The motivation behind starting to write these missives was anger.
I make no apology for that. There’s a lot to be angry about.
There still is. Arguably, even more to be angry about.
I’ll also be honest that part of it was personal. I was angry about what ‘work’ had done to me. I’d been chewed up and spat out by the corporate machine and wasn’t happy about it. I knew it was unnecessary and I felt it was unfair. It also didn’t make any sense to me. Why? And why me? Had I just been unlucky?
Well, if I was unlucky, I’ve found out that there’s a hell of a lot of bad luck going around out there. I’ve spoken to numerous people who have also had bad experiences of work, who’s careers were capriciously or malicious truncated, who were damaged during the course of simply trying to do a good job and get on. I’m not an anomaly, I’m one of a sizeable cohort. And it appears to be growing.
I started ‘Decrapify Work’ to try and help those people and to stop others suffering in the way that we had, to help them avoid being chewed up and spat out. I was rather anxious about calling it ‘Decrapify Work’, though. It seemed dangerous and provocative and I was fearful of provoking a negative reaction and a backlash.
I needn’t have worried. The vast majority of the feedback was, and has been, along the lines of ‘oh god, we need that’ and ‘love the name’ and ‘yes, please!’. I started with the premise that ‘work is broken’ and that seemed contentious back then but today it is a generally accepted truth, at least amongst those at the sharp end.
I suppose that, as a result, I have found my fellow pirates, renegades, rebels and mavericks. Many of us have somehow ended up outside of the corporate citadels, whether through choice, circumstance or for personal survival. We couldn’t fit in any longer, so we left ; or we were ejected. And we were damaged in the process.
But it didn’t need to be that way. It doesn’t just damage us, it damages the organisations that were unable or unwilling to harness our talents, it damages the economies that they under-perform in, and it damages our societies that have to deal with the wreckage.
We all believe we could have contributed so much more, that we could have made those work environments better places to be. That, in fact, we still can. The remedies are known and proven to work and we can help transform work.
But those with the power are not listening. Not to us, at least. They are doubling down on the approaches that no longer work, that have and continue to fail. Even when put in a position where a better path is right in front of them, such as hybrid working, they long to go back to the office and the command structures that are making the organisation less effective. They yearn to return a past that was already doomed.
It’s stupid. It has to stop.
And I’m still angry.
Re-Rewind (The Crowd Say Bo Selecta)
My original thesis, as I wrote on www.decrapifywork.com four years ago, was as follows:
‘The Crapification of Work must end
Work didn’t suddenly become crap, it’s been a gradual process over the past few decades that created this cesspool of stress, anxiety, bullying and bullshit that typifies too many workplaces today.
It’s not even deliberate (well, not in most cases). It’s the product of a number of trends and changes that have leveraged each other to create this spiralling descent into crap work.
Putting profits before people.
Valuing efficiency over effectiveness.
An obsession with process and measurement.
The spread of mobile phones and the ‘always on’ culture
Tech replacing human interaction
Increasing work loads, hours and stress
These trends, and the many imperceptible changes they have brought about, have interwoven and multiplied each other to bring us to a crisis point of crapification. We are to our necks in crap and we’re about to drown in it.
Individually, perhaps, they could have been borne but their collective effect is overwhelming. As Jeffery Pfeiffer details in his book “Dying for a Paycheck”, work today is quite literally killing us. Not only physically, but psychologically and spiritually too.
Whilst there may be a boost to the bottom line and the share price, driven by the overriding obsession with profitability, it’s only for the short-term gain of the C-suite. In the long term, the crapification of work threatens the very existence of the organisation because it causes fragility, rigidity and sterility.’
I think that’s stood up pretty well. If it was a fringe perspective when I wrote it, it’s not any more.
It felt like a risk writing about this stuff because I really only had my own experience to bring to it (or so I thought). I hadn’t done loads of research or reading around the topics I was about to pontificate on. I thought there’s bound to be loads of people who are better informed than me, who have much more solid opinions. In short, I expected to get shot down in flames.
But I also felt that the perspective of people who’d actually experienced working and knew the insides of large organisations was largely unheard. So I decided to throw in my two-penn’orth.
That I had hardly read any books on organisational design, management theory, leadership or the myriad other subject areas that I was about to plunge into was deliberate. I wanted to work out my position without being influenced by the status quo, free of the mental barriers of received wisdom.
I’m so glad I saved myself the time. I’ve since been guided to some really good books and thinkers that have really added to my understanding but most of the rest of the stuff I’ve come across is useless (for reasons I expanded upon in last week’s missive. OK, ranted about.) There’s a reason things aren’t getting better, it’s because a lot of the ‘received wisdom’ is rubbish.
Although, paradoxically, there is a lot of research and writing that is really insightful and useful (although you probably haven’t come across much of it because your horizon is filled up with the output of the HBR-academia-consultancy complex - see last week’s volley). I have found that many of my own observations and conclusions, much of what I would call ‘common sense’, are backed up by solid research. That there are good, accessible and effective remedies to many of the ills we experience in the workplace. We do know what to do. But, mostly, we’re not doing it.
Well, when I say ‘we’, I really mean the people with the power, the ones at the top. You might call them our leaders, but I refuse to give them that title until they show some signs of actually leading us to somewhere better, rather than straight over a cliff.
I’d like to tell you that this will change soon but experience has tempered my natural optimism. My mate Geoff Marlow likes to quote the principle attributed to Max Plank that ‘Science progresses one funeral at a time’. The march of time will ensure that the current cohort dies off but it doesn’t happen overnight.
