When the fun stops

The Party’s Over

“Work is no fun anymore”.

This was said by to me by someone who works in finance in the UK and is responsible for client relationships. He’d heard his older colleagues reminisce about the good old days of golf days, expense account lunches, cases of wine at Christmas and all the rest of ‘client entertaining’. Now, they can barely accept a free pen and any entertaining of clients has to be determinedly modest (for regulatory reasons, supposedly, but surely not minded by the Finance Director either.)

You might not have much sympathy for sales people having their expense wings clipped a bit (especially those who greatly abused the opportunity), or for the clients who no longer get lunch at ‘La Caprice’ with £200 bottles of wine, but these things were a source of enjoyment and fun that was part of the attraction of the job. And it’s not just the ‘good time charlies’ of the sales teams that have had the joy squeezed out of their work, it’s been happening across all jobs and all industries.

That’s the trend explored by the Wall Street Journal in their piece “How Working in America Became So Joyless - The loss of small perks and rise of AI have conspired to strip work of all fun; ‘It feels like a funeral in the office right now.’”

They start by recounting how Dell provided free coffee for workers as a ‘small dose of joy’ for them every morning. Then came the ‘buzz kill’ when they started charging for the coffee.

When I worked in BT, it was a more British response. They stopped the free biscuits at meetings. But the same effect. A small and relatively inexpensive ‘perk’ that just made office life a bit more pleasant was taken away and pissed everyone off. I mean, it was a kind of amazing example of efficiency, to annoy so many people so much for such a small amount of money …

The article talks about the ‘war on fun’ and how middle managers are on the front line due to their ever-widening span of control (something I wrote about last week). With an average of 12 direct reports, they simply don’t have time to engage with people properly and develop the relationships that make work more pleasant and more human.

And then AI comes along and amps up the whole thing. Expectations about productivity are rising, even though how AI actually helps here remains something of a mystery. One thing it does do is increase surveillance, which means employees are under even more scrutiny and pressure.

And it’s undermining job security and career certainty. As Suzy Welch, a management professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, comments, “All the conveyor belts are broken”.

And the article doesn’t even include the regular rounds of sackings that are attributed to AI but we all know are just the normal pumping up of profits, to the applause of Wall Street. All this is happening in the Tech sector, which has always been seen as the best place to work, with the best benefits and opportunities, the one that has been the trend-setter for everyone else.

The problem is not just that the fun has been taken out. It’s that fear and loathing has been put in its place.

Espresso

The fun is also about human interaction. What we enjoy in these moments is the connection with our fellow human beings, the shared experience.

My guess is that the people at Dell didn’t just enjoy their free coffee but would also take moment to chat to their colleagues, to share their ‘perk’ experience with coworkers. There’s something unifying about all enjoying a free coffee that is qualitatively different from one you’ve paid for - even if it’s just coming together to bitch and moan about the taste or the quality.

If you’re all getting coffee from the same place, it’s easy to say “Let’s grab a coffee downstairs and chat’. When there’s going to be an awkward “Who’s paying?” moment, it’s much less likely to happen. If you’re all going to your own favourite coffee shop, it’s not going to happen at all.

It’s the small moments of interaction that lay the foundations of relationships. You all get to know the barristas, you recognise the people who have a coffee at the same time as you, you bump into colleagues you might have been meaning to speak to. In a workplace that has increasingly driven out human interaction, where our exchanges have been intermediated by technology, these opportunities for people to rub up against each other are increasingly valuable.

Although, obviously, Dell doesn’t think they are worth a hill of beans. Well, not coffee beans, apparently.

You’ve Got A Friend In Me

This topic of relationships at work has been brought up this week by two of my favourite commentators on the workplace.

First, Bruce Daisley interviews Gillian Sandstrom about her book “Once Upon A Stranger” in this podcast ‘Your colleagues like you more than you realise…,’

Gillian talks about how we have anxiety about talking to other people. In fact, we have multiple interaction fears.

“But there’s long lists, so we worry about our behaviour, how we’re going to act during the conversation, so we worry that we’ll talk too much, or we’ll talk too little, or we worry about the content of the conversation itself, like will we know what to say, are we going to have those dreaded awkward silences? I think that’s actually people’s biggest fear.

We worry about what the other person is going to think about us. Are they even going to want to talk to us? Are they going to reject us?”

The good news is that the rejection rate is quite low, about 13%. The bad news is that if you fix one interaction fear, people will just worry about another one.

And then we have the likability gap, where we think we like the other person more than they like us. This can persist for a long time, over months of constant interaction, and it’s almost always untrue.

These mitigate against people starting up conversations. But the evidence is that people enjoy conversations with strangers, or with coworkers they don’t really know, much more than they anticipate. And the person you start the conversation with is almost always grateful for it.

These interactions humanise people, we feel more connected and closer to them and we feel more willing to work with them and to collaborate. After that quick chat about the weather in the coffee queue, it’s much easier to speak to them about a work matter later on that week.

