The Living Dead

The popular depiction of today’s office worker as highly stressed, struggling to get ahead in the rat race of today’s cut-throat corporate world, is a familiar one. Yet the key concepts in a book at the top of the UK business list in November 2005 were boredom, time-wasting and apathy. The Living Dead, by Times columnist David Bolchover, turns notions of time-management and striving to maintain a work-life balance inside out — its aim is to ‘unearth the last taboo’, that a large proportion of office workers do not actually do very much work at all. Offices across the public and private sectors around the world are argued to be filled with workers whose talents and energies are being wasted, as employees spend their time pretending to work hard instead of actually doing so.

Statistics such as ‘14.6% of US workers admit to surfing the internet for non-work related items constantly’, presented in support of this perturbing phenomenon, may elicit a nod of identification from those workers who while away their employer’s time playing internet games at their desk. The international popularity of Dilbert cartoons180 and The Office, a UK ‘mockumentary’ parodying workplace dynamics, reflects the element of identification that many people feel with their own working lives — work is not a meaningful activity which engages our skills and motivation, but a often a façade of productivity that must be paid lip-service to between the hours of 9am and 5pm.

Research by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD)181 in the UK uses the concept of a ‘psychological contract’ between individual employees and organisations to describe the unspoken agreement based on mutual trust and fairness that exists in addition to legal contracts. Good quality supervisory leadership and appropriate Human Resources policies are considered key to ensuring that this contract is upheld, bringing about high levels of employee satisfaction and performance. A survey published in November 2005182 studied the ‘organisational DNA’  of 50,000 companies worldwide and came to the conclusion that around 70% of businesses have ‘unhealthy’ organisational cultures, where poor relations between staff led to low levels of efficiency. It also found that low-level employees were more able to diagnose unhealthy practices than senior management. Bolchover’s book aims to catalyse an improvement in middle-management practices, to bridge the gap between the rosy vision of efficiency held by senior management and the reality at many office desks.

The issue of effective leadership is important, but problems undermining meaningful employment and work satisfaction can run deeper than being undervalued and overlooked by an ‘invisible’ manager. A survey183 of 15,000 workers worldwide found that one quarter of US and Brazilian, one third of British and 40% of French employees are indifferent to their work and the success of their employer. A job pays the bills for these people, but disengagement from the goals of their efforts means that the activity that consumes one third to one half of their waking life is compartmentalised, separated from pursuits which bring meaning and value into our existence. Consequentially, low energy levels, depression and reliance on alcohol and other drugs are on the increase. A 2004/2005 study by the British Health and Safety Executive184 suggests that depression or anxiety caused by stress, or perhaps underwork, account for an estimated 12.8 million reported lost working days per year in the UK — more than double the levels of 1990.

Neil Crofts, founder of the website and www.authenticbusiness.co.uk author, argues that this dissatisfaction with our working lives is a symptom of the disharmony between the objectives of the current individualistic, hard-hearted form of capitalism in which we operate in and the well-being of the planet and its people. In the Authentic Business November 2005 newsletter, Crofts presents health problems associated with work, smoking and overeating, and also social and ecological degradation on a community and global level, as self harm carried out on an individual and collective scale. Whether they keel over from working 70-hour weeks or sit idly playing computer Solitaire, millions of people are conforming to society’s expectations regarding the acquisition of increasing levels of material wealth, even if the process is at direct odds with self-fulfilment, maintaining close family relationships and the ecological well-being of the planet. Cycles of self-harm are argued by Crofts to be propelled by a lack of confidence in ourselves and each other, resulting from a false separation between what we value and what we feel we must do with our lives.

Mohandas Gandhi famously said that ‘you must be the change you want to see in the world’. The ‘authentic self’, to use Croft’s term, is argued to be the building block of a more just, safer, happier global existence. Central to the concept is our confidence in our own judgements of the world we perceive around us — if the factors influencing our decision-making are based mainly on norms and expectations shaped by families, communities and the media, we may not be following paths that promote our psychological and physical well-being and consequently, the well-being of the planet. Accepting that all that glitters is not gold is easy. But stepping back and realising that even if it is gold, it is no big deal, requires a good deal of confidence in your own judgement and in your capabilities to find happiness elsewhere. Our blinkered system of material wealth-chasing has successfully taught us how to be employees, bosses and shoppers. Those who want to live, work, eat and travel without harm to others or the environment have to step out of this cushioned comfort zone and simply be human again.

