by The New York Times | Sep 13, 2019 | General
After a revolution in the workplace spurred by technology, companies are finding that a balanced approach may be the most effective.
The numbers defining drastic changes in the modern workplace are striking and relentless: five generations all working together, the role of automation in replacing or enhancing physically repetitive tasks (up to 55%) and an increase in telecommuting (115% over the past decade). But how do these numbers reflect the way we actually work and how productive we really are?
Today, the answers are increasingly nuanced, characterised by a cycle of changes in the workplace – in large part driven by technology – that provoke the anticipation of even more change. No longer is there a simple binary view of the old, traditional way of doing work characterised by corner offices and strict dress codes. The new, modern worker does what they want, from wherever they are.
A more enlightened view of how work is evolving takes the cue from more than a century of office culture, while also incorporating cutting-edge advances in collaboration. These forces may seem paradoxical, even oppositional, but they can be complementary.
A look at how some of the most drastic changes in the modern workplace shows it has evolved to redefine what it means to work smarter.
Millennials may have believed the office was obsolete. But too much working from home has left them seeking structure and the benefits of mentorship.
Mobile technology was going to free workers from their work stations – eliminating long commutes and scotching many of the annoying distractions of office culture – all the while facilitating new highs in productivity.
The truth is, except for a glitch from 1995 to 2005, overall productivity in Western economies has been largely stagnant for the past 50 years. Workers may feel freer, but, at least according to traditional measures, they’re not producing much more.
For many workers, separated from the interpersonal exchange of traditional offices, mobility has left them feeling disoriented. People want autonomy but, it turns out, they still crave structure and social interaction.
“That’s the surprise,” said Arvind Malhotra, a professor at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina who specialises in workforce dynamics. “It’s a tacit admission that human contact has value in building organisational culture.”
Ironically, the workers who most expect mobility – younger employees – are most adversely affected by it. One of the greatest causes of workplace anxiety, according to Malhotra, is a lack of mentorship.
“Around 2001,” Malhotra said, “I started to hear young employees saying, ‘I feel like my boss doesn’t know that I’m working on really good stuff’ and ‘I’m not getting the one-on-one time with my mentor.’”
On-the-job training is most intense in the early years of a career. Working from a cafe might result in great coffee options, but it robs young workers of crucial learning opportunities and mentorship when they need those most.
Albert Segars, Malhotra’s collaborator and the PNC distinguished professor of strategy and entrepreneurship, said he believes that, at least in the case of millennials, there’s a sociological factor involved. One of the things that make millennials different from other generations is a deeper level of parental involvement.
“Parents were deeply engaged with their well-being: the things millennials did or did not do growing up,” Segars said. “When they can’t get that at work, they get frustrated and think nobody is interested in them. When they do get it, it’s amazing what they can do. But they need some of the structure and feedback found in traditional workplaces.”
However, newer collaboration technology can enable the very feedback loops young workers are missing, said Lisette Sutherland, an expert on working remotely.
“You have to make communicating with one another so easy that it’s like talking to someone right next to you,” she said. “It sounds really simple, but most multinational workers don’t even have headsets. Another big part of it is turning the video on. People don’t realise how much team building you can do just by turning on the screen.”
Sutherland said that the richer, real-time interface provided by a new wave of technological advances will help quell the isolation people feel when working at home. Robotic cameras that move through the halls of an office and pivot to look around a conference room will help remote workers feel more connected. “What we’re trying to do is replicate the human experience as much as possible,” she said.
At a minimum, companies should supplement face-to-face leadership by teaming younger workers with digital mentors, someone in the organisation with whom they can chat regularly for guidance and support, to eliminate anxiety fuelled by greater mobility.
Increased mobility magnified another phenomenon unique to today’s workforce. For the first time, there are five generations working together, from the youngest of the Greatest Generation to the oldest of Generation Z.
The arrival of millennials and other digital natives in the workforce more than 15 years ago triggered some anxiety among older generations, wondering how they could catch up, but simultaneously generated high expectations.
