What is it with corporate psychopaths and flexible working arrangements?
Sorry to break it to you, Elon, but there’s plenty of ‘pretend work’ going on in offices
Imagine, if you will, the following scenario. You’ve been plotting your rapid ascent to the top of the greasy pole since at least your mid-teens. While others were enjoying their youth, you were beavering away at school and university. And, from the moment you landed that sought-after grad position at that prestigious company, you’ve had your eyes on the C-suite prize.
You’ve obsessed, Patrick Bateman-style, about your image, spending vast amounts on clothes and haircuts. You’ve boned up on The Art of War. You’ve deployed organisational restructures and spread office rumours to white ant any potential rivals. You’ve never once got tipsy at a work function or truly let your guard down with a coworker, but you’ve made sure to profit from your more reckless or trusting peers, mentally filing away any kompromat that could come in handy in the future.
You’ve been shamelessly willing to take the credit for the work of others while showing a ScoMoesque slipperiness whenever confronted with evidence of any of your failures. You’ve relentlessly kissed up and kicked down, impressing the powers-that-be with your emotionless ability to ‘make the hard decisions’ required to ‘get results’.
And now the day has come for you to move into that coveted corner office. You get to work early so you can spend some time war gaming strategies to dramatically impress upon your underlings that there is a new sheriff in town. You decide you’ll start by tearing strips off your 2IC, screaming loudly enough at them to ensure your accusations of laziness, incompetence and fecklessness will be audible throughout the office, even with the door shut.
At precisely 9.01am, you walk purposefully out of your office, eager to humiliate your deputy pour encourager les autres. But they aren’t there. Neither is anybody else. They are all working from home.
What are you meant to do now? Send them a snarky email? Reprimand them one-to-one on a Zoom call with absolutely nobody around to gaze upon their ashen face and trembling limbs as they do a walk of shame back to their own office?
Deflated, you return to your desk. An email from the CEO appears in your inbox. You are brusquely informed that the company will be cutting costs by downsizing office space. Soon, you won’t have a corner office in a prestigious CBD office building. You’ll be splitting your time between your home office and some hellishly egalitarian, open-plan co-working space with ping pong tables.
No. This won’t do at all.
Three valid arguments for workplaces
By my count, there are precisely three valid reasons for workers to gather together in central locations:
1) Collaboration: Do you get a great Beatles song if John is laying down a demo in the US and Paul, George and Ringo are adding their parts later in the UK, Switzerland and Monaco? The uncharacteristically crap ‘Free as a Bird’, suggests not. If and when the Metaverse gets up and running it may be a different story, but there’s no getting away from the fact that a Skype brainstorming session is always going to be a lot more stilted and constrained than a real-world one.
2) Mentoring: It’s by no means impossible, but it’s undoubtedly more difficult for early career staff to learn from their more experienced colleagues if they are not in the same physical location. It’s an open question as to whether Gen Y and Z workers feel they have anything to learn from their ancient Gen X and Boomer elders, and whether those elders are much inclined to train up their future replacements in industries that are notoriously ageist (i.e. almost all of them). Still, I’ll readily concede mentor-mentee relationships are more likely to flourish in meatspace than cyberspace.
3) Socialising: At this point, we’re starting to reach the bottom of the barrel. Nonetheless, it is the case that people in their twenties and thirties often look for friends and romantic partners at work. (People in their forties and fifties tend to have all the friends they need and children to look after and are not so keen to go out drinking with coworkers until midnight on a Friday evening.) Of course, younger people can search for new friends and potential partners in non-workplace settings. However, given we live in increasingly digitised and atomised societies, a development that appears to be having a seriously deleterious impact on the mental health of digitally native generations, it seems reckless to blithely dispense with one of the few remaining sources of human connection for many people.
However, even if you believe, as I do, that some amount of face-to-face interaction among coworkers is beneficial, it remains a stretch to argue that people need to spend the best part of 2000 hours a year in the company of their colleagues to collaborate, foster mentor-mentee relationships and form friendships (or more-than-friendships). After all, there’s a burgeoning number of ‘fully remote’ companies with happy employees and (until recently at least) soaring stock prices that get by perfectly well with a single weekend-long company get-together each year.
The bullshit reasons to end flexible work arrangements advanced by office politicians
1) Class solidarity: Those keen to go back to the old way of doing things often make the quasi-Marxist argument that because many pink-collar and blue-collar workers don’t have the option of remote working, neither should the pampered and vaguely despicable “laptop class”. The kind of people not previously noted for their willingness to pay lots of tax to enable the generous funding of hospitals, fire brigades and police forces have spent the past two years arguing that because nurses, firemen and cops have to leave their homes to go to work, so should software developers, bookkeepers and salespeople. As the kids say, WTF?
