An Ode to Corporate Cynicism
A look at corporate employee-centric mental gymnastics through the lens of Orwell’s best.
We can be a lot less dumb than forcing people back into a car three days a week or whatever, to literally be back on the same Zoom meeting they would have been at home. There’s a better way to do this.
— Drew Houston, Dropbox CEO
The above lines are an oasis of common sense in a world that’s hellbent on treating adult employees as kindergarteners.
Now, let me add some context and perspective to what I’m trying to preach, and why Houston’s voice of reason is what every corporation should be focusing on instead of treating the C-suite as their favourite child.
Last year, I was exploring the grounds of a well-known global corporation with my wife, whose services they employ. It’s an astutely self-aware building, if I may lend some sentience to these modern brutes of glass and cement. No, I won’t reveal the name for obvious reasons (the company pays my wife well, and I am vain), but I must add to how impressive the office spaces were made to look.
The building knew what you’d want, and it’d have it ready at the press of the (elevator’s) button. Craving food? Go to a highly decorated mess with big names and indie cafés. Craving video games? There are some consoles hooked up over there, right around the corner of the recreation floor. Craving to stretch your muscles? Play some outdoor sports indoors and indoor sports, well, even more indoors than you could ever imagine. The best part? If you were craving work, there were 10+ floors to do so!
On a good day, I have no issues with any of this. But the moment I whipped my Pentel Graphgear 1000 to pierce the thin veil of “providing for employees,” all I found was a kindergarten pretending to be an office in disguise.
RTO? GTFO!
Houston, in his address on Fortune’s “Leadership Next” podcast, highlights the very thing that I’ve been nagging my wife with all this time: that corporations do not respect employees. Except those in Europe, brought down to their knees thanks to EU regulations.
Let me elaborate: Adult employees know what they are doing. If you can’t place trust in them, don’t hire them. Plain and simple. But if you do, stop forcing them to do your bidding just because you power trip every time you look at your job title.
And this brings me to the above-mentioned facilities that these corporations build. No, it’s not mental health that you care about. No, it’s not the well-being you care about. And no, it’s not relaxation you care about. If you did, employees working from home wouldn’t be a problem; they get all these perks minus the travel time and the managerial monster breathing down their neck. The real reason you have erected these “incentives” is to make it seem like you do care. It’s no different than flying rainbow colours in June to signal alliance to the LGBTQ+ community—a token to stay relevant in the zeitgeist. In reality, you are running a kindergarten for adults.
To better understand these, I invite you to the parallels I’ve drawn from George Orwell’s work. Let’s start off with an essay of his, shall we?
Micro-minded Scapegoating
Phew, big words in that title. But I chose those for a very specific reason. To give a possible explanation for why managers micromanage while breathing down your neck, I draw your attention to George Orwell’s essay, “Shooting an Elephant.”
As the story goes, the narrator describes being tasked, as a police officer in Burma, to kill a beast of an elephant rampaging through the lands. Soon, after investigating, he leads a crowd to search for the elephant, which, to his surprise, is calm. But the crowd starts to demand that he shoot the beast. Wanting not to look like a fool in front of everyone, he proceeds to do so, shooting the elephant several times while still being conflicted from within.
Yeah, I squeezed an excellent essay into a measly paragraph, but the point still stands. Managers, C-suite executives, and anyone with a wild trip about their title act no differently than this colonial mindset highlighted by Orwell’s essay. Rule with an iron fist, if only not to look like a fool in front of everyone or your own superiors.
So, what do micromanagers do? Hark back to COVID times, and you’ll find a tranche of reports on how employees were ordered to be chained to their systems and not to attend to their families, lest they feel the wrath of middle management. I’m sure that, right after ordering their reports to stay put, the managers and C-suites then gave themselves a pat on the back, joined a corporate lunch, asked their domestic help to attend to family, or made a business call that clocks in at 70 hours or something. Shoot the elephant and send a message about who’s the boss to the whole village. Yeah, that’ll teach them, those pesky humans with feelings and families. Urgh!
Employee Unity vs Banner of the Office
If you think the above was a stretch—and I know some of you might—brace for this one. When our office-dwelling superiors can snatch a deadline out of thin air, I can certainly draw sensible parallels from well-known literature that, at the very least, rings true, can’t I?
It’s with this enthusiasm that we turn to Orwell’s famous mid-1940s satire, “Animal Farm.” Oh yes, I can already see some of you rolling your eyes, especially if you do manage a small team. Animal Farm is about a rebellion that turns into an iron fist rule. Had the animals let the status quo with their human farmer, things would have been better. They certainly wouldn’t have come under the rule of a pig named Napoleon, of all things!
