Says Esther Walker at 6 minutes and 9 seconds into this week's episode of the podcast "Giles Coren Has No Idea."
They're talking about the post-lockdown phenomenon of refusal to go back to work in the office.
I enjoy her mode of expression. It's hyperbole, but it's getting at something true, no? It's a subjective matter — what's bullying and what's weird — but the topic is human behavior. It can't be anything but subjective.
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There's a power imbalance inherent in the office environment and a lot of people don't deal well with that. Some people are petty tyrants, others are territorial, lack boundaries, or are just manipulative. And then we have an HR system that pretends to look out for employee's welfare, but really just protects the company. It's not healthy.
Except for HR, it's always been this way and people deal. Some of this will continue to go in a WFH environment, but if a worker can be just as efficient/effective from home and wants to work from home, then why not let them?
Very recently the progressive dream was rabbit warren offices, maybe with some kind of play area for overgrown children, rabbit warren homes, high rises with somewhat iffy elevators, and public transit. If I can do Dr. Phil: How's that workin' out for ya?
Trouble is the ‘bully’ may be a highly productive staffer who doesn’t come to work to socialize and satisfy their every emotion.
i can see, where working from home would work, if..
you're experienced, and you already work alone in your cube
but i'm Still trying to figure out HOW new people are supposed to learn the ropes by themselves?
The Reason you are at work, is to train the next gen.. I guess if you don't care; it's fine
Meh, grow a pair.
Life is a Balancing Act, Act 2023.
I am catching up on other podcasts. I'm not an absolutist on this subject. There are good arguments for being at the workplace and good arguments for working at home. Bad arguments for both too. Personally, I like my right to work state and recognize the agreement between me and my employer is a contract that I can accept or not accept. I grant that employers tend to change the contract often without discussion with employees, but I can do the same by rejecting it and going elsewhere.
But then, I learned to code (even before Obama suggested it), so I have that going for me.
Home: safe space.
My experience in 30+ years in corporate America was that bullies, tyrants, petty people, praise- and credit-seekers, blame shifters, territorial people and especially those who constantly complained about how busy they are were among the least productive employees in the company.
Recent spate of articles about kids refusing to go back to school. Naturally, tone of the piece was "What's wrong with our children?" rather than asking what's wrong with our schools.
Ditto for workplace. People got a taste of non-office life and realized what a dysfunctional cesspool many organizations have become.
@Althouse: " It's hyperbole, but it's getting at something true, no? It's a subjective matter — what's bullying and what's weird — but the topic is human behavior. It can't be anything but subjective."
Subjective? Tell it to HR, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Labor Relations Board, and all the other groups that process complaints of workplace hostility and discrimination. They have complex legal theories and standards for "bullying." For example:
https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/cm-604-theories-discrimination
Millions of $$$$$$$ are paid in settlements yearly over bullying for "protected classes." Per the link above, race, sex, disability, skin color, age, etc. get people and businesses fined or fired.
Weird...well you are partly right on that front. The hard left has made workplace weirdness a virtue and many now have a hair-trigger responses to anything perceived as a "micro aggression." This is despite that fact that's some so-called aggressive acts are perceptions that attribute aggression to people who are not aggressive at all. The hard left allows no room for simple curiosity or foolish statements, for everything said by non-brown, non-black people can be systemically aggressive. Sad but true. HR-related units spend a lot of time litigating and training staff about grossly subjective weirdness.
Embrace the suck.
So, if all the normal people are working at home, downtown offices are largely empty spaces in which the weirdos and the bullies roam, warily eying each other? Can a bully bully a weirdo? By definition, they're the ones who might go psycho, right? On the other hand, bullies don't seem like the weirdo target audience, either.
Based on my thirty years of working in an office environment, I would say that attractive women draw a lot of unwanted crap in an office.
I don't know why you keep citing Giles and discussing his ideas. His sister Victoria is much more interesting and saner.
Recent spate of articles about kids refusing to go back to school.
I was surprised that almost all of the kids came back. I expected around half to decide to stay at home and go to school online.
It has become too easy to exist, and this is a symptom. "That place is full of bullies who want to force me to actually work in the office to get paid ! ". Yeah. And the subway is smelly too, and the traffic is terrible. It sucks, being a grown-up with all those things one needs, that aren't free of charge.
“People got a taste of non-office life and realized what a dysfunctional cesspool many organizations have become.”
True!
And jobs/professions that don’t have the option of working at home are going to be increasingly more difficult to fill. Healthcare and other hands on professions that deal with humans may need AI to take on a mobile unit as a costume to fill the shortage of human workers.