Indeed, 15 years ago young people entering the workforce had their own ideas about the future of work. They assumed their fluency with mobile devices and remote communications would free them to work on meaningful projects at their own discretion.
In fact, the democratisation of data has allowed younger employers to fuel their ambitions with information. Before digitalisation, the ability to access information signalled power. In the new workforce, it signals ability.
But as young workers forged new pathways, older managers struggled to evaluate their performance. The younger employees’ autonomous, remote work demanded new schemes for effective monitoring.
Historically, much of how work got done depended on who knew whom in the organisational hierarchy, Malhotra said. But new ways of working meant managers had to promote group performance while also recognising individual rewards, a dynamic most companies still struggle with.
This article first appeared in The New York Times.
by The New York Times | Sep 6, 2019 | General
Workplace expert Choires Sicha answers workplace questions.
Question: I work for an NGO that relies heavily on private sponsors. Our new boss loves to celebrate with wine or Champagne when any amount is donated and we constantly receive donations.
Even for the end of the week, the boss decided to bring in drinks. As a person who is not a heavy drinker, it makes me feel a bit uncomfortable. How do I rectify this culture change of constantly drinking in the workplace?
Answer: Really though, aren’t we all drinking in the workplace? Drinking the rancid Kool-Aid of corporate eco-terrorism and capitalist larceny, that is.
But alcohol-drinking, honestly, isn’t that fun in the office. I do find it cute when people parade a bar cart around on Friday at 6 pm.
Yet I find it way less cute at 5.45pm and reprehensible before 5.15pm. I just pack up and go home when people start drinking. But as you can tell, I’m the most fun person in the room.
I wish I was a chilled someone who believed that everyone should crack open a cold one after lunch. But there’s no world in which it’s appropriate for an NGO to have regular drinking in the office, unless it is an NGO devoted to housing for aging winegrowers.
Do you know who finds excuses to introduce alcohol into all life events? Yes. That’s right. Your boss is an alcoholic.
Question: I’m about a year in at a new job that I’m proud to have. I love the work I do, I’m happy enough with the pay and I feel respected. One big problem, though, I do not relate socially to anyone in my office.
I’ve definitely tried. I send the occasional joke over group chat, I ask how people’s weekends were when I run into them in the kitchen, all that, but I get nothing back. It permeates the office culture.
It seems that no one here really socially interacts with each other. I work long hours and I’m a fairly extroverted person, so I’m thinking that the company culture just might not be right for me. I don’t need much, but I do know the occasional banter would help me feel a lot happier.
A lot of it has to do with a pretty significant age gap. However, the lack of social interaction makes me pine to leave the office, thus I feel burnt out often and the burnout has led to me tending towards laziness sometimes. Is this enough for me to consider leaving an otherwise great job?
Answer: I think you’re having too many cascading experiences about this workplace when you should be having cascading experiences of trauma over the fact that you are scouring the ocean bare of life with your daily existence.
Sorry. Somewhere a plastic bag you once touched is choking the life from a dolphin. I don’t think you’re burnt out. I think you have a job, a life and perhaps they are meeting different needs in some kind of “balance”. A balance of work and life, if you will, to coin a phrase.
You should probably check to see if your co-workers are just socialising behind your back because they don’t like you.
by The New York Times | Sep 6, 2019 | General
New York Times workplace expert Choire Sicha responds to workplace questions.
Question: I recently landed my first real job after graduating. While it is a job that I find myself succeeding at when assigned to tasks, more often than not I am not given any tasks.
My team consists of myself and two male colleagues, one being my boss. They are always busy. I have asked if there is anything I can do or learn, time and time again, only to be told: “No, you’re good.”
Worst of all, I am often alone in the office, so when the phone rings or someone comes in or emails us, I can’t do anything, because I haven’t been trained to do anything.
I feel that I’m wasting my talent and their time by being here. How do I diplomatically approach my boss with this?
