Red Light Spells Danger
If we really knew in advance quite how dangerous work can be (by which I mean a normal ‘office’ job), we’d probably all become lumberjacks, jungle guides or chainsaw-juggling street entertainers. At least then we’d know what the dangers are and be trained to deal with them.
It’s all so innocuous, especially today when you can physically be in your own home or other space that you feel totally relaxed in. You can go from seeing a job to being on-boarded without even leaving the comfort of your home. If you do have to go to a physical location (formerly known as an office), then it’s usually clean, warm and well-lit (if it’s not, those are DEFINITELY warning signs!).
‘The job’ mostly involves typing stuff on a keyboard and talking to people. There’s no smoke and fire, no loud percussive noises (unless someone has got their headphones turned up super-high), you don’t have to wear any protective clothing. The only real physical risks are that you get back pain or RSI from bad posture, unfit because you don’t move around enough and overweight from eating all those snacks when you are bored. To be fair, most of those risks are the same when you are sitting at home watching TV or playing video games.
And yet the innocuous, bland, faceless and emotionless nothing that has come to typify the modern corporate workplace is incredible dangerous, full of hidden hazards and silent threats.
This is not an entirely new observation. Jeffrey Pfieffer published ‘Dying For A Paycheck’ six years ago. I experienced these dangers and the harm they can do over two decades ago. What has changed is the ubiquity and the normalisation of these dangers, and consequently, the number of people damaged and the extent of their wounds.
What was once a small, if significant, problem has now become an epidemic. It’s no longer a risk that you will experience harm because of your job, it’s now likely.
That’s why mental health has become such a big concern, that’s why burnout is a rapidly growing problem, that’s why GenZ are rejecting the corporate path (I use this as short hand for ‘knowledge work in a big organisation’).
What I seek to do with Decrapify Work is to alert people to the dangers, enable them to identify the threats and equip them to avoid them and minimise the risk of harm.
A lot of the harm that I suffered came about because I was naive and uninformed. I didn’t realise what the dangers were and when I began to suspect things were going wrong, I didn’t know how to protect myself. I don’t want others to blunder into danger, unaware and unprepared, as I did.
Of course, the bigger goal is to remove the dangers from the workplace but, in the meantime, we can make sure we are open-eyed and ready to deal with what’s there.
Just because you have to go into the jungle, it doesn’t mean you have to end up as dinner.
Because The Night
‘Toxic workplace’ has become a common phrase these days, some may think an over-used one. There is always a danger that we conflate too broad a spread and rob the term of its potency.
A deeply toxic workplace is one that drives people to despair, harmful behaviours and even suicide. Like the situation at Orange, the French telecomm company that had a policy to deliberately drive older managers out of the business. Unusually, the real brutality of the workplace was revealed. Even more unusually, prosecution ensued and those at the very top of the organisation were sent to jail.
When people say their workplace is toxic, it’s very unlikely they mean THAT toxic. So it’s probably more useful to talk about the extent and degree of toxicity in workplaces. My perspective is that both have increased, that more workplaces have a degree of toxicity in them, and that the level of toxicity is rising.
That means more and more people are experiencing workplace trauma, and suffering long-lasting effects from this, something explored at depth in this article ‘Why long-term workplace trauma is a real phenomenon’ - BBC WorkLife
The causes are wide but include racism, bullying, poor work-life boundaries and job insecurity. Many of these have been on the increase over the course of my lifetime due to the ‘Forces of Crapification’, which are:
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
At its essence is that people feel that their workplace is unsafe. When they suffer from the effects, their problems are not acknowledged and they are not given any support to address them. This exacerbates the harm and causes long-term effects, which has become known as ‘Workplace PTSD’.
This is what my friend was referring to when she suggested I might be suffering from PTSD, something that has not even entered my head. I didn’t even know it was a thing, let alone consider I might be experiencing it.
That’s why it’s so important to highlight these dangers. Younger generations are much more vocal about their mental health and harms that are being inflicted upon them but older generations (and certainly mine) have been conditioned to play down or even ignore these problems, which simply prolongs and worsens them.
There is a growing recognition of these ‘psycho-social’ harms and Australia is pioneering legislation that will mandate organisations to protect their employees from them, in the same way they must protect them from physical harms (whether their approach is the right one is still a live debate but they have raised the profile of the issue and legitimised it).
We need to keep this conversation alive and amplify it so governments and organisations take action to address the real harms being caused to many.
Do You Really Want To Hurt Me?