Remote work, remote outsourcing; local work, immigration reform is labor arbitrage (e.g. slavery).
The Green energy revolution is environmental arbitrage.
Shared responsibility through progressive prices subsidized through capital depletion and arbitrage schemes. Change is good.
Boy. Wait until they get a dose of the world.
Some people need or want to get out of the house, and when they're in the office, they may want people to interact with. Some people don't make the office their life and they don't appreciate being pulled in for the purpose of providing a faux social life for those in the first group.
The quote in the post title suggests that those in the first group are creeps who want to mess with the more normal people in the second group.
Life is full of weirdos and bullies. A capable adult learns how to deal with them without appealing to a higher power, like a Principal (High School) a Dean (College) or the Government (whenever).
If you have a great boss, the bullies and weirdos have little power because they know stuff will not be tolerated. Three cheers for my bosses.
"People have realized that workplaces are full of bullies and weirdos and they don't want to deal with them anymore."
Then quit and find a better job.
The quote in the post title suggests that those in the first group are creeps who want to mess with the more normal people in the second group.
Both groups consist primarily of women, in my observation. Men are more likely to do their job without having their emotional wellness determined by the traits of their coworkers (unless the behavior is outright unprofessional, making it difficult to do one's job.) Again, that's my observation over the decades.
As one of the few around here who's still working; I have to say I'm 100% for remote work. I've spent too many years dodging idiots on the freeway during rush hour to not be. And in the past couple of years it's just gotten worse since they all seem to be doing their morning staff meeting Zoom call while they're driving.
You can't have true diversity (sorry, Diversity) without bullies and weirdos, who populate HR.
If your job can be done remotely from home.. Your job can be done remotely from Bangalore
There is a general reluctance to work evidenced by a reduction in the workforce. The QuidProJoes use the reduction to phony down unemployment figures.
The welfare available articles make interesting reading. The amounts are shocking.
Remember Reagan's exposés of the "welfare queens" when he was governor of California? This is worse.
I don't know about the bullies, but I can assure you the weirdos are among the ones never wanting to go back to the office.
Yet another example of a university professor having no clue whatsoever as to how life in an office setting works. As a retired software project leader I recognize that my experiences may differ from other supervisors and managers, and my experiences will certainly differ from managers who prefer to hide in their offices instead of “management by walking around,” but here’s what I could not do as a project leader if I do not see the project staff in the office regularly:
- Determine who is working a side hustle on company time.
- Identify who is struggling with his or her assignment and is at risk for missing critical deadlines
- If there’s friction, identify it figure out how to address it. For example, we once had a problem with our builds using the wrong database schema. The build manager argued that he was doing the builds correctly and the lead DBA could show that he was loading the proper schema. A tiger team with them and me and a couple bright developers (yes, I used “bright” deliberately) figured out that the commercial software product we were using to assemble the build had a bug. Thirty minutes later we had a workaround.
Mostly we did agile software development using Scrum (we were pioneers back in those days) and so interaction between team members was pretty important. Work from home doesn’t preclude interaction, but it does make it a bit more challenging.
People rightly prefer to walk their dogs while on calls versus being brought into an important meeting in the office on the spur of the moment. Plus they get to complain about being out of the loop.
I'm reminded or Raylan Givens line,
Human behavior can be experienced subjectively, and analyzed subjectively, but human behavior like any behaviors of living things also can be studied objectively and analyzed through scientific methods in order to allow statistically valid predictions to be made about stimuli and responses of individuals and groups.
The Hawthorne Effect is real, and today is often used (overtly, covertly, or entirely without awareness of its existence) to promote a short term productivity bump in a business setting by changing a factor in the process or the people doing the work.
Many a midlevel manager cheated themselves into upper management by having a couple of good quarters of productivity increase, due to "shaking things up," while leaving a dysfunctional business mess behind them that crashes soon thereafter.
Society is full of bullies and weirdos. It's full of...people!
You gotta tell 'em: the workplace is full of people!
Since March 17th, 2020, when we were told to go home for "two weeks", I've been to the office maybe 5 times, and I've hated it each time. I can concentrate a lot better at home, and on the last office visit a month ago, I heard the 20-something person next to me saying the same thing; and initially she hated the idea of working from home, because she found it too full of distractions.
Well shock and surprise, after a couple of years of being forced out of the office by the powers that be, people adapted to working from home, and a lot of us found we liked it. A lot. Corporate America is just gonna have to get used to it.
