Fear Of Putting A Foot Wrong In A New Job

As noted in my last posting, after 12 months of unemployment I have finally found work.  Whilst that has lifted a great deal of burden off me and lifted the threat of losing my house and never being able to own one again, it has opened up new fears, which in my weariness after joblessness, weigh heavily on me. 

One key fear is that I will not be able to do the job.  Much of the feedback I received from interviews over the past year has been incredibly negative.  One company sent me three pages of criticisms of my performance in the interview and another accused me of having lied on my application form because when they met me they felt I was incompetent and could not have been the man who appied.  When I was a teenager you were told that if you saw a vacancy for which you could match 4 out of 5 of the requirements you should apply for it.  That principle has long gone.  These days not only do you have to match 25 out of 25 of the listed requirements but also show evidence of what you have done.  I think this may be one reason why youth unemployment has reached a level even higher than in the 1980s even though overall unemployment has yet to reach that decade's peak.  Recruitment has become 'mechanised' and so the young without vast experience now do not even get the chance to show their potential because they are filtered out at stage one for not being able to say they have 3 years' experience using every piece of industry software listed on the job specification.  The increase in industry-specific qualifications which I have also noted on this blog, is an additional factor in this too.  By the time I applied for recent jobs, I was stretching every crumb of experience so as to match the specifications.  I was scrupulous in never lying, not even exaggerating, but now fear that I am simply not as confident or as skilled in the wide range of activities my job expects me to undertake as the interviewers believed as a result of my desperation to get interviews.

Other fears stem from coming into a new office and company environment.  I made a huge mistake in going to work for my last employer.  I had not checked what kind of working culture they had and so was really caught out when I found that it was a culture from the 1950s.  The snobbery and social class division at the company was incredible.  I was told that I should not be at the level that I as at, not because I could not do the job (I actually did it far better than my predecessor), but because of my social background.  I was told this blatantly by my line manager.  Bizarre things such as me being unable to say what my favourite recipe cooked on an Aga (a range oven burning wood or coal costing around £6000) was used to show how unsuited I was for the post.  I do not anticipate this in my new job, but it has made me very cautious of 'not fitting in'. 

In two of my last three jobs I have been bullied.  In my last full-time post a manager took a personal dislike to me from the start and taking individual words from emails portrayed me as setting up a 'resistance group' within the company.  She went around eliciting any negative comment or even neutral comment, that she could use to compile a list of complaints against me.  None of the complaints had substance and the word were taken out of context and blown up into some fantasy.  It made me phobic of saying or doing anything, knowing that even good work could be twisted some way to appear as a flaw.  The trade union representative found it incredible that she could do such things.  However, like me he recognised that these days you have little ability to fight back when someone even in a slightly more senior position decides to use the system against you.  Her behaviour cost the company thousands of pounds but they seem to have taken no steps to head off something like that happening again.  Procedures are wonderful for helping run a company smoothly, but too often in the hands of someone with a personal grudge, as I have seen happening too often to colleagues of mine, they can easily be used as a method of bullying.

Two jobs back from that I was bullied for a year by a colleague on the same level as me.  He was incredibly arrogant believing that anything that came out of our office had to have been influenced by his ideas and so should have his name on it rather than mine.  He was terribly impatient and assumed that if he sent an email it would be received instantly and in turn he would expect an instant response.  As anyone who has worked in a large company knows, this does not always happen.  I have had emails arrive between 4 and 14 days after they have beens sent and internal mail has arrived up to 2 months late.  In addition, I had other work to do other than that which involved him, often on behalf of more senior staff or with a greater urgency.  On aspect on which I was employed was my ability to time manage and prioritise, which I did.  Yet, of course, that often meant his work involving me had to wait in a queue, something he could not accept.  He was also critical of me for not being married or having children and so felt it meant I was immoral.  In fact I led a quiet, celibate life free from drugs and alcohol abuse.  This was not enough, the simple fact that I was unmarried implied to him that I must be a reprobate and unsuitable for work alongside him.  Both these bullies were 'nice people' liked by those they were not bullying and in both cases it proved impossible to make more than a handful of people understand how much I was suffering from working with them.  Bullying in 2 out of 3 jobs make me fear it will happen again, to the long-term detriment of my career.

