Skivers and time wasters the psycho dynamics of work in the information age
Introduction - the historical Development of Work Psycho-dynamics
At the risk of incredible oversimplification we may distinguish three historical phases in the forms of organisation of work - each of which has had different features to work's "emotional management". (In practice the three stages exist side by side in much of the world)
Pre-capitalist - psychopaths in control.
Work is self-directed in an economic system which is largely focused upon self-supplying food, water, shelter, etc. (i.e. A predominantly agrarian/peasant society). Surpluses above what people need for themselves are traded by the people who make them or, later, by an emerging merchant class. The work systems include slavery and/or the bonded labour arrangements characteristic of feudalism. Feudal systems leave decision making about production in the hands of the direct producer (i.e. peasant families take decisions for themselves and plan their own rhythm and methods of animal husbandry, sowing, cultivation, harvesting, storage/food preservation.) And the masters take their rake-off in the manner of a protection racket scam.
The people who produce the range of food and craft products have a wide range of skills and take decisions about production which is an extension of their household activity - so that most people take charge of making, or adapting, and mending their house and habitation, their clothes, as well as providing their own health care, childcare, care of the sick and elderly, "leisure", festivals, celebrations, cultural activities and the like. Most people are, and have to be, 'Jacks and Jills' of all trades.
In this system the upper class have virtually no planning or decision making role in the production system. They are basically, addicts of violence, live for and glorify what are, to them, the 'honourable' arts of battle and war, and like Mafia bosses, operate a protection racket rake-off (firstly in labour service and later in money rents and taxes) to pay for their military establishments and their court systems. (Listen to the speech of nobles and kings, about war, in virtually any of the more serious Shakespeare plays for their enthusiastic and self celebratory glorification of heroic violence). At most the rulers provide the patronage for opulent arts and building, as well as intellectual activities. The psychodynamics between master and population are therefore based on terror and intimidation, with periodic wars between warlords for with its negative effects on the economic system - but the managerial aspects of the system are essentially simple - it is Do It Yourself and Mutual Aid. You could say, without too much exaggeration, that in unstable times, that this is an economic system for psychopaths.
Similarities to this system are flourishing today in various parts of the world in conditions of economic and social chaos and collapse - so this is by no means a purely historical description. The difference is that instability is caused by the destruction of communities and societies as they are drawn into the world market and local ecologies are degraded driving people to desperate measures when they lose acess to the land and their means of living. In this context terror and forced labour is larger now than it has ever been. Above all are children enslaved and drawn into the systems of terror. Thus, for example, between 2 to 5 million children are sold into slavery in the world every year according to human rights experts. Trade in child slaves is the third most profitable source of profits for organised criminals - drugs are taken but once but children can be worked continually. Child slaves are purchased to work as prostitutes and in pornography (100,000 in the Philippines for example), 300,000 children fight as soldiers (120,000 in Africa and 50,000 in Burma). According to the International Labour Organisation at least a quarter of a billion 5 to 10 years old work and a half of them full time. The ILO estimate that 60 million children world wide work in dangerous occupations. (Figures from Der Spiegel 15 September 2001. Kinder. Die Morale des Geldes. - Children - The Moralities of Money).
For a large part of the world the "psycho-dynamics of work" boils down to just three things - ignorance, exploitation and terror. (This is a terror that is highly unlikely to be on the agenda for the "war against terror" however. Virtually all the victims of these processes, were they to try to escape to an industrial country, would be described as economic migrants and sent back.)
Industrial Capitalism - the internalisation of work ethics and discipline
In industrial capitalism a large part of work takes the form of employment, producing specialist marketed products. As time went on this was more and more in machine-paced production processes powered by fossil fuels located in factories. Detailed decision making about, and supervision of, the labour process now in the hands of an employer (or employers agent) who plans and directs the labour-process. The labour process is specialised and largely manual (thus people are described as "factory hands"). Productivity amplified by fuel powered machinery. Economic organisation is more specialised, complex and more opaque. Rewards to the masters perceived as a payoff for their decision making and their money input. Work psycho-dynamics typically take the form of collective antagonistic relations between factory "hands" and "masters" mainly focused on wages and conditions. Work is centralised in time and place at workplace locations (the factory).
During this period, as Foucault showed, a process began in which the social control and social hierarchy moved from being terror-based (public executions) to internalised control exercised through psychology, psychiatry, social work, education, the media etc. This has its effects also in the world of work and the beginning of the emergence of new professions of health and social care with social control and management functions.
Although industrial capitalist production no longer provides the bulk of employment in the so called 'developed countries' the ways of thinking about work to which it get rise still continue. It would be a mistake to see the legacy as being simply one of punctuality, labour discipline and hierarchy. Many of today's senior managers and politicians were brought up in the era of industrial capitalism in the 50s and 60s - an era when there was full employment and labour discipline had somewhat relaxed, as compared to previous decades. After world war two, in Britain in particular, there was a culture of what might call 'skiving' which had been a product of National Service. When there wasn't a war to fight, soldiers didn't have much to do, but they had to appear busy, so they were made to do pointless things - like whitewashing coal. This created cynicism - and a generation of young men in their formative years developed "skiving" to a fine art. Indeed, employers organisations were instrumental in calling for an end to National Service for this very reason. During the periods of full employment in the 1950s and 1960s, when employers could not pick and choose employees, but took any they could get, they were dismayed that so many carried over what they had learned about skiving from the Army into employment. (In my first ever job, for Folkestone Corporation Parks Department at the end of the 1960s, I remember the attitude of my foreman, Claud, who cycled along and caught me working 15 minutes after the end of the lunch break. "Cor, you're keen aren't you?" he chided me. These were civilised days......)