The article put me in mind of the definition of violence that is used by Charles Rojzman (Social Psychologist, Conflict Mediator, creator of Transformational Social Therapy), an experienced peace negotiator who has mediated in many major disputes such as the Israeli-Palestine conflict.
He defines four types of violence:
Mistreatment
Humiliation
Abandonment or Indifference
Guilt-tripping or Victimhood
What is striking to me is how subtle and common place violence is, especially in the workplace, and particularly the last two.
I was personally told on more than one occasion that what I did was unimportant and that my manager couldn’t afford to spend any time with me. I had four different managers in one year. How many people experience that sort of neglect, or feel that no-one really cares about them or what they are doing?
As for guilt-tripping, that’s practically baked-in to how many organisations operate. You are not just exhorted to ‘go above and beyond’, it is expected, even demanded, that you will give up your discretionary effort to show you are a good employee. Not to do so is deviant behaviour, called out as “Quiet Quitting” and other pejorative labels.
When you struggle to keep up with the ever-increasing workload, it is your fault because you are not organised enough, your personal productivity is too low, you are slacking or you are just not up to it.
And when your struggles start to impact your mental and physical health, you are told you need to become more ‘resilient’, or even that you need to ‘man up’. It’s like blaming a drowning man for not developing gills.
On top of that is the constant gaslighting that work is great and you have nothing to complain about. That the reality of your own eyes and ears is not true, that the company loves you and you should give the company everything. (That’s pretty much straight out of 1984, by the way). Denial of how you feel and how you see the world is both abandonment AND guilt-tripping.
How dangerous is that?
Cum On Feel The Noize
The excellent Eat Sleep Work repeat podcast recently had an episode entitled “Hang on, was the office stressing us out all along?”
(Spoiler Alert! The answer is YES).
In it they interviewed Dr Libby Sander about her research on the future of work (summarised in this article she wrote). She has studied how the ubiquitous open plan office affects us and came up with some stunning (if not entirely unexpected) results.
We all know the open plan office has become a living nightmare for many workers, which is why it was only occupied half the time before COVID ushered in Work From Anywhere. How often have you booked a meeting room so you can get that report written, or gone out into the corridor to have a phone call because you can’t hear yourself at your desk? Not to mention the bastard who cooks fish in the microwave…
It’s a distraction engine, uniquely evolved to meet the needs of absolutely nobody who has to use it. A good idea destroyed by accountants who leapt on it as a way to reduce costs, ignoring the resultant destruction of productivity.
But actually, it’s worse than that. I know, hard to believe it but …
Dr Sander found out that the impact of the noise we endure working in a open plan office increases our negative mood by 25% and ups our psychological stress by 34%!!!
It’s hardly any wonder that people embraced working from home. In the middle of the existential crisis of a global pandemic, juggling home education, confined to your home and having to work at the kitchen table, or worse, it was better than getting depressed and stressed at your desk in an open-plan office!
Now, that effect comes on top of the dangers I’ve spoken about above.
It means that even if your workplace isn’t toxic, it can still be damaging.
Just think about that.
Right Place Right Time
Whilst we’re looking at Dr Sanders research, she haas studied what we need for our workplace and ranked them. The top three are
Focus
A sense of beauty
Connectedness
Now, before you rack you brains to think of what sort of workplace can encompass those (I mean, I’ve found many things in workplace but a ‘sense of beauty’ ain’t one of them, unless you’re seriously addicted to beige), she points out that we need all three but not at the same time, not in the same place.
We need them according to the type of work we are doing. Focus for the deep work, a sense of beauty when we seek inspiration and divergent creative thinking, connectedness for collaboration and relationship building (I paraphrase, it’s a bit more complex than that but you get the picture).
She also points out that sameness is boring to our senses, that’s why we seek variety (and why I am sitting in a coffee shop writing this!).
She concludes that “Instead of focusing so much on the workplace, our focus should be on the work state we are trying to achieve.”
Well I heartily agree with that because I’ve been saying much the same thing for a while. Work is not a homogenous activity, it’s a variety of tasks and we need different environments to optimise for each.
And they have to be safe, too.
Call Me Maybe
If any of the above has struck a chord with you, or made you see your work experience in a different light, then I’d love to hear from you. Email or DM me, or book a chat on my Calendly page.
As I put together the Corporate Survival Guide, I’d like to draw upon your experiences to supplement my own. What are the traps that you fell into, what harms did you experience and how could you have avoided them? Have you experienced something that I have missed? Help me help others avoid what we’ve suffered.
(If you just fancy having a chat, I’d love to hear from you too!)