I never asked to work from home. They told me I had to; and for at least a year, I was forbidden to go into the office at all because I refused to get the stupid shot. That was fine by me. My home office is quiet and clean. The company office is dusty, and there is a tv on all day in the break room set to cnn or fox news, which I can hear from my cubicle. I have very good hearing and after years of working in silence, I'm now very distracted by other voices while I'm trying to work.
Some of us warned that it was a really bad idea to shutdown the economy. But progressives always think they know better, when in reality they're short-sighted idiots. I guess the blue urban areas that are now struggling will be forced to adapt; just like we were forced to adapt to working from home.
Most office work can be successfully completed in much less than 8 hours. The reward for working hard the rest of the workday, versus not working during that time, is usually minimal. Working from home allows you to do something valuable (to you) during those extra 2-4 hours each day.
Tim @ 8:15
"...attractive women draw a lot of unwanted crap in an office."
True, but my wife agreed to marry me anyway.
I always preferred going into an office to work, although I've been doing lots of 'remote' work for years now. I like having "work" and "home" differentiated. I haven't been full time in years either, so when I go to an office I sit there and work for a few hours and then leave.
That said, the org I worked for at a Large Western University I loved going to. Liked the people, and it was the only time I got choked up a bit when heading to the elevator for the Last Time. Maybe I've been lucky, maybe it's the more researchy work I do, but I've always had good experiences with the vast majority of co-workers.
"I don't know why you keep citing Giles...."
I like the podcast.
"Based on my thirty years of working in an office environment, I would say that attractive women draw a lot of unwanted crap in an office."
I think many of the people who do want to go back and want others to go back are the bullies and weirdos who want attractive women to come back too so they can pester them. Whose playground is the workplace?
Inga said...
“Healthcare and other hands on professions that deal with humans may need AI to take on a mobile unit as a costume to fill the shortage of human workers."
The Mobile Virtual Presence Device (MVPD), aka "Shelbot", comes to mind.
tim in vermont said...
Based on my thirty years of working in an office environment, I would say that attractive women draw a lot of unwanted crap in an office.
I worked part time in retail for years. In my experience it was the fat unattractive women who caused most of the problems. Many of them caused by their jealousy of attractive women. Most behing the scenes HR offices are made of of less attractive women. Once they get into positions to hire- attractive women don't have a shot at a job in that store/company.
Specialty sales are tracked by companies. Appliances, kitchen and bath cabinets, flooring, doors and windows, etc. Things that aren't just there but need to actually be sold to customers. Sales per hour and total sales for people in the departments arre tracked. The people with the highest numbers are generally males- regardless of attractiveness, and attractive and/or confident females. Confidence and attractiveness seem to run together in the female half of humanity.
I also think a lot of people are staying home to avoid commuting. Why get up at 5 to be to work by 8 when you can sleep until 7 and just go upstairs to your home office?
Not a bully, weirdo, or pesterer of attractive women, but I never stopped going to my office. From the very start of my work life one of my primary goals was to keep home and work entirely separate. The notion of tainting my greatest refuge with the stresses and challenges of work repels me.
And let's not kid ourselves. WFH is exploited. For day care, for doing house chores, for watching six seasons of Archer.
I'll just say this much: Workplace and team interactions are the last things that anyone pays any attention to, and the last things anyone gives weight to. Yet, they're likely the most important things in any enterprise.
And, it's bizarrely underrated, and studied hardly at all.
You would think that the US Army, for an example, would have an exquisitely perfect conception of what makes a successful infantry squad and how they work down to the smallest detail. Reality? LOL... Nope. It's all entirely artisanal, passed on by word of mouth by people who have no real power or say in how things are done above them, the things that influence what they do at every turn.
It's the same in every workspace, whether you are talking corporate America at the executive level, or the guys down on the loading dock. Team formation and team interaction are just handwaved away, and nobody pays attention at all to the nitty-gritty details whatsoever. It's all just left to "happen", and when it doesn't? They blame everything else but the management's obliviousness to these issues.
People don't want to go into work because the entire Goddamn environment at work is usually toxic as f*ck. That's the deal; you make people miserable, they don't want to be there. And, the ways that companies and institutions make things miserable are legion.
I gotta be honest about my time in the military: Most of it was miserable, working for miserable, toxic people doing miserable toxic things. But... The couple of times I wasn't working for assholes like that, around other assholes that aspired to be assholes just like them? It was unbelievably good, fulfilling, and absolutely the best times of my life. I kept going with my career, trying to recapture those periods with those people, and the seventy or so percent of the time I had to deal with the miserable assholes was well worth the suffering.
And, the thing that strikes me about all that? I honestly don't think anyone was trying to make all of that "good"; it just happened by sheer random chance and accident, juxtapositions of good people with good leadership and good circumstances.
