As I pull off my tie and unbutton my collar; with sweat coating the body beneath my shirt, let alone how uncomfortable the rest of me feels, as a man I feel hard done by. I know that the increasingly obsolete nature of men in the 21st century is our gender's punishment for centuries of oppressing women. However, in this hot weather, I just wish companies were less complicit with making men endure discomfort day in/day out. A couple of months ago when selecting which shoes to put on to go out, the 11-year old boy who used to live in my house, complained to me that all the shoes he had looked like 'girls' shoes'. This is not because he has a cupboard full of pink pumps, it is because every style of shoe a boy might wear is now worn by girls. Yes, girls can wear pumps and court shoes, they can wear calf-high, knee-high and even over-the knee-boots; they can wear them with heels of various types or flat; smooth-soled or with tread; they can be shiny or matt. Yet, these days it is acceptable for an 11-year old girl to wear trainers (sneakers in the USA), DM boots, flat ankle boots, basketball boots, worker boots, lace-up or slip-on brogues even wellington boots, all styles once seen as 'boys' shoes'. No wonder he had no style that he did not feel would make him look feminine. Gender identity is something we are all conscious of especially when growing up.
In the recent hot weather, I have similarly become very conscious of how many more options my female colleagues have in what to wear to work compared to me. The can wear a suit and tie the way I am compelled to, whenever they wish. However, in the hot weather, that is the only option I have. I could wear a short-sleeved shirt, still with a tie, but immediately would look as if I had become 65, not something desirable in the current workplace. The best I can do is take my jacket off. My female colleagues, however, flaunt their freedom and come in a wide range of clothing seen as suitable for the office and which is immensely cooler; many have a different outfit for each day whereas I just have different coloured suits to choose between. A man is ridiculed if his trousers are above his ankle and yet my female colleagues can come in skirts above the knee, or midi or even maxi so large they can swirl around in them; even skating-style skirst. They can wear tight or loose trousers, harem pants, long or short culottes, long leggings, cropped leggings, capri pants, pedal pushers, Bermuda shorts, cycling shorts (if matt) and traditional length canvas shorts. About the only fashion off limits for the workplace are the bum-hugging denim shorts so favoured by female students. Women can wear blouses with long sleeves, short sleeves or no sleeves; tops with some, a few or no buttons and all of these things in a range of shades.
The dichotomy between how comfortable a man is allowed to be in this weather and how comfortable a woman can choose to be is shown every morning by the difference between the male and female presenter on the BBC Breakfast programme on BBC1. This morning the man was in a suit, with jacket on, and a tie; the woman was in a sleeveless dress. Studios may be air conditioned, but it is very hot under those lights.
A large percentage of my female colleagues are in sleeveless dresses and sandals, seen as acceptable for the workplace. If I turned up in a teeshirt (let alone a sleeveless one), even a short sleeved shirt unable of having a tie, and shorts, no matter how much they looked like those worn by the Bermudan police, I would be sent home. I read some months ago a comment that the tie shown on the novel 'Fifty Shades of Grey' (2012) did not reflect what men actually wore to work. I have no idea what it is like in newspaper offices, but every day you see men heading to work and indeed in offices (I just walked past an accountants' office full of them) with the ties on. This is the expectation in many British workplaces, there is no other option when you work in an office. Pity those compelled to turn up in uniforms fit to work outside in December.
Ridicule and condemnation awaits any man who wears sandals even on his days off let alone at work. Dressing in a way which would give me some modicum of comfort in work, is liable to damage my standing in the job. I have two interviews next week. The interviewees I have seen at my workplace this week have all been in sleeveless dresses, so each probably carrying many hundreds of grams less in weight than I will be compared to do and without it all pulled tight by the top button and the tie. I will have to drive in these clothes, I will have to sit waiting in these clothes, I will have to concentrate while being interviewed in these clothes. I am not going to perform as well as my rivals. In my department there are 7 men and 53 women. The imbalances of the past can be seen that even though there are so few men two of the four deputy-heads of the unit are men, though the current and past two heads have been women as is her boss. This suggests that in my industry, though, there is no need to further favour women in interviews, by making the men feel so uncomfortable.
I am not a transvestite. I have no desire to wear 'women's clothes', but certainly when the temperatures reach a certain level, I think there should be more leeway for men. We should be allowed to remove ties for a start. I am tired of having a chafed neck every evening; it is agonising when the sweat pours into yesterday's wounds. An open-necked, white short-sleeved shirt can be very smart. For trousers, long shorts in cotton, say in navy blue, again would look smart. If sandals are unacceptable then slip-on pump-like shoes in a dark shade and allowed without socks again could take a lot of heat off male employees and yet look as if they mean business. However, I know this is never going to happen in my lifetime and I simply have to pray for more summers like 2012.
I have taken a bold step and looking around the world at what men who want to look smart in hot countries do, I have ordered a white thobe (also known as a thawb, dishdasha, kandura or suriyah), a long loose garment warn in North Africa and the Middle East. I doubt I have the courage to wear it to work and if I did that would probably be my career over, no matter if it was a 'dress down' day. In addition, given that I now walk to work, the chances that I would be reported as being 'suspicious' as people travelling on public transport in London are advised to look out for and would be picked up by the police as a terrorist threat before I reach work. Being bald I had been tempted to buy a skull cap too as my head burns as I walk home; I have worked out a route which is most shaded, to reduce the damage. However, I may try a brimmed hat, a little like those Australian ones, and hope that the clash of cultures will reduce the apparent threat I pose.
In the mid-Victorian and the Edwardian periods there were campaigns for 'rational dress' for women. These did not really win through until after the Second World War. I think we need to introduce 'rational dress' for working men which allows them to work without being endanger of over-heating in the office and having to spend the evening tending to the chafed skin around their necks and other parts of their bodies. Men have been backed into a single option for office wear and puts us at even more of a disadvantage in the workplace than is already the case.
Showing posts with label offices. Show all posts
Showing posts with label offices. Show all posts
Thursday, 18 July 2013
Sunday, 1 April 2012
Trying Not To Become Contaminated With Hatred
As regular readers of this blog will know my line manager in my current job has systematically driven me from it. She has set up conflicting demands, i.e. that by dismissing any suggestion I make as irrelevant or 'inappropriate', even striking through proposals I have written and then complains that I defer to her too much and do not propose innovations. Similarly she complained that I bothered her too much coming to talk to her about things, so I reduced that and used more emails, but that too is wrong as now I am not speaking to her sufficiently and not asking 'probing questions'. She says she finds me too submissive but fears coming to speak to me.
