Uncreative workplaces

Posted on | July 1, 2008 | 2 Comments

Below is the text from my talk at last week’s cci conference, “Creating Value: Between Commerce and Commons”. Thanks to the participants of my study for allowing me to publish this. Given the overall tone of the event, and the upbeat nature of many presentations in the Workplace Futures stream, I think it’s important for stories like these to be heard. An accompanying powerpoint with pictures is here; meanwhile some liveblogging and other reflections from the conference are available over at Gatewatching. I would urge the many other bloggers in attendance to share their thoughts!

I’m currently in Brisbane airport waiting to start the long haul to Jamaica. With whatever wireless I can steal during transit I’ll try to account for the last few weeks of hard-core conferencing…

In trying to understand the workplace of the future, it is crucial to understand the workplace of the present. In this paper I provide some evidence of changes to contemporary white collar employment in recent years, particularly the impact of new media technologies on the work and home lives of information professionals working in some of Brisbane’s largest cultural and communications organisations.

At this conference we will no doubt hear a lot about the emancipatory promise of a creative workplace that is always on the horizon. But for every enterprising innovator or start-up entrepreneur that is heralded as the employee of the future, there remains a vast layer of information workers in large organisations who facilitate, disseminate and respond to the creative ideas produced by others—and will continue to do so in order for the information economy to flourish.

My current 3 year research project, ‘Working From Home: New media technology, workplace culture and the changing nature of domesticity’ studies the workstyles of these employees in the engine room of the cultural and creative industries, and includes academics, public servants, policy officers, branding and marketing strategists, librarians, senior directors, infrastructure and assets managers, online journalists and web developers. My research is trying to identify what I call the ‘presence bleed’ that results as mobile devices increasingly allow employees to work outside the office, on the road and at home, asking what effects this has on people’s lives and relationships.

For this paper I’ll focus on the youngest workers in my study, because it seems that the experiences of this latest generation of workers can help to identify priorities for training and policy fitting the current and coming employment landscape.

To provide a profile for these employees, they are all university educated and in their mid to late 20s. Their location in the workplace hierarchy means that they are usually on fixed term contracts, often hired repeatedly and at short notice to deliver specific tasks that the organisation depends upon for its functioning. The security of ongoing employment therefore eludes them, despite their ongoing and important contributions, and there is pressure on them to perform to a standard that is proven and reliable—if not for their current employer to recognise, then to build a portfolio for prospective employers.

Their casual status typically prevents them from accruing any of the added benefits of salaried work within a large and authoritative organisation. One participant, for instance, found it easier to come in to work late at night or on weekends because as a casual she couldn’t get access to studios during normal hours. She also didn’t have a log-in provided for her computer to export the audio she needed to produce as part of her job—she had to borrow another person’s which would regularly change for security reasons. She had no on-site tech support for the hours she spent filing her stories (between 7pm and midnight):

The big problem with that is obviously I’m always coming in after hours, so there’s no tech support at all. The mini disc in this studio doesn’t work, so I have to try and crack into the next… I run on mini disc, because that was the equipment supplied to me… when I started my employment.

And the mini disc in this studio doesn’t work, so I have to try and use the set up in the next room to upload the mini disc and then come back in here to do the editing. Although sometimes that studio is locked because somebody’s been using it and then it’s locked onto their user name and I can’t unlock it without putting in their user name. Yeah. (Female Casual Reporter, 25)

For this casual reporter, work is often a lonely, independent venture met at odd hours without senior surveillance, security, technical support or indeed any contact with colleagues. Another key obstacle is that her modest income means the technology that would assist in making the job easier (eg. using mp3s or working from home) is prohibitively expensive, and both the training and the technology formats she was initially provided are now outdated. Because the actual experience working with the organisation involves inadequate training, modest pay, a lack of wider institutional funding, and little if any collegial interaction, these employees use the organisation’s name as CV filler to move somewhere else: the authority of the employer’s brand name assures cultural capital that can be traded up in time.

Another casual employee who has moved on from her position since this interview shares some of these sentiments:

It was like I didn’t know how to do shit and I knew I didn’t know how to do shit but I was very passionate about the job. But I didn’t know like technical stuff and I didn’t know how to do it but no one was there to really support you or help you or teach you. It was like well, this is what you do and you figure out to do it. (Female Office Casual, 24)

An interview participant who spent a lot of time on her own in the office had developed a term for keeping herself company and amused at work—what she called “recreational internetting”. Apart from using social networking sites, she also listed a range of daily activities that weren’t exactly work-oriented:

I look up the news, I do Internet banking, I look up celebrity gossip, I look up YouTube and general browsing of crap; Wikipedia – if I ever think of something that I want to look up; IMDb – the Internet Movie Database. But that would be mostly it. I do a bit of – flights – I look up flights and travel, do my travel arrangements. (Female Sessional lecturer and PhD student, 26)

In her office, she claimed, ‘we tend to eat our lunch at our desk, and that’s when I’ll do a lot of that recreational Internetting.’

For this generation of employees the split between work and lunchtime is rarely marked by any attempt to leave the office environment but instead tends to be differentiated by consuming different content on-screen. Other younger workers share similar stories. In the typical 7 or 8 hour day, one web worker claimed: “We don’t get up from our desk at all”:

There’s a culture in here of eating at our desks; so you go and warm something up in the microwave, and then come back and eat at your desk, which I don’t like. (Female Online News Editor, 30).

Comments like these suggest that the literature on workplace culture gets it wrong when it claims that working from home has a negative impact on employee sociality. Employees that are physically co-present also regularly prefer to communicate through the screen, not only because it makes interaction more controllable from the sender’s point of view, but because of the perhaps mistaken assumption that it is less disruptive.

