ALL FALL DOWN! THE COLLAPSE OF THE WORKPLACE -- IS ITS REINVENTION TO BE BY THE SEAT OF THE PANTS?

                             ALL FALL DOWN!  THE COLLAPSE OF THE WORKPLACE

IS ITS REINVENTION TO BE BY THE SEAT OF THE PANTS?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© July 31, 2014

Nikil Saval has bravely written a book about the workplace dilemma, putting it in the perspective of what work has become over the last two centuries. 

He calls his work, “Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace” (2014), making reference to the cubicles or open cages that have become endemic to the modern workplace.

Saval reminds us of an open secret, and that is that three quarters to four fifths of workers today make nothing, touch nothing that is made, but only track what is made financially and logistically.

Most workers cannot imagine a workplace other than the open boxes they occupy in tall buildings.

Moreover, people, who work on farms or in our disappearing factories, don’t have a clue as to what office workers do, or why they are doing it.  In any case, they don't consider what they do as being "work," as they know the word to mean.

Alas, most office workers would find it difficult to describe their jobs as work as it is not "hands on." These workers don't mine, manufacturer, construct buildings, build roads, or canvass or teach, but they still feel superior to people who do.  It is one way to justify better pay, working conditions, and cleaner clothes.

In the late nineteenth century, as office workers became an increasing presence, what they actually did was not totally clear to anyone, leastwise themselves.  They showed up every work day and followed orders.

They acquired “positions” and felt justified in looking down at people who made things, did things, and knew exactly their worth.

Corporate guru Peter Drucker was to tag these workers as “knowledge workers,” a concept that took hold although relatively meaningless.  He assigned this term to people involved in planning, directing, designing, negotiating, organizing, recording, tracking, etc.

Drucker is a philosopher for corporate executives who read no philosophy.

It was nice to see Saval give a nod to the medieval guilds that combined work and management as a single function and not a division of labor between the two. 

A form of the guild was adopted in the 20th century with great success, called Skunk Works™.  The aerospace industry has promoted Skunk Works or small work groups giving them specific assignments, often out performing groups ten times their size.

Nineteenth century Europe created office workers, housing them in large buildings that managed to diminish them as persons by the sheer size of these structures, which played on their psychology. 

In the 20th century, these buildings became skyscrapers.  Hundreds, even thousands of workers rushed into these buildings to take residence in diminutive ready-made spaces.  The buildings defined the work that these office workers did.

A kind of intimate dependency developed between office workers and their bosses, who kept close tabs on their work. 

The closeness of office workers and bosses precluded any possibility of unionization as these workers were less inclined to sue for pay or working conditions, but rather to cue for greater intimacy with their bosses. 

Prestige could be earned by how many times an office workers was invited into the boss's closed office, often a glass bubble, to discuss a project.  Brownie points were powerful incentives.

To give a sense of how well defined this was between the boss and the worker, when I was interviewing for assignment in Europe in the late 1980s for Honeywell Europe, Ltd., as Director of Human Resources Planning & Development, I was waiting to be interviewed by the late Dr. Helmet Hosse, President of Honeywell's extensive German operation, when I had to go to the bathroom. 

From the corner of my eye, I spied a washroom off the President’s office, and moved towards it.  The President’s secretary nearly made a flying tackle of me as I approached the washroom, yelling in German, “Can’t you see that is Dr. Hosse's private washroom?”

Charles Dickens in David Copperfield created Uriah Heep (1850) with his cloying humility and obsequious manner, as one form of an office worker.  Herman Melville in contrast created Bartleby (1853), who’s enigmatic refusal to work became the haunting mantra, “I prefer not to.”

By 1855, a third of all workers in New York City were office workers.

The pre-20th century office worker felt superior to the laboring masses, but ambivalent about his management. This worker was solipsistic but nothing compared to the narcissism of the 20th century office worker who thought work was all about him.

This gave birth to the pyramid climber who sought the right mentor to flatter, the right boxes to fill to attain an inside track to promotion, leaving nothing to chance, but also little time or energy to do the job paid to do.

Nationally, early in the 20th century, 80 percent of American workers were in farming, manufacturing or allied fields.  These workers did not consider what office workers did as “work.” 

They saw these workers as an effete mob, effeminate, greedy, decadent, talkative, cowardly, and more interested in being well dressed than having a skill set.

Frederick Winslow Taylor, the author of “The Principles of Scientific Management” (1911), and the guru of assembly line time and motion efficiency, turned his attention to office work and workers at mid-century. 

In the 1950s, time and motion studies were conducted of office workers in an attempt to replicate the rhythm of the factory. 

Drucker was right in sync with Taylor's idea, seeing these workers as cogs in a machine by adding his Management by Objectives (MBOs) to the mix.  A bevy of work station architects followed.

These ergonomic specialists came on the scene to make office workers as efficient as automatons, the apotheosis of form following function in skyscrapers to house these workers.

Millions of workers flocked into these buildings to work in “cells” or “cubes” in open three-walled cubicles, in building now known as “Taylor’s Cathedrals.”