One reason for not asking probing questions and getting everything written down, as I have explained before, is because she forgets what she has said to me previously, for example, switching the days of regular meetings and twice altering the number of copies of reports that have to be produced. Now, there is no problem changing your mind, but when she has she insists it must be me who was doing it deliberately wrongly as she could 'never' have thought the other way let alone given instructions saying that. I have tried to fit in with everything she instructs but even that is apparently inappropriate 'complying' or 'fitting in' with her wishes is the wrong attitude, so she says, though she cannot indicate the right attitude I would adopt, it is just that I am wrong.
Anyway, in the current pattern of working in the UK, the line manager decides everything and so removes you by the rules she sets with no come-back. Thus, over a period of nine months not only has this job proven to be impossible for me to hold on to, no matter what I try to do, it has effectively brought my career to an end at the age of 44. Ahead lies having my house repossessed and a long period of unemployment for me, simply because of the caprice and personal prejudices of one manager.
Obviously all of this has caused stress for me as I have sought ways to please my manager and cling on to my job only for her to come back with new criticisms in the highly indignant way which is apparently the common attitude. My very behaviour is insulting and apparently even a question I asked at a public lecture was insulting to her and 'an embarrassment' to myself and the unit, despite the fact that the lecture was unrelated to the work of my company let alone my unit. Apparently, I am both too confident and outspoken, but insufficiently positive and by that very fact I disparage the unit. I would ask anyone how could they be positive when facing such criticism especially when it is often contradictory. I think I am doing well not to have had a nervous breakdown faced with such Kafkaesque treatment.
I know I will not work again for a long time and that all that I have worked for over the past ten years has been trashed in less than hat in months. One challenge going forward is not holding on to hatred. It is so easy to curse my boss and just to think, 'what if?' before one of these nasty meetings (typically lasting 2-3 hours). What if her car broke down, what if she was attacked in the street, what if she fell ill, what if someone found something to complain about her for, what if someone made her comply with the rules of the company, what if her friends in high places disowned her, or even better, turned on her? It is very easy, sometimes consoling to run through these scenarios. However, I realise how corrosive such thoughts can be. I have written recently about how anger might feel good, but like a narcotic actually damages you and hatred is much the same.
I am undecided on whether I believe in karma, but I do think that you can trigger some immediate effect if you let yourself hate. It begins to blind you to how someone else believes. Perhaps my manager has set out intentionally to do me harm, but it is more likely that she genuinely believes she is right to criticise me and remove me from the company, that I am truly insulting and will damage the reputation of her and the business she works for. If I cannot see the way she sees the world then I cannot be alert to things I might be able to do to make things that little bit less unpleasant for me. Another thing, I realise, is that I am probably well out-of-step with current business culture, in which you are free to take individual words or even tone of voice as something which causes offence to you, for which you have to become vocally indignant and visibly horrified. I must say some of the 'horrified' performances are quite comic as if the manager in question has suddenly gone back to the days of Jane Austen and seen an inappropriately clad man emerging from the lake.
Though I do not like Catherine Tate's 'comic characters', I think the phrase of one of them 'how very dare you?' perfectly sums up the indignant tone so often used; self-righteousness taken to an absurd level. Maybe the absurdity is why I am slow to spot that such an attitude is a weapon that can be turned against anyone they choose. By being offended you stop the question being one of a difference of opinion and turn it immediately into a moral question, one in which you have already seized the 'high ground'. In addition the horror expressed at the view disagreed with means that they can shut down any rational discussion, 'it's so offensive, I can't talk about it' means that they can make a charge, define that it is bad and shoot down any challenge all in one.
Perhaps rather than anger, I should pity the people who are so lacking in business skills that they have to resort to such tricks simply to get their way. Getting their way is a key goal, not just in substance but down to the minute details, individual words, colour of text, absolutely everything. For them getting 99% of what they want is not enough. Even with 100% it is not 'wrong' or 'inappropriate' if not expressed precisely the way they want it (even if they never actually tell you this). Unless you can read your manager's mind you are going to suffer. Maybe I am less tolerant of this attitude than some people but I have seen even very good workers who are praised across their departments, criticised over small issues, sending an email a day later than expected (even with two weeks remaining before the deadline) and not expressing something the exact way the manager wants. Even such petty things they are told, is 'letting the side down'.
I am getting back into repeating my postings about indignitaries and this posting is about something different, even though in my case it has been prompted by indignitary behaviour. What I check myself from doing is running through all this speculation of how bad or even mildly discomforting things should happen to my line manager, even if in part as some kind of balance for the unpleasantness she has assiduously inflicted on me, whatever her motive. Beginning to have thoughts like these are the first step on being contaminated by hatred. Such fantasies begin to dominate your waking thoughts, perhaps even your dreams. They can easily become more extreme. Talking with friends and colleagues it was fascinating how one advised me in all seriousness to shoot my manager and that he being in with certain people in West London could organise that. Another said how he had identified the car park at the company which had no CCTV surveillance and was near to a public exit to the site so was the ideal one for assaulting people returning to their car! To some degree it is heartening to think that I am not alone in thinking this way about our company's management, but on the other hand, it alarmed me to think that I was at risk of becoming like these two, just a step away from actual violence.
I know that simple prejudice at work can muck up your entire life and the lives of those people around you. Violence would do that to a greater extent, not only messing up the life of the manager, perhaps she would simply brush it off, but others around her and of course, myself and others around me. I do worry that if she is mugged or burgled or her car vandalised, already it is me at the top of the suspect list which would put me into even worse circumstances. In addition, it is corrosive to think this way. If there is no way you can get at being treated so badly by your manager, then you have to rely on non-human sources.
