Stuck in the present

What, we’re still here?

Rewind

I ran my Decrapify Work webinar again this week. The presentation has evolved over the past 3 years or so and I’m very familiar with it now. I did two webinars so I had times that worked for Europe and America and for AsiaPac (yes, folks, I am internationally famous!). For some reason, when I did it the second time I saw it with fresh eyes and it gave me a bit of a shock.

I have a couple of slides that summarise the problem with the workplace today. Here they are:

(Yeah, I know, stylish, right? Minimalism is in. And quick.)

So, I normally say something like “I’m not going to spend too long on these because we are all in agreement that the workplace is a mess” and I skim through the points. Only this time I was thinking, “Woah, hang on a minute, these are terrible!!”

Employee engagement is pitiful and has been since Gartner started their survey in 2000. (These figures aren’t current but they haven’t shifted much). In the just over two decades they’ve been available an entire industry has grown up around employee engagement and employee experience. Everyone and their dog has run a programme or an initiative, management teams have spent countless hours fretting about the scores, acres of words have been written about it and billions have been spent and it’s barely shifted the dial.

Surely employee engagement should be above 50%? In our advanced civilisation, we should be looking for 70-80%? (Not 100%, because there will always be some who aren’t engaged for a whole host of reasons.) It’s shocking, right? But it seems it’s now accepted. This is the best we can do, oh well, let’s wring our hands a bit, do some meaningless and ineffectual programmes and then ignore it.

Jeffery Pfeffer wrote a big thick book full of facts and figures that showed that work is killing people. Not dangerous work, not shovelling coal into blast furnaces or digging it out of the ground but nice, clean, white-collar work sitting in a nice safe office tapping on a keyboard. Killing people and harming huge numbers more, and costing business a fortune. 5 years it’s been out and what’s the result? Wring hands, look concerned, run some meaningless and ineffectual programmes and ignore it. It’s just the ‘cost of doing business’. Well, that’s one hell of a bloody cost, isn’t it?

Burnout. A recognised and defined illness CAUSED BY WORK!!! We know what causes it and we know how to stop it, yet it’s a growing problem affecting more and more people. It’s not bloody COVID, it’s not some act of God, this is actual harm being done to people deliberately. I say deliberately because we can stop it. And what’s the response? Wring hands, look concerned, run some meaningless and ineffectual programmes and ignore it.

Right behind it is workplace isolation. How is that even a thing? People working in organisations, being part of a large body of employees (that’s ‘other people’, right?), interacting with those people and being amongst them everyday and yet feeling utterly alone and isolated. How have we even allowed that to happen? How have we allowed such levels of dehumanisation to occur that people feel alone in the crowd? (And this was happening before COVID and hybrid working came in) Perhaps it’s the result of ‘best practice’, or change programmes dreamt up by MBAs in ivory towers. And the response? Wring hands, look concerned, run some meaningless and ineffectual programmes and ignore it.

We should be up in arms about any one of these (and the other ones I haven't expanded upon). Why aren’t government’s acting? Why aren’t they legislating to stop these harms? Why aren’t more people speaking out against these? Why aren’t people angrier?

It’s just not good enough. Today’s organisations and the people who manage them are failing us and failing society. Professor Antionette Wiebel calls them ‘misery machines’ and, shockingly, it’s become a growth sector. It’s about time we started switching these machines off. Before they kill everyone.

Down Down

One of the causes of the dire state of affairs is the massive disconnect between CEOs and their teams and the ‘ordinary people’ who work in the organisations they lead. The huge escalation of their remuneration has pushed them into their own social strata, far above their employees. The way they work is also a different world to the one inhabited by the people below them. Added to that, arrogance and sociopathy are traits that will get you promoted by our modern organisational systems (a quick reminder of Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic’s deadly Leadership triad of Confidence, Charisma and Narcissism seems pertinent here).

Well, just recently we seem to be awash with examples of this disconnect that has led to behaviour ranging from the merely exasperating and eye-roll inducing to the absolutely hair-raising, gasp-out-loud plain astonishing.

So Apple announced a ‘fixed-hybrid’ policy to start in September, mandating that staff would have to be in the office for 3 days a week and would be sanctioned if they did not. 'Staggeringly tone-deaf, they’re not going to make that stick’ was a view shared by me and many of my network on LinkedIN. Predictably, there was pushback as employees saw things rather differently to management and actually valued flexibility. Some said they would leave if the policy was enforced. So THEN Apple decided it would be a good idea to ask staff about it. <eye-roll>

(Apple probably think they have the upper-hand, what with all the tech lays-offs happening. However, the best people, the ‘A-players’ they famously aim to recruit, still have choices. So my prediction is that the policy will be ‘modified’.)

