The tug of war between managers and employees continues.

Let me start by saying, I am somewhere in between a capitalist and socialist, I don’t believe either is completely wrong or right, a balance between the two is needed.

I mentioned in a prior post that before covid, a lot of companies made you fill out a separate HR forms, to work from home, regardless of whether your job really needed to be office based or not, HR helped craft those company policies, which helped keep many employees shackled to the office instead of embracing modern technology.

There was often bias in who was granted the ability to work from home, you found it was usually parents, senior managers or people who had good relationships with their line managers who got the ‘privilege’, others where just given corporate goop for reasons they could not work from home.

I once was on a panel arguing that we need to embrace working from home and have smaller satellite sites, this will save on Rent and Business Rates, this was shot down, as “you can’t manage staff remotely, they need to be in the office”.

This was infuriating, the insinuation that when employees are at work, they are working flat out, is not true, there is tons of idle time in the office, in fact, the office becomes distracting for those who like to tunnel into their work.

It is not uncommon to find that those who are in roles that don’t involve phone calls, waste around for about 20/30 mins before they start, long lunches, gossip, and banter; no one’s working flat out, all day every day.

There is also an environmental benefit: biggest one is transportation, there is also less waste from fast food (lunch time), air conditioning unit and paper usage (pushes companies towards paperless).

We also need to stop acting like companies have our best interests at heart, these are the same companies who lobby governments to make employment terms more favourable to them, openly say ‘Red Brick or Russell Group’ University candidates only, or the most brutal, make someone forcefully redundant who has been loyal to the company 5+ years.

I was watching the TV show ‘Industry’ and it quoted a popular saying, “you’re only as good as your last quarter”. As much as companies cry about people working to contract, companies have done a poor job of looking after staff who have been burnt out by the company, looking after staff who have suffered mental health issues because of the job, looking out for staff who relationships have collapsed because of all the extra hours.

Don’t preach mental health concerns, then say “people are lazy” or my favourite “nobody wants to work anymore” or “they are quiet quitting”, when there are reasons behind these actions.

Employers have been comfortable exploiting employees for eons, the fact that working your job, for what you signed up and paid to do, has been given this ridiculous title is insane.

Is it quiet quitting or is it stopping an accepted exploitation?

No one should be working for free unless voluntary, if employees doing what they are paid to do is a problem for your organisation, you have been benefiting/profiting from exploitation of your employees, using PDR’s and Bonuses as whipping devices, you are now upset because employees are saying fine, we’ll do exactly what you hire and pay us to do.   

Employees are now learning that HR is not our friend, their loyalty is to the company not the employees, HR has been quietly complicit in trying to protect companies in discrimination cases and watching staff be underpaid.

Bloomberg describes the new stance, as employees doing the bare minimum, but it’s never been described as employers under paying staff.

Employees are acting their wage; after covid many are embracing “work to live, not live to work” and fighting back for a work life balance.

@Brainthrough

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