Corporate mentality

My friend, mentor and writing partner Colleen Patrick wrote recently about Crisis Mentality, taking the wind out of my sails somewhat as I had it in mind to write a similar piece about short-termism in the arena of public services (which is every bit as bad in the UK as in the US). I might get back to that sometime later, but a recent email from a different Transatlantic friend caused me to focus on another of life's bugbears: the corporate machine and its insidious effects on anyone who works in it or depends on it for any part of their life.

There was a time, and it wasn't so long ago, when it was sufficient to work hard for seven-and-a-half (or eight) hours a day at the end of which not only were you free to come home and pursue other interests (like cooking dinner), but you felt as if you were free. All your colleagues were working the same pattern and there was no pressure to outdo each other, certainly not in the matter of number of hours worked.

A couple of days ago I wrote briefly about my years spent in support and it's true that we worked extra hours back then. But it was paid overtime. It was a fair day's work for a fair day's pay and if you worked more? You were paid more.

This is about more than just money though. It's also about fun. Yes, it is possible to have fun at work, and I did. It was camaraderie, it was taking time to help colleagues work out answers to hard problems or design complex solutions, it was the sense that we were all in it together (whatever "it" was). Real team work and a sense of knowing what you were about, where you were going, and how you were going to get there.

Today, the constant focus on the bottom line is poisonous. It ruins relationships (both in work time and at home), reduces the time you can spend on coaching and developing a rounded solution to a problem and generally takes the fun out of everything. People are just assets to be sweated and all the while companies put out the spin that "people are their most valuable resource." They should invest in them then, instead of working them into the ground!

It is regularly reported in news media that folk in the UK feel coerced into working long hours - 50+ hours a week - because they think if they're not seen to be working as hard as, or harder than, everyone else their job will be at risk. This is outrageous. Little wonder family life is suffering, relationships are breaking down, and kids feel lost, abandoned and hopeless. Especially when all they have to look forward to is the day when they will be caught up in it too!

If I'm sorry enough to leave my laptop connected to the company mail server, then I can be sure to receive emails at midnight, or 6am, and on Saturdays and Sundays. Many people work extraordinary hours and a few are known to work during the whole of their waking time. They stop when they sleep and start again when they wake the next day.

Ever heard the line "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy"? Dull doesn't come close. Mad would be better.

Short bursts of exceptional activity are expected when there are important deadlines to be met. But it's too easy for this to become the norm, especially when people move from one "important" piece of work to the next without a break, or time out for training, or for less pressured tasks. What attracted me to software development in the first place, and what has kept me in computing for almost thirty years is that it's not just technologically exciting. That is a large part of the attraction, but at the same time you get the sense of creating something that would help other people. There's a deal of satisfaction in being able to stand back and say "I built that."

Unfortunately so much of creating a solution today is simply plugging together standard components. What used to be an engineering industry has now almost completed its metamorphosis into a service industry. There are no more frontiers. And being a service, the corporate and commercial pressure is on to drive out costs, increase productivity and do more and more for less and less. So it's not surprising that companies are very happy to let their employees work long hours. In the absence of overtime payments a fifteen hour day represents a 100% increase in throughput for a zero% increase in cost.

But this is like running a carbon-based economy in the absence of carbon taxes. There is a price to pay, but it's hidden. It's being paid by the employees in terms of its effects on their long-term (mental) health, by their families in terms of lost hours and, therefore, by the company itself eventually in terms of employee burn-out. Until the financial effects of this "asset sweating" are exposed, calculated, and added to the bottom line, we will continue to be subjected to the growing expectations of the long hours culture.