The idea that people cannot be trusted to work, and will skive if you didn't keep an eye on them, has remained with us until recently. ( There are signs, however, of a more enlightened attitude creeping in some places in the last few years). It has, in turn, created an anxiety among many employees that they be seen to be trying as hard as possible. This is sometimes in the backround to self imposed overwork.
At school in the 1960s my schoolmasters, mostly former officers or NCOs, seemed chiefly concerned to impose an academic work ethic, struggling against the assumed natural tendency of pupils, if left to themselves, to fritter their time away wastefully. Some of the pupils of this time are now the senior managers and politicians of today and seemed to have taken this work ethic to a heart with a vengeance. If we are to believe what we read, our political leaders like Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, work incredibly long hours and they expect us to work hard to. The grammar school boys are a government of hard workers who loath and hate shirkers. They tell us "....a decent society is not based on rights. It is based on duty. Our duty to each other. To all should be given opportunity, from all responsibility demanded". (Tony Blair). So what are our chief duties? "Your responsibility is to seek work. My guarantee if you seek work, work will pay...Those with an offer of work can have no excuse for staying home on benefits". (Gordon Brown).
A lot of people seem anxious to do just this. But, in the meantime, work itself has changed.
Late Capitalism
The forms of work in the so called "developed countries" in late capitalism can be contrasted to those of the so called "developing countries". Production and cultivation industries which work with material products employ a declining proportion of the labour force - both because of automation, and because of the displacement of material production to the "developing countries". ( It should be kept in mind, however, that this 'Tertiarisation of the Economy' is mainly a geographical relocation process. Labour is cheap in the third world - partly because of the terror regimes there. The absolute volume of material production and trade continues to rise world wide - with considerable environmental consequences).
The typical workplace in the developed world is therefore no longer the factory but, rather, the office. It seems clear that, beyond this, many workers are actually not located anywhere in particular but are continually on the move. The work done involves the institutionalised maintenance of health, education and social welfare (functions that families and local communities previously fulfilled but which are now institutionalised), a variety of state regulatory functions and, in the private sector, the planning, co-ordination and organisation of distant production processes, together with arrangements for PR and marketing. The development of financial management and services is a huge area of expansion deserving of recognition in its own right. (Between 1955 and 1988 British banking, insurance stockbroking, tax collecting and accountancy increased employment from 493,000 employees to 2,475,000 employees!) The communications and information processing media are part of the infrastructure for all these services. All these activities require an increasingly highly educated labour force.
When work is largely conceptual and intangible.
Work is increasingly conceptual and intangible. This, in turn, makes supervision very different from the factory system in most cases. It makes it impossible to give detailed directive supervision of many work tasks - much work must be delegated to "coalface worker" to get on with at their own initiative. Techniques of management are not so much telling people what to do but negotiating and discussing context setting arrangements. Management is indirect - via context setting mission statements, performance standards, quality controls, good practice guidelines, SMART targets, the setting of procedures - then workers are left, day to day, hour by hour, to get on with it and try to work it out as best they can, staying within their infuriatingly irrelevant or off the mark targets, trying very hard to be seen to be doing their job.
The fact that many of these work activities have very intangible outputs and outcomes has psychological consequences. Whereas with factory work one could see a material product taking shape as a result of the labour, and therefore measure productivity increases in a very tangible way, in many modern forms of work measurable outputs and outcomes are very difficult to show. This can make workers anxious that their contribution is not being noticed.
Productivity increases to intangible work - what does it mean?
A further difference from work in the factory system is that, whereas in the factory system the investment in (fuel powered) machinery led to visible and tangible increases in the productivity of labour, as well as labour displacement, many service sector jobs cannot be mechanised in the same way. One can, of course, mechanise things like mailings lists with computer generated address labels from data bases, and the pressure is on to try to standardise as much as possible. However you cannot mechanise so easily the work of a teacher, or social worker or surgeon nor the work of advertising agency staff. As a result many "tertiary" jobs, particularly those which involve person to person interaction, cannot demonstrate continuing increases in productivity to justify their continued salary increases. This amplifies the problem already mentioned.
Despite this there is an ideology of "continuous improvement" which means that the present situation is never good enough - in a situation where startling increases in productivity arising from investment, whatever that means, are ruled out. A new machine will automatically increase the productivity of a factory worker and perhaps also increase quality and quality control. In many service sector jobs computers will increase output to a degree but in person to person services there is no investment or automation that will obviously increase output in a continuous way, nor automated means to increase quality. In many cases the only way to get improvement, it seems, is to put in longer and longer hours. And yet longer hours does not increase outcomes at all - after a point cases it reduces output as workers become tired, make mistakes, and morale slumps. Even if it did improve outcomes as people work harder - how would anyone noticing anyway?
'Presenteeism'
At the time of writing this essay I heard a report on a radio programme about the new phenomena of "presenteeism". It is the opposite of absenteeism. Apparently one in 6 British workers are still at their desks after 10.00pm at least once a month. Some employers are becoming aware that presenteeism rarely results in real output increases and are trying to discourage it. The programme interviewed people who revealed that, in some cases, they were really working because they were anxious about job security and wanted to be seen to be keen. A recession where people have even more reason to fear for their jobs will probably make this kind of situation worse - it certainly has in Japan over the last decade of recession.
In some material that I have seen from the Austrian based organisation Verein zur Verzoegerung der Zeit, which was analysing the same phenomena, other motivations are suggested too. Sometimes people prefer the office to their homes. For example, some people are so busy with being the manager at the office they cannot switch out of this role at home. Their spouses and children find it hard to cope with them being the manager at home too. Or, again, other processes like the following can occur: as work is given priority over family, the relations with family deteriorates. Then, when the dedicated worker finally does go home, they experience such hostility that they get caught in a vicious circle of preferring to stay away even longer.
