Office parties are more painful than actual work

If you haven't already had your office holiday party, chances are it is right around the corner.

Company holiday parties are designed to boost company morale. Yet what do people say when they tell you about their upcoming office holiday party? "Awww man, I've got to go to my company holiday party this week...it's gonna be a nightmare!"

So much for building camaraderie.

Nobody talks about their office holiday party with a dreamy twinkle in their eye. When they bring it up, their eyes go glassy and their bottom lip droops like a baby who just realized his pacifier is laced with arsenic.

Why do corporate higher-ups think these parties are a good idea? No one looks forward to them. They don't improve the office vibe and they cost money (which higher-ups are always going to crazy lengths to save). The kind of boilerplate imagination it takes to believe in these things is the same kind that drives so many companies into the ground.

Here's a message to the higher-ups from all us employees: holiday parties achieve the opposite of what you are trying to achieve. They do not lift anyone's spirits. They do not reinforce the mission statement. Think of it this way: We can't stand the sight of you when you're wearing a three piece suit. What makes you think we're going to hate you any less when you're wearing a Santa suit? A plate of red and green cupcakes doesn't make your jokes any funnier.

If you want to lift our spirits, just let us leave early that day.

Workers of the world stay home

In 1994, with the help of America Online, my mother started telecommuting to work a few times a week. This was almost twenty years ago. The future was here!

I remember being 15 and thinking; “Too bad. Offices are about to become obsolete. All those commercial strip malls designed to serve commuters; the ones with poorly named delis and over-priced shoeshines…they’re about to disappear. How sad.”

(Why a teenager would be wistful about the death of watercooler chats and crap cafes that close at two might say something about the kind of daydreaming chump I was already becoming...)

I thought by now the whole concept of driving to work five days a week would be an artifact. I figured by now everyone would be driving to the office maybe once or twice a week and working from home the rest of the time. Well almost twenty years later most people still commute. Five days a week. Significant distances. To unnecessary office buildings.

We’ve gone to incredible lengths to make the car ride more fun; satellite radio, DVD players on the backs of the seats. But the fact of the car ride, the commute, remains the same.

Now in California (home of commuter dungeons like Los Angeles) they have legalized driverless cars. That’s right. They are getting rid of the inconvenience of the human hand on the steering wheel, but not the inconvenience of the human driving to work five days a week. We would rather create virtual chauffeurs than abandon the tradition of commuting to central offices.

It's not like commuting is cheap. Gas prices have gone up a lot since 1994. The price of oil has really dominated the headlines for the past seven years. And this had barely made a dent in the standard commuting routine.
 
And back when everyone was talking about climate change, what hogged the discussion? Green energy, clean energy. Not WORKING FROM HOME so you’re not constantly driving.

The focus on climate change sparked plenty of discussion about public transportation, but very little talk of not needing as much transportation. In 2012 does the subway still need be like a turkey farm each morning?

What else has changed the landscape since '94? Outsourcing. People making sales calls from India. People performing IT tasks for American companies from centers in Bangalore. We're comfortable with having sales teams in Bangalore. We're not ready for sales team working from US living rooms.

So what is going on here? Are humans just that stupid? Well yes, but I don’t believe that is the entire explanation.

Why are we still thinking inside the box? Why are employees still idling in cubicles and gathering in conference rooms? Well, when we hear about the glories of “thinking outside the box,” the inference is that everyone benefits equally when the box is bypassed. Not true. More often than not, Managers, Directors, CEOs, bosses, whatever rubric they carry, need the box to justify their existence (or at the very least their much larger salary).