Next up, we have the ‘Pity Party’ video of MillerKnoll CEO and President Andi Owen (hey, what happened to dual governance there? Checks and balances, no?). It’s worth watching this minute and a half of video when the mask slipped and a peevish Owen showed what she really thought about her employees. In answer to questions about bonuses, she actually says at the start that ‘we should treat each other well, be kind, be respectful’ and then berates them all for visiting ‘pity city’. The sign off is, well, breath-taking. But not in a good way.

Now, Miller Knoll say that this clip was taken out of context and at the end of a positive 75-minute call. They also point out that bonuses have not yet been decided for this year and some other mitigating factors (more details in this article on vice.com). However, I can’t see any context in which this is acceptable in terms of what is said, the tone used and the attitude displayed. It is, at very best, a professional error. As Maya Angelou said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time”.

And finally, taking centre stage, we have Clearlink CEO James Clarke who said in a bizarre video call “You have misinterpreted my kindness for weakness”. And that wasn’t even the worst of it.

I’ll just quote the opening paragraph of this article from vice.com (good work this week, btw, guys!)

“In a virtual town hall last week, the CEO of a Utah-based digital marketing and technology company, who is forcing employees to return to the office, celebrated the sacrifice of a worker who had to sell the family dog as a result of his decisions. He also questioned the motives of those who disagreed, accusing some of quiet quitting, and waxed skeptical on the compatibility of working full time with serving as a primary caregiver to children.”

Presumably, if an employee sold their children so they could focus fully on their work, he's be ecstatic. Again, from the article “All he was asking, he said, is that people come into the office and give their “blood, sweat, and tears” to the company. “I challenge any of you to outwork me, but you won’t,” he added.”

It should be noted that this is after the company had announced that they were a ‘remote-first’ company and had hired people on that basis. But now, if you lived within 50 miles of the HQ, you had to come into the office.

Oh yeah, they have a new HQ that is “amazing,” “top-tier,” and “world class.” And he claims that he has seen improved “collaboration, productivity, and accountability” amongst those who have come back in to the office. Of course he has.

I really recommend you read the article to appreciate the full awfulness.

I ascribe the state of the workplace that I ranted about at the beginning on the ‘Forces of Crapification’ but maybe the answer is actually simpler. We just allow terrible people to run our organisations.

Three Blind Mice

And I didn’t even mention Musk. Or Zuckerberg. Or Murdoch.

All of whom are actively destroying value in their organisations right now. Musk is blowing up Twitter, which reminds me of the answer to the question “How do you make a small fortune?”. Start with a large one.

Musk’s Twitterations are starting to affect the value of Tesla too, which is an impressive amount of damage for one man to make. And yesterday his new rocket blew up on launch. Maybe there’s a pattern emerging here …

Zuckerberg meanwhile has wasted millions on the metaverse, only to abandon it and start chasing the new shiny thing that is AI. Sorry, pivot to address the burgeoning new market…

Ed Zitron has written a great post on this and Zuckerberg’s utter failure as an innovator. He can’t be sacked, though, so he is gradually destroying a billion-dollar business. He’ll start making Musk jealous soon.

And then we come to Murdoch, who has just agreed that Fox News make a $787 million settlement with Dominion for telling lies about their polling equipment. More law suits are on the way from others who were similarly libelled by Fox News hosts, who Murdoch knew were telling lies. It should be remembered that Murdoch’s UK papers have already paid out fortunes to settle phone hacking disputes and that he also closed the leading Sunday title “News of the World” to avoid further publicity and court cases.

The final cost to Fox News will be considerable and some wonder if it might bring it down completely.

These eye-watering pay-offs are the result of Murdoch’s famously autocratic control of his companies, which leads poor management and lack of challenge. The nepotism probably doesn’t help either. These financial hits are apparently referred to as ‘the Murdoch Discount’ by investors, who tolerate them and price them in.

Funny old world, isn’t it?

Beat On The Brat

Dominic Raab has just resigned from the UK government as an inquiry finds him guilty of bullying, something I absolutely abhor.

In his resignation letter, he offers the usual ‘sorry, not sorry’ apology “I am genuinely sorry for any unintended stress or offence that any officials felt, as a result of the pace, standards and challenge that I brought…”

He says Ministers must ‘be able to exercise direct oversight’ and ‘give direct critical feedback on briefings and submissions to senior officials, in order to set the standards and drive the reform’.

This is what the bully always says. “I didn’t mean to hurt them. I didn’t realise I was hurting them. I have high and exacting standards. I was being firm but fair. It’s a necessary part of the job. It’s a high pressure environment.”

They never say “I’m sorry”. They never say “I did wrong, it was my fault”.

He was found guilty of two offences but still refuses to accept his guilt.

This man was Deputy Prime Minister. At the very apex of government. It’s no wonder we are where we are, is it?

As I said earlier, “We just allow terrible people to run our organisations.”

(It should be noted that, under Raab, the Ministry of Justice has seen a significant deterioration in the justice system. So he’s not only a bully, he’s bad at the job too. I wonder if these two things are related?)