An interesting essay in today’s Telegraph, I thought.
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Well… I say interesting. It’s long-winded (even by my standards) and contains a number of conflations, so let me summarise for you.
The Wuhan farrago dislocated people from their workplace, and altered their perspectives on their jobs and offices, waking them up to the soullessness and futility.
Technology-driven bureaucracy and an over-abundance of pointless meetings has driven disengagement.
Successful and productive workplaces have a sense of ‘tribe and place’ and numbers show that people who have friends in the workplace are more engaged and ergo more productive.
I don’t think it’s worth talking too much about points 1 and 2. Anyone with workplace experience knows that modern occupations are soul-crushing and futile. And that technological progress has meant incrementally complicating simple tasks to the point where we avoid doing them or we passive-aggressively half-ass them. Also, technology has also yielded an appalling array of tools for workers to be dehumanised, surveilled and measured as if they are literal cogs in a machine.
Point 3 is the big one here. And, in common with many articles I’ve commented on in the last year or so, the author is absolutely right, but he studiously avoids what is at the heart of the problem:
A minority of self-pitying ninnies with doctorates in nurturing grievance have been empowered to hold the rest of the business hostage, armed with two equally corrosive powers - lawfare and diversity.
For the purpose of this discussion, let’s assume that there are at least some proficient people in the workforce, and that this isn’t necessarily a function of their sex, ethnicity, cultural background, sexuality or religion. I know that at least some of these people exist - I’ve worked with them, over my 30+ years in my industry. Men, women, gays, foreigners, Muslims, whatever. I’ve experienced truly great and truly awful workmates from each of the baskets we’re all divvied up into by the DEI charlatans.
I remember times past when I worked in places with a great social scene and great camaraderie. Enduring friendships, couplings and marriages came out of it on a regular basis. Occasionally people fucked up, particularly when drunk, but 9 times out of 10, the situation was recoverable. Thoughtless or socially clumsy behaviour was called out and apologised for. In order for the situation to lead to disciplinary action, there would need to have been an unequivocal physical or sexual assault, or a blatant and egregious act of racism. We are talking about the sort of behaviour that no decent person would have contemplated.
Remember that? Back when we were adults? When we were resilient enough to roll with things and move on?
There were no eggshells on which to dance. No ever-shifting speech codes. No ‘microaggressions’. No (or at least vanishingly few) people who were so emotionally fragile that they’d run to HR at the faintest whiff of a personal slight. And if HR did receive a complaint, they weren’t prepared to roll over and sack a poorly-socialised top performer in order to placate the snowflake. The bottom line was king.
And the bottom line is still king, but the legal environment has changed. A snowflake who goes to a tribunal in the 21st century stands every chance of receiving a payout that would cripple all but the richest companies, which is why the only places that you still see cavalier workplace behaviour are banks and law firms. No company that operates on, say, sub-10% profit margins or on sub-billion-pound revenues wants to spend significant money on legal defences against aggrieved employees, less still have a judgement go against them that could wipe out their entire year’s profits.
This leads to companies fostering an environment in which a corporate social life is seen as a huge risk. Stringent codes of conduct are created and policed.
Add to this the cancer of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion: Affirmative action, quotas, awareness raising and the fetishisation of minority identities.
We are all implored to “bring our whole selves to work”, provided we don’t have traditional Christian or conservative views about the nuclear family, marriage or homosexuality. And that we aren’t women who fear or resent their women-only spaces being invaded by potentially predatory trans-people. Provided we aren’t concerned that clumsily applied quotas are leading to people holding senior positions on account of their innate characteristics, irrespective of any honest appraisal of their qualification and suitability to perform the role. Provided we aren’t concerned that some people are more likely to be disciplined for under-performing or behaving improperly than others, observing an entirely predictable pattern.
Suspicion and distrust spreads like wildfire. I had been with my current employer for nearly 3 years before I felt able to share anything at all of myself with my colleagues. Certainly I am always far more careful about what I share with them then I ever was in the past. Thanks to recent post-Wuhan corporate social events, I’ve made some potentially good friends through work, but there will always be a barrier there that would not have been there 10 years ago.
Totting up wives and girlfriends, I’ve previously been partnered up with women I’d met at work for about 15 years, but that would never happen now. Even if I met someone I hit it off with, it’s absurd to think that I’d throw my lot in with a woman who had the power to go to HR and wreck my career at the drop of a hat (and had been encouraged by our social media society to think that would be a reasonable thing to do). So if I did want to get partnered up, I certainly wouldn’t be expending my precious social energy cultivating relationships with people at work.
You can call it the left’s long march through the institutions; you can say that capitalists and statists deceived women into the ‘empowerment’ of abandoning the family unit to become wage slaves; you can say that avaricious and creative lawyers poisoned the well; you can say that women in positions of power created a legal and cultural milieu in which feelings trump facts; you can say that diversity + proximity = war. All of those things are true to some extent, and the combined momentum of them is self-perpetuating.
For years now we have been sliding towards society where dwindling social capital is replaced with perverse laws and pernicious regulations. If our productivity problem rests on the fact that we no longer have actual friends in the workplace, we can’t begin to put that right unless we can recognise the elephants in the room.
AJ