Who makes the policy on working from home? Bosses do, and bosses need conference rooms to herd people into for unnecessary meetings. Bosses need everyone in that conference room looking attentive as they go through their latest list of impossible goals and unspecific ideas on achieving those impossible goals. If this same unnecessary discussion takes place through a conference call with everyone calling in from home, one person will be making the call while watching a Hoarders marathon. Another will be painting her toes. Another will be cleaning the cat box, and still another will be closing his sleepy eyes and grunting agreement when it appears necessary. Ultimately those employees will probably be just as productive, but in this scenario, the manager’s power is diminished. On a conference call where everyone is at home, no one is staring up at the boss in search of "direction." Without that hierarchical structure, the fact that he and his bosses get paid much more for contributing far less becomes easier to see (and prove). So allowing folks to work from home represents serious career risk for these diddling parasites. When people cease to be bamboozled by empty titles (and when clients stop being bamboozled by fancy offices), perhaps a major transition to large-scale telecommuting will finally take place.

One part of my 1994 prediction has come true. All over America, commercial property stands empty. In some parts of the country, LOTS of it stands empty. Not because of telecommuting; but because the economy is in such bad shape. It is enough to make you wistful.

 

EVERYONE IS MICROMANAGED!!! Or are they?

Every man, woman, and child complains that his boss is a micromanager. If we were to take this at face value, we would have to believe that every single corporate authority figure is a bitchy Sasquatch with a sawed-off Blackberry. It is not that unambiguous.

As someone who has been micromanaged, I sympathize with the anguish it causes, but listening to people’s huffy homilies about micromanaging bosses is like listening to their huffy homilies about bad drivers. Everyone claims every driver but them is an incompetent maniac. Not true. Driving is an activity that begs for catastrophe, yet accidents are infrequent. It is simply not the case that every driver but you is unable to differentiate between the gas pedal and the brake.

It is more probable that many folks define themselves as great drivers and therefore must claim everyone who isn’t them is so useless behind the wheel they couldn’t even crash a bumper car. Just as it is impossible that every driver but you is a menace, it is impossible for every single boss to be a psychopathic micromanager. I don’t doubt that micromanaging is widespread, but I don’t think it happens to the extent the anecdotal reporting would indicate.

Here are some of what I think are the nuances of the micromanagement phenomenon:

Most people work in close quarters now; offices ("cubicle farms"). This means when you’re ordered to do something, it is right up close, so your sheer proximity to the order-giver makes you feel more micromanaged.

It also used to be much easier to fire people. When it was more of a “My way or the highway” world, you only had to tell someone to do something once, because if he didn’t comply, you could can him. Now that employees have much more leeway, you have to nag them to get them to perform their duties, which of course is interpreted as micromanagement.

And unlike the days when many people worked in factories and fields, today it is less obvious who is in charge. When you’re the team leader of an office as opposed to a factory foreman, it is less apparent what purpose you serve, so you must show yourself to be conspicuously in charge, which leads to constant authority-asserting emails and 386 word mission statements with 2 words of actual meaning.

Also, you can now send someone a command from anywhere. Before smartphones, if you were physically away from your computer, you couldn’t send or receive email. Neither could your boss. So if he went to lunch, no commands were issued for at least 30 minutes. If you went to lunch, no commands were received for at least 30 minutes. What this means is that in the old days, an email sent at 12:02 wasn’t read until you returned to your desk at 12:30. Now that 12:02 email reaches you while you’re on line at Chipotle, prompting you to scream: “Doesn’t he know I’m at lunch?!” Pre-smartphone or post, that email was sent at 12:02, but now that it reaches you wherever you are, it makes you feel he’s all over you.

Leaving aside technology, the old axiom still holds: If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. Every person thinks his way is the right way. If you’re a boss, your subordinates are never going to be exact clones of you, which means you will never get them to do things exactly as you would, which in your mind is the right way. So because they’re not you, in your mind everything they do is at least a little wrong, causing you to keep trying to correct them (it is after all your job to mold them to do things “right”). Hence micromanaging.

And because you the subordinate also think you know how everything should be done, you resent receiving any instruction on a task, because you believe you innately know the best method for the task (again, if you want something done right...). So any degree of instruction is going to make you feel micromanaged.

What is happening is the mechanisms required to be a boss in the modern white-collar world are colliding with the innate sense people have always had that they know best how to do things. I guess all we can do is update some old worker angst songs: “You load 16 GBs, whadda ya get? Another day older and deeper in debt.”




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