#wordrobe.nyc

[stoweboyd]

Work Futures Daily - Work, Work, Work

Stress, surveillance, and a shorter life: all in a day's work?

2018-04-05 Beacon NY - I enjoyed this story on Wardrobe.nyc, an atelier that has taken the notion of a business uniform to a new extreme, one that Jason Gay finds quite appealing after trying it out for a week.

Among other comments, he found the starkly black-and-white eight-piece collection empowering, both in its brutalist paring down of choice, and how it makes the wearer feel:

When I put on any grouping of the eight-piece—the suit, the long coat, the hoodie, the trousers—I immediately felt like a more interesting person. Suddenly, I was a private art dealer. Or an in-demand architect. I resembled someone who had an opinion about hotels in Berlin and Spanish wine. I probably knew Bono.

But he wasn't a more interesting person, really, was he? Well, maybe a little, since adopting a uniform is a change in your ways, like selling your car andusing public transportation. An intentional simplification.

In the end, he sent back his new ensemble, both because of the expense — $3,000 for matched a coat, a blazer, pants, a hoodie, a knit sweater, a dress shirt, a T-shirt and trousers — and also because he chickened out on wearing some of the pieces to work: he's a sportswriter.

But he was ambivalent about sending it back:

But don’t get the wrong idea. I really grew to like it. I’ve never had a look (I went from postcollege slob to cargo-pants Dad very quickly), and here was a look. The sharp-shouldered long coat was a real stunner—people actually moved out of my way on the train when I wore it. Another favorite was the trousers, which were Chaplin-like baggy. I’d never buy pants like that in a million years, but they made it seem as if I had a developed sense of style, even though I don’t.

In the end, I did not become a tech mogul. I did not learn a lick of French. I didn’t even wake up later in the morning. But I did get a taste of where the uniform wearers are coming from—how a lack of choice can be liberating, how even the simplest style can be a statement. In my uniform, I felt like the future. But now my uniform is going back, and I’m returning to my old closet full of choices, colors and sizes, which suddenly feels very big—and very yesterday.

A great line: In my uniform, I felt like the future.

On Work Stress

Dylan Walsh interviewed Jeffrey Pfeffer, the author of Dying for a Paycheck, which we are supposed to take literally. He asserts it the fifth leading cause of death in the US.

Walsh: I was struck by the story of Robert Chapman, CEO of Barry-Wehmiller, standing in front of 1,000 other CEOs and saying, “You are the cause of the health care crisis.”

Pfeffer: It’s true. He takes three points and puts them together. The first point, which is consistent with data reported by the World Economic Forum and other sources, is that an enormous percentage of the health care cost burden in the developed world, and in particular in the U.S., comes from chronic disease — things like diabetes and cardiovascular and circulatory disease. You begin with that premise: A large fraction — some estimates are 75 percent — of the disease burden in the U.S. is from chronic diseases.

Second, there is a tremendous amount of epidemiological literature that suggests that diabetes, cardiovascular disease and metabolic syndrome — and many health-relevant individual behaviors such as overeating and underexercising and drug and alcohol abuse — come from stress.

And third, there is a large amount of data that suggests the biggest source of stress is the workplace. So that’s how Chapman can stand up and make the statement that CEOs are the cause of the health care crisis: You are the source of stress, stress causes chronic disease, and chronic disease is the biggest component of our ongoing and enormous health care costs.

I really click with this term social pollution, coined by Nuria Chinchilla:

Walsh: You reference professor Nuria Chinchilla [of IESE Business School], who describes this as social pollution. What does that mean?

Pfeffer: She has said that the real inconvenient truth is not just that there is environmental pollution, which there certainly is, but that there is also social pollution. The work hours that companies are demanding of their employees are causing the breakup of marriages, burdens on raising children, and general disruption to family life. And the family unit is an important source of social support.

You can see this in stories from my book — the GE guy who’s on the road all the time and never sees his kids until he finally decides to quit. So she coined the term “social pollution,” and I think it’s a wonderful term.

Companies should care about what they are doing to the social environment, not just the physical environment.

Pfeffer means it when he says, in essence, that companies are two-faced: they say they want to be sustainable but overwork their employees, they say they care about their employees but crow when the laminate costs by laying them off.