Answer: I’m going to ignore the part where many of us just saw the phrases “I am not given any tasks” and “I can’t do anything.
Shouldn’t you be spending those free and lovely empty hours working on your graphic novel. The world is giving you a gift. You’re sitting in an office alone with nothing to do.
Look at this job as a teaching moment and teach yourself something. You have encountered a classic nonsensical entry-level job. Why is someone paying you to sit there for 55 hours a week?
Likely, it is because “That’s how we’ve always done it.” Sure, it is totally reasonable to spend five minutes with your boss each week to ask: “What more can I take on here?” Note that none of that sentence was about how you feel or about fairness or your career path. Skip the preamble.
It is possible that you will never get trained to do anything and your boss wonders why you haven’t picked up the skills by yourself or by osmosis. But none of this matters.
You have entered the workforce at the uneasy top of a scary boom cycle. Write your pretty poems on the clock. You’ll look back on this job and laugh.
Question: I have several chronic but stable medical conditions that sometimes cause me to miss work slightly more than average, though I try to attend as much as possible. Do I disclose and seek accommodations or just keep pretending I have a particularly dodgy stomach or bad colds?
Answer: So, in the Proper World, which is a pocket universe that exists only in some sophomore philosophy seminar, you would have a cosy and empathetic meeting with your supervisor and an HR representative.
Together you could read the guidelines about reasonable accommodations. Maybe you’d laugh and cry a little together as you discussed how you have so many rights under the law. Then you’d figure out how to best do your job in a way that improves your health, instead of hindering it.
Out here, in the world in which we live there’s a reason we had to make all these laws. But also, your employer has the right to have an employee perform her job and the consequences of unexplained or frequent absences might actually harm you as much as bias. Decide which path fits into your ethics and go boldly forward.
Question: I work at a small law firm. Recently, the partners asked if I would write for our blog. My first piece was referred to a partner’s sister, an editor.
When I saw her edits, I couldn’t recognise my piece. The partner only wanted to know if I accepted her sister’s edits. I did because I didn’t want to completely rewrite it or disappoint the partner.
Having never had anything reviewed by a professional editor before, is this the process?
Answer: The only way to save yourself from editors is to write like such an identifiable and idiosyncratic wing nut that they don’t even know where to start with your text and soon enough they move on to an easier victim or just decline to publish you.
Question: Recently, our boss said I and four others were no longer going to do our jobs. They had decided to consolidate our work into different sites.
However is now months later and we’ve not had any update as to when this will happen. We recently made an enquiry as to when we might hear and were told “it’s not a priority”.
Do I sit and wait for my severance or start looking for a new job with a new company? I don’t trust them anymore.
Answer: In case you’re wondering if this is crazy, it is. Workers, despite providing most or all of the value of the business, are also puzzle pieces in the grand scheme of middle managers who come up with solutions all day.
Middle management is all about the act of imagining towards a set of goals. So, your life is the consequence of someone whiteboarding in a room and issuing a sentence that starts off with: “What if…” and always ends up like: “We move Bob’s team to the Lansing office, close the DC shop and then fold all the remaining analytics people into the finance pod! Let us now repair to the blood-drinking room.”
But your situation is true for all of us. They just did something dumb or maybe kind, but poorly. They decided to give you an advance heads-up that your jobs were going to be some other kind of thing. The rest of us will just have to be taken by surprise.
by The New York Times | Sep 6, 2019 | General
Well-known workplace columnist, Megan Greenwell answers workplace questions.
Question: My co-worker seems to work more for their (I don’t want to specify gender) personal brand than for the company.
This team member posts their whereabouts: they’re at a conference, at class (coursework tangential to their job), working from home.
They keep us up-to-date on the minutiae of their travel (leaving at 11am on a train without wi-fi until 7pm). They meet their goals, but I’m not privy to what their results look like. Are they treading water or exceeding their goals?
