The Power of None

OH&S's initiative to encourage staff to wear hardhats and safety vests while inside the office was only moderately successful.

One employee grapples with corporate culture, feedback, ownership, empowerment, and acronyms.

Recently at my workplace we've been agonising over company "culture". So much so that concerned management commissioned a survey. Staff were encouraged to complete a multiple-choice questionnaire about how our culture is, and how we'd like it to be. Well, we did the survey, saw the results, and skated through a series of related meetings. So what did we learn about our workplace culture? In a nutshell: the company wants to be great, thought it was good, turned out to be shit.

Less lateral-thinking management might think that the way to relieve workplace malaise is to make workload commensurate with reward. More pay or less work—hell, a bit of both maybe. But with their raffish penchant for thinking outside the box, management instead held marathon meetings complete with statistics and multicoloured pie charts.

Some people might get cynical about this process. But not me. There's a certain cosiness, I think, to being commodified, formalised, standardised, mathmaticalised, and pie charted—quite frankly, it's nice to know someone cares. And that's the endearing part of the corporate cutting edge: you're a mathematical formula, yet still part of one big, fat, happy family.

I don't know about anyone else, but I'm at my best when rating things on a scale of one to 10, filling out forms, and engaging in feedback. My perfect workday is pie chart by midmorning, one to 10 by lunch, and multiple-choice questionaire by midafternoon—all topped off by a draft "vision statement" once a month. (More than once a month and it loses its orgasmic edge.) Strictly speaking, the statement isn't necessary—I could still go home a happy camper without it—but, damn it, it is kinda nice. It makes me feel like a contributor. It puts a smile on my dial. It replaces "malaise" with "marvelous" in my workplace vocabulary.

Not everyone was happy, though. According to the carpers, this meeting was merely an exercise in corporate doublespeak. This, I felt, was unfair. The meeting wasn't an attempt to obfuscate problems with jargon. It wasn't an attempt to relabel "underpaid" and "overworked", nor an attempt to persuade employees that their concerns were being heard, without actually addressing them. This wasn't feedback as the illusion of reciprocity. Catharsis without cure.

Exactly what it was, I'm not sure. It just wasn't any of those things.

Predictably, at our ensuing vision statement meeting some staff members charged into the fray with their kilts over their heads. These colleagues showed an admirable ability to enter into the spirit of it all. Rarely, I'm sure, have abstract issues of uncertain application and nebulous benefit been debated with such fervour.

At first the relevance of the vision statement wasn't apparent to me. But don't get me wrong: I was chuffed I'd been empowered to contribute to it. Indeed, on reflection I have great faith in the transformative power of our vision statement. Now that it's been hammered out, I expect things at work to improve exponentially. OK, it doesn't address pay or workload, but it does address other issues. For one thing, we'll have a vision, and what's more, we'll have stated it. The benefits of this are obvious, I think. (I know it'll be one less thing preying on my mind.)

As a whole, the vision meeting was a resounding success. Sure, you could see it as four-and-a-half more hours of your finite—and ever-dwindling—existence that you'll never get back, and some might even weep bitter tears for all the filing they could have done. But me? I'm all for it. When staff ownership is at stake... Well, you just try to hold me back, mister.

And let's talk about ownership , shall we? One of my favourite company words. (Admittedly, it had me flustered at first—I wondered if the company's founders had died and left me legal title to the "How to Archive Emails" pdf.)

A thought-provoking concept, ownership. My provoked thoughts were as follows: what, in fact, did I own, and what did it mean? Did it mean I could exercise the traditional Australian rights of ownership—install a stereo in it, paint it, build a second storey on it? And if it was my work that I owned, well, when would the royalties start pouring in?

Because that's ownership, right? If you own it, you can sell it. And when it's sold, you get the proceeds… Don't you? After all, what kind of ownership involves none of the rights and prerequisites of ownership? Why, without them it wouldn't be ownership.

And then the penny dropped. This was corporate ownership. A non-owning form of ownership. You know, the stakeholding you do when you're not a stakeholder.

A metaphor, dummy.

So I didn't actually own anything (not even the "How to Archive Emails" pdf). But that doesn't mean that ownership is some kind of psychobabble, buzzword bullshit. Far from it. I FEEL the ownership. It's coursing through my veins. I like to sip from the ownership chalice regularly—and it's just as well, because on what the company pay me, this is the only kind of ownership I'll ever know.

But I wasn't upset—as a metaphor, it was a cracker. Golly it was empowering.

And that's the other thing: I'm glad the company's so concerned with staff empowerment. Because I feel so fucking powerful it's not funny. Indeed, in true company style I've even turned it into an acronym: IFSFPINF.

But despite my X-ray vision and sudden liking for capes and skin-tight lycra, I'm still stumped. What to do with my newfound power? There are so many possibilities; I'm paralysed by choice. Soon I'm gonna start doing some of management's beloved "rolling out". And when I've had my fill of rolling out, I'm going to start "actioning". In fact, I might just action my rolling out of ownership implementation strategies. There. Now that's power!

All that roguishly dynamic verbiness has empowered me so much I might just edit another chapter. Phew! All that power has gone to my head. If the style manual didn't say otherwise, I might not italicise that word. Hell, I might not anyway!

Oh God, today italics, tomorrow the world. Fuck. Hold me back before someone gets hurt. Or as we in the world of the acronym like to say: HMBBSGH.

An alternative vision statement:

• Don't pretend you're empowering me when you're only giving me the power to decide the tangential and irrelevant.
• Don't conceal unpalatable truths with jargon.
• Don't treat me like a statistic, then pretend we're the Waltons.
• Don't feed me shit, then pretend it's fairy floss.

-- Hans Fruck