After a presentation to Stanford Alumni when he made this case — that social pollution is as bad for health as air pollution and cigarette smoking -- a lawyer approached him and said there would be lawsuits about this:

Walsh: On what grounds?

Pfeffer: In a way parallel to the lawsuits that were filed against tobacco companies. Some companies are killing their workers. People have been harmed. If I had to bet on how this will change, some company is going to get sued, some lawyer will win an enormous award, and that will open the floodgates.

Asked if he had changed his mind about anything after working on the book, he answered:

Yes, I changed my mind in the following way: It’s worse than I thought.

On Workplace Surveillance

Will AI tools in the hands of management lead to a Benthamite Panopticon, where all are watched all the time and nothing goes unlogged? An Economist piece pleads for humanism, but doesn't actually sound too hopeful:

Surveillance at work is nothing new. Factory workers have long clocked in and out; bosses can already see what idle workers do on their computers. But AI makes ubiquitous surveillance worthwhile, because every bit of data is potentially valuable. Few laws govern how data are collected at work, and many employees unguardedly consent to surveillance when they sign their employment contract. Where does all this lead?

[...]

Yet AI’s benefits will come with many potential drawbacks. Algorithms may not be free of the biases of their programmers. They can also have unintended consequences. The length of a commute may predict whether an employee will quit a job, but this focus may inadvertently harm poorer applicants. Older staff might work more slowly than younger ones and could risk losing their positions if all AI looks for is productivity.

And surveillance may feel Orwellian — a sensitive matter now that people have begun to question how much Facebook and other tech giants know about their private lives. Companies are starting to monitor how much time employees spend on breaks. Veriato, a software firm, goes so far as to track and log every keystroke employees make on their computers in order to gauge how committed they are to their company. Firms can use AI to sift through not just employees’ professional communications but their social-media profiles, too. The clue is in Slack’s name, which stands for “searchable log of all conversation and knowledge”.

[...]

Some people are better placed than others to stop employers going too far. If your skills are in demand, you are more likely to be able to resist than if you are easy to replace. Paid-by-the-hour workers in low-wage industries such as retailing will be especially vulnerable. That could fuel a resurgence of labour unions seeking to represent employees’ interests and to set norms. Even then, the choice in some jobs will be between being replaced by a robot or being treated like one.

[...]

The march of AI into the workplace calls for trade-offs between privacy and performance. A fairer, more productive workforce is a prize worth having, but not if it shackles and dehumanises employees. Striking a balance will require thought, a willingness for both employers and employees to adapt, and a strong dose of humanity.

On Innovating Innovation

Umair Haque uses Facebook as a cautionary tale about being truly innovative, and then spins into a manifesto for innovating innovation. Or, as I would spin it, adopting complex ethics that transcend cheap ideologies like 'maximizing sharehold value', 'to the victor go the spoils', or 'everyone for themselves'.

Yesterday, innovation meant technological innovation. But today, it means institutional and organizational innovation — ways to motivate, inspire, and coordinate human effort, ideas, and imagination that have greater, deeper, and truer human benefits.

[...]

How do we build organizations that can really create, sustain, and nurture human dignity, happiness, meaning, health, wisdom, truth, freedom? If you think that we have good answers to that question, take a hard look at the fractured, collapsing global order. Tomorrow’s breakthroughs won’t be what we think — glittering technologies. But new kinds of organizations and institutions that can use technologies to put human ideas, effort, and imagination to explosively, meaningfully, beneficial use.

[...]

Too much efficiency and productivity is now costing us prosperity, democracy, and stability — and so it’s time for us to develop models of how human beings can work, live, and play together that are centred on higher, truer, and nobler goals.

[...]

So. We need to innovate innovation. Are we up to the challenge? That is one of the great questions of this decade.

I wonder. We might have to have the Human Spring before we can tackle this challenge. In the meantime, innovation is a handmaiden to the established order, which, as Pfeffer points out in Dying for a Job, is killing us.

Sign up here for notifications of free posts.. I'll get you to subscribe eventually, I bet.

Question or comment? (Can be private, or public: your choice. I occasionally publish public comments or questions.)

Follow me on Twitter.

More media, politics, and social commentary on stoweboyd.com, including bio.