Work as motivation and massaging appearances
Many modern jobs are about massaging appearances, about motivating people and controlling them or trying to alter their behaviour. This is true, for example, of the PR industry and advertising, as well as, in a very different kind of way, true of the burgeoning counselling and therapy industries. It is obviously true too, for the media industries. Some jobs are about mystification and some about clarification. Some of us are employed to find ways to motivate people to eat a more healthy diet, others are employed to motivate people to eat out of burger bars and fast food restaurants. Graduates are coming straight out of the same university departments of psychology and other human and medical sciences and, in effect, working against each other. The so called Information Economy is not about neutral information at all - it a contested space where rival interpretations, exhortations, motivations jostle with each other for our attention and choice. The biggest players often have the loudest voices through their access to mainstream institutions and the mass media.
What is important in this world is to get noticed - to have your narrative about your work taken into account. This is not necessarily the same as doing a good job. It is more about good PR.
The importance of being noticed
One strategy for the problem that your work is not seen is to make sure that you are seen - this means turning up to, or even better, calling a large number of meetings. There is safety in numbers and, the more managers or officials that tag along to your meetings the higher your outcome targets are, as well as the more you are likely to be perceived as a busy and important person. You will be "well connected", advance your career, or, at least, be safe from the next round of cuts. It's an excellent personal PR strategy. (I'm always impressed by the huge salary bill that turns up to meetings...)
Fluctuating Workloads - taking on more work in quiet periods overhypes the peaks
Much work is inevitably unstable - there are troughs as well as peaks. In such troughs to spend time doing background reading, or reflecting, would seem to be doing nothing however and there are those who dare not give this appearance. So, rather than take advantage of the troughs to relax they anxious seek out new work - that way as their work picks up again they hit workload peaks with the old work and the new agenda they have now added - and they simply cannot control their workloads getting into a frightful state.
'Emotional labour'
Since work is person to person, and frequently about motivation, an increasingly large element of work is 'emotional labour'. Emotional labour is when your employer requires you to have a particular set of feelings that will please the customer or public. At home and in our personal relationships, therapists tell us we should get in touch with our feelings and not bottle them up. When you are feeling angry, frustrated and irritated, or when you are feeling frightened, you need to be able to get out what it is that is bothering you and negotiate your relationships with those around you. You need to be able to recognise their feelings too, respect them, and work with them. But can you do that if, for example, you work at a call centre? What exactly do you do with the impatient and rude caller who is steaming with rage because his computer isn't working and he's having to pay a telephone charge to get your advice to fix it? He might typically be the tenth of such aggressive callers in the last day. Are you expected to express what you are really feeling to him? Hardly.....among other things the caller might actually be an agent of your employer checking up on your telephone manner.
Workers in health and social welfare also do emotional labour. They are employed to empathise, or keep their cool, under difficult conditions. On the corporate mission statements, for example, it says that staff will deal with users of services with politeness and respect - and yet these may be the very same users who, because of the time they have had to wait, as well as the intensity of their needs, are very often aggressive and angry.
Insincerity becomes the norm. Avoiding the truth is ordinary.
Working without a clear workplace
A further feature of contemporary work is that, because it is person-to-person work, conceptual, organising, logistics and persuading work, the labour process often doesn't have to be fixed in place to a particular machine and location. Even your computer and phone are now available in mobile options and there are powerful reasons to move around with them. But this loss of a fixed location for your work can carry anxieties with it. It can mean that you are no longer seen doing the intangible things that you do. At least in the office people saw you making phone calls and typing letters - now how are your superiors to know that you are there and still doing things? You are out of sight and possible out of mind - until possibly you are remembered at the time of the next reorganisation and round of cuts and, perhaps, therefore the victim of the next staff down sizing. How many calls on the mobile are really about reminding the office that you still exist and are an important part of the operation?
A further complication - Co-ordinating and synchronising with the underclass
Working in dispersed locations has stresses of its own - particularly co-ordinating with when people are actually in. I used to think that the difficulties that my colleagues had, trying to help vulnerable people do DIY renovations of their own homes, were unique to Ecoworks (my employer). My colleagues have the problem of finding a time when people are in their homes so that they can arrange a time to help them. It's a problem not only of agreeing a time, but of actually sticking to it. The client groups we are trying to work with, often have no daily routine and they probably often have no diary to help them to remember. In the 'underclass' are people whose chaotic lives mean a succession of crises - so, even that if they remember your appointment at their house, there's still no guarantee they will be in - because they may be at a doctors surgeries, summoned to solve a housing benefit crisis, or they may have run away, too embarrassed to let anyone in to see their shambolic and sordid circumstances.
As it turns out, co-ordinating and synchronising with the underclass is a major problem for a variety of public sector and voluntary organisations. In preparing this paper I received a package or articles from the University of Klagenfurth based Verein zur Verzoegerung der Zeit. In it there was a fascinating article by Christian Lackner on Time and Organisation in Vienna's Psychiatric Hospital (Zeit und Organisation im Psychiatrischen Krankenhaus der Stadt Wien published in Gruppendynamik Vol 26 No2. 1995 pp223-235). It made clear to me that what I thought was a problem for our organisation is universally a problem wherever one tries to develop community based solutions that take services to where people live.
