There’s a natural state of heightened attention to the self when we know we’re being watched, Bernstein notes. “Our practiced response become better,” he told me, “our unpracticed responses become worse.” So actions that have been drilled by the boss may well turn out better when everyone believes the boss is watching. On the other hand, for behavior that isn’t already learned—where the best response needs unselfconscious focus on the problem, and the chance to try something new without fear—being watched makes things harder. Attention that could have gone to one’s actions goes, instead, to managing the appearance of one’s actions.
The “gospel of transparency” declares that this is not a problem, because workers should stick to management’s script. But in one vast Chinese factory that Bernstein studied, workers who craftily deviated from standard procedure often improved the plant’s productivity.
People act differently when they know they are being watched. Period. Whether you are talking about the workplace, out in public, at events, etc. and the way we behave when being watched is not always in the best interests of the company or society.
There are serious ramifications to this study, in and out of the workplace.
The first thing that jumped out at me is that I am very glad to see people taking learning into their own hands instead of waiting for their company to train them. I have always been a big fan of that. Your career, is your career, and you should act that way when it comes to learning new skills.
The second thing I thought was, if 77% of people are ready to learn new skills, as a company, you need to step up and offer opportunities for people to do just that. Very few people are going to be happy sitting and doing the same job for the next 20 years, and rightfully so, since we know that there’s almost no chance the jobs we do now, will still exist in the same way in as little as 5 years.
And, the last thing that jumped out at me? Nearly half are interested in running their own businesses? Are you prepared for that? For half of your employees to maybe become your competitors? It wouldn’t shock me. There’s a lot to be said for the flexibility of working for yourself. Choosing your projects, choosing your location, and your hours. Really, the one thing I keep seeing, over and over again, in interviews with experts and economists, is that health insurance is the one thing standing in the way. If we untied employment and health coverage, there might just be a massive overall in the U.S. labor market.
I’m not exactly sure how they thought this would work, “For example, Email 3 – an email purportedly from Plaintiff to Defendant — stated, “[w]e are interested in cutting off training. We are interested in taking over the business and moving it forward. We believe we can do this.” Yet, Email 4 — an email…
We’ve seen the memes. The ones about the law firm offering a lunch hour yoga class to overworked, stressed, associates who haven’t had time to even take a lunch break in months. Or the “reward” for months of 70-80 hour work weeks is free pizza. It just makes people angry because it’s a token that does nothing to actually recognize the work involved, or correct the problems that created this mess to start with.
Workplace stress, anxiety, and other mental health issues are not just something a little mindfulness can fix. Workers are waking up to the fact that it’s the company culture that is contributing to this. Offering a way for employees to help “fix” themselves might seem like a nice thing, and in many ways it is, but doing it while not making any effort to recognize the contributions managers and corporate culture make to the problem, along with a commitment to make changes, is the very definition of “too little”.
Unfortunately, I do believe we are taught the opposite of this. We are expected to work harder and harder and then use our time off to rest so that we can go back and do it some more. It’s all focused on being a good worker, but this study seems to indicate that we are all better off focusing on other parts of our lives during the time we spend away from work. Maybe, just maybe, we are more than our jobs. Maybe when we spend the energy and focus on other parts of our lives enough to plan them out and be intentional about them, we’re happier.
“The new product — called “Microsoft Edge for Business” — natively separates work and personal browsing into dedicated browser windows with their own favorites, separate caches and storage locations.”
