The war on the work ethic proceeds apace. We have had quiet quitting, where workers have tried to do less work, the better to reserve time to do laundry. Then we had work from home, where workers decided that they would be just as functional working from the basement, distracted by children and spouses and piles of laundry.
These aberrant practices have now been rejected by senior management. In their stead we have the movement to bring your whole Self to work. Since your whole Self presumably includes your erotic proclivities, propensities and yearnings, the slogan, doubtless conjured by some idiot Ivy League graduate, invites people to expose their private parts in the office.
At a time when sexual harassment is a serious problem, we ought to be opting for more, not less formality. Unfortunately, this is no longer the case.
According to Miranda Green in the Financial Times, more and more workers act as though their workplace is a therapist’s office. They seem to believe that they should share and overshare, whine and complain about private matters, regardless of how distracting it is to their co-workers.
One suspects, though Green does not say it, that this new form of oversharing has something to do with the gender makeup of the office staff. Certain members of one specific gender are more likely to want to express their feelings and to harass people with their troubles and turmoils. We will not say which gender is more likely to emote and complain, because it is now forbidden.
Anyway, if you, as we all, want to diminish the amount of sexual harassment in offices, a good place to start would be by tamping down exposure of private matters. It gives the wrong message. I trust that I do not need to tell you that, but I probably do.
Anyway, Green explains:
With personal crises arriving thick and fast there is an epidemic of letting it all hang out emotionally in the office.
Just like therapy the new office is chockablock with confession and empathy. People expose themselves willy nilly to whomever, therefore ruining professional cooperation:
Nevertheless, whatever we call it, attempts at professional poise have gradually been abandoned in favour of mass, multidirectional exchanges of confession and empathy. It’s become totally #nofilter — we’re all so beaten up by the rolling programme of challenges that there is little energy for anything other than the work itself. You can forget keeping up appearances let alone a stiff upper lip.
As it happens, Green is right to suggest that we do not yet know the cost of turning the workplace into a therapist’s office, but one suspects that it will be costly:
But we don’t yet know the nature and extent of the costs attached to airing our dirty linen in the office (and I’m no longer talking an aspirational trousersuit, more the psychological equivalent of loungewear). What if the collapse of your at-work persona means a career penalty after your crisis is over? What if work friendships can’t take the load?
This ends up turning office relationships into high drama, and at times grand opera. This does not contribute to office harmony or social cohesion:
Take the call to “bring your whole self to work”, or the slightly terrifying exhortation to “radical candour”, a sort of update of tough love. It is a direction of travel that introduces more emotion rather than damping it down. This seemed refreshing pre-pandemic: a chance to wriggle out of an office straitjacket that homogenised the workforce. “I’m not like you so don’t make me pretend” is a pretty good response to outmoded and often exclusive formality.
Would you believe, we now have offices that are inundated with too much information. Everyone is becoming a therapist, therefore distracting from the business at hand.
But we now have a different problem of too much information — a TMI SOS, with workers at all levels sending up emergency flares. It’s a constant onslaught of exhausting revelations. Career reviews since Covid are a minefield of medical updates and childcare and eldercare crises. With so many of us withdrawing from work or struggling because of ill health and caring responsibilities, particularly among the over-50s, running a team has become less like a normal whitecollar job and more like keeping a unit’s morale up in a trench filling with muddy water. There’s too much for managers to handle — and for our poor colleagues, who bear the brunt as carefully crafted competent personas crumble before their eyes.
So, Green is not optimistic that this will continue. And yet, it is not so easy to put the toothpaste back in the tube. People, she notes sagely, are going to start avoiding each other, and especially avoiding asking polite questions like: How are you?
This doesn’t feel sustainable. Employees need support better tailored to these tricky times and managers need help to cope with the carnage. In the meantime, my newest worry is I’ve become one of those people whom it’s dangerous to ask “how are you?” in case they actually, you know, tell you.
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