I think the reason why karma and 'vengeance is mine sayeth the Lord' were brought in for humans was to stop them wasting their lives. It is so easy to get into a frame of mind in which you think about how the person might come unstuck from severe action you might take against them to humiliate or discredit them to simple things such as their car breaking down on their way to the meeting at which they are going to treat you so badly. This clogs up your brain and means you fail to focus on things like trying to get another job or engaging with effective ways of winning some compensation, Thoughts of revenge easily become your entire focus and sap your energy. While the target is probably oblivious to your thoughts, you are effectively helping them to win by damaging your own life on top of the damage they have already inflicted.
It can be stunning how many people cannot see beyond their own egos. Not only my current manager but also bullies in the past have believed that I 'need to see' that what they are doing is 'right' because it is nothing more than common sense. Their view of the world is so distorted that they set their own moral boundaries. I have sometimes thought what characterises evil and have come to a conclusion that it is a focus which is just on the benefit of the individual and however that can be achieved, with no thought or even disapproval of those affected by the actions of the evil person. If we look at real evil people (as opposed to portrayals) they generally do not believe they are evil. Think of the serial killers and the war criminals, they all believe what they did was 'right' even 'moral'. Yet by objective judgement they are evil. Now I am not equating my manager with such criminals, but it seems all too common that you have people in business who are so focused on their own personal advancement and ensuring their personal perspectives are the only acceptable ones that they begin to stray into modes of behaviour that we see among the genuinely evil.
Everyone, even the most powerful will face people they feel hard done by, whether this is genuine or not. In some/most/all cases we can wreak retribution on these people. Yet to be obsessed in planning to do so, let alone acting on it, we are further corroding ourselves. We become consumed, literally, eaten up by the need for revenge. It strips us of our faculties, we can no longer see clearly, we can no longer hear differing advice, we cannot think about other things, certainly we lose enjoyment. We all hope that 'whatever comes around, goes around' and that the person gets their come-uppance. Of course, quite often we never see them 'fall', but from the moment they begin treating us and others badly, they are beginning to lose and they will continue losing. Perhaps not in the financial sense, but in the fact that they chip away at their humanity and people respond to that.
For all her apparent success, no-one trusts my manager and they only do what she wants not out of respect but from fear of their own positions, something which will no doubt increase now they have seen what has been done to me and how quickly. Things will be done for her at best in a lacklustre way. In addition even the CEO of a company cannot work in a vacuum they need to hear differing perspectives to their own. If they are not then the company will falter, not immediately but steadily. This is happening in my context already no-one is warning my manager of the pitfalls she is walking into. To do so would be to risk being treated the way I have been. Being way behind schedule in planning a prestige event, not keeping the website updated, jobs she has taken on herself but is neglecting because she puts no store by the views of colleagues; only she can be right. When your views are rejected so often you stop giving your view. Consequently you can already see she is walking head long into failure. Her obsession with the advertising of an upcoming prestige event has meant she has neglected the organisation of the event and with less than four weeks to go has only a single speaker for the whole day. There is no incentive for me to step in and try to rectify that. My ideas have now been taken up by her and have become 'hers' but her obsession with style over substance means that the event will fail, it is too late to prevent this now.
It is hard not to wallow in anger and a desire for revenge against someone who has treated you badly. However, with reflection it can be seen that it does more harm to you than to them. In addition, there will be revenge maybe that you will never witness, but it will come. A person who is a bully reaps the consequences of such behaviour and will fail. Their narrow focus means they miss the warning signs and they will not listen to any alerts that they are busily marching towards such an outcome. You have to accept that some balance ensure they will not escape unpunished by their behaviour and instead cut yourself off from concerning yourself any longer with that person otherwise you risk being dragged down into their morass alongside them.
One reason for not asking probing questions and getting everything written down, as I have explained before, is because she forgets what she has said to me previously, for example, switching the days of regular meetings and twice altering the number of copies of reports that have to be produced. Now, there is no problem changing your mind, but when she has she insists it must be me who was doing it deliberately wrongly as she could 'never' have thought the other way let alone given instructions saying that. I have tried to fit in with everything she instructs but even that is apparently inappropriate 'complying' or 'fitting in' with her wishes is the wrong attitude, so she says, though she cannot indicate the right attitude I would adopt, it is just that I am wrong.
Anyway, in the current pattern of working in the UK, the line manager decides everything and so removes you by the rules she sets with no come-back. Thus, over a period of nine months not only has this job proven to be impossible for me to hold on to, no matter what I try to do, it has effectively brought my career to an end at the age of 44. Ahead lies having my house repossessed and a long period of unemployment for me, simply because of the caprice and personal prejudices of one manager.
Obviously all of this has caused stress for me as I have sought ways to please my manager and cling on to my job only for her to come back with new criticisms in the highly indignant way which is apparently the common attitude. My very behaviour is insulting and apparently even a question I asked at a public lecture was insulting to her and 'an embarrassment' to myself and the unit, despite the fact that the lecture was unrelated to the work of my company let alone my unit. Apparently, I am both too confident and outspoken, but insufficiently positive and by that very fact I disparage the unit. I would ask anyone how could they be positive when facing such criticism especially when it is often contradictory. I think I am doing well not to have had a nervous breakdown faced with such Kafkaesque treatment.
I know I will not work again for a long time and that all that I have worked for over the past ten years has been trashed in less than hat in months. One challenge going forward is not holding on to hatred. It is so easy to curse my boss and just to think, 'what if?' before one of these nasty meetings (typically lasting 2-3 hours). What if her car broke down, what if she was attacked in the street, what if she fell ill, what if someone found something to complain about her for, what if someone made her comply with the rules of the company, what if her friends in high places disowned her, or even better, turned on her? It is very easy, sometimes consoling to run through these scenarios. However, I realise how corrosive such thoughts can be. I have written recently about how anger might feel good, but like a narcotic actually damages you and hatred is much the same.
I am undecided on whether I believe in karma, but I do think that you can trigger some immediate effect if you let yourself hate. It begins to blind you to how someone else believes. Perhaps my manager has set out intentionally to do me harm, but it is more likely that she genuinely believes she is right to criticise me and remove me from the company, that I am truly insulting and will damage the reputation of her and the business she works for. If I cannot see the way she sees the world then I cannot be alert to things I might be able to do to make things that little bit less unpleasant for me. Another thing, I realise, is that I am probably well out-of-step with current business culture, in which you are free to take individual words or even tone of voice as something which causes offence to you, for which you have to become vocally indignant and visibly horrified. I must say some of the 'horrified' performances are quite comic as if the manager in question has suddenly gone back to the days of Jane Austen and seen an inappropriately clad man emerging from the lake.