To earn access to these cubicles (post-World War II), increasingly, you had to be credentialed, which meant you had to submit to IQ tests and personality profiles, to assessment centers, where the nature of your work was created to assess your capability to do the job, followed by a barrage of interviews conducted by executives before winning approval and being hired.

Much of this was tossed out a decade later, especially the IQ tests and personality profiles, as being unconstitutional.

I’m familiar with this process as I endured it when I was hired by Nalco Chemical Company in 1958. The company prided itself in screening 200 qualified applicants before hiring one.

Less than two decades after the war, an army of mainly academics created paradigms to make management less draconian and arbitrary when it came to these workers.

 

Such managerial theorists as Douglas McGregor, Rensis Likert, Robert Blake and Jane Mouton, Frederick Hertzberg, Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard appeared with their solutions, but alas, none succeeded. 

The workplace was evolving more quickly than recipes could be formulated to deal with the changing situation.

Sociologists entered the fray with such books The Lonely Crowd, and The Organization Man, and such films as The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. 

Anomie and self-estrangement were part of the new vocabulary to describe the loss of social and economic identity of workers who felt little connection to work or themselves.  

                          

Meanwhile, with the workplace now more than 80 percent occupied by office workers in cubicles, the ergonomic gurus turned to personalizing these cubicles as veritable oases. 

Although workers were now caged in these labyrinth catacombs, each office worker could call his place and space his “home away from home."

These diminutive spaces were cross pollinated with the right chair, desk, filing cabinet, and bookcase to be perfect for the occupant.

But then came the dot.com revolution of the 1980s.

Now all bets were once again off.

The bookcases and filing cabinets had to go, as well as pushing paper, and in place was a computer screen that needed constant attention, which meant resolute brainpower to develop and run innovative operational programs. 

The work was exhaustive.  What to do?

To keep minds fresh, on task, office work of the past was scuttled, and the workplace was turned into a playground. 

No more suits and ties, now it was jeans and T-shirts.  Executives dressed the same as workers.  Everything was loosey goosey, but kept on task, always on task.

Pizzas were delivered, beer busts on campus on Friday nights (workplaces came to be called "campuses"), full recreational facilities including basketball and handball courts, running tracks, weight rooms, and entertainment centers to rival Disney World.

The 80/20 rule, which has always held was now more apparent.  As much as 90 percent of work being done could be reduced to 10 percent of these office workers.  Other workers were too busy playing, or thinking about playing, or complaining about not having enough time to play.

Ergonomic gurus promoted the idea of turning these glass cathedrals into open spaces sans defined functionality, which meant no cubicles. 

So, people got lost at work as to where they should be or what they should do because work had been changed into eclectic paradises with no specific work stations. 

Saval goes into this to read like science fiction.  Perhaps it is.

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A current trend, which may prove anachronistic, is to abandon these monolithic vertical cities for flat one-story barracks like buildings in small towns in countryside and suburban settings, where hundreds of computer screens drone on 24/7 with attentive eyes on the Wide World Web.

The reason these flatbed cities may prove anachronistic is because progressive thinkers are playing with the idea of most office workers working at home, or if not working at home, not working at all.  

As this pregnant idea is bandied about, others are thinking of abandoning the whole concept of working at home to simply outsourcing most of a company's work, thus reducing the overhead costs, and the cost of benefits, pensions, and other entitlements. 

This outsourcing designates these workers euphemistically as "contract consultants," meaning they are on their own nickel.

Little thought has been given to the fact that a short fifty years ago, people worked in one place for one company their entire careers.  They felt secure and loyal to that employer, and counted on entitlements and benefits as part of that security package.

Just as farmers and manufacturers had no idea what office workers called "work" a century ago, these office workers cannot get their minds around the idea of work being that of "contract consultants."  They translate that idea into insecurity and even poverty, subject to the whims of employers. 

It should come as no surprise that trauma is written on these workers' faces as if in scarlet letters.  For the past two or three generations, nothing even close to this has been demanded of them as workers. 

That said the old rules of employment have been turned upside down, and workers have been given no orientation, no training, no insight, and no perspective on what these new demands may entail.  

They have not been asked to develop a self-employed mindset, a mindset that cannot be realized instantaneously by osmosis.

This will take special attention, attention that is beyond the pale of the current conversation.

The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics projects by 2020, less than a short six years away, freelancers, temporary workers, day laborers and independent contract consultants will constitute 40 to 50 percent of the workforce.  Can you fathom much less imagine that?

 

Regarding freelancers, the bureau also reports that currently as high as 77 percent of these workers have had trouble collecting payment for the work provided.  Employers appear to be holding the money as long as they legally can.  This should give pause.

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NOTE: 

TATE Publishing Company is coming out with Second Editions of Dr. Fisher's books on this topic: Work Without Manager: A View from the Trenches (2014), Six Silent Killers: Management's Greatest Challenge (2014), The Worker, Alone!  Going Against the Grain (2014). and Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leadership and Dissonant Workers (2014).