The suggestion that uncovering our ‘authentic’ selves will enable us to both be happier and also interact more harmoniously with each-other and the planet invites us to believe that the ‘true’ human nature is cooperative and loving. This essential ‘human nature’ has been debated for centuries by different religious traditions, with many Oriental philosophies suggesting that our spiritual nature is an evolving one, from one reincarnation to the next, whilst Abrahamic religions include a concept of ‘original sin’. However, Oriental philosophies suggest that our true nature, once freed from the illusions of the material world that creates a sense of separation in individuals, is a connected expression of the whole. For some the implication of this is that there is no separate self, and we are inventing one, whereas others consider the authentic self is a ‘higher’ self, where all physical, mental and spiritual aspects of our existence are harmonious with the whole. Some strands of thought in Abrahamic religions, such as some Sufism, also stress the oneness of humans with a universal God as the original situation. In this sense, an authentic self would have a relationship with ‘God’. Therefore both Oriental and Abrahamic traditions provide some encouragement for the view that we have a natural capacity for being ‘good’ towards each-other. Other insights into human nature, from evolutionary biology to post-structural sociology, raise some difficult questions. Mainstream evolutionary biologists’ assumptions about the inevitable spread of selfish genes is problematic if we consider how cooperative and even altruistic behaviour may have helped communities outperform others.185 Sociological and psycho-sociological insights into the social construction of identities raise the possibility that there is no ‘un-socialised’ self that can be discovered, just different socially constructed views of who we tell our ‘selves’ we are. However, such theoretical positions are difficult to test, and instead some focus attention on helping people to recognise processes of socialisation that may be influencing their own sense of self and who this helps or hinders, as by doing this, helping them to free themselves from those processes - if they so decide. Efforts by Crofts and others to help people discover their authentic selves resonates with efforts at ‘consciencisation’ pioneered with the poor in Latin America some decades ago186, and their work can be regarded as developing a ‘pedagogy of the oppressed oppressor’.

Some will be suspicious of the notion that work within a capitalist system characterised by exploitation in order to generate profits can allow the expression of the authentic self at all. In an attempt to bridge the gulf between the authentic self and meaningful work centred on the ‘bottom-line’, Croft’s book Authentic Business (2005) defines such an organisation as built on a purpose beyond profit, that is ‘profoundly held’ and that is socially and/or environmentally positive. The decision-makers in such a business still aim to generate profit, but must foster integrity between communication and action and act on the basis of principles, not just jumping on bandwagons. It is argued that these businesses will boast high levels of efficiency and employee motivation; ‘everyone working in an authentic business lives and breathes what the company stands for’. British companies Innocent Drinks and Yeo Valley Organic are two of the given examples of successful ‘authentic’ businesses. These are also described as social enterprises by some commentators, indicating some overlap in the concepts, and the search for appropriate terminology to describe and understand people who seek to make a positive difference through working in the private sector.

‘Corporate social responsibility’ and ‘corporate citizenship’ are often discussed in terms of issue areas like child labour or deforestation, or business functions such as marketing or public affairs. However, at the root of the movement of professionals that coax companies to perform better in these areas is people’s search for a more meaningful way of work – as part of a more meaningful way of life. By engaging this system in order to change it, these professionals risk imbibing its values as our own and beginning to see their work merely in terms of reports, projects, and promotions, and becoming a new breed of ‘living dead’. This means the development and implementation of effective processes for re-awakening and reaffirming the values of professionals working in this area will be essential to the success of voluntary corporate responses to sustainable development.

contents © Greenleaf Publishing, apart from the Introduction © jem bendell, 2006. site by waywardmedia.com