We can see signs that this necessary changing of the guard is beginning but there’s no guarantee that the new cohort will be markedly better, especially if they are all MBA students. Research shows that having MBAs as CEOs is bad for workers, wages and businesses, and that they are more self-serving and fail more often.
So, the message I have has to be more personal. Sure, you can try to improve the organisation, or your bit of it at least. You can improve the work experience of those around you, the people who work for you and with you. It’s worth it for the personal growth (although it’s probably not going to help your career), it’s good for your daily experience of work and it’s good for your soul.
You should do it because it’s the right thing to do.
But the most important thing to do is to save yourself.
Because no-one else will.
Still Crazy After All These Years
It can all feel a bit heavy and hopeless at times, which is why I also try to highlight the places and people that are doing better, the progressive practices that are working, and the possibilities that are out there.
But mostly I take the piss. Why? Because corporate life is just absurd and if you took it seriously you’d either end up in therapy, or rehab. Or much worse, in senior management.
You have to laugh at the absolute folly of it all. Because whilst I do believe there are some malign forces and bad actors out there (psychopaths are over-represented amongst CEOs, after all), it’s mostly just one big cosmic cock-up; the result of happenstance, stupidity and mendacity; magical realism brought to life.
For example, some CEOs may be yearning for people to be back in the office so those all important ‘water cooler’ moments can happen, where they imagine their employees connecting, talking about their work and coming up with innovative ideas. However, we all know what was really going on at the water cooler was everyone taking the piss out the latest management announcements and plotting how to frig the numbers to hit their targets without doing any work.
We all know that if you stay in one place for long enough, the same things will come around again, like one big cycle of nonsense. For example. you will be organised by function, then you will organised by territories, then you will be organised by product. None of these will have any significant impact on performance because with each change everyone spends a huge amount of time figuring out how they fit in the new organisation and re-establishing the connections they had before. By the time they’ve actually begun to really get to grips with the new structure, management has concluded it hasn’t worked. So then you go back to being organised by function and the whole merry-go-round sets off again.
When you’re not wasting time on re-orgs, you’re busy trying to survive the latest ‘change project’ that doesn’t change anything, except move the people who run the project further up the hierarchy to their next level of incompetence.
But never mind, because the work you do is largely to create more work for other people in the organisation, who are too busy dealing with the reorgs and the change projects to do the work anyway. So everyone’s happy!
Meanwhile, desperate customers are trying to claw their way into the Headquarters building in order to speak to someone because no-one answers any communication sent through any of the plethora of channels set up as part of the last ‘digital transformation’ project. Or was it the ‘Customer Comes First’ project? Maybe the ‘Market Proximity’ project?
There’s a reason there are very few satires about corporate life.
(Notable exceptions to this are Twenty Twelve and W1A. Although satirical events in those programmes subsequently occurred in real life, which rather reinforces my point about how bonkers it really is).
Reflections
Reflecting upon all that I have covered and discovered over the course of writing these 150 missives, I jotted down the following observations:
Work touches all aspects of our lives, and all aspects of us.
It can grow or diminish us, sometimes at the same time.
We have individualised work when it is, in fact, a social and collective endeavour.
We have pathologised the impacts of work upon us and treated them as the problem when in fact, they are the outputs of the system. (Stafford Beer’s POSIWID - the Purpose Of The System Is What It Does). It’s the system that is sick, not us.
It is pointless to consider work with putting it into context, particularly the political, economic and social contexts.
We are many different people, being an employee is just one of our identities. We do many different things in our lives, work is just one of them. It’s the interplay between our multiples selves and these various activities that is interesting.
We think and talk about work in terms that suggest it is discrete, concrete and universal - ‘the office job’, ‘the 9-5’, ’work/life balance’. These infer it is stable and normalised. In reality, it is fluid, in constant flux and infinitely varied. The only constant is us, and the coming together in pursuit of a common goal.
We should define what work is and not let work define who we are.
As work continues to degrade as an experience, we all lose. Even the ones who think they are winning.
I have also found out that most of the the conversation around work (as found in the media and among ‘opinion formers’ and ‘thought leaders’ and everyone else plugging their latest book) is sterile, or mis-informed or promoting the perspective of one or other interest group (mostly the bosses, because they buy the advertising that funds the media). What is absent, most of the time, is the voice of the ordinary employee. Or rather, the voices, because there is not one homogenous group of ‘workers’, even though the media often characterises it that way.
That’s why I often invite you to get in touch and tell me your stories. I’d love get your views out into the conversation - and help you, if I can. So please do (details below, or you can comment on this post).
Otherwise, it will just be me pontificating. For years and years and years. And no-ones wants that, do they?
Thanks for taking this on Colin. Your articles are relating the real story and in very necessary language and tone. A strong motivator for the dismal 'workplace' today is decades of neoliberal economics - profits about all else. On a daily basis most companies/organizations have a difficult time defining productivity and promote 'one-size-fits-all' when clearly this is not the case. Some work is very concentrative, some very collaborative, some mobile and most are instances of all three focusses. People work at different paces dependent on what they are doing and who they are working with. For the most part, work is what you do - not where you are. We were learning this BT (before technology). With tech tools, we can work from almost anywhere there is connection and we can accomplish more through collaboration - team play. Mono-cultures tend to die off.
Keep your posts coming! We're already a quarter into then 21st century!
Thanks, Rick. You’ve articulated the space I am writing in more clearly than I could. There is so much of the other stuff, the voice of the people ‘just getting on with it’ is almost completely missing. Yet I think it’s the most important and universal. I want to hear more voices fill that gap.