The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [59]
For most of human history, the only instrument needed to induce employees to complete their duties energetically and adroitly was the whip. So long as workers had only to kneel down and retrieve stray ears of corn from the threshing-room floor or heave quarried stones up a slope, they could be struck hard and often, with impunity and benefit. But the rules of employment had to be rewritten with the emergence of tasks whose adequate performance required their protagonists to be to a significant degree content, rather than simply terrified or resigned. Once it became evident that someone who was expected to remove brain tumours, draw up binding legal documents or sell condominiums with convincing energy could not profitably be sullen or resentful, morose or angry, the mental well-being of employees commenced to be a supreme object of managerial concern.
The jobs in the world’s glass office towers cannot be administered by the fear of an external power. Watchtowers are of no use in encouraging staff to engage their higher faculties in the drafting of annual tax-deferment schedules, requiring senior managers to handle their charges with patient and costly respect. These overlords have been deprived of the cavalier attitudes of eighteenth-century ship owners, who were enviably free to propel their slaves into the mid-Atlantic at early signs of scurvy. The new figures of authority must involve themselves with day-care centres and, at monthly get-togethers, animatedly ask their subordinates how they are enjoying their jobs so far.
Responsible for wrapping the iron fist of authority in its velvet glove is Jane Axtell, head of the accountancy firm’s Human Resources department, based on the sixth floor. She recently organised a landscape-painting competition to help the auditors to release their untapped creativity, and is now, in an effort further to boost morale, engaged in lining the building’s corridors and reception areas with plaques bearing the legend ‘Our Values Statement: Who We Are and What We Stand For’.
There would certainly have been less for a diarist such as Saint-Simon to report on in Louis XIV’s court had Axtell been present at Versailles. Thanks to her, the company now has in place a zero-tolerance policy towards bullying and gossip, a twenty-four-hour hotline for distressed employees, forums in which complaints may be lodged against colleagues and a tactful procedure by which a manager can let a team member know that his breath smells.
Underlying these innovations is the belief that workplace dynamics are no less complicated or unexpectedly intense than family relations, with only the added difficulty that whereas families are at least well-recognised and sanctioned loci for hysteria reminiscent of scenes from Medea, office life typically proceeds behind a mask of shallow cheerfulness, leaving workers grievously unprepared to handle the fury and sadness continually aroused by their colleagues.
Contrived as the strategies instituted by the Human Resources department may seem, it is in fact their very artificiality which guarantees their success, for the laboured tone of away-day seminars and group feedback exercises allows workers manfully to protest that they have nothing whatsoever to learn from submitting to such disciplines. Then, like guests at a house party who at first mock their host’s suggestion of a round of Pictionary, they may be surprised to find themselves, as the game gets under way, able thereby to channel their hostilities, identify their affections and escape the agony of insincere chatter.
There are, admittedly, few historical