Institutional Time Structures Examples - the differing time structure of community care
The Viennese psychiatric services, just like the UK ones are moving towards community care. The multiple consequences for time management are discussed by Lackner. Here there is space for giving only a few of the many observations he makes. Community care has a completely different time structure to hospital care. It requires more time quantitatively, and the time is used in a more complicated and variegated way. This is because new specialisms have sprang up (psychiatric social workers, therapists, community nurses, patients advocates etc.) so that the different kinds of professionals, each with a different role, have to be co-ordinated together. All this has knock on effects back in the hospital. As more staff are working outside the hospital, and more kinds of treatment and help are on offer, there is less personnel left in the hospital. Back in the hospital, community care means, of course, an acceleration of the throughput through acute hospital wards. People spend less time in hospital if they do go in and there are less beds for them. However, it should be borne in mind that the treatment and recovery phases for patient in acute crisis have their own time dimensions. If one hurries the initial diagnostic interviews the staff get the problem wrong and then the patient may get the wrong treatment (e.g. dosage) and end up staying longer. Paradoxically, to speed up the treatment one needs adequate initial time analysing the problem. Meanwhile the need for social workers, doctors (and sometimes both together) to go and see patients outside the hospital is incredibly time consuming. Of course, if the time criteria of doctors alone were what mattered, then the patients would come to, or be kept in hospital. Quite apart from when patients are not at home, there is the travel time to go to see them. As with the UK the Austrians have a legal procedure, with rights of appeal, for cases where compulsory admission and treatment is deemed necessary. The requirement for second opinions and the involvement of lawyers and hearings is also very expensive of time.
Working without clear work times
When a clear notion of work place begins to dissolve so too, often enough, does the notion of a work time. If your work involves a lot of thinking and you always contactable on your mobile - when exactly does work stop and when does it begin? If you go to sleep thinking about unresolved dilemmas at work and wake early thinking about them - are you even at work in bed? It's all a long way from "clocking off" from a shift in the factory, or at a large care institution with fixed shifts, where you left behind fixed routines, "switching off" psychologically as well.
There are powerful pressures to overwork in this kind of world - if you are insecure about it then, to compensate for the invisibility and intangibility of your work, you do that bit extra...attending a meeting that isn't otherwise really necessary, just to make sure your bosses are still aware that you are there.
Specialised work that no one else understands
Yet another feature of work nowadays is the use of more narrow specialisms. As the home and local community are emptied of more and more production and service functions, everyone want to be a graduate expert in the resultant externally organised institutions. For most of history Jacks and Jills of all trades provided for the bulk of their own needs, DIY style, with the help of their neighbours in small local communities. Now millions of highly educated specialists are trying to live together and co-ordinate immense bureaucratic empires each of which are themselves focused only on a narrow range of activities - education specialisms, social work specialisms, market niche specialisms, computer software specialisms, art niches, media niches...As like as not, only a tiny number could understands what you are doing in your job anyway - because only a few have had your ten year training. So on what criteria can your managers judge your work and appreciate it anyway?
The growth of bureaucratic empires
The more specialisms, the more complicated and complex the resultant co-ordination between them, the more referrals, the more departments and the more liaison and referral arrangements, the more committees needed to manage them all.
The bureaucracies and managerial structures also blossom because they cover larger and larger geographical areas. When I started as a mental health development worker there was a Nottingham Mental Health Unit which was part of the Nottingham National Health Service. Then there was a 'purchaser' and 'provider' split in the health services. At this time the Mental Health Unit became an NHS Trust that merged with Learning Difficulty Services. Now that service has grown from a Nottingham to a Nottinghamshire Service swallowing up Rampton Special Hospital. Of course, the larger the organisation, the further away senior managers are, the more to co-ordinate and the more bureaucratic layers. As senior managers get to be further away in geographical and organisational space from the on the spot operational level, so too a breed of manager takes over that has no experience of 'coming up through the ranks' and no idea what is involved at the operational level. This breed also has no personal interest, loyalty or commitment to local staff or local services who they never meet regularly, nor get to know. As like as not their background will be in accountancy and they will know a lot about costs and record keeping - but little about practical operations.
What senior managers do to appear to be useful - measurement and reorganisation
This is linked to the another feature of modern work - the phenomena of permanent reorganisation with all its unstable and unsettling effects. One of the big mysteries of recent years is why, in view of the huge amount of labour saving equipment, of automation and the increased speed of office procedures, there is nevertheless a great deal more to do. When microprocessors were first invented visionaries predicted an forthcoming age of leisure and the "end of work". Machines could and would do it all for us. Yet, funnily enough, the opposite has happened. Part of the reason is doubtless that the money economy manufactures new health, consumption and other needs - however in part the reason for this paradox, I think, lies in the need for our betters to be seen to be doing something, to be seen to be improving things, lest we forget how much we need them. A lot of the things we have to do is to reassure them that they are really needed. This goes for managerial reorganisations, for example, and for the ever increasing volume of quantitative performance returns.
The consequences of senior managers feeling the need to be seen to be doing something can be negative when the most important thing to be done is thinking about things - or resting. Thinking and resting are not unproductive activities. Thinking, reflecting upon things, is the very stuff of intelligent management - even if you can't see it when it is happening. Nor is resting an unproductive activity. Rest and recreation is re-creation. It is the re-creation of the capacity of the human body and mind to function - it is like the recharging of a battery. It is biological time in which, to be sure, you cannot see anything taking place, but something very important is happening nonetheless. Without the recharge process there will be no long run effectiveness.
Alas, to an insecure manager (or politician) things may not appear like this. If they must be seen to be doing something (when, in reality, it would be better to do nothing) then senior managers or politicians always have one option they can turn to -- to reorganise the managerial structure itself, its funding and monitoring regimes and/or its fundamental policies. Too often reorganisations are a substitute for thinking up any new ideas. Thus it will often be necessary to bring in consultants from outside to give the ideas.