2) A tender concern for the ongoing employment prospects of the little people: There always comes a point where the mask slips and frustrated founders or their senior executives blurt out something like, “If your job can be done from Brighton or Parramatta or Chatswood, it can probably also be done from Bangalore or Johannesburg, for a lot cheaper.” Sounds frightening until you realise that if your employer had the option of automating your job, or outsourcing it to Bangalore, Johannesburg, Manila or Guangzhou, they would have already done so.
Personal anecdote time: I finally accepted there was no future in journalism back in 2015 when I read that Mia Freedman, not content with getting obscenely rich off the unpaid or modestly paid labour of young and starry-eyed Australian women, was looking to employ subeditors in India and Bangladesh.
Outsourcing provides access to cheap labour but it comes with some significant downsides. Trust me, if the Mia Freedmans of the world could get away with outsourcing all the work they need done to desperate Indians and Bangladeshis, they would. They don’t because they’ve discovered it’s a false economy to offshore complex tasks that require, for example, deep local knowledge, a high degree of English language fluency and an ability to grasp nuance and subtext. This is why, even at the height of their cost-cutting mania, Australian newspapers didn’t outsource the writing of articles to foreigners and preferred to outsource the subediting of them to those foreigners most familiar with Australia (i.e. New Zealanders).
3) A concern that an unsurveilled worker is a bludging worker
Or as Musk so piquantly put it, if you aren’t prepared to spend at least 40 hours in the office, go “pretend to work somewhere else”. Admittedly, we are still in the early days of the mass remote working experiment. But the weight of evidence suggests employees are more productive working remotely. This is hardly surprising given that they are more likely to be well-rested (no more getting up early to dress up and commute into the city), less stressed (no more worries about having to call your boss to say you have to stay home with your sick kid) and at least slightly wealthier (no more having to pay for parking or train tickets, or expensive lunches and coffees). Arguably most importantly of all, workers can now spend their time completing tasks rather than spending countless hours engaging in ‘corporate bullshit’ (i.e. pointless meetings, busy work, laughing uproariously at the boss’s longwinded ‘humorous’ anecdotes etc).
How about a world-changing-arseholes-only rule?
Most rational people agree that individuals should be judged solely, or at least primarily, on how well they do their job.
Most rational people also recognise that the world, especially the corporate world, isn’t fair and that people get hired and promoted based on factors unrelated to their competence. Such as gender, age, height, ethnicity, class, educational background, physical appearance, dress sense, personal charm, whether they are neurotypical or neurodivergent and, perhaps most importantly of all, whether they have the capacity and willingness to play the office politics game hard.
Of course, it’s sometimes the case that someone is both extremely good at their job and breathtakingly brilliant at Game of Thrones-style manoeuvering. I’m in favour of making allowances for these exceptional individuals. After all, great men are usually not also good men and geniuses are invariably erratic.
Steve Jobs may have ripped off his co-founder Steve Wozniak, refused to acknowledge paternity of his daughter, fired scores of loyal, hardworking employees on dubious grounds, screamed abuse at minimum-wage-earning retail staff and colluded with other Silicon Valley CEOs to keep a lid on tech-industry wages but, hey, you’ve got to cut the guy who midwifed the iPhone some slack.
Likewise, I’d argue that Musk, the current role model of corporate mini-Machiavellis everywhere, shouldn’t be too harshly judged on his attention-seeking stunts. I doubt his employees will be much more productive once they are corralled back into Tesla HQ. But if the genius attempting to colonise Mars and develop a high bandwidth brain-machine interface wants to act like a dick, I’m inclined to indulge him.
The people who should no longer be indulged are those who are just psychopaths rather than psychopathic geniuses. I’m proposing an update on the no-arsehole rule first proposed by Robert Sutton, a professor of management science at Stanford, in a 2004 Harvard Business Review article. Sutton argued that, as well as leaving a trail of destroyed careers (and often lives) in their wake, arseholes ultimately cost rather than make shareholders money given the impact they have on morale and productivity.
I’m not sure that’s entirely true – Apple employees during the reign of Jobs may or may not have had good morale, but there’s no doubt they were incredibly productive. But I think Sutton is right on the broader point. Most arseholes aren’t in the Jobs and Musk category and it’s in everyone’s interest to weed them out as soon as possible. I suspect the arseholes are protesting so much about flexible working arrangements precisely because they sense on some level that they will increasingly be surplus to requirements in a world where workers are judged on their output rather than their politicking abilities.