The War on the Work Ethic

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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