Though I do not like Catherine Tate's 'comic characters', I think the phrase of one of them 'how very dare you?' perfectly sums up the indignant tone so often used; self-righteousness taken to an absurd level. Maybe the absurdity is why I am slow to spot that such an attitude is a weapon that can be turned against anyone they choose. By being offended you stop the question being one of a difference of opinion and turn it immediately into a moral question, one in which you have already seized the 'high ground'. In addition the horror expressed at the view disagreed with means that they can shut down any rational discussion, 'it's so offensive, I can't talk about it' means that they can make a charge, define that it is bad and shoot down any challenge all in one.
Perhaps rather than anger, I should pity the people who are so lacking in business skills that they have to resort to such tricks simply to get their way. Getting their way is a key goal, not just in substance but down to the minute details, individual words, colour of text, absolutely everything. For them getting 99% of what they want is not enough. Even with 100% it is not 'wrong' or 'inappropriate' if not expressed precisely the way they want it (even if they never actually tell you this). Unless you can read your manager's mind you are going to suffer. Maybe I am less tolerant of this attitude than some people but I have seen even very good workers who are praised across their departments, criticised over small issues, sending an email a day later than expected (even with two weeks remaining before the deadline) and not expressing something the exact way the manager wants. Even such petty things they are told, is 'letting the side down'.
I am getting back into repeating my postings about indignitaries and this posting is about something different, even though in my case it has been prompted by indignitary behaviour. What I check myself from doing is running through all this speculation of how bad or even mildly discomforting things should happen to my line manager, even if in part as some kind of balance for the unpleasantness she has assiduously inflicted on me, whatever her motive. Beginning to have thoughts like these are the first step on being contaminated by hatred. Such fantasies begin to dominate your waking thoughts, perhaps even your dreams. They can easily become more extreme. Talking with friends and colleagues it was fascinating how one advised me in all seriousness to shoot my manager and that he being in with certain people in West London could organise that. Another said how he had identified the car park at the company which had no CCTV surveillance and was near to a public exit to the site so was the ideal one for assaulting people returning to their car! To some degree it is heartening to think that I am not alone in thinking this way about our company's management, but on the other hand, it alarmed me to think that I was at risk of becoming like these two, just a step away from actual violence.
I know that simple prejudice at work can muck up your entire life and the lives of those people around you. Violence would do that to a greater extent, not only messing up the life of the manager, perhaps she would simply brush it off, but others around her and of course, myself and others around me. I do worry that if she is mugged or burgled or her car vandalised, already it is me at the top of the suspect list which would put me into even worse circumstances. In addition, it is corrosive to think this way. If there is no way you can get at being treated so badly by your manager, then you have to rely on non-human sources.
I think the reason why karma and 'vengeance is mine sayeth the Lord' were brought in for humans was to stop them wasting their lives. It is so easy to get into a frame of mind in which you think about how the person might come unstuck from severe action you might take against them to humiliate or discredit them to simple things such as their car breaking down on their way to the meeting at which they are going to treat you so badly. This clogs up your brain and means you fail to focus on things like trying to get another job or engaging with effective ways of winning some compensation, Thoughts of revenge easily become your entire focus and sap your energy. While the target is probably oblivious to your thoughts, you are effectively helping them to win by damaging your own life on top of the damage they have already inflicted.
It can be stunning how many people cannot see beyond their own egos. Not only my current manager but also bullies in the past have believed that I 'need to see' that what they are doing is 'right' because it is nothing more than common sense. Their view of the world is so distorted that they set their own moral boundaries. I have sometimes thought what characterises evil and have come to a conclusion that it is a focus which is just on the benefit of the individual and however that can be achieved, with no thought or even disapproval of those affected by the actions of the evil person. If we look at real evil people (as opposed to portrayals) they generally do not believe they are evil. Think of the serial killers and the war criminals, they all believe what they did was 'right' even 'moral'. Yet by objective judgement they are evil. Now I am not equating my manager with such criminals, but it seems all too common that you have people in business who are so focused on their own personal advancement and ensuring their personal perspectives are the only acceptable ones that they begin to stray into modes of behaviour that we see among the genuinely evil.
Everyone, even the most powerful will face people they feel hard done by, whether this is genuine or not. In some/most/all cases we can wreak retribution on these people. Yet to be obsessed in planning to do so, let alone acting on it, we are further corroding ourselves. We become consumed, literally, eaten up by the need for revenge. It strips us of our faculties, we can no longer see clearly, we can no longer hear differing advice, we cannot think about other things, certainly we lose enjoyment. We all hope that 'whatever comes around, goes around' and that the person gets their come-uppance. Of course, quite often we never see them 'fall', but from the moment they begin treating us and others badly, they are beginning to lose and they will continue losing. Perhaps not in the financial sense, but in the fact that they chip away at their humanity and people respond to that.
For all her apparent success, no-one trusts my manager and they only do what she wants not out of respect but from fear of their own positions, something which will no doubt increase now they have seen what has been done to me and how quickly. Things will be done for her at best in a lacklustre way. In addition even the CEO of a company cannot work in a vacuum they need to hear differing perspectives to their own. If they are not then the company will falter, not immediately but steadily. This is happening in my context already no-one is warning my manager of the pitfalls she is walking into. To do so would be to risk being treated the way I have been. Being way behind schedule in planning a prestige event, not keeping the website updated, jobs she has taken on herself but is neglecting because she puts no store by the views of colleagues; only she can be right. When your views are rejected so often you stop giving your view. Consequently you can already see she is walking head long into failure. Her obsession with the advertising of an upcoming prestige event has meant she has neglected the organisation of the event and with less than four weeks to go has only a single speaker for the whole day. There is no incentive for me to step in and try to rectify that. My ideas have now been taken up by her and have become 'hers' but her obsession with style over substance means that the event will fail, it is too late to prevent this now.
