in front of
the class than hear an adult tell you to ‘just believe in yourself and it will
all work out’. That may be true, that it usually does work out. But as adults,
we are responsible for training the young, not leaving them to their own
devices. I find it ironic that adult workplaces are micromanaged to the nth
degree, whereas children’s (public) schools are not, or haven’t been up to this
point. The teachers may be micromanaged, yes, and forced to fill out a myriad
of reports; the children are given a lot of ‘freedom’. Discipline is
discouraged, homework likewise; teachers who come down hard on students are
reprimanded. It’s a very different world than the one I grew up in, and I don’t
really understand it. The same is true about the modern workplace—it is not the
workplace I cut my teeth on, and I am spending a fair amount of time trying to
figure out when the paradigm shift occurred, when the rug got pulled out from
under our feet, and how it all changed when no one was looking. The values and
ethics I grew up with that I expected would be valued in the workplace, are not
necessarily valued as much as I thought they would be. Loyalty, discipline,
structure, focus, hard work—I know they are appreciated, but not in the same
way as in my parents’ generation. But when I started out in the work world over
thirty years ago, they were still highly appreciated. It is amazing how much can
change in the space of ten or twenty years. I suppose when I look at it all
objectively, I cannot really be surprised. Change is part and parcel of life,
including work life. Perhaps it has been rather naive to expect it to remain
the same, especially when everything else around us changes continually.