Consultants and reorganisations
The consultants, significantly these are typically from accountancy organisations, will usually understand the situation even less but have the necessary rapacious arrogance to assume that their MBA qualifies them to recommend for any situation. There are then rarely any improvements to the quality of the work done, at ground level, "at the coal face". However, such reorganisations still have two advantages. Firstly they conveys the appearance that senior management (or politicians ) are active and in control, while, secondly it takes up the time of subordinates and stops them finding the time to take their own initiatives. (Which could often be more focused and relevant because closer to coal face realities). If reorganisation involves lots of partnerships, e.g. with community groups, it ties everyone up with consultations about the bigger agenda, rather than allowing these other people to find the time to develop agendas of their own. And it all adds to the time pressure down the line, as everyone goes to the meetings about the latest good idea about a yet bigger and more complicated management system - rather than setting up meetings of their own about what concern them. Furthermore, as every dictator in history has realised, regular reshuffles and reorganisations of the bureaucratic hierarchy prevents trust relations, allegiances and alliances being formed out of which opposition, or even new bids for power, might be made.
Measurement and paper trails - drugs for insecure managers?
Another option for managers who need to be seen to be busy is to measure things. Since managers are paid to manage it follows that they are paid to improve the performance of their subordinates. Politicians are keen to claim that the public sector, and particularly its bureaucracy, can be made more efficient. The use of public money must be closely scrutinised. Money paid in taxes must not be wasted. To prevent skiving and waste by officials they are put under scrutiny by auditors, management consultants and put under pressure to justify whatever they do. Needless to say, this does not reduce the amount of work and resources used, it increases it. In proportion to the implied lack of trust the anxiety about the need to prove what one does increases, and the need for managers to keep records that will cover their backs likewise rises. This leads to a snowball effect in the amount of paper work, form filling and record keeping. Everywhere there are instructions, procedures, best practice guidelines, measurable targets to be met. Meanwhile statistical returns work like a drug to reassure managers. In the public sector they can be shown to politicians if they want to know how public money is being spent - and if the statistical dosage was previously yearly then an increase in the prescription to quarterly is an option to cope with an increase in anxiety.
Measurement and the decline of trust relations
This increased paperwork does nothing to improve services - indeed it takes the time resources away from their improvement. Their improvement can usually only come about through practitioners having time for reflection about the coal face practice, some space for leisurely strategic thinking about day to day to operational problems - but away from these problems, not in the middle of them, while the phone is ringing. To this must be added the need for senior managers to then trust in the judgement and suggestions of their subordinates - letting them implement their strategic ideas. However, in this regime of neurotic management and paper trails, trust is just what is lacking. To develop trust itself requires time and stability in work groups. However, not only is there no time for reflection in the work, there is no time for "time wasting" on developing trust relations, mutual understanding and communication inside work groups themselves, or between them and higher decision making bodies.
Neglected time needs
Those of us who have to struggle with these social neuroses of our betters have to draw up descriptions of our work in the new fashionable form: with project milestones, with specific, measurable achievable repeatable targets and so on. Typically the things that we dare not dare not put in are target times for pausing, for reflection on our work, times for the development of good relations in the office - the creation of a work group common spirit.
If you want targets for these things, then you have to remember to put something in the budget for training and consultancy, and you pray that you will actually find the time so actually do them. We call such times "time out" which says a lot how we see them, as a sort of additional luxury. In fact, if a group or an organisation is really to function, and develop as a team, it must devote time to the structure itself and the human relations between people. From this point of view "times out" are crucial to functioning - building trust, relationships and understanding between members.
(Anyone who has been on a good away weekend will find out how much you learn about other people and how much it serves to bring out issues and team spirit. This is really quite crucial but is often neglected. Time is needed for such things - yet too often time is only available for people to work together as if they are mere automatons, who are the operators of a collection of kinds of technical expertise).
Different management styles
Managers are individuals. One cannot generalise. Some of them are interested in, and care about, their work. They understand their job as being about working with people - with colleagues, clients and citizens who they seek to understand as individuals as well as seeing them as "human resources" i.e. as means to organisational ends. Other managers are more interested in, and care about, their career paths. Being a good manager and being on a successful career path are not the same. When you are interested in, and care about the people, as well as about the work, you accumulate a deeper understanding. You remain open in attitude to the ideas of colleagues, to whom you may feel a certain loyalty and responsibility. When you are interested in your career path and promotion what you are interested in are measured results. Your relationships to the 'human resources' are less important as you don't intend to hang around long anyway. You are aiming for promotion to head office.
How the ambitious manager benefits from situations to demonstrate fire fighting skills
Sometimes the times are heaven made for this kind of ambitious manager. If they are lucky they get promoted when there are plenty of problems to be sorted out - and they can rush around fire fighting. If middle managers get their faces seen resolving problems, their self esteem, morale and reputation are on a rising curve. But sometimes it's not like that. Just think of what might happen were they to get caught in the nightmare of everything going well! If everything is functioning reasonably smoothly, subordinates looking after themselves fine, well able to sort out problems among themselves, then who is going to notice that the ambitious middle manager is even there? The same paradox goes for senior managers. To get yourself noticed you need to be fire fighting, so you need a good crisis. If you haven't got a crisis you can provoke one - set up a new project or discover the need to reorganise things.
