Silly Season

More nonsense from the world of work

Beat On The Brat

Well, I took much of August off but the world of work carried on stupiding in my absence. Oh well, it’s given me plenty to write about this week …

Such as Chris Ellison, the billionaire boss of Australian mining industry company Mineral Resources, who this week said he didn’t want his staff to leave the office - at all. (I presume he meant during the working day but, having read the coverage, it leaves some room for doubt).

Let’s start with the positives, shall we? He’s invested money in a lovely head office in Perth and provides lots of facilities for employees, such as a restaurant, nine staff psychologists, a gym, and other facilities designed to encourage staff to stay in the office.

He’s even provided a sizeable day care centre for employees’ children. What a softie, eh? (No, but we’ll come to that later).

He is very clear. He said he wants to "hold staff captive all day long".

"I don't want them leaving the building.”

So he’s invested in facilities to hold them captive. No, wait, that doesn’t sound right. Surely that would be things like razor wire, watch towers and guard dogs? Sounds like he’s trying to imprison them with soft furnishings and smoothies.

Anyway, moving on.

He goes on to say "I don't want them walking down the road for a cup of coffee. We kind of figured out a few years ago how much that costs.”

I’d be really interested in seeing those calculations but I’m guessing they are ‘company confidential’ a.k.a. ‘spurious numbers created to support my prejudices’. Must have got some consultants in to do it.

Obviously, they are sure there are no beneficial effects to getting outside into the fresh air, changing the scenery and horizons, random interactions with the public, and all that stuff. Or perhaps the HQ is in the middle of some urban desert bereft of nature and populated with zombies. He doesn’t say.

It’s all part of the company’s strict ‘no work from home’ policy, which he wants the rest of the industry to get on board with. He asserts, "The industry cannot afford it (working from home). We can't have people working three days a week and picking up five days a week pay - or four days.”

Now I find this a bit odd because if all my competitors were doing something that was bad for their business, it would be in my interest to let them carry on. Why would I want them to do the same as I’m doing? Unless it is actually ‘work from home’ that is good for productivity rather than ‘work from prison’. Er, I mean ‘office’.

(This article by Dr. Gleb Tipursky, “Why Forced RTO is Corporate America’s Silent Profit Killer”, gives a bit of a pointer here.)

So back to that day care centre for the employees’ children. That’s pretty progressive, right? Very parent friendly, recognising the particular demands on parents and supporting them.

Mr. Ellison explains it like this: "Another reason for them to come in and enjoy work.”

"Drop their little tykes off next door. We have doctors on board and nurses who are going to feed them, but mum and dad will be working in our office."

He’s all heart, isn’t he? What a stand-up guy.

Sorry, I meant slave driver. Easy mistake.

I know someone who worked in the Australian mining industry and she told me about the chauvinism and backward thinking that eventually made her leave, so I am not entirely surprised by all this. After all, mining is, by definition, an extractive industry. But this guy is taking it to whole new levels. Somewhat appropriately, in a downwards direction.

Making Plans For Nigel

What can follow that? How about a bit of casual ageism? Indeed.

No, I mean Indeed, the recruitment site, who put out report on career development that included the following jaw-droppingly misleading chart.

I find it kind of hilarious that I am, apparently, beyond decline. Does that mean I have plateaued at ‘barely sentient’? Or have I progressed to another state, an immortal corporate being (as opposed to a corporeal one)?

It’s clearly utter nonsense, but dangerous and insulting nonsense. However, it reflects some attitudes that are still found in organisational life.

When I was in the telecoms industry, there was a definite attitude that once you were over 55 you were just hanging around for your pension (unless you’d broken through to the C-suite, where your age made you venerable and wise rather than past it and expensive). I found myself pushed out in my early 40s, very much mid-career, and found I was considered too experienced and too old for the positions I applied for.

Since then, however, career paths have become much more varied, dynamic and non-linear. The days of people staying in the same type of role or the same industry, much less the same company, are long gone. The idea that there is some pre-determined track for you to follow is way past it’s sell-by date.

