Tag Archives: workplace

Tales From the Office: I Hate My Job

cubiclesIt is no coincidence that I post this article on a Monday. After all it’s the most loathsome day of the week according to most people this side of the galaxy. All because of the very human invention known as work.

Some present-day Bartleby (the Scrivener)’s are taking up arms and rising up against the man. A few human gears in the vast corporate machine are no longer content to suck up to the boss or accept every demand from the corner office — take the recent case of a Manhattan court stenographer.

From the Guardian:

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a wage slave typing: “I hate my job. I hate my job. I hate my job,” on a keyboard, for ever. That’s what a Manhattan court typist is accused of doing, having been fired from his post two years ago, after jeopardising upwards of 30 trials, according to the New York Post. Many of the court transcripts were “complete gibberish” as the stenographer was alledgedly suffering the effects of alcohol abuse, but the one that has caught public attention contains the phrase “I hate my job” over and over again. Officials are reportedly struggling to mitigate the damage, and the typist now says he’s in recovery, but it’s worth considering how long it took the court officials to realise he hadn’t been taking proper notes at all.

You can’t help but feel a small pang of joy at part of the story, though. Surely everyone, at some point, has longed, but perhaps not dared, to do the same. In a dreary Coventry bedsit in 2007, I read Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, the tale of a new employee who calmly refuses to do anything he is paid to do, to the complete bafflement of his boss, and found myself thinking in wonder: “This is the greatest story I have ever read.” No wonder it still resonates. Who hasn’t sat in their office, and felt like saying to their bosses: “I would prefer not to,” when asked to stuff envelopes or run to the post office?

For some bizarre reason, it’s still taboo to admit that most jobs are unspeakably dull. On application forms, it’s anathema to write: “Reason for leaving last job: hated it”, and “Reason for applying for this post: I like money.” The fact that so many people gleefully shared this story shows that many of us, deep down, harbour a suspicion that our jobs aren’t necessarily what we want to be doing for the rest of our lives. A lot of us aren’t always happy and fulfilled at work, and aren’t always completely productive.

Dreaming of turning to our boss and saying: “I would prefer not to,” or spending an afternoon typing “I hate my job. I hate my job. I hate my job” into Microsoft Word seems like a worthy way of spending the time. And, as with the court typist, maybe people wouldn’t even notice. In one of my workplaces, before a round of redundancies, on my last day my manager piled yet more work on to my desk and said yet again that she was far too busy to do her invoices. With nothing to lose, I pointed out that she had a large plate glass window behind her, so for the entire length of my temp job, I’d been able to see that she spent most of the day playing Spider Solitaire.

Howard Beale’s rant in Network, caricaturish as it is cathartic, strikes a nerve too: there’s something endlessly satisfying in fantasising about pushing your computer over, throwing your chair through the window and telling your most hated colleagues what you’ve always thought about them. But instead we keep it bottled up, go to the pub and grind our teeth. Still, here’s to the modern-day Bartlebys.

Read the entire article here.

Image: Office cubicles. Courtesy of Nomorecubes.

 

Mr.Busy

Mr_BusyCompeting with the co-worker who is a frenzy of activity is stressful. You know the type. This person is constantly rushing from one assignment to the next, hosting multiple hallway conversations, leaving meetings to take a call, dropping a call to answer an email, multitasking on 3 devices.

After all, you have to keep up — the busy colleague must be important or must be working on a critical project, right? Yes, it’s entirely possible, and no it could just be mis-perception — busy work is very different to smart work. Regardless, keeping up with “Mr.Busy” creates anxiety, friction and resentment in the workplace.

From WSJ:

Every office has (at least) one—the colleague who is always walking fast, finishing other people’s sentences and racing from meeting to meeting while fielding email, texts and voice mail on multiple devices. That person can appear very important.

They may not know it, but they’re usually causing secondhand stress.

Rushing blocks thoughtful communication and creates worries among colleagues that “maybe I should be doing that, too, or maybe my stuff isn’t as important as his, or maybe he’ll be irritable if I interrupt,” says Jordan Friedman, a New York City stress-management speaker and trainer.

Ray Hollinger was known for years among colleagues in a previous job as a sales-training executive as “Mr. Busy,” he says. In his quest to be a top performer, he says, he often thought, “If all this stuff just keeps coming at me, I will take it on. I will take it all on,” says Mr. Hollinger, founder of More Time More Sales, a Phoenixville, Pa., training firm.

He says he wasn’t aware that his constant motion sometimes made others feel uncomfortable—until a co-worker pointed it out. She told him that when she tried to talk with him, ” ‘your volume goes up, your pace of speaking goes up, and you’re not fully in the conversation,’ ” he says.

Working a few years ago with Rosemary Tator, a Waltham, Mass., leadership-development coach, Mr. Hollinger stopped piling on projects and started blocking out on his calendar the time he needed to achieve realistic goals—including time for interruptions. He also now stops himself when he talks too fast, by “taking a couple of breaths, and lowering my volume and my pace,” he says.

Ms. Tator invites rushers to visualize themselves on video. “What would you think of that person who ran into every meeting late, spent half the time on their cellphone with their email, and had to ask, ‘Could you please repeat that?’ because they weren’t listening?” says Ms. Tator, principal partner in 2beffective, a coaching and consulting firm.