I have certainly learnt not to say anything of my private life; not to have a photograph of my girlfriend or her child on my desk, because I have found these would be things used against me.  At my last job so many characteristics of my girlfriend (being from abroad originally, coming from a 'low' social class [daughter of a police officer], being a single parent, running her own business) were criticised and these criticisms were added to those of me, even though she had never even been within 120 Km of the company site while I was working there.  From now on I am going to keep all mention of my life outside work a complete secret.  Conversely, though, I do worry that I will be charged with being 'distant' or 'cold' because I cannot bring a wife along to work social events.  It seems ironic in an age when you have to complete extensive 'equal opportunities' forms every time you apply for a job, outlining your nationality, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, marital status and any disabilities, to then find that even minor elements of these will, in fact, be used as a basis on which to criticise you.

Another thing I have learnt in the past 2-3 years is not to hold too tightly to the truth.  I think that I feel a real discomfort when lies are spoken partly because of Asperger's tendencies (and going for a proper diagnosis of that, I have now been persuaded, would be best put back if I want to keep my job).  However, as I have noted before, we are in an era of management culture which again smacks of the 1950s, with bosses feeling freer to say 'my way or the highway', to compel workers, no matter what their level to 'put up and shut up' rather than raising concerns about what is planned.  Of course, this is a trend which is prevalent in Chinese companies and government so I guess we should not be surprised to see it so common here in the UK.  In addition, the 'whip of unemployment' is back in full effect just as many employers were crying out for in the mid-2000s.  I am certainly cowed by it and know that in the coming year I am going to have to bite my lip and not speak out even when I see a plan which is bound for disaster.  It is ironic given that I have been employed for my expertise in 17 areas and have reached office manager level, that my views are not only not solicited but even raising concerns risks me losing my job.  You can term this the 'Titanic mentality' but it seems increasingly prevalent in British business and as a consequence projects are going to be driven through without sufficient discussion or reflection, based on the enthusiasm of one or two individuals rather than drawing on the knowledge of a range of staff.

Related to having to remain silent about any potential flaws in proposals is the need to check word-for-word everything that I write or say.  In my last post, emails would be checked literally word-by-word by my line manager and single 'offending' words were used as the basis for complaint. It was not about the overall content or the thrust of an argument, simply about the vocabulary used.

I speak plainly and clearly, but now need to learn how to discuss issues, no matter how controversial they may be, in language as circumspect as that used in the court of the Japanese emperor.  When a single word in a set of minutes or a report can be used to suggest you are trying to undermine the company, you have to check and check again.  Not only that, you have to quickly understand what your managers and colleagues understand by certain phrases, even if that understanding is out of step with the rest of the industry.  In the age of desktops and laptops we are all our own secretaries, but from now on, I am going to get as much written by other staff as possible so at least to put a 'fire gap' between me and the readers of the minutes or reports, knowing that so much will be 'lost in translation' as we battle to know what the readers (not only those who the material is intended for, but anyone who may stumble across it later too) understand by individual words.

Another challenge for me is length of communications.  As I have noted before, there is a demand for everything to be very brief as if Twitter has become the baseline for our communications.  Again I have been criticised for the simple length of what I write, not the content.  I have failed to learn the unstated acceptable length for an email, which of course varies depending on the particular recipient and the subject being discussed on that occasion.  The length dismisses any discussion of the actual content and so makes it pointless for me to even bother communicating.  I have no idea what the acceptable length of communication is in my new job, but you can guarantee that I will be sending lots of single sentence emails filled with abbreviations; with separate emails to cover different aspects of a single case, rather than risking putting them into a single email or report.

My experiences make me feel as if I have become an outsider in the workplace and that, despite all my years of expertise, have missed out on the training on what seems to so many employers to be the 'standard' and only acceptable approach to working in an office.  Ironically it ignores things which on paper should be basics of office work, such as clear communication and avoiding discrimination on any basis.  I am certainly going into the workplace fearful of saying or writing anything wrong.  This has effectively castrated me as an employee, not willing to risk making comments on any proposals, let alone taking any initiative or leading an activity for fear that even minor differences from the 'norm' will be used to attack me.

