Ping-Pong Oppression
Arguably the most pervasive element enabling exploitative office culture is the postmodern trickery of the contemporary working environment. [The Slovenian philosopher] Slavoj Žižek argues that modern employment tactics create the illusion that our employer is our friend. This fabrication empowers the employer while denying the employed the right to vocalize and protest dissatisfaction of their working conditions. “You’re not going to stick around and help out? I thought we were a team? I thought we were friends?” Žižek suggests that the environment of the workplace has been twisted, using architectural devices, to manipulate employees. Kitchens, "break-out spaces," lounges, free food, free coffee -- all this is a postmodern sleight of hand designed to manipulate and disarm staff. By fabricating the illusion of employer as friend, the employed is denied the opportunity to protest, argue, fight, be adversarial, and demand more of their working conditions. These informal spaces are political spaces of control, surveillance, and manipulation.
http://www.archdaily.com/234633/worklifework-balance/
Too much inequality kills the work ethic
Capitalism relies on inequality. Pay disparities steer resources to where they would be most productively employed. Inequality spurs economic growth by providing incentives for people to accumulate human capital and become more productive. It pulls the best and brightest into the most lucrative lines of work, where the most profitable companies hire them. Yet the increasingly outsize rewards accruing to the nation’s elite threaten to gum up this incentive mechanism. If only a very lucky few can aspire to a big reward, most workers are likely to conclude that it is not worth the effort to try. The odds are not on their side. Inequality has been found to turn people off. Ultimately, the question is this: How much inequality is necessary?
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/business/26excerpt.html
Management Foul-up Number One
When companies make money, we assume they are well-managed. That perception is reinforced by the CEOs of those companies who are happy to tell you all the clever things they did to make it happen. The problem with relying on this source of information is that CEOs are highly skilled in a special form of lying called leadership. Leadership involves convincing employees and investors that the CEO has something called a vision, a type of optimistic hallucination that can come true only in an environment in which the CEO is massively overcompensated and the employees have learned to be less selfish.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704025304575285000265955016.html
Results-Only Work Environment
Hennepin County, Minnesota, has taken the idea of a flexible work schedule to its logical extreme: the county is practicing what is called a results-only work environment, or ROWE, which gives everyone in a company the freedom to do their job when and where they want, as long as the work gets done. This is clearly a good idea. After all, what could an employer possibly care about beyond results? And in Hennepin County, there is some initial evidence that ROWE has made things much more efficient. They used to have a two-week backlog of public support cases to process. Now that is down to five days. A ROWE program would save employers money on everything from printing paper to electricity. If this seems risky, it is probably because employers think they need visual reassurance that people are actually doing work. Their real problem is, however, that they have failed to clearly define the "results" they care about.
http://www.good.is/post/minnesota-s-result-only-work-environment
Oh shit.
Your chair is your enemy. It does not matter if you go running every morning, or you are a regular at the gym. If you spend most of the rest of the day sitting -- in your car, your office chair, on your sofa at home -- you are putting yourself at increased risk of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, a variety of cancers, and an early death. In other words, irrespective of whether you exercise vigorously, sitting for long periods is bad for you.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/23/stand-up-while-you-read-this/
Want change? Change the environment.
One of the most consistent findings in psychology is that people behave differently when their environment changes. When we are in a place where people are quiet (church), we are quiet. When we are in a place where people are loud (stadiums), we are loud. When we are driving and the lanes narrow, we slow down. When they widen, we speed up again. This may seem obvious, but when we try to make change at work, we often obsesse about the people involved rather than their environment. Often the easiest way to drive change is to shape the environment.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/02/06/the-war-on-interruptions-an-excerpt-from-switch-how-to-change-things-when-change-is-hard/
Tags
- LOL (175)
- USA (116)
- WTF (85)
- Iran (57)
- Internet (56)
- IranElection (45)
- Capitalism (39)
- Israel (39)
- Human Rights (38)
- Cool (36)
- View all 1964 tags »
