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Why leading with love is needed now
Organisations are rarely places of love. Organisations are the spaces in which goals are pursued, both shared and contested, and where people are put to work in pursuit of these goals. Of course, there is nothing wrong with the communal pursuit of shared goals – where would we be without hospitals, large companies that provide for a range of our needs, charities that care for the vulnerable, and government institutions that take responsibility for our safety, health, education, and environment? However, in our shared pursuit of organisational goals, perhaps we have lost a sense of whom organisations are meant to serve, and what function they should play in our lives?
Let us meet some people who work for organisations.
Adam is an options trader who works for a bank. He never stops working. He spends at least 14 hours a day at work and constantly checks the markets to ensure his trading positions are exactly where he wants them to be. He is wealthy beyond most people’s dreams. As a result of his obsession with work, he recently divorced, and rarely sees his children. So now there is no respite from work even if he wanted it, as he must maintain two households and three children at private school. He is trapped. He is anxious: the bank he works for has been underperforming and they have invited in a professional services company to ‘rationalise’ his operation. He is scared of losing his job and sometimes feels suicidal.
Jackie works for the professional services company that is consulting to Adam’s bank. She specialises in cost-cutting and re-engineering. She regularly spends 12 hours a day at work. She has no partner or family as she has never found the time to get out and meet people. When she gets home she still has work to do; with no time to cook, she orders a meal that is delivered by a local food delivery service. The man who hands over her meal is on a zero-hour contract and is working ten hours a day, hours that are scattered around the early morning, lunchtime, and early and late evening. For those hours where there is less demand and therefore no work, he is not paid, but there is nothing else for him to do but wait until he is called. He has no job security and is living off an income that barely covers his expenses: there is no pension or sick pay and he is constantly afraid of getting ill or of not being given any work. On his days off – normally Monday and Wednesday (he rarely gets a full two days’ rest) – he relaxes with his video games ordered from an online retailer.
Sonya works for that retailer in one of their giant warehouses; she is also on a zero-hour contract. In fact, Sonya does not work directly for the retailer but for a contractor who rarely pays her on time and often pays her the wrong money (always less than she is owed). Sonya always works with a monitor strapped around her wrist to measure how long it takes her to pick the customer’s item and place it in the right despatch point. She walks at least ten miles a day around the warehouse picking and sorting items that have been ordered by customers online. There is no time to go to the toilet (the time would be included in the time she takes to collect an item) and lunch breaks are limited to half an hour. Every day she is assessed to see if she has met her time targets: if she misses her target on too many occasions, she will lose her job. Sonya is one of the working poor – i.e. she does not earn enough money to cover the expenses incurred by her and her family – so she has to deal with the government office that dispenses her top-up payment.
At that office she has recently come into contact with Mark, whose role is so broad following the government cutbacks that he is constantly stressed and unable to deal with the queries and complaints that come his way. He eventually sees his doctor about his stress and feelings of depression. His doctor, Janine, is given a maximum of ten minutes to deal with each patient. She has seen many people like Mark – in fact, the number is increasing – but she cannot go into any depth about his complaint and dispenses some antidepressants to help him in the short term. When she gets home, she realises that it is parents’ evening and she has an appointment to see her daughter’s teacher. The teacher, Paul, informs her that her daughter is not thriving at school and seems somewhat anxious: this is affecting her test scores and maybe she will have to drop a couple of subjects as the school cannot afford to have too many pupils attaining poor grades because it will affect their rankings.
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We seem to have reached a situation where human beings are serving organisations rather than organisations serving human beings. People are becoming instrumentalised by the objects of their own creation. Some may be benefiting – and we will come to that point later – but many are simply suffering: from anxiety, exhaustion, meaninglessness, anger, and fear.
In fact, there is a short but poignant Zen tale that encapsulates the condition in which we find ourselves: the story of Zumbach the tailor.
Zumbach the tailor
A man went to Zumbach the tailor to have a new suit made. When the suit was ready, the man tried it on to check the fit. Strangely, he noticed the right arm of the suit was too short so he asked Zumbach to lengthen it.
‘The sleeve is not too short,’ Zumbach replied. ‘Your arm is too long. Just pull your arm up a bit and you’ll see the sleeve fits perfectly.’ The man did as Zumbach told him and the sleeve seemed to fit much better, but holding his arm like this rumpled the collar of the jacket.
‘Okay, so the sleeve looks fine but the collar is all wrong,’ the man complained. ‘There’s nothing wrong with the collar,’ Zumbach replied. ‘You need to raise your left shoulder up a bit more.’ The man raised his shoulder and it seemed to do the job, but now the bottom of the jacket rested too high up his back.
‘This is hopeless,’ the man insisted, ‘the jacket is halfway up my back.’ ‘No problem,’ Zumbach replied. ‘Lower your head and bend your knees so the jacket sits on your hips.’ The man did as Zumbach suggested and it worked: the suit fitted him perfectly and was beautifully stylish.