Is R.S.V.P. Dead?

The fact that historically people have written 'R.S.V.P.' (standing for the French phrase Répondez S'il Vous Plait, i.e., Respond, Please) on the bottom of invitations suggests that even in the past, ages which we think had greater manners, people could be neglectful of telling their host if they were coming to an event or not.  However, certainly in my life of forty years, I have seen a decline in this basic courtesy.  It seems to occur at all levels.  In the workplace the advent of electronic systems has actually reversed this tendency a little.  Send an electronic invitation to a meeting and the recipient is often compelled to click if they will attend or not.  If you do not use such a system, though, then people sending apologies, or probably more accurately, Apologies, has declined severely even in the period that I have been in full-time work since the early 1990s.  I suppose there are things like emails and even online conferencing to fill the gaps, but it is not only an issue of knowing who has been involved in a debate at a meeting and who has had their voice heard, but simple professional courtesy.  I suppose such 'non-productive' activity has been frowned upon since the era of 'lunch is for wimps' that came in during the 1980s, in fact to make under-staffed offices seem dynamic.

Of course, companies not contacting you after you have attended an interview to tell you that you have not got the job has been going on for many years now.  It leaves you hanging in doubt for a number of days, hoping that you will get a call.  How hard is it, as with my last interview, when there have only been four candidates, to telephone and thank you for attending but saying you have not got the job.  They do not have to telephone, they could send an email, putting you out of your misery far quicker.  No-one seems to spare a thought for the fact that applying and being interviewed for jobs is tough enough and the lingering hope that you might have got it, just makes it feel even more bitter.  Clearly I cannot comprehend that for companies recruiting, a quick phonecall is something that they have no time for or no willingness to do.  Perhaps they do not even give it that much thought, once the candidate is out the room they give no consideration to the fate of the people who did not get the job.  In this, however, they do not realise that they might be dissuading someone they thought was good enough to interview from ever applying again and also might be attracting unnecessary bad publicity from someone working in their sector.

I suppose the fact that I cannot understand this off-hand behaviour shows how out-of-step I am with current business culture, which, certainly where I am now working, seems to have gone back to the 1980s.  I get accused of being 'unprofessional' because I keep my workforce informed about developments, rather than concealing what I know.  The attitude of my superiors is often incredibly patronising, they seem to believe that the average office worker has no idea about the broader business and lacks the intelligence to guess about it.  They also seem to assume that people are only concerned about having a job or being unemployed, that they are not interested in the own job, its quality and how it fits into the broader scope of the company's activity. 
Another criticism I have levelled at me, is that I 'waste' too much time on niceties.  I guess perhaps living in Britain with culture so influenced by the USA I am in a society far removed from what I see as courteous.  When I faced frustration from colleagues that meetings did not start the moment everyone was seated, I began to characterise the introductory conversation as the 'Bedouin tent coffee conversations', i.e that before you start business you show interest in the people you are meeting with, as humans.  Having worked in Germany and especially in Spain and Portugal, I know business people there put a lot of store by such interaction.  It was incredibly embarrassing to be at a series of meetings across a number of days in Portugal involving representatives from France, Germany, Hungary, Spain and Portugal, to find we had to turn down the events we had been invited to because my company had booked us to fly out two hours after the last meeting was scheduled to finish. The company seemed to have no idea how rude that seemed to our hosts and the fact that we missed out on the informal networking.  I know that people on expenses and 'junkets' earn a bad name, but in British business culture we seem to have gone too far the other way and now seem terse and cold towards international business partners.