In The Country

And next up, Christine Armstrong, who’s currently obsessed with the weakening ties between us at work, picks up on this in her vlog this week. She shares her experience of moving from the city to a village in the country, where she thought she would be bored and lonely. In fact, the opposite has occurred and she’s got fully immersed in village life. She attributes this to the fact that it’s a lot like the offices of her early career, where you bumped into people, things got organised and you kind of got dragged in, where you regularly had conversations with the people around you.

Again, it’s those little encounters and interactions that matter. They provide the social lubrication for relationships to develop, whilst they also make us feel like we belong somewhere, and make us feel more connected and happier too.

These personal encounters have largely disappeared from the workplace. A big reason that has occurred in my lifetime is the intermediation by technology. Face-to-face conversations have been replace by email, instant messages, or applications like product managements systems.

Then there’s the relentless focus on efficiency, where ‘idle’ conversations are seen as time-wasting. Workloads are constantly increasing too, so people don’t feel they have the time to speak to someone or lift their heads up from their desks for a minute. As mentioned above, managers have less and less time to spend with their direct reports due the much higher number they have to manage these days, so people feel they are not important and not valued.

Add on anxiety about speaking to people, heightened by our COVID experience; more distributed working across location and time-zone, requiring more asynchronous working through technology platforms; and hybrid schedules that means people are less likely to be in offices at the same time and so less likely have chance encounters, and we can see why this is becoming a widespread and deep-seated problem.

Anyone Who Had A Heart

The only way we start to fix this is for organisations to see these relationships as valuable. The current situation has not come about by accident. It’s not an unfortunate occurrence, this isolation and lack of connection is by design.

I don’t mean that C-suites have sat down and thought “How do we create a workplace where people don’t have any connection with each other?”. What I mean is that they have continually prioritised efficiency and systemisation over human connection. Faced with evidence that having a friend at work is a significant indicator of higher engagement, productivity and retention - things that they surely want to encourage - they are likely to scoff and say something like “What is this, playschool?”, dismissing the evidence out of hand.

By constantly marginalising human qualities, by constantly seeking to create a machine where the employees are replaceable and interchangeable cogs, by constantly seeking to eradicate human variation and uniqueness, they have made the human experience peripheral to the workplace and how it functions.

Our two greatest needs as humans are for belonging and connection. And they have put them at the bottom of the list of priorities every time (often whilst saying they are doing the opposite.)

When people advocate for humanising the workplace, for making work more human again, it’s not some wishy-washy liberal idealism. It’s the way forward, because otherwise we’re heading for dysfunction and dystopia.

Go Your Own Way

Just to be clear, I’m not talking about the ‘forced fun’ company socials or team-building away days. In fact, in the current environment I’ve described above, these are likely go down even worse than they have in past.

I’m talking about designing organisations from the ground up around the humans, placing relationships above everything else and embracing the glorious variation of talents in any group of people.

The way that Buurtzorg, the Dutch community nursing group have done, with their structure of small, self-managing community nursing teams networked through an intranet and supported by a handful of central staff.

Or the way the Morning Star organise their tomato processing business through a series of contracts between the people responsible at each stage of the process i.e. between the farmer and haulier, between the processor and packager. They chain these agreements into a highly flexible and functioning production stream but each is negotiated directly between two individuals.

Or perhaps the approach of Haier, the global white goods organisation out of China that consists of thousands of self-organising micro-enterprises, each focused on a specific customer segment. They operate in an ecosystem created centrally and supported through application platforms providing all the support the teams need to achieve their own market and profit goals.

There are many models already out there, if organisations want to change. Bayer is a prime example of one who has grasped that nettle, even if it is through necessity, with their Dynamic Shared Organisation model that echoes much of Haier’s approach.

Or you could look at something like Sociocracy, an approach that seeks to create psychologically safe environments and productive organisations, drawing on the use of consent, rather than majority voting, in discussion and decision-making by people who have a shared goal or work process (Wikipedia). My friend Lizzie Benton has a free webinar next week, so if you want to know more about Sociocracy you can sign up here.

The ideas are out there. We don’t lack the means, now we need the will.

Wasn’t Expecting That

And finally, in this Linked In post, Dave Cairns asked Professor Nick Bloom what he would advise his children and students to do when applying for jobs in the environment AI has created. His first point was to apply for more jobs, simply on the basis that everyone else is because AI makes it so easy, so you have to match the numbers (250 applications, in case you wondered, where it used to be 100!).

His other observations are that networking is becoming more and more important, and that interview are coming back into fashion because employers can’t trust a written submission any more (he’d recently been asked to give a reference ‘in person’ i.e. by an Zoom interview).

My reading? AI slop is drowning the systems that we have put in place, and so the human element is becoming more and more important. Kind of ironic, right?

In fact, recruitment is going back to how it used to be before technology came along. When recruiters met people face to face and when job openings were often found through networks.

Mind you, that was back in the days when you used to talk to people at the office.

And going to work used to be a lot more fun.