The overall picture - absurd jobs, mentally unhealthy workplaces
A not untypical worker in the "Tertiary Sector" is therefore involved in a large bewildering bureaucracy whose senior managers know and care little about the front line operational staff or their clients. Such staff will be typically struggling to recover from the practical and emotional turmoil of a reorganisation and/or are confronted by a new one which adds to their sense of job insecurity and expandability. Their work may involve a host of conceptual and intangible activities that no one else fully understands and, typically, they may have difficulty showing what tangible outcomes they create. They may therefore find it difficult to prove that the outcomes of their work are improving over time - even though this is what is expected of them. What will make their lot more difficult is that they will typically be operating in a world where the competition for appearances are everything to one's security and advancement - so that profiling oneself by being seen and heard, particularly by attending a lot of meetings, is more important than actually getting on and doing one's job. As like as not their employer has a PR strategy and a mission statement about the supposed representation of the interests of all stakeholders which is far from the realities and at least part of the strain is knowing this, or even being one of those inauthentic people responsible for the maintenance of the facade. The problems that such a worker faces appear, as like as not, unresolvable, such problems follow them home, with tasks to do on the lap top and while they are on call. Only by making a big enough space between themselves and their work, by flying abroad on holiday, do they really feel they "escape". (Though your work may follow you on holiday too, if you take your mobile). In short, what is called work stress is based on a pervading sense that much of their work is actually absurd or futile, a profound sense of insecurity and a sense that they are living a lie.
Very few people seem to be asking whether this system development might not itself be creating new kinds of pathologies and problems - particularly in the field of work related illness and mental illness. In these new structures work problems are no longer experienced so much collectively - in a way picked up by trade unions as collective bargaining issues, they are more and more experienced individually. The psycho-dynamics of work in the new bureaucracies is experienced as conflicts and tensions between individuals and particular colleagues, supervisors and customers (and volunteers). The problems lie in coping with the tensions arising from: aggressive clients; envious or hostile colleagues who are floundering in their jobs, with knock-on effects, of both an emotional and performance character; harassment by supervisors and/or floundering supervisors and failing support mechanisms; failure to meet targets because these targets are meaningless, unrealistic or contradictory. Finally there is a pervading sense that no one at senior levels really cares, that whatever the PR and the mission statement say, that the real mood is one of cynicism, powerlessness and hopelessness which makes if difficult to live with the gulf between the institutional PR narrative and the down to earth reality.
A personal account
Is this analysis just being cynical? A lot of these ideas come from over two decades personal experience of working in the voluntary sector and on the edge of local government.
In the late 1970s I helped set up a research and resources centre for trade unions and community groups in Nottingham with grant aid from a national charity. For considerable periods of time after setting up the organisation I was floundering, not being very clear what projects to develop that would justify the grant aid and my (meagre) salary. Far from skiving, my anxieties at that time derived from a terror that I would be discovered as not doing anything at all very productive - in fact as wasting the grant aid given to us. This terror became crippling at some points - times which were described by my doctor as 'anxiety' and 'depression'. In retrospect my fear was draining me of the energy to think freely. However, when, from time to time in those years, the opportunities presented themselves to initiate activities with a high chance of being productive and justifying my pay, I would work all hours and throw myself into a frantic activism. So I went back and forth between frantic activism and demoralisation and my work context can be seen as the setting in which I developed mental health problems. It provides the background against which I developed what a psychiatrist called manic depression. I am not being cynical or unsympathetic therefore if I describe work situations in which one feels anxious because one's work role appears rather superfluous or unproductive. I am writing from personal experience.
When is Manic depression really hectic activism and demoralisation while floundering in a job?
It is not uncommon, when describing 'manic depression', to argue that, in the early stages of mania, the manic person may be energetically creative. People who say or write this seem keen to show that mania, and being a good worker, are not necessarily incompatible. Would it not, perhaps, be relevant to go one step further? In several articles by Christian Lackner I discovered that the Austrian based Society for the Deceleration of Time (Verein zur Verzoegerung der Zeit) studied several organisations in the early 1990s. These included Mercedes Benz A.G. and the Psychiatric Hospital and Services in Vienna. Lackner's research was based on interviews with staff and managers. In his work Lackner makes an interesting observation about workers who are floundering in their jobs. To deal with their anxieties they sometimes fall into hectic activism or into depression. He makes the obvious point that neither helps their organisation. I suggest taking this observation further. Perhaps 'hectic activism' and 'depression', as responses to being out of one's depth in one's job, are sometimes interpreted as 'manic depression' (Christian Lackner - "Zeit" und Führung - "Zeit" und Organisation - paper supplied by the Verein zur Verzoegerung der Zeit)..
What is a healthy approach to work?
To start to develop a healthy attitude to work, to develop an attitude beyond neurotic self imposed overwork, or the futile imposition of work pressures upon us by our employers that we cannot cope with, we need to have a concept of work that is healthy to us as individuals and groups. We need a process, akin to a therapy process, which unveils what is really happening and thereby frees us up to make new choices and to start to behave differently in work. This will unveil and unravel both how the organisations that we inhabit might be acting in an unnecessarily futile and unproductive fashion, as well as how we, as individuals, might be responding neurotically. (For example, by 'presenteeism' which neither benefits ourselves, nor our employers, nor our clients or users of services).
For us as individuals or as groups there is a need to identify what are a healthy and non futile amount of work beyond which we will not go. This is largely the same as identifying the personal and group pace of work, faster than which it is futile to try to operate.
Identifying your own pace - the concept of eigenzeit
I have found much German thinking very helpful to this personal reevaluation. Particularly useful are ideas like that of "Eigenzeit" and "Eigenzeitlichkeit" . These are difficult to translate using a single word in English - although perhaps the best phrase would be "personally appropriate pace". Zeit and Zeitlichkeit are the German words for time and temporality and "eigen" can be various interpreted as "your own", "intrinsic to"; "inherent to" or "appropriate to". Thus the word "Eigenzeit" conveys the idea that a person, a group of people, an object or a situation has time needs or temporal qualities that are its own, that are appropriate to it, or inherent to it. In short, it is the time (time need) appropriate to the person or thing.
