Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It_ The Results-Only Revolution - Cali Ressler [13]
Next time you’re at work, try listening for Sludge. The next time people are gossiping or venting about another employee’s work habits, listen to the underlying assumptions being made about that person. You will hear lots of strange beliefs about time and place. You will hear assumptions that have nothing to do with whether or not that person is actually doing their job, but rather the way they behave at work. You might also hear what is ultimately behind every piece of Sludge: the sound of people feeling out of control. In each of these judgments there is a core truth. I have no control. I have no control over this broken system, and so I’m forced to judge other people based on rules that I instinctually know are wrong.
If the game is to prove that you’re putting in time at the office, then of course you’re going to judge someone who isn’t putting in their time. If you have no control over when and how you work, then of course you’re going to feel jealous and resentful of someone who appears to be free. If the game is unfair but you can’t change it, your only choices are to suffer in silence or to vent.
If Sludge is the sound of people feeling out of control, for management it’s also an excellent means of control. Think back to the story about Heather. If you’re not at work at eight then you’re not performing. Somehow in the space of fifteen minutes or half an hour she went from a good employee (on time at eight every day!) to a bad employee (nice of you to join us). Using nothing other than the big hand and the little hand, her boss put Heather under her thumb, and for what?
Seemingly innocent comments tell us everything about what a workplace values. We care more about time and the appearance of being dedicated and present than we do about actual performance. We care more about controlling people than about letting them succeed. We’d rather have order than excellence.
This is why you can change jobs every year and still find yourself running into the same problems with work. This is why the love you feel in the job interview eventually sours when you find out how the place really works. This is why even “progressive” companies or “young” companies can still suck. It’s not the finer points of your workplace—it’s every workplace. It’s not the bad boss or the unfair break policy. It’s the very nature of how we work.
Time, belief, and judgment are one way of looking at the problem of work, but before we move to the next chapter, we’d like to offer another. There are two opposing forces at work on your life: demand and control.
Demands push at you from one direction, and they include things like doing your job, taking care of yourself and your home, staying connected to your family and friends. These are the basic ones. People also have demands put on them from a sick or aging parent, volunteer work, a neighborhood association, a city league softball team. Even the need to sit back once in a while and read a book counts. A demand is anything you require to live your life.
The tool for pushing back against demand is control. Imagine a typical Saturday. You might run errands, have time with family and friends, go to a movie, eat lunch, pay bills, whatever. Because you’re in control of your time on Saturday you have the freedom to satisfy those demands as you see fit. You might eat lunch at three thirty instead of a traditional “lunch-time” because you’d rather catch a movie at noon and eat afterward. You might get up an hour early and pay bills and shop online to get those chores out of the way before the rest of the house wakes up, and you do so without resentment because you’re choosing to get through the low-value work so