Which has led to my continual study of these things, and total bewilderment at how we ignore the work environment like so many fish swimming in polluted waters. We honestly don't pay attention to these things in any organization, which is baffling given how much impact it has on daily life and performance.
You think those folks quietly going mad in the Post Office just "happen"? Nope; workplace environment drives all of that, all the damn time. Managers actively set up those situations, not paying attention to effects, because the people above and around them drive them to do it, and none of them have the slightest idea of what they're doing when they do it.
Most people running organizations really have no damn idea at all how those organizations actually work, actually function. They don't really know who the truly critical people are, who it is that is making everything successful. Mostly, because they live in a self-generated fantasy world that's entirely oblivious to the reality of it all, the things that they create. They've no idea at all that the things in their head don't actually represent the world around them that they and others have to move through and work in.
As a species, we're terrible at all of this. It's endemic to the human condition, self-immiseration to a degree that is mind-boggling when you step back and look at it.
The thing that really kills me, though? All the "managers" and "leaders" who think they're successful, when everyone around and beneath them would rather go on unemployment rather than work with them any more. I'd say that there's an increasing dissatisfaction in the masses with how we do things, and that's manifesting itself in the "work reluctance" we're witnessing.
It depends on the office and the job. Some offices are simply toxic and I can fully appreciate wanting to work from home. My experience with working from home was (a) I originally enjoyed it, (b) after a while I started getting anti-social to the point that it was no longer healthy, and (c) while there were a lot of things I could do remotely, there were a lot of things that required me to be on site to accomplish. After I built up too much "I need to be in the office" work, I returned to the office and didn't look back. However, it is obvious that not everyone took that approach, as some employees I only see a few days a week and others are almost completely remote.
How necessary it is to be in the office really depends on the company and their staff. There are some where everyone could work remote and it would be fine, and perhaps better that way. Others really need their employees in the same place to be most productive. We are stuck with the "everyone should be in the office" mindset because that was the only option for quite some time, but technological changes have made alternatives feasible.
It was at the workplace were gay rights made inroads.
#JustSaying
Wait. Althouse is watching Succession?
“I think many of the people who do want to go back and want others to go back are the bullies and weirdos who want attractive women to come back too so they can pester them. Whose playground is the workplace?”
I can think of a lot of bad behavior that USED to go on years ago. But here in California, for these last few decades, a man would be thought a criminal, let alone a fool, to behave in that manor.
tim in vermont said...
Based on my thirty years of working in an office environment, I would say that attractive women draw a lot of unwanted crap in an office.
And it’s the responsibility of management to squelch that, and quickly. Early in my career there were problems with male software developers who liked to put bitmapped nudes on the walls of their cubicles. Needless to say this did not go over well with our female software developers! Why the guys were proud of their pictures is beyond me — all they did was get a file given to them by someone and route it to the printer. Anyone, one of the women put a couple bitmapped nudes in her cubicle — Michelangelo’s David (without fig leaf) and a bitmapped, well hung, centerfold from “Playgirl” (I assume). Finally it got through to management.
Also note that my software development career goes back to punch cards and paper tape for program input, before green screen terminals, before WYSIWYG document software, before spread sheets, waaaayy before the Internet.
Anyway, by the time I was running projects most software developers knew not to act like pigs around their female colleagues. My biggest problems involved counseling older, senior engineers who saw nothing wrong referring to female colleagues and subordinates with terms like “dearie” or “sweetie.”
Plus there are no blacks or queers at home.
Big Mike said...
...
Anyway, by the time I was running projects most software developers knew not to act like pigs around their female colleagues. My biggest problems involved counseling older, senior engineers who saw nothing wrong referring to female colleagues and subordinates with terms like “dearie” or “sweetie.”
You mean like how most female waitstaff, store clerks, or pretty much any random woman I'm talking to refers to me? Whether they're older oy younger then me?
Funny how that's a one way street. And I never refer to anyone except by their name. Or rank or job... That includes my wife. She has multiple names from different family members- and I call her by the name she introduced herself to me as. No honey or sweethert or any other so called cute endearing things. IIRC- she tried when we first married 46 years ago- but soon realized I didn't respond because I didn't recognize she was calling me... I'd have been diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome if it had been a thing when I was a kid.
I get 'sweetied' and 'honeyed' all the time by the ladies I encounter in my daily rounds--especially the B/black ones.
That's just the way people talk here.
My wife and I have an ironic routine with 'dear,' and for real laughs I call her 'dear lady'
like old Jack Greeven (one of the Kaiser's conscripts) used to call his wife when they bickered.
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