It is important to be aware that "Eigenzeit" is, to take an example, the time you need to complete a task, rather than the time that you have been granted to complete it - for the point of this concept of "Eigenzeit" is to draw attention to the difference. Collectives or work groups can also be described as having eigenzeit needs. In the case of groups eigenzeit is the time that is appropriate to the task for a particular group, rather than the time allowed before a deadline runs out - which has been imposed the group's managers or by the external environment.
So used are many of us to accepting and living within institutionally/externally imposed time conditions that we have virtually lost awareness of our individual "Eigenzeiten" - the plural word for eigenzeit. Before the industrial revolution and the advent of capitalism jobs, as such, did not really exist. People did what had to be done, as and when. In these historical periods if an agricultural labourer felt tired, during field labour, s/he could often lie down and sleep. Unless you were a galley slave, rowing to the beat of a drum, you often had a certain leeway to take things at your own pace and in your own time. Taking things at your own pace, and at your own time, was basically living according to your individual "Eigenzeiten". Nowadays the pace of things is increasingly determined by social institutions, often with nothing negotiable about the times to which we therefore forced to adapt ourselves.
Nowadays if we are to work towards a harmony in which our own eigenzeit matches the pace and rhythms set institutionally and socially, we must actually understand it and become sensitive to it again. Just as psychotherapy exists because many people live unaware of their emotions and emotional relationships, so too, people can live unaware of the time patterning of their own lives and unaware of the consequences for their health and relationships.
Only by being aware of our time needs, our eigenzeit, can we match up self management of ourselves, and of our time, with the institutionally and machine set times that we must live inside. For this we need a concept and language system to describe the dimensions of our "I time" to ourselves. Without explanatory concepts we can scarcely begin to notice its patterns and use them to develop well-being in our lives. At most, instead, we will notice the times when we are tired and cannot concentrate well. Often enough, however, people try to ignore their tiredness and plough on regardless - or are obliged to do so.
(Since working a three day week I set aside two days largely as "thinking time" to pursue my own interests. Slowly I am getting much more sensitive to the way that I do my creative thinking, when I write essays like this, in bursts of a varying lengths and durations which it is not productive to try to exceed. While writing something like this in these "bursts" there always comes a point where, either my ideas run out for the time being or too many new avenues and connections to explore occur to me. If I am tired I notice that I am not concentrating and there is little point in forcing myself to try to continue. Then I have to leave the word processor for a time to let the mental whirlpool settle - or to have a snooze perhaps, depending on the circumstances. Sometimes I feel the need for social time and go and visit a friend - or need some exercise and perhaps go on a bike ride. The trick is to trust what my body/mind is telling me and get attentive to it. It is, after all, my time. No employer is paying me for it. I'm free to do what I like within my means and circumstances. As far as the essay is concerned the matching attitude is to believe that, however long it takes, the essay, my leisure activity of clarification, will be finished when it is finished, and not worry when that will be. This is the very opposite of the performance orientation that would regard the work task, writing the essay, as something to be finished as soon as possible - so that I could then go on to writing the next one.)
Bio-time, mental time and social time - the different components of eigenzeit
Klaus Muesebeck has developed a concept system to help people become more aware of their eigenzeit. He distinguishes between three kinds of time needs and time uses - bio-time, mental time and social time. These three kinds of time also help us understand three different kinds of life style preferences where each kind of time use describes a possible life style priority.
Bio-time is that time allowed for the bodies "energy budget", as well as its hygiene needs, over the short term. The notion of rest time is somewhat misleading in the sense that the body is, so to speak, recharging itself in these periods. When it is at rest it is, in this sense, not inactive but re-polarising itself for periods of activity.
Mental time is the necessary period set aside for emotional and psychic activity.
Finally, social time is the period devoted to human relationships.
The life of every human organism can be considered as a collection of processes and activities that oscillate on different frequencies. There are:
Short - to medium wave, or ultraradian rhythms, that oscillate in less than a day. The information processes and flows in brain and central nervous system works in a variety of cycles at a fractions of a second - and the whole is synthesised into consciousness of "the present" which can be shown to be like a series of three second windows, after which our consciousness jumps to some other centre of interest. The heart, lung and circulatory system, as well as the limbs of movement, are related together in a system that oscillates in minutes and seconds. The metabolism of nutritional intakes takes place on a cycle of hours.
Medium to long wave oscillations over the circadian rhythm, which includes bio times like our daily sleeping and waking cycle.
Finally there are infradian - long term oscillations over weeks, months or even years. These are the periods needed for healing and regeneration, for growth and adaptation to new living environments. (The slow creation of new habits in new habitats which make life liveable).
Muesebeck argues that each kind of time and frequency oscillation must at certain times take priority or be, so to speak, in the foreground. They must find a harmonious synchronisation with each other or there will be effects on health. What often happens, however, is that people use a variety of pharmaceutical and other means to "keep going" and to try to "outwit" or find a way around the natural rhythms (stimulants, tranquillisers, sleeping pills, caffeine, tobacco) . The consequences are long term health damage and short term errors which often have catastrophic consequences. For example, in terms of long term health damage the consequences of long term night shift work on the cardiovascular system are reckoned to be equivalent to smoking 20 cigarettes a day. Or again; all the following accidents were related to human error where tiredness was a key component - Chernobyl, the Exxon Valdez, Three Mile Island disaster, Challenger disaster, the Herald of Free Enterprise. If you note what timing of motor accidents they have yearly, weekly and daily peaks - corresponding to the organisation of social time and when attentiveness/rest rhythms set in - which is different for older and younger drivers. German studies show that young drivers have more accidents at weekends while older drivers in the week.