Yeah, I saw that coming a mile away. And here I draw two points with as much swiftness as a boss would ask his subordinates to submit their needed-late-in-week reports by 7:30 p.m. sharp, well after the E.O.D.
1) Unions Do Matter
This is actually a kicker: the animals were just in their demand for equality. Let’s phrase this in the sense of unions, something that many a corporate bushwhacker hate. When people (or animals, in the story) have the right to be represented as humans, everyone has a voice and a right in the workplace. Corporations can farm a human’s capacity to be productive with abstract numbers to justify their egos, but no one ever is productive for more than three hours a day anyway. So, why not actually go for better pursuits in life and let people do the work they do without putting in place unnecessary restrictions that suck the life out of them (read: overtime without pay, stingy leave policies, nagging during vacations, etc.).
In the same vein, I urge my fellow readers to not shy away from unionizing. It’s for your own benefit. You need to understand that corporations can’t run without you (I’m going to wholly ignore the AI shitstorm brewing in the distance for now, resting my hope in the better of humanity in all of us). Uniting for better pay, better working conditions, better equipment, and better leave policies for all will never make you evil, no matter what HR says. Just make sure that you vest your decisions in someone who actually represents you, and not someone who’s power-hungry and yaps promises for a better future. Which brings us to the second point . . .
2) Ambition ≠ Double Crossing
Don’t be like Napoleon (the one in the story, but also Bonaparte—come on!). Ambitions are good, but not to double-cross your colleagues. Cut-throat competition leads to more cut-throat competition. Eventually, quite like the popular show Squid Game, someone will come for your throat. Nor is it good to make false promises and exact more work from those you represent or manage. It is certainly distasteful to claim someone else’s work as your own. And it’s definitely vile to gaslight others for your own benefit.
Sadly, how Animal Farm’s Napoleon turns out is a mirror image of the path many managers walk. Masked smiles and promises for everyone’s betterment, until they themselves can afford a Mercedes-Benz C-Class. It’s all downhill from there. The propaganda machine continues, much like 1984. (You thought I’d let Orwell’s best go amiss? Ha!)
Worker-Man: Yes Way Home
In a world with increasingly efficient capabilities of transferring data as well as goods to the remotest corners of the world, drowning employees at their desks, especially when they don’t want to, not only insults their intelligence, it makes the top brass and management appear distrustful. When the employees eventually fall out in disbelief, you see suited executives crying their diamonds out because who will slave away for them now?
Let’s start with a simple facet: Trust. When a company hires someone to do the work, they should only focus on whether that work is being done or not. Apart from some jobs that require on-site duties, there are many white-collar areas that do exactly what they’d be doing at home: Attend Teams or Zoom calls or Slack away for the next message to resolve issues. There should be no need to micromanage or to keep employees on a tight leash. Yes, performance matters, but it’s not tied to any geographical location. Don’t come at me with the “workplace discipline” or “team collaboration” points because they’re as useless as the glass-half-full interview trope. It all depends on the individual.
And here’s another radical thought: Why not ask your employees how they want to work? If someone does their work, does it matter where they do it from? Hybrid work is not the answer, at least in the sense that “hybrid” is loosely used to force employees into the office for a set number of days. True hybridization is giving away the choice to the employees of whether they want to work from home or in the office, and then letting them carry on with their tasks. Those who prefer the structured discipline remain in your brutalist buildings, while others work from home with peace of mind. If any want both, then why not? They’re perfectly capable adults to make that decision. Surely, if the top minds were to give a crack at it, they’d find a workable solution.
Now, I could go on about the benefit this will bring to the environment as well, but that’s for some other day. Besides, you and I, whether residing in Bengaluru, London, Kyoto, New York, or Brussels, certainly can’t take a private jet to beat the traffic (nor can we do so to attend a billionaire’s pointless wedding charade in Venice).
So, let’s stick to the simple measures. Trust, have faith, and ask. Maybe then corporations won’t need to hire morale-boosting dogs and cats in the office. The employees can be a part of their families, do their work, enjoy some downtime, not commute while hotly swearing at (and sweating in) the traffic, and actually fulfil their goals (all the while attending to their own pets!).
After all, why should having more leaders who treat employees like adults be a fantasy?
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References:
· https://www.techspot.com/news/108227-dropbox-ceo-slams-return-office-mandates-compares-them.html