So the man walked out of the shop in a highly contorted and uncomfortable manner but feeling like he was wearing the most beautiful suit in the world.
He got onto a bus and the person next to him looked at his suit. ‘What a lovely suit,’ he said, ‘I bet you got that suit from Zumbach the tailor.’ ‘How did you know?’ the man asked.
‘Because only the brilliant Zumbach could cut a suit to fit a body as distorted as yours.’
The organisation as Zumbach’s suit: the performativity culture
We are contorting ourselves and incapacitating our bodies and minds in order to fit into our own version of Zumbach’s suit: the organisations we work for.
We already know that work can have a major negative impact on our mental health. While being out of work very often has severe negative consequences, the wrong type of work can also lead to mental disorders such as stress, anxiety, and depression. Recent evidence has shown that the workplace is one of the main sources of stress we experience in our lives. According to research quoted by Pfeffer and Carney (2018: 75), ‘almost half of US workers experience[ed] work-related stress and one-quarter of respondents claim[ed] that the work-place was their single biggest source of stress.’ A recent survey in the United Kingdom demonstrated that 60% of UK employees experienced poor mental health due to work-related conditions (BITC 2017). Factors causing psychological stress include experiencing a lack of control over one’s work, low social support, the behaviour of one’s line manager, increased work intensification, and even linking pay to time (whether hourly paid manual work or hourly billed professional work) (Pfeffer and Carney 2018).
It has been shown that alleviating workplace stress increases productivity (Jackson, Alexander, and Frame, 2018), and yet advances in technology are increasingly tempting senior management into upping their levels of observation and control of employees’ actions in order to maximise the effort they can extract. And, in doing so, stress levels go up. We saw in the example above how warehouses monitor employees’ movements to ensure that every step they take is efficiently dedicated to locating and sorting stock, limiting toilet and refreshment breaks, and threatening dismissal if the required targets are not met. We will also see how performance is measured with increasing frequency and intensity throughout a range of industry sectors, leading to people going from ‘hero’ to ‘zero’ on a month-by-month basis. And we will also see how ‘performativity cultures’ lead to excessive working hours, family breakdowns and burnout. Performativity cultures are those in which there is a normative acceptance that the sole purpose of the organisation is to extract from its employees the maximum performance possible often by recourse to extensive and intrusive controls, targets, and measures.1
Of course, productivity/GDP, partly as a result of these technological advancements, has soared since 1980, so perhaps this emphasis on performance is no bad thing (Boushey 2019). One could argue that this increase in our ability to monitor efficiency ultimately leads to increases in wealth (and, for those on the breadline, increases in income that could ease their stress). However, the increase in productivity over the past 40 years has not led to an equivalent rise in wages (Ghilarducci 2018). According to labour economist Teresa Ghilarducci, in the United States (which is the most extreme example), ‘[f]rom 1973 to 2013, hourly compensation of a typical worker rose just 9 percent while productivity increased 74 percent’ (Ghilarducci 2018). Similar trends, decoupling productivity from wages, can be seen in Europe and other industrialised countries (Piketty 2014).
In essence, workers from all socioeconomic backgrounds are being controlled to an increasingly sophisticated extent in order to maximise the amount of work it is possible to extract from a human being. Most of these workers are experiencing high levels of stress as a result, and very few are receiving any significant financial benefit from their increased efficiency. Even those who are privileged enough to enjoy some of the monetary rewards from their efforts (i.e. the small percentage of top earners who receive bonuses in the form of shares and other financial assets) suffer from a lack of family and leisure time and the accompanying social and psychological problems.
For many, if not most, workers in industrialised countries, the quality of working life (and therefore the quality of life in general) has diminished, the main causes being fear of job loss, fear of missing targets, excessive working hours/insufficient working hours, stagnant income, loss of pensions and other security-enhancing systems, and increasing control being exercised over their every move (McDowall and Kinman 2017).
According to the UK government’s report on Sports Direct, a company that epitomises this approach, the kinds of working practices commonly seen represent:
an arrogance and a contempt, actually, at the very highest level of this business. We have it described to us as a gulag, as Victorian, as a workhouse, not a warehouse. We believe that there is no place for these kinds of 19th century working practices in 21st century Britain.
(House of Commons Business, Innovation and Skills Committee 2016: 8)
The report went on to say that this increased work intensification and the instrumentalisation of the workforce (at all levels) is in danger of becoming the norm.
The business model described here – which focuses on extracting the maximum work possible from every employee while withholding financial compensation, employment rights, pension rights, and rights to union representation – is underpinned by fear.
Another Sports Direct witness stated:
The problem with this is when you have people under that much fear, they come into work ill. When you get presenteeism in the workplace that creates a significant health and safety risk, because these people are now not only at risk to themselves but they are at risk to those they are working with.
(House of Commons Business, Innovation and Skills Committee 2016: 8)
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