Today, people’s careers are much more squiggly. In fact, that’s exactly what you should prepare for. I like to think of them as fluid, moving between different types of employment (salaried, contract, freelance, entrepreneurial and everything in between), different roles and different industries. People take much more adaptive paths, responding to changing circumstances and life situations. Age is just one influence, it’s not a determinant.

Indeed have pulled the report and graphic, apparently. The attitudes still linger, though.

(As a sidebar, Indeed have become a leading recruitment site in the UK. They have developed technology to do ‘job matching’, algorithmically matching candidates to job opportunities. They are based in Texas, USA. We don’t know how their algorithm works and yet it is influencing a large part of our job market. This seems to me to be a bigger loss of sovereignty than anything to do with the EU, and the sort of thing we should really be concerned about.)

Rat Trap

Someone who thinks along the same lines as me is Richard Merrick, a fellow ‘substacker’ who connected with me earlier this year. Richard talks about re-framing our relationship with work and re-casting ourselves as artisans, focused on our craft rather than our role/status/career path. (If I haven’t got that right, I invite him to correct me!)

In this post, he suggests that we should view our first decade or so in CorporateLand as our apprenticeship, a time when we acquire skills and develop our craft.

This apprenticeship is the time to build our platform for what comes next, which will be determined by us in response to our needs and situation, our curiosity and capacities.

Like me, he suggests that entrusting our future to corporate entities that are solely focused in increasing profits and minimising risk is an unwise thing to do. Rather, we should view corporates as a training ground, an opportunity to educate ourselves and accelerate our development.

I think this is eminently wise advice, I just wish I had followed it!

To put it in the framework that Indeed put forward (because that is how, in the worst case, you will be pigeon-holed - and you should always prepare for the worst case scenario), you should complete your ‘apprenticeship’ during the first two stages, and look to get yourself out early in your mid-career. That way you beat them to the jump, because the organisation will consider you expensive and expendable when you hit 45 - 50 anyway. Finding yourself suddenly ejected, without being mentally or emotionally prepared for it is not a fun place to be. Trust me.

It may be more about how you perceive your career than the reality. You may end up staying in the same type of role (or an evolution of it), or the same industry, or even the same organisation. However, you will always be ready and open to change, ready to move on through your own volition, open to reinventing and recasting yourself. It creates a necessary separation between your identity and your job, it gives you a sense of agency.

The chances are, however, that you’re not really suited to the corporate career. Too much of an independent thinker, too questioning, too weird. You’re meant to make your own path, not follow someone else’s. Richard is exploring what your options could be, so give him a follow.

Up The Junction

It’s easy to say these things, of course, but harder to implement. Work is not the only thing in our lives. When we are in mid-career, we’re also in mid-life. We may have children, parents, other dependents to care for. Our lives are full, our resources stretched. We barely have time to think, let alone reflect on our lives and where we are headed.

Life comes at you fast and furious and suddenly you find you have lost control of your destiny and are caught in the system. You might want to make changes but you don’t know how and you’re not even sure it’s possible. You can’t see any viable options and you don’t have the resources to look harder, so you just put your head down and push on.

You cling to the hope that things will change but you carry on in the same groove because you don’t know how to get out of it. I know, I’ve been there.

And then, maybe, you find you’ve ‘fallen out of corporate’, like I did. That’s a whole other ball game of emotions and challenges. An upending of things as what seemed certain dissolves into ambiguity, leaving you grasping around for something solid to hold on to.

That’s what I’m going to be focusing more on, how work and career can push you into a corner and damage you in ways you never realised. I’ll be talking about what you can do to protect yourself from the worst and heal yourself from what does impact you.

I’ll be using my personal story as an example. If you’ve been through something similar, if you recognise your own experience in what I’ve described, I’d love to hear your story (in complete confidentiality, of course). I’d like to understand how I can help you and others.

I might be in the decrepit and past-it stage of my career, but I’m still coming out swinging!