Seeing colleagues—especially managers—operate at a frenzied, frantic pace can make the behavior contagious, says Robert S. Rubin, an associate professor of management at DePaul University, Chicago. He advises managers to hold “inoculation discussions, to inoculate the employee from catching the feeling” that rushing around is necessary to being seen as a good performer.

Open-plan offices help spread the contagion. When the boss has a view of the entire office, “no one wants to be seen as the slowest moving object in the solar system. You have to keep up with the Joneses—literally,” says Ben Jacobson, co-founder of Conifer Research, Chicago, which conducts behavioral and cultural research for companies.

Architects have begun blurring human figures in drawings of new-office projects, to appeal to clients who aspire to active, high-energy workplaces, says Jorge Barrero, a technical designer in Chicago for Gensler, an architecture, planning and design firm. The image is one clients “can connect with on an emotional level,” Mr. Barrero says.

Tom Krizmanic, a principal with Studios Architecture in New York, says about a quarter of the 218 designs he helped judge in a recent office-design competition, co-sponsored by Business Interiors by Staples, showed humans as blurred figures in motion. The trend began about three years ago, he says.

Some people go into overdrive after getting promoted or taking a challenging new job. Surrounded by senior managers, “they’re not the smartest person in the room any more,” says William Arruda of New York City, a personal-branding consultant. Instead of prioritizing their lengthening to-do lists, “they go into hair-on-fire mode, telling themselves, ‘I’m a machine. I get so much done. There’s nothing you can give me that will break me.’ “

“The productivity of entire teams can go down,” Mr. Arruda says. “If you have one person rushing into meetings at the last minute and tapping a pencil through the entire session, it changes the cadence for the entire group.”

To jolt rushers into awareness, he has them ask for written feedback from 10 to 20 colleagues. The form includes such seemingly frivolous questions as, “If I were a household appliance, which one would I be?” Chronic rushers are shocked when co-workers liken them to “a blender whirring around at 9 million miles an hour,” he says.

Read the entire article here.

Image: Mr.Busy. Courtesy of MrMen.

 

Watch Out Corporate America: Gen-Y is Coming

Social scientists have had Generation-Y, also known as “millenials”, under their microscopes for a while. Born between 1982 and 1999, Gen-Y is now coming of age and becoming a force in the workplace displacing aging “boomers” as they retire to the hills. So, researchers are now looking at how Gen-Y is faring inside corporate America. Remember, Gen-Y is the “it’s all about me generation”; members are characterized as typically lazy and spoiled, have a grandiose sense of entitlement, inflated self-esteem and deep emotional fragility. Their predecessors, the baby boomers, on the other hand are often seen as over-bearing, work-obsessed, competitive and narrow-minded. A clash of cultures is taking shape in office cubes across the country as these groups, with such differing personalities and philosophies, tussle within the workplace. However, it may not be all bad, as columnist Emily Matchar, argues below — corporate America needs the kind of shake-up that Gen-Y promises.

[div class=attrib]From the Washington Post:[end-div]

Have you heard the one about the kid who got his mom to call his boss and ask for a raise? Or about the college student who quit her summer internship because it forbade Facebook in the office?

Yep, we’re talking about Generation Y — loosely defined as those born between 1982 and 1999 — also known as millennials. Perhaps you know them by their other media-generated nicknames: teacup kids,for their supposed emotional fragility; boomerang kids, who always wind up back home; trophy kids — everyone’s a winner!; the Peter Pan generation, who’ll never grow up.

Now this pampered, over-praised, relentlessly self-confident generation (at age 30, I consider myself a sort of older sister to them) is flooding the workplace. They’ll make up 75 percent of the American workforce by 2025 — and they’re trying to change everything.

These are the kids, after all, who text their dads from meetings. They think “business casual” includes skinny jeans. And they expect the company president to listen to their “brilliant idea.”

When will they adapt?

They won’t. Ever. Instead, through their sense of entitlement and inflated self-esteem, they’ll make the modern workplace adapt to them. And we should thank them for it. Because the modern workplace frankly stinks, and the changes wrought by Gen Y will be good for everybody.

Few developed countries demand as much from their workers as the United States. Americans spend more time at the office than citizens of most other developed nations. Annually, we work 408 hours more than the Dutch, 374 hours more than the Germans and 311 hours more than the French. We even work 59 hours more than the stereotypically nose-to-the-grindstone Japanese. Though women make up half of the American workforce, the United States is the only country in the developed world without guaranteed paid maternity leave.

All this hard work is done for less and less reward. Wages have been stagnant for years, benefits shorn, opportunities for advancement blocked. While the richest Americans get richer, middle-class workers are left to do more with less. Because jobs are scarce and we’re used to a hierarchical workforce, we accept things the way they are. Worse, we’ve taken our overwork as a badge of pride. Who hasn’t flushed with a touch of self-importance when turning down social plans because we’re “too busy with work”?

Into this sorry situation strolls the self-esteem generation, printer-fresh diplomas in hand. And they’re not interested in business as usual.

The current corporate culture simply doesn’t make sense to much of middle-class Gen Y. Since the cradle, these privileged kids have been offered autonomy, control and choices (“Green pants or blue pants today, sweetie?”). They’ve been encouraged to show their creativity and to take their extracurricular interests seriously. Raised by parents who wanted to be friends with their kids, they’re used to seeing their elders as peers rather than authority figures. When they want something, they’re not afraid to say so.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article after the jump.[end-div]