It is hard not to wallow in anger and a desire for revenge against someone who has treated you badly. However, with reflection it can be seen that it does more harm to you than to them. In addition, there will be revenge maybe that you will never witness, but it will come. A person who is a bully reaps the consequences of such behaviour and will fail. Their narrow focus means they miss the warning signs and they will not listen to any alerts that they are busily marching towards such an outcome. You have to accept that some balance ensure they will not escape unpunished by their behaviour and instead cut yourself off from concerning yourself any longer with that person otherwise you risk being dragged down into their morass alongside them.
Sunday, 11 March 2012
Caution: Indignitaries At Work
I am now in line to be kicked out of my job. It is not on the grounds that I have stolen money or harrassed anyone or even was incompetent, it is simply that my manager dislikes me. She somehow sees my very person let alone my manner, offensive. She complains I repeat myself and write too long emails and yet goes on at length repeatedly around the office whining the same stories to everyone about her washing machine. She complains I do not meet the 'high standards' of the department, primarily on the basis that I lack 'team spirit' a very ill-defined criterion which basically comes down to whatever she thinks it should be. It has nothing to do with being a colleague as I have worked successfully with the other seven people in my office and tens of others across the company. What is alarming is how a single manager has so much power, how she can set different rules for me to my colleagues. I am supposed to eat elsewhere, I am supposed to knock more loudly on her door than my colleagues, I have to notify her in a particular way if I have to go to the doctor, something my colleagues do not have to do. She complains that I am too outspoken but also that I defer to her too much. There are no objective measures of her criteria which allows her to say such contradictory things at one time. She spends so much time socialising with senior staff, taking up a large part of the working day, that they take her views without question. I have tried to talk to her manager and simply have been told he cannot discuss the case. There is no-one I can turn to bar the union representative and I have no idea what you do in such situations if you are not in a union.
For me the severity of this step is great. I am liable to be kicked out with no pay and so will immediately default on the mortgage payments on my house meaning that my fears of having it repossessed have only been delayed by a year. It seems unlikely that I will work again as I will be unable to get anything but a highly biased reference from my manager. I have explored the problems with this particular manager before: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2011/12/why-are-british-managers-so-bad.html
Looking back I wonder if I could have done anything different to forestall this problem and the answer seems to be no. The case against me has been built on such insubstantial complaints that if it had not been these then it would have been something else. Basically the difficulties were two emails which apparently were critical of how my unit worked, though you would struggle to find that meaning in what I wrote. I suppose that I should not have said that I had no ability to control scheduling, the thing that the correspondent was making a mild complaint against. Apparently I was supposed to accept blame for things I cannot control. I was told I should not have said a colleague was off sick, even though that is completely the reverse approach to the previous place I worked. There they felt if you did not reveal the cause of the shortage of staff as something legitimate like illness then you were effectively criticising the company for not looking ahead sensibly to recruit sufficient staff. A more established in my office made the identical error some weeks later and while he has been chastised for it he is not being kicked out. I also said that my job did not involve cleaning up, which is a statement of fact. However, in a twisted way, this has been portrayed as being an unacceptable statement, on the grounds that it is both disparaging to cleaners who do a wonderful job; makes me appear as arrogant due to my qualifications and experience and yet also is said to show I have no pride in myself and thus, by implication no pride in my colleagues, thus violating the team spirit requirement. This statement was apparently so offensive that it led to a complaint being telephoned in by a visitor.
The last damning charge is that I did not inform my manager correctly before going to a hospital appointment despite it being in the Outlook system she can access for weeks and me talking about it with her for 10 minutes precisely a day before I went. Apparently it is fine that she forgot the conversation and she argues that she cannot afford the few seconds it takes to check the Outlook calendar. It is also apparently acceptable for her to stamp around the office demanding where I am, when just asking one of the colleagues could have revealed that. My behaviour is portrayed as 'discourteous' whereas hers is apparently beyond reproach though to most readers I would assume it would appear at best childish at worst idiotic, but maybe I am wrong in modern British society.
This is the key factor: indignation. In our powerless society, it seems that no-one can be anyone I am the first to admit that I make mistakes, but I learn from them. In addition, I have never done anything that is so severe it should lose you your job. Is it fair that individual words, assuming they are not racist, sexist or otherwise insulting should be enough to bring down your career? Maybe in this era of unemployment it is sufficient and we should all look at every single word we use thinking how it might be turned against us.
Of course, it is impossible to see through someone else's eyes, so what to us might be anondyne, apparently can be highly inappropriate to someone else. I have neither violated what society would deem acceptable nor what my company does, just what my manager 'feels' is unacceptable. That is not even direct criticism, but apparently something that seems to her as being insufficiently ardent in singing the praises of the unit she runs. From my historical knowledge such mentality seems very much like a personality cult and I am someone like those who stopped clapping some seconds before the rest of the people having heard one of Stalin's or Mao's speeches. Of course, I will not be killed but at the age of 44, my career is over and I have effectively become unemployable for the rest of my life.
As I have noted before, it is no longer sufficient in the UK to complain about something, you have to stamp and shout at your loudest. Neither is it sufficient to be irritated, annoyed or put out, you must be utterly appalled, completely indignant, generally way out of proportion to what has happened: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2008/12/rise-of-indignitaries.html I suppose given the prevalence of this trend in society we should not be surprised to find it in the workplace. It is exacerbated by procedures like performance reviews, appraisals, probation periods, fixed-term contracts which put immense power into the hands of often poorly trained managers certainly without an ability to detach personal prejudice from their judgements of work effectiveness. It is a kind of focused discrimination, not on race, age or gender, but simply on who they like or dislike. Staff of all levels will not discuss or debate or really just complain they become indignant as if even the most minor misunderstanding has been concocted with malicious intent, both offensive in itself and aimed at bringing the company into disrepute. Of course, none of these things is done that way. However, not being indignant gives away the few grams of power they feel they have snatched and, horror of horrors, they might be forced to admit that they are sometimes wrong, something my manager seems incapable of acknowledging. Thus, by being so offended, she can play, 'it is so terrible I cannot even talk about it' card, shutting down any reasonable rational debate.