People under pressure
The point I am making here is that people who are not (able to) manage their eigenzeit needs between their social, mental and bio times, to allow each oscillation its needed time, for whatever reason, end up ill and/or causing accidents. What psychologists call "Type A personalities" are people whose work prioritisation structures their social time, bio-time and mental time in a way that keep them under pressure - and keeps other people under pressure too. This then compounds the problems because they are impatient, angry and tense with their work colleagues or subordinates, with effects on everyone's mental and physical well being.
We should beware, however, of lapsing into psychological reductionism. The situation that we are describing here is not adequately described as being "caused" by the existence of a personality type among the managers - Type A neurotics. People function at work as part of social and institutional systems where people are working together. Their personality (response pattern in work settings) can be considered as one interrelated and evolving dimension of the total system evolution over time - a system evolution pattern which has psycho-dynamic, temporal and performance features. People are employed by organisations which have different degrees of complexity, which have different ratios between their time and other resources and the tasks at hand, which have different operating environments. People become Type A personalities, often enough, because of the pressures upon them. (I recently spoke to someone who described how he had always thought of himself as a patient and unflappable sort of person. Then he developed his career in a new direction and had to start working to externally imposed deadlines upon which his income was dependent. He became, surprise surprise, a very impatient person. His personality changed...)
Institutional Contexts - When Resource Problems become time problems
Often enough, particularly in the public and not for profit sectors, managers put themselves and other people under time pressure, because they are trying their best to solve or ameliorate a mountain of health, social and environmental problems and the misery and pain associated with these.
Far too often, the sheer volume of these problems in relation to the available time resources, is so great, that "care" takes the form of a form of processing that uses fixed procedures with little room for tuning into individuals. The time does not exist and the supplicant for institutional help must subordinate themselves to the time availabilities and rhythms of the institution. Resource problems reveal themselves in waiting lists. Type A managers and staff in hospitals probably have shorter waiting lists - though they probably die younger and make more mistakes too. This is the consequence where the public must have its health and education service - but it does not want to pay higher taxes for more time (trained staff) resources for these services. It is the same where teachers are required to put in more time on the cheap. The public sector and voluntary sector is then literally worked to death - because people who have been turned into Type A managers, doctors, nurses and teachers, have more heart attacks and strokes.
Obviously the time management problems that exist at the interface between public and voluntary sector organisations and citizens in need are not simply waiting list problems. Particularly at the bottom of the social structure, where health, care and environmental problems are concentrated, there is a much greater difficulty of synchronising with public and voluntary services. This difficulty is getting worse now that services are more located in the community.
In conclusion
The identification of an appropriate pace and amount of work is, it should be said, only useful if we then decide that we will not work beyond that pace. This requires a personal decision - and/or a group one. About a year ago I decided that if my work continued to be as stressful as it was then, it would be better not to work at all. It was important to be able to contemplate the possibility of leaving my job altogether in order to set up, in my mind, a marker, beyond which I was not prepared to work under any circumstances. Without this decision, that one has a 'bail out point', one has no natural or obvious limit beyond which one will not keep on trying to do more, even though it is futile.
It then became possible to admit to myself that some of my overwork - e.g. Attending some meetings - was really more about trying to be seen. It was my attempt to retain some influence by being thought of as a 'hard worker for good causes'. When I abandoned this idea as futile I was released to start to adjust all my thinking.
Now I think that an important contribution to a sustainable society is to be made when overworked people decide to drop out, or radically reduce, the amount they work - if necessary reducing their income and consumption at the same time. Much consumption is, in any case, akin to comfort eating, a sort of psychological compensation or substitute for living. Since high consumption is also a burden to the ecology of the planet the greater well being is probably to be found in a lower energy, lower income and lower work life style for those who are currently overworked, overweight and over tired. Giving up our huge ideas about ourselves and our ambitions might be just what is needed.
None of this, however, should be interpreted as meaning that dealing with stress is wholely a matter for workers themselves. Stress cannot be dealt with by setting up a stress industry of counselling and other services, telling workers to work less but maintaining the pressures on them by ceaseless reorganisations and performance management pressures. Something has to give here too otherwise people have to recognise the truth - their only realistic option is to drop out or reduce their workloads and we need support arrangements for people to do so - whatever our betters say about 'work' being a duty.
What would help - a provisional list
A moratorium and halt to re-organisations in the public sector and local government. It is time trade unions started pointing out that permanent reorganisations end up making staff sick.
Clear acknowledgement from management/funders that it recognises that staff are under pressure and that dealing with this overwork is a priority that overrides other priorities as staff health is being negatively effected.
It would be iniquitous or hypocritical of managements to tell staff to work shorter hours and, at the same time, not be prepared to accept the possible effects of that - i.e. managements and funders must INDICATE THEIR WILLINGNESS TO TAKE ONBOARD and understand DEVIATIONS FROM TARGETS when the reasons for these deviations are clearly explained. and targets prove unrealistic.
Encouraging reflection and reading time in temporary 'work troughs' - rather than taking on new work and over hyping the peaks.
Such clear statements would give staff permission so that they are prepared to (risk) the sacrifice of other priorities and targets - e.g. Service Level Agreements that do not get wholely fulfilled.
Targets should be flexible and negotiated/set at the lowest possible level, not imposed from above by people with no experience of operational problems.
The frequency of monitoring should be reduced whereover possible - e.g. quarterly to yearly.
Staff should be given time out and help to work out what they feel are appropriate times for them to do the tasks involved in their jobs - and the contrast with the times actually required should be discussed working with and through trade unions.
People should be given practical support and advice if they wish to work part time or drop out of employment if their health is clearly suffering.
Brian Davey
Written in a personal capacity and copied at own expense. (Not the responsbility of my employer)
Written between June and September 2001
© BRIAN DAVEY