Mostly, Bosses Want Their Ass Kissed
When it's all said and done, where do we really think burnout comes from?
Good newsletter from Anne Helen Petersen about “why bosses are so miserable.” That’s a question I’ve been chasing for the last 10 years, with much less fanfare than her. The main pop of the newsletter is her talking to a VP at Slack associated with the “Future Forum.” Obviously Slack has a noted predilection towards remote work, and that should be (and, thankfully, is) noted in the newsletter. There are a couple of good parts, and let me point you to two-three:
Who tends to work flexibly
And that’s one area where we still need to work on changing when it comes to equity — especially as some people are in the office, and some people are not. The concern I have is that those who prefer to work flexibly tend to be working mothers, women, and employees of color. Those who prefer to be in the office full-time tend to be male, white, executives (with commas between each of those). If we continue to celebrate folks who are nearby, who are first in-last-to-leave, we’re actually going to see a lot of the equity gains from the last few years get erased. So we really need to focus, and train managers to focus on the outcomes and the value that people are delivering, rather than the time that they’re spending in the office.
Indeed. Remember 2020 and George Floyd and all these social uprisings that were happening and everything is crazy? Indeed. Obviously a lot of it was performative, but now what’s happening is we’re dragging all these fools back, and the people who can’t come back are those people we were supposedly “lifting up” and “amplifying” like, 20 months ago. Now we’re just grinding them under the wheels of capitalism? “Want flexibility? Too bad, Susan. Targets to hit!”
That begs the next question: WHY are we bringing these people back if they can be productive at home, or at WeWork, or at the coffee shop?
I’ve addressed this before — it’s largely about fiefdoms and control.
You always have to remember that work is very much a place run by men, even if it’s slowly changing a bit. You also have to understand that modern masculinity is extraordinarily fragile. Let me give you an example from just yesterday, when I spent about $90 at a downtown Hooters. Yes, I did that.
See, modern masculinity has about three swim lanes of success:
Make good money
Sire children
Be a “provider” and/or a “rock”
I do approximately 0.0 of these things at present, so I can get pretty down and go pound a few beers while talking to other derelict guys sitting at a Hooters bar at 1pm on a Wednesday (some of whom are actually big finance guys chasing the three-beer lunch).
Virtually every man you meet who is a “white-collar success story” is also somewhat broken, if not largely broken. The wife is ignoring him. The kids are talking back. He feels lower than the dog at home. He fondly recalls his glory days playing 1B back in high school in Michigan. He remembers that first sorority girl, Ashley. Man, she was fun…
He doesn’t have that anymore because “he did what you’re supposed to do,” and he’s broken, and drinking at 1pm at a Hooters to get a flash of what Ashley used to do for him.
That same guy has essentially one area of true control in his life, and that’s his fiefdom at work. Of course it’s not really control because the founder, or the executives, can still crush this guy like a bug for one off-task email, but it feels like control, and that’s important.
But with his 12 direct reports on Zoom screens and maybe some doing work from a camper in Idaho… hmmm, that’s less control. That might mean more trips to Hooters. Or 4 beers at lunch instead of 2. I wonder if Ashley is on Facebook Messenger…
We are bringing people back because Hooters Harry needs control, because he doesn’t have much else. It’s really that simple.
And this is bad, of course, for many reasons — notably burnout
We are seeing disparities in terms of who is feeling burned out. Female workers show 32% more burnout than their male counterparts. We’re also seeing higher burnout amongst younger employees, because they don’t necessarily know what good looks like because they’re new to their jobs. 43% of middle managers are also feeling burnout. That’s why I think it’s important to, again, focus on what are the outcomes that people need to deliver rather than always being on. Part of the problem is that nearly half of employees feel the need to show that they’re working in addition to their actual work — LARPing their career.
I don’t think that this is the only solution, but we’ve seen that scheduled flexibility helps a lot with burnout. It helps with giving people autonomy, the trust, feeling like they have more choice in how they work.
Have done deep dives on burnout, and while I’m not shocked that female burnout is higher — the Minneapolis branch of the Federal Reserve wrote a paper during COVID literally entitled “Why is Mommy So Stressed?” — it’s a big (32%) jump. In that way, it’s kinda comical because the needs of men are coming before the needs of women in the “future of work” canon, which is exactly also the reason why women fake orgasms. What a time to be alive.
Let’s go back to Hooters for a second. I actually had a conversation with a construction worker there about “cock worship.” Yes, this is a thing people discuss midday at a bar. (One white-collar guy there noted he was a VP at an aeronautics company and said, “I am honestly not sure what I do all day.”) As for “cock worship,” though, ultimately all guys love some form or fashion of it. You’d be hard-pressed to meet a guy who doesn’t.
And this whole office hokey pokey nonsense — “You come back, you go back out, you come back in and stay here until 7pm and yes and do it” — is almost the cock worship of work, because basically we’re even having these discussions because high middle managers and executives want to be worshipped. They want to have a place where they feel big and powerful and in control and where they can grab a warm body and tell it what to do. A lot of guys want that in bed, and if they can’t get it in bed, they try to get it in offices and cubicles. In many ways, it’s perverse.
Makes sense, too, as in many ways compensation is the sex of the working world. So please that HIPPO.
Executives were already geared up for a brawl over “the fulcrum of work” and ready to discuss ad nauseam how we need to “maintain the culture” (a meaningless phrase), all the while drowning everything in lip service. Now we seem to have moved more towards the brute force stage of the game, i.e. “You will and must return.” We’re going to miss a lot of good things as a result.
As crap as the job market is in general, I'm sensing it's even worse for middle management types.