I could be glad this younger co-worker is out and about so much, but the department doesn’t benefit in any way. We’re in marketing. When this co-worker reports on conferences, they don’t say how what they learnt will help us.
Another co-worker and I try to see if we’re jealous. We have family obligations and perhaps we’re a bit stodgy? But I think if someone is getting smarter on company resources, they should share with their team.
Instead, we’re on the outside, watching our co-worker flit from thing to thing, polishing their own brand.
Am I not thinking the new-think? Or is this person a workplace narcissist? Why does it bother us so much? What language can I use with co-worker’s supervisor and the department head that doesn’t make it seem like a personality issue, but about adding value to the organisation?
Or is it just that co-worker’s personality and mine are far apart and I should look for my own classes and conferences and polish my own brand?
What’s the balance between what’s good for the individual versus what is good for the team?
Answer: I’ve previously outed myself as a millennial in this column. I suppose I should further disclose that I recently and quite publicly quit my job and got a new one thanks in part to my largely positive reputation in an industry known for absurd levels of upheaval.
So, I am impressed by your colleague’s savvy brand-building, which I strongly suspect has less to do with narcissism than with their experiences making a career in a post-financial crisis world.
Of course, we would rather quit social media and stop going to conferences and professional mixers and take all our holidays and develop real hobbies and deeper human connections, but the entire economic system has shown us over and over that we cannot, because we will end up broke disappointments to everyone we know.
If you are interested in taking classes and attending conferences, why not take your company up on its ability to pay for them?
If you’re not in a position to attend because of your family commitments, that’s okay too, but it doesn’t mean your colleague needs to stop attending. If opportunities aren’t being doled out unequally and you aren’t being forced to take on extra work to cover for their absence, whether they are an average performer or a superstar really doesn’t concern you.
The fact that you are not responsible for this person’s work outcomes and that you are considering complaining to their supervisor – who is responsible for said work outcomes and knows where their subordinate is on any given day – suggests it is not in fact about “adding value” but pure resentment.
This is the economic system’s fault, too. You’ve been set up to resent millennials just as much as we’ve been set up to resent you. The good news is that you can still break the cycle.
If you are genuinely curious about learning more from your co-worker’s experiences, try to ask.
Question: I have a great new job and great co-workers. But I’m in a shared office with one other person sitting across from me who sometimes clips his nails at his desk, is often eating something noisy and murmurs to himself.
There is also a woman down the hall who clips both her fingernails and her toe nails, listens to music without headphones and leaves the volume on her phone turned up so we can hear each time she receives an SMS or email.
The noises don’t happen constantly, but they happen enough to be distracting. I mostly keep earplugs in, which gets painful.
My job requires me to write code and do detailed work. Also, I know I’m noise sensitive. What kind of expectations are reasonable for me to have?
What is appropriate office etiquette and how could I convey this to my co-workers, especially regarding personal hygiene tasks?
As a non-manager, is it my place to convey etiquette? Is my need for a quiet, nail-clipping free workplace unreasonable?
Answer: There are no fewer than eight emails in the inbox about office nail-clippers. How is it possible that there exist more than eight people in 2019 who have not yet been shamed out of this behaviour?
Tell the co-worker or HR, if you don’t feel comfortable going directly to someone who outranks you, that society has agreed that this is unacceptable and you’d appreciate some help enacting some basic standards of decency.
But the tricky thing about your nail-clipping question is that you are being a little unreasonable, too. You can, and should, stop people from conducting personal hygiene activities meant for the privacy of their homes in the workplace, but asking everyone in your office to cease “eating something noisy” and to mute their cellphones all day is not possible.
I don’t think it is your fault. Hyperacusis and misophonia are real conditions that make people unbearably sensitive to noise, but it’s your problem regardless.
Good noise-cancelling headphones are expensive, but they make a much more sustainable solution than earplugs.
If that doesn’t work, ask your doctor for a note confirming this is a real condition for which you need accommodation in the form of your own office or permission to work from home.