Of course this assumption leads to some significant effects: namely, the chronic email overload in information jobs. Email is the cause of constant lament and frustration and has clearly become an entrenched part of organisational dynamics, with individual workers having to develop tactics to manage a constant expectation that they will be available through the screen, if not in person. This employee of a major telecommunications company has strategies for dealing with the expectation of fast-turnaround requests. The start of the day is a crucial time:

I try to delete and file as soon as I get them and I like to make sure that my emails don’t go over the page as in the one pane that you can see on the front. I try and keep it to the one pane otherwise I start to get stressed out.

But usually when I come in, in the morning there is like three panes and then it’s just a matter of getting it down to a level where I feel comfortable to be able to go to meetings and not feel like I should be doing all my emails.

I definitely get stressed about the amount of emails that come through and the urgency of some of the emails. Like they come through and expect a response by close of business that day and it might require you to check with the whole team about something and it’s hard to get in touch with everyone.

This potential that an email might be important and require action affects her ability to concentrate when things aren’t actually urgent. That she is always expecting that something might be requiring action affects her overall disposition:

I notice every time a single email comes in. I don’t close it and only look at it every three hours which you’re probably supposed to do but I’m like an addict with email and have to see the minute it comes in and see if it’s important or not. If it isn’t I’ll continue but if it is I’ll do it straight away. (Female Telco Marketer, 25)

So those workers that do hold secure positions but are at entry levels of the organisation are subject to highly bureaucratic and hierarchical management cultures. For them, mobile and wireless devices deliver new forms of imposition and surveillance as much as they do efficiency or freedom. The fast turnarounds and deadlines that these technologies facilitate are the cause of high anxiety. Some of the measures used to manage email volume include clearing the inbox during breakfast, monitoring and replying during knock-off drinks and continuing work-related contact even in bed.

It is for this reason that online technologies must now be factored into any test of ‘work-life’ balance—and workplaces need to develop explicit policies to set limits on the levels of screen commitment required of employees.

My final example is what we might call the ideal creative employee: a 24 year-old radio producer and part time musician. Employed in morning radio, his schedule involves early starts and a lot of media monitoring to stay abreast of breaking stories. The temptation of such an interesting job is to keep working when he gets home, a tension that heightens when working different hours to his partner. He describes the rules he has been trying to establish about this, such as:

I try not to work right before I go to bed. Apart from just checking what’s happening in the news but that’s more – I think I do that anyway because I think I’m a little bit paranoid that some place has blown up and I just want to know about it before I go to bed. But no, not work as such before I go to bed.

Also I try not to feel like, if I for some reason, am not able to see the news or if there’s something that’s preventing me from being as connected, I try not to feel too guilty about it.

Like many, this participant uses online platforms like MySpace and Facebook to share intimacy, solidarity and friendship while at home, but as an amateur musician, the pleasures of these social networking sites are increasingly limited. In his words:

Obviously I want to be in touch with people. I feel as though technology is blackmailing me. I’m feeling as though if I don’t maintain some kind of – especially with music – online hyperactive presence, not that I aspire to this but just my impressions, that suddenly everything that’s dear in my life would just sort of go away and disappear and vanish that I will have no friends, that no one will turn up to my gigs and then I will practically cease to exist. I mean, that’s kind of the reality, that’s the threat that I feel with technology at the moment. It’s a terrible thing.

These workers are increasingly tethered to the keyboard for business and pleasure, and the health ramifications of this require serious discussion as ever more media-savvy generations gain employment.

Placed in relation to the other employees in my study it seems clear that new media technologies have been embraced by workers in information jobs because the desire to be connected, and hence to be recognised as valuable and productive, has its roots in a middle-class professional persona that is only now learning to adjust to an ‘always-on’ society. In their use of new media technology, information professionals demonstrate their loyalty to an increasingly unfashionable ‘social ethic’ (Whyte 1956)—one that can be positioned precisely between the motivations of commerce and commons.

But this paper has outlined some of the problems that younger workers currently face as always-on technologies exacerbate the precarity that is already a constituent feature of white-collar apprenticeships. Technologies are part and parcel of the loneliness and anomie of the office cubicle; the lack of support from physically present colleagues; and the new forms of stress arising from the demands of constant contact and identity performance.

These developing health issues emerging from repeated computer use that my participants report—even in their mid twenties—include high levels of anxiety and paranoia about missing vital information, RSI-related conditions, overall body tension, and various kinds of (often denied, forgotten or overlooked) back, arm and eye discomfort. These symptoms are the result of mental labour fast supplanting manual labour as the basis for physical distress among workers and are part of the overall effects of the sedentarism normalised in many office jobs.

Part of my overall aim with the study is to argue that workplaces of the future will need to pay close attention to current obstacles to sustainable work practices—particularly those that develop in tandem with new media technologies supposedly so liberating. And if large organisations are to keep a ready supply of workers beyond their poorly paid traineeships, they are going to have to ensure that employees at every level of the organisation are valued.

The question this poses for discussion is: How do we train workers for what can often be a disappointing, lonely and challenging workplace reality?

Category: Research, Work

Comments

2 Responses to “Uncreative workplaces”

  1. Neddy
    July 1st, 2008 @ 6:20 pm

    I am so excited to see some of this research come to life! x

  2. Ian Rogers
    August 14th, 2008 @ 1:38 pm

    Hi Mel, the lunch at the desk issue rang out like a siren. My friends even have a name for it: eating aldesko!

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