As I have noted before, the clamping down on discussion let alone the suggestion of different approaches or Heaven forbid, even mild criticism, is damaging to British business: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2011/02/i-dont-want-to-hear-that-censoring-in.html I have no idea when I might work again and it seems unlikely that it will ever be for a large company. I am naturally bitter that years of study and hard work can be trashed by the prejudice of a single individual, but I imagine it is a common occurrence. There was nothing I could have done once I got the job. If I kept quiet I was being rude and not taking sufficient initiative, if I spoke I was being rude and arrogant. There was never a way of winning and never any redemption for my 'offences'. I just post this as a warning for people who might be in similar positions, I do pity you, yet I fear this approach in the workplace will become even more common as incompetent people remain in position and unemployment rises higher.
For me the severity of this step is great. I am liable to be kicked out with no pay and so will immediately default on the mortgage payments on my house meaning that my fears of having it repossessed have only been delayed by a year. It seems unlikely that I will work again as I will be unable to get anything but a highly biased reference from my manager. I have explored the problems with this particular manager before: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2011/12/why-are-british-managers-so-bad.html
Looking back I wonder if I could have done anything different to forestall this problem and the answer seems to be no. The case against me has been built on such insubstantial complaints that if it had not been these then it would have been something else. Basically the difficulties were two emails which apparently were critical of how my unit worked, though you would struggle to find that meaning in what I wrote. I suppose that I should not have said that I had no ability to control scheduling, the thing that the correspondent was making a mild complaint against. Apparently I was supposed to accept blame for things I cannot control. I was told I should not have said a colleague was off sick, even though that is completely the reverse approach to the previous place I worked. There they felt if you did not reveal the cause of the shortage of staff as something legitimate like illness then you were effectively criticising the company for not looking ahead sensibly to recruit sufficient staff. A more established in my office made the identical error some weeks later and while he has been chastised for it he is not being kicked out. I also said that my job did not involve cleaning up, which is a statement of fact. However, in a twisted way, this has been portrayed as being an unacceptable statement, on the grounds that it is both disparaging to cleaners who do a wonderful job; makes me appear as arrogant due to my qualifications and experience and yet also is said to show I have no pride in myself and thus, by implication no pride in my colleagues, thus violating the team spirit requirement. This statement was apparently so offensive that it led to a complaint being telephoned in by a visitor.
The last damning charge is that I did not inform my manager correctly before going to a hospital appointment despite it being in the Outlook system she can access for weeks and me talking about it with her for 10 minutes precisely a day before I went. Apparently it is fine that she forgot the conversation and she argues that she cannot afford the few seconds it takes to check the Outlook calendar. It is also apparently acceptable for her to stamp around the office demanding where I am, when just asking one of the colleagues could have revealed that. My behaviour is portrayed as 'discourteous' whereas hers is apparently beyond reproach though to most readers I would assume it would appear at best childish at worst idiotic, but maybe I am wrong in modern British society.
This is the key factor: indignation. In our powerless society, it seems that no-one can be anyone I am the first to admit that I make mistakes, but I learn from them. In addition, I have never done anything that is so severe it should lose you your job. Is it fair that individual words, assuming they are not racist, sexist or otherwise insulting should be enough to bring down your career? Maybe in this era of unemployment it is sufficient and we should all look at every single word we use thinking how it might be turned against us.
Of course, it is impossible to see through someone else's eyes, so what to us might be anondyne, apparently can be highly inappropriate to someone else. I have neither violated what society would deem acceptable nor what my company does, just what my manager 'feels' is unacceptable. That is not even direct criticism, but apparently something that seems to her as being insufficiently ardent in singing the praises of the unit she runs. From my historical knowledge such mentality seems very much like a personality cult and I am someone like those who stopped clapping some seconds before the rest of the people having heard one of Stalin's or Mao's speeches. Of course, I will not be killed but at the age of 44, my career is over and I have effectively become unemployable for the rest of my life.
As I have noted before, it is no longer sufficient in the UK to complain about something, you have to stamp and shout at your loudest. Neither is it sufficient to be irritated, annoyed or put out, you must be utterly appalled, completely indignant, generally way out of proportion to what has happened: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2008/12/rise-of-indignitaries.html I suppose given the prevalence of this trend in society we should not be surprised to find it in the workplace. It is exacerbated by procedures like performance reviews, appraisals, probation periods, fixed-term contracts which put immense power into the hands of often poorly trained managers certainly without an ability to detach personal prejudice from their judgements of work effectiveness. It is a kind of focused discrimination, not on race, age or gender, but simply on who they like or dislike. Staff of all levels will not discuss or debate or really just complain they become indignant as if even the most minor misunderstanding has been concocted with malicious intent, both offensive in itself and aimed at bringing the company into disrepute. Of course, none of these things is done that way. However, not being indignant gives away the few grams of power they feel they have snatched and, horror of horrors, they might be forced to admit that they are sometimes wrong, something my manager seems incapable of acknowledging. Thus, by being so offended, she can play, 'it is so terrible I cannot even talk about it' card, shutting down any reasonable rational debate.
As I have noted before, the clamping down on discussion let alone the suggestion of different approaches or Heaven forbid, even mild criticism, is damaging to British business: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2011/02/i-dont-want-to-hear-that-censoring-in.html I have no idea when I might work again and it seems unlikely that it will ever be for a large company. I am naturally bitter that years of study and hard work can be trashed by the prejudice of a single individual, but I imagine it is a common occurrence. There was nothing I could have done once I got the job. If I kept quiet I was being rude and not taking sufficient initiative, if I spoke I was being rude and arrogant. There was never a way of winning and never any redemption for my 'offences'. I just post this as a warning for people who might be in similar positions, I do pity you, yet I fear this approach in the workplace will become even more common as incompetent people remain in position and unemployment rises higher.
Tuesday, 7 February 2012
Powerpoint Heretic?
I keep expecting the use of PowerPoint, the system for making presentations to die in business. My predictions of 2010 are not being lived up to: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2010/09/managing-time-at-work-challenge-of.html and as I highlight here many of the problems persist. PowerPoint is now coming up to 22 years old. Whilst different facilities are available, the basic approach of landscape-orientated slides which can hold about four items of information has remained. The criticisms of PowerPoint notably by Edward Tufte from 2003 onwards do not seem to have dented its usage. It is not a good format for presenting the kind of complex information that is often necessary to be discussed in business. In some ways it stops the content becoming over-specialised for a general audience, but the constraints imposed by making the words fit to the slide size (often hemmed in further by company logos and frames) and yet still be legible often in large rooms means that the content is over-simplified.
Further problems come from how easy it is to make numerous PowerPoint slides so that you end up with a situation in which the audience is 'hypnotised' by the passage of similarly looking content without engaging with the content. It is unsurprising that watching a procession of very similarly looking objects, pretty much like a herd of sheep going through a gateway leads the audience to fall asleep. My principle is that you should have half as many slides as you have minutes for a presentation, so if you are presenting for 30 minutes you should have no more than 15 slides; saying that 30 slides in 60 minutes seems excessive and perhaps there is a sliding scale with the ratio falling to a third by the time you reach the hour mark. However, this view is unpopular. A colleague severely criticised me when I put forward this principle saying that he found a presentation of 10 minutes which used 98 slides to be acceptable, a rate of one slide every 6.1 seconds. He said many contained a sequence of single images and I said, well, then do not try to make a 'flick book' on screen these days it is simpler and less distracting to have a looping animation of what you are showing. It is ironic that PowerPoint facilities such as animation are, in most cases, just used as decoration (and a distraction) rather than actually communicating a point in a more appropriate way.
People read about 70 words per minute at a relaxed pace for content more sophisticated than 'simple', it rises to 100 words for simple content, though I know some business schools who expect 250 words per minute from their students. Now, this means that for an average slide, at 70 words per minute you would expect it to take about 45 seconds to read it given the amount of content there. However, these reading rates are derived from books where the idea is often continued on for a number of sentences. PowerPoint is renowned to providing a whole series of different ideas or factors quickly in succession. Thus, while your eye can look over the content in 45 seconds the brain may take longer, especially as there is recent evidence that such mental faculties begin deteriorating from the age of 45 so encompassing much a business audience.
Demands for the audience further diffuse their ability to concentrate on content. Many audiences become indignant if you do not provide handouts of the content you are parading on the slides. However, if you do that you add a third form of input into their minds on top of your voice and whatever is on the screen. PowerPoint has increasingly enabled the use of audio and video resources so how do you put them on to a handout, print them out as a 'flick book'? In addition, anyone who asks for handouts is effectively saying that they are not actually going to engage with what you are saying, they will flick through it later. I accept that people with particular disabilities benefit from handouts but then they are using them instead of what is on the screen not in addition to that content. There have long been slide presentations, dating back to magic lantern shows of the 19th century and many of them were very tedious. What the difference has been with PowerPoint is the ability to add words on to them so duplicating visual and aural communication of the same message, especially as so many presenters simply read from the slide. I always feel that this suggests the audience is illiterate and the presenter is filling the role of the mice who read the headings in the movie 'Babe' (1995) the director knowing that the reading age of much of the audience was pretty low (it is a children's movie).
Due to these difficulties, PowerPoint presentations often become a ritual rather than any form of communication. It is like watching holy communion and brings similar benefits to you. As yet I have not heard of any priests using PowerPoint for their sermons though I may be mistaken. Religious officers have a history of knowing how to present, it is something that they have been doing for centuries. Of course, some people feel that they can brighten up their content with unrelated images or even random sounds.
I am fascinated with the industry of creating 'business images' often surreal portrayals of 'business people' faking a meeting or bellowing at each other through megaphones or wandering around a desert pulling something like a ball and chain. I wonder what the working conditions are like for these people who have to model strange activities in these deserts. If the image whether a random shape or one of these photographs is of use, why not simply have it to represent the idea you are trying to communicate? Why have the words and the picture too? Of course, in international business images can be culturally confusing though I also note having worked with Americans and South Africans that words even in the same language can obfuscate more than they can clarify.
Back in the 2000s I found such any different approaches to the slog through numerous slides was challenged and I was told that it showed I lacked ability in using PowerPoint, apparently a necessary minimum requirement. There was no discussion of the intellectual engagement, purely a focus on the cosmetic aspect. It was more acceptable to have an excessive quantity of slides for the time allotted than to try a different approach which stepped away from the ingrained expectations of PowerPoint. I certainly believe that 'less is more' in terms of PowerPoint. Often you can put questions up which you then answer orally for the audience. You can use it to present diagrams of illustrations that provoke discussion. Ironically, Bill Bailey in his 'Dandelion Mind' tour does this surprisingly well when discussing 'Doubting' Thomas in art. Part of the problem of these approaches are that they are dependent on using PowerPoint in the way it was designed to be used, i.e. as an aid to an oral presentation. Now, however, you have to prepare slides for different purposes. I am now habitually asked to put my slides on to websites or email them to people. Thus, I need to have enough words on them that someone who does not have me standing beside them talking about the content can still understand them.
Increasingly I make two versions for these different audiences so reducing the benefit of the time saving offered by PowerPoint. However, someone looking for the content to read online or be emailed to them would far better receiving a piece of prose, a report going into the details in some detail or simply summarising them. There is no point in having slides if you are simply going to print them out or read them on your own computer screen, you might as well simply have a body of text including appropriate illustrations. You would not expect to put pages of a Word document up at a presentation so why do you expect to give presentation slides to someone as if they were a report? PowerPoint has become so fetishised that it is difficult for many people in business to think about communicating without using it even when it is not an appropriate medium for what you are saying.
Perhaps my views are beginning to take root in some isolated places. Whilst I am being pressured to write more and more wordy texts so that I can go through the ritual of twisting round so I can read my own words from an inappropriate way of presenting them, i.e. vast and close to my face, a young colleague has listened to my views. I have now attended two presentations in which he has eschewed PowerPoint except to introduce the fact that he is not going to use it. At the last presentation he pointed out to the audience that, whilst they were apparently not aware of it they actually knew all the points he was about to raise about customer demands already. He gave them three questions and in the space of fifteen minutes the audience of fourteen came up with all the findings that he would have presented. Perhaps they felt cheated of their ritual of slide watching, but I have a feeling that they gained the message more effectively. We need to keep reminding ourselves that it is the effectiveness of what we are doing in terms of communicating what we have to say that must be the starting point. Otherwise it is like picking up a hammer or a saw and struggling to think what we could build with them rather than planning to build something and then taking the appropriate tool out of the box. Trying to defy the dogmatic, orthodox PowerPoint approach, however, may expose you to being treated like a heretic of old.
