Corporate LARPing

Despite having no ambition and a low tolerance for organisational faff I’ve found myself acting in a middle-management role, for the second time in as many years. It’s a lot easier this time around. “Acting” is apt because there’s a bit of theatre involved. Not in the “fake it til you make it” way, I’m not claiming imposter syndrome here. These jobs are in no way beyond the average person, rather the difficulty for me is that I struggle to recognise parts of it as being valid work. Fortunately I’m still doing pretty much all of the work for my normal job so I’m not completely untethered from utility.

Yes I have read Bullshit Jobs. I don’t think that I’m in a bullshit job, or that we necessarily have any in the organisation. I hope not because we definitely can’t afford to. But I’ve been doing white collar work for a few years now and have noticed some patterns. A new role gets created and new work proliferates to fill however many FTEs have been allocated. Within a year there’s complaints of job creep and under-resourcing and threats of burnout. I don’t want to go into this too much because talking about this stuff ad infinitum is one of the things I consider to be a waste of time when I’m on the clock. Suffice to say I find the whole thing pretty sus.

Because of my background in service jobs/self-employed hustling I hate being at work with nothing to do. In the early days of my email jobs this was probably quite annoying for people around me, but since then I have come to appreciate that it’s truly a marathon. I’ve seen colleagues come and go and procreate and die. Fortunately I realised eventually that the big invisible meta-job is trying to make the work environment pleasant enough that the good people will stay. We’ve been doing pretty good on that the past few years.

Anyway despite this I’ve still struggled with downtime at work and haven’t yet become a stalwart of the 25-minute tea break. The one thing that’s always appeased me when I’m spinning my thumbs is the thought that I could be doing worse than nothing. I could be sending long emails to dozens of recipients re-litigating something that happened a year ago. I could be inventing pointless project work that fails to resolve the one interpersonal issue that it was supposed to obliquely address. I could instigate a review, or even worse, a working group. I could spend a bunch of money on some ill-advised professional development that pisses everyone off. All of that good shit that they pay you the big bucks for.

In my lead role I’ve been coming across this stuff a lot and I’m fighting for my life to not perpetuate it. I haven’t been perfect but I’ve found some clarity of purpose. I try to find out as much information as I can and I’m pretty transparent about telling my teams if it’s going to affect their work. I might live to regret this, but I’ve been working closely with these people for years and I want to treat them like adults. I try to not make anyone’s job harder and if possible to make it easier or more interesting. When shit gets kicked to me I sometimes take it off their hands and sometimes nudge it back with a hint on how to resolve it themselves. I invest time in teaching people how to do stuff on their phones and computers. Not really my job, but actually if I could choose anything that might be part of what I’d like to do. We have extremely variable tech skill levels in our organisation and also heaps of neurodiverse people are drawn to the work and we’ve never really addressed either of these properly in terms of training.

One thing I’m not so strong on is pastoral care. My predecessor in the role is literally a former minister (the church kind) so I decided at the start that I wasn’t going to try to live up to that. But I have found that if I just get people to talk for a while they’ll usually reveal things that are bothering them and often enough they already have an idea of how to solve it. Classic therapy move. I don’t think I have particularly high empathy emotionally but hey, it’s a workplace, you probably don’t want to get too involved. I’m invested mentally in human thriving and that’s probably enough to be getting on with.

Thanks for coming to my shit work chat, there’s not that much else going on at the moment. Pray for me to get bored enough again to finish all the stuff I’ve half written!