Decrapify Work or Die (because it IS killing you)
Dirty Work
The impetus behind Decrapify Work has always been my own experiences of ‘Corporate Life’. The response to my LinkedIN post about things that were said to me during my career firmly reminded me of this. In fact, I was rather taken aback by how strongly people associated with them (I hope I didn’t trigger anyone).
Put simply, I don’t want people to put up with the same crap as I did and suffer the experiences I had. And my experiences are by no means unique, as the response to my post shows. They are also, sadly, far from the worst.
My experience wasn’t all bad, by any means. The first half of my career in BT was brilliant. I was working in a very entrepreneurial environment, on leading edge services with a great bunch of people (many of whom remain friends). I got to try out loads of stuff, learnt a ton and had a lot of fun.
But (you knew that was coming) we then got merged into a larger division where the experience was very different. It was strongly hierarchical, command-and-control, fear-driven and macho culture. Bullying was not only prevalent, it was the preferred management style. I only managed to survive by keeping under the radar and because I still had a bunch of good mates with me.
And it shouldn’t really need saying but I know which of those I prefer and it’s the one that works better too. In the first part of my career, we were pulling up trees. In the second part, we were surviving in the shadows.
People I met in the first part of my career went on to do bigger and better things. People I met in the second part either escaped, or got trashed by the culture. Those at the top either moved sideways, their reputation tainted by the culture, or were ignominiously removed (eventually).
And every time I think “Oh, Colin, that was years ago, you’re probably completely out of touch with what’s going on today”, I find evidence that it’s not only prevalent but that it has been normalised. I put up a post and get an overwhelming response of “Oh god, you must have been at the same place as me!”.
So I am reminded it still matters and I need to redouble my efforts to Decrapify Work.
Go Now
I got ‘given the elbow’ three times in my career. I use that phrase because only one of them was technically a redundancy but the sense of rejection and failure was the same for each. In fact, the one that appeared to be the least painful because, although I didn’t have a role, I was still employed, was the most devastating.
I call redundancy ‘the everyday brutality of business’. We accept it as normal business practice, just a ‘readjustment’ but it can often be an extremely painful and damaging life event for the individuals involved.
We know this, at an emotional level, which is why it is dressed up with euphemisms and obscured with double talk. When we hear bosses talking about ‘downsizing’, ‘rightsizing’, ‘labour force adjustments’ and other obfuscations, then this is plainly deceit and misdirection. I have a bit more sympathy for the poor sods in HR who have to carry out these policies, whose circumlocutions and ‘best practice policies’ give them some emotional distance and self-protection.
I’m not saying organisations shouldn’t make people redundant, I’m saying we should stop downplaying how damaging it is and we should really make it a last resort. I’ve been fed that deathless platitude “It’s not you that is being made redundant, it’s the position” and I can tell you it bloody well felt like it was me. It felt like a punch in guts. A physical and emotional assault on my being.
We know from responses to the Global Financial Crash and the Pandemic, there are ways to shrink an organisation where the pain is shared and so minimised. Engaging with the people in an adult conversation can uncover all sorts of solutions, from reduced days to sabbaticals.
Just don’t tell me ‘there is no choice’ when it comes to redundancies. There are always alternatives and when you look at the true costs of redundancy, in wrecked lives and careers, there’s every reason to try and find them.
Psycho Killer
Of course, it’s not just redundancy that damages people it’s ‘work’ in general. Well, not the actual work (although after a few hours stuck in spreadsheets, it feels like my brain has degraded to that of a five-year old) but the experience of work. The physical demands of travel, working in an office, sitting at a desk, eating bad sandwiches and drinking atrocious coffee whilst work such long hours you don’t have time to exercise have a cumulative effect. However, these pale against the psychological toll of work, which is the major cause of stress and its related diseases. As Jeffrey Pfeiffer put it in his book, we are ‘Dying for a Paycheck’.
Burnout is now recognised as a medical condition, and it is growing in prevalence (this was true before the pandemic, which has made things rather worse). Anxiety is rife, wellbeing is now seen as something employers have to consider and address. Indeed, some see it as a competitive advantage when recruiting people to boast about their well-being programme. Although, as someone pointed out, when we are considering that a perk, we’ve really lost the plot.
It doesn’t have to be like this. We know there are different ways of organising, or structuring our organisations, of putting the flourishing of people at the core of everything. If people are flourishing you don’t need a well-being programme, by definition and by intent. This is what I mean when I say we must decrapify work. It’s not a cosmetic change (although it can start with small, bold actions), it’s a fundamental shift.
Whilst we bolt on programmes to existing crumbling infrastructure, we will continue to damage people and waste huge amount of human potential. We need to put the realisation of that potential as the key driver of everything the organisation does, and in every way it does it. It needs to be the core purpose, what they call at Barry Wehmiller ‘the stewardship of the people who we are fortunate to have in our care’.
What we are doing now is not only damaging to people but it destroys the capability to address complexity and the wicked problems we face; in business, in society and in our environment.
Work isn’t just killing you, it’s killing everything. The need for a shift is evident and it needs to happen soon. That really would be building back better.
We can work it out
A wicked problem we are dealing with right now is the pandemic. It is a highly complex, dynamic, unpredictable environment. It requires a complexity of thinking, hyper vigilance, rapid sense-making, global co-ordination, rapid experimentation and calculated risk-taking. We’ve seen the global science community step up to the challenge, creating new vaccines, test, treatments, models and tracking systems in record time. A true burst of innovation in response to the crisis.
However, this is all too hard for our politicians in the UK. Today is the dubiously dubbed “Freedom Day”, when all legal restrictions relating to COVID are lifted. As James O’Brien points out, today you can have your own face-licking festival if you want and no-one can stop you. They’ve decided that we ‘have to learn to live with COVID’ and it’s ‘now or never’ to open up the economy, leaving infection-obtained immunity to complete the job vaccination has got halfway through.
A simple solution to a complex problem. It will have severe consequences in terms of infections, hospitalisations and deaths, with probable knock-on impacts on the very economy they are ‘opening up’ (you can’t run businesses if all the staff are off sick). There may be the catastrophic outcome of a vaccine-resistant strain emerging that would squander the progress of the past year.
Simple solutions to complex problems are highly dangerous and, in this case, deadly. They need to be called out. I am sick of suffering at the hands of the ‘hard of thinking’, whether that’s in politics or business.
Stay safe, friends.