Such terse verging on rude behaviour is not confined to the business world, it is now embedded in our social contacts as well.  It seems ironic that people feel that if they cannot raise you on your mobile phone that something is wrong.  Using Twitter and Facebook people update their acquaintances and even complete strangers to their state of mind, even their whereabouts.  However, send out an invitation, electronically, or particularly on paper and you receive a completely different attitude.  Of course, two hours before any event you are hosting you receive a flurry of people pulling out.  This is the stage when they realise that if they actually are going to attend they need to stop what they are doing and begin getting ready and setting off.  This is pretty rude especially for events that need catering, but these days I am glad for even this last minute courtesy.  What is more common is people simply not turning up and not informing you of that fact.  Given the range of communication devices we have these days there is no excuse.  You can text or call from a traffic jam, you can send an email or a tweet from the railway station where you are stuck or even from the wireless laptop you have with you on the train.  You can telephone.  Even if your mobile phone has been stolen or run out of charge you can still use the remaining telephone boxes.  If I am not able to answer, then simply leave a message.  None of this is difficult.  For those people who have decided not to come long before the actual day, it is even easier.  However, these days it is rare to receive any communication that the people are not coming.

It seems ironic given how much 'rage' we have in public life that people actually find it difficult to engage with people, even their friends, over 'challenging' or 'difficult' issues.  They are quite happy to bellow or hoot someone or swear vigorously at them as that is all one-way communication, they have no real emotional engagement with it and can stomp or drive away if they do not like the response.  People cannot deal with 'I am sorry, I cannot come to your party' and the 'That's a shame I was really looking forward to you being there'.  That is too much of a burden for so many adults these days.  They would rather be rude and saying nothing at all.  This unwillingness to even face a slightly discomforting conversation feeds back into business and I have a manager who complains 'I don't want to know that' when people make even constructive criticism about the company and tries to have every meeting artificially jolly even when people are at loggerheads.  Part of the reason is that too many people in work cannot process the concept that others see their company and people's behaviour within it as different from how they see it themselves.  Often these days I hear people say that it is a 'lie' when people express a differing opinion.  This tunnel vision allows people who do not respond either way to an invite, to see themselves as being polite and in the right.

It is not that I accept that my event may not be the most important thing on a person's agenda, I am quite happy for them to say 'no, I cannot come', whatever their reason.  What is more difficult is hearing nothing at all, especially when buying food and drink is an issue.  It is infinitely worse when the event is not an adult one but a child's.  This is the situation in which rudeness begins to result not just in too much food being bought or people sitting around waiting for someone to turn up who never comes, in such circumstances it is far more unpleasant.  For the past five years I have been involved each year indirectly in a child's birthday party.  Given that with funds tight, children these days are usually limited to the number of people they can invite, they carefully select who will receive an invitation.  The day of the party comes and you have heard nothing back from half of the parents even though you have left reminder messages on their answerphone and sent texts.  You dare not tell the child that half of their friends may not come, just in case, as often happens, some of them actually turn up, even though they have given you no indication that they are attending. 

Another percentage will show up at the wrong time.  Two of the families this year, despite saying their child was attending had gone shopping, one lot to London and then only realised they were supposed to be coming to the party.  One showed up near the end and one never came at all.  I feel discouraged when people do that to me as an adult, but to a child with all the issues about having their friends around and the presents they will receive it easily turns what is supposed to be a happy day into a stressful one as they cling on hoping a particular friend will show and the adults are no better informed than them.

Are our lives so busy; do we and the children around us have so much going on that we simply forget all invitations?  In fact, those families who fill their children's weekends with sports and music activities are often the ones best at responding to invitiations even if it is with a constant 'no'.  If we lived in primative times when communication was difficult there might be an excuse, but these days when we walk around with communication devices that can send a movie to the other side of the world in seconds, why is it so difficult to use such tools?  I am probably coming at this from the wrong end.  How did it become acceptable to not respond to an invitation at all, and yet see no difficulty in speaking to the people you have so snubbed, again?  How is it acceptable to ignore an invitation and then turn round and invite the people you have just snubbed to some event?  I suppose it is this breakage in people's minds between their actions and the consequences of those actions.  I suppose when people see nothing wrong in speeding then I should not be surprised that they see nothing wrong in ignoring an invitation and expecting you to be happy about it.  We have become so utterly selfish that other people's feelings count for nothing compared to our desires and our apathy.  Have we so lost empathy that we cannot see that if we treat someone else's child in such an off hand way someone will treat our child just the same?  It seems so.

One reason why I like Goths is that all, I think without exception among those I have met, have 'old fashioned' manners.  