Further problems come from how easy it is to make numerous PowerPoint slides so that you end up with a situation in which the audience is 'hypnotised' by the passage of similarly looking content without engaging with the content. It is unsurprising that watching a procession of very similarly looking objects, pretty much like a herd of sheep going through a gateway leads the audience to fall asleep. My principle is that you should have half as many slides as you have minutes for a presentation, so if you are presenting for 30 minutes you should have no more than 15 slides; saying that 30 slides in 60 minutes seems excessive and perhaps there is a sliding scale with the ratio falling to a third by the time you reach the hour mark. However, this view is unpopular. A colleague severely criticised me when I put forward this principle saying that he found a presentation of 10 minutes which used 98 slides to be acceptable, a rate of one slide every 6.1 seconds. He said many contained a sequence of single images and I said, well, then do not try to make a 'flick book' on screen these days it is simpler and less distracting to have a looping animation of what you are showing. It is ironic that PowerPoint facilities such as animation are, in most cases, just used as decoration (and a distraction) rather than actually communicating a point in a more appropriate way.
People read about 70 words per minute at a relaxed pace for content more sophisticated than 'simple', it rises to 100 words for simple content, though I know some business schools who expect 250 words per minute from their students. Now, this means that for an average slide, at 70 words per minute you would expect it to take about 45 seconds to read it given the amount of content there. However, these reading rates are derived from books where the idea is often continued on for a number of sentences. PowerPoint is renowned to providing a whole series of different ideas or factors quickly in succession. Thus, while your eye can look over the content in 45 seconds the brain may take longer, especially as there is recent evidence that such mental faculties begin deteriorating from the age of 45 so encompassing much a business audience.
Demands for the audience further diffuse their ability to concentrate on content. Many audiences become indignant if you do not provide handouts of the content you are parading on the slides. However, if you do that you add a third form of input into their minds on top of your voice and whatever is on the screen. PowerPoint has increasingly enabled the use of audio and video resources so how do you put them on to a handout, print them out as a 'flick book'? In addition, anyone who asks for handouts is effectively saying that they are not actually going to engage with what you are saying, they will flick through it later. I accept that people with particular disabilities benefit from handouts but then they are using them instead of what is on the screen not in addition to that content. There have long been slide presentations, dating back to magic lantern shows of the 19th century and many of them were very tedious. What the difference has been with PowerPoint is the ability to add words on to them so duplicating visual and aural communication of the same message, especially as so many presenters simply read from the slide. I always feel that this suggests the audience is illiterate and the presenter is filling the role of the mice who read the headings in the movie 'Babe' (1995) the director knowing that the reading age of much of the audience was pretty low (it is a children's movie).
Due to these difficulties, PowerPoint presentations often become a ritual rather than any form of communication. It is like watching holy communion and brings similar benefits to you. As yet I have not heard of any priests using PowerPoint for their sermons though I may be mistaken. Religious officers have a history of knowing how to present, it is something that they have been doing for centuries. Of course, some people feel that they can brighten up their content with unrelated images or even random sounds.
I am fascinated with the industry of creating 'business images' often surreal portrayals of 'business people' faking a meeting or bellowing at each other through megaphones or wandering around a desert pulling something like a ball and chain. I wonder what the working conditions are like for these people who have to model strange activities in these deserts. If the image whether a random shape or one of these photographs is of use, why not simply have it to represent the idea you are trying to communicate? Why have the words and the picture too? Of course, in international business images can be culturally confusing though I also note having worked with Americans and South Africans that words even in the same language can obfuscate more than they can clarify.
Back in the 2000s I found such any different approaches to the slog through numerous slides was challenged and I was told that it showed I lacked ability in using PowerPoint, apparently a necessary minimum requirement. There was no discussion of the intellectual engagement, purely a focus on the cosmetic aspect. It was more acceptable to have an excessive quantity of slides for the time allotted than to try a different approach which stepped away from the ingrained expectations of PowerPoint. I certainly believe that 'less is more' in terms of PowerPoint. Often you can put questions up which you then answer orally for the audience. You can use it to present diagrams of illustrations that provoke discussion. Ironically, Bill Bailey in his 'Dandelion Mind' tour does this surprisingly well when discussing 'Doubting' Thomas in art. Part of the problem of these approaches are that they are dependent on using PowerPoint in the way it was designed to be used, i.e. as an aid to an oral presentation. Now, however, you have to prepare slides for different purposes. I am now habitually asked to put my slides on to websites or email them to people. Thus, I need to have enough words on them that someone who does not have me standing beside them talking about the content can still understand them.
Increasingly I make two versions for these different audiences so reducing the benefit of the time saving offered by PowerPoint. However, someone looking for the content to read online or be emailed to them would far better receiving a piece of prose, a report going into the details in some detail or simply summarising them. There is no point in having slides if you are simply going to print them out or read them on your own computer screen, you might as well simply have a body of text including appropriate illustrations. You would not expect to put pages of a Word document up at a presentation so why do you expect to give presentation slides to someone as if they were a report? PowerPoint has become so fetishised that it is difficult for many people in business to think about communicating without using it even when it is not an appropriate medium for what you are saying.
Perhaps my views are beginning to take root in some isolated places. Whilst I am being pressured to write more and more wordy texts so that I can go through the ritual of twisting round so I can read my own words from an inappropriate way of presenting them, i.e. vast and close to my face, a young colleague has listened to my views. I have now attended two presentations in which he has eschewed PowerPoint except to introduce the fact that he is not going to use it. At the last presentation he pointed out to the audience that, whilst they were apparently not aware of it they actually knew all the points he was about to raise about customer demands already. He gave them three questions and in the space of fifteen minutes the audience of fourteen came up with all the findings that he would have presented. Perhaps they felt cheated of their ritual of slide watching, but I have a feeling that they gained the message more effectively. We need to keep reminding ourselves that it is the effectiveness of what we are doing in terms of communicating what we have to say that must be the starting point. Otherwise it is like picking up a hammer or a saw and struggling to think what we could build with them rather than planning to build something and then taking the appropriate tool out of the box. Trying to defy the dogmatic, orthodox PowerPoint approach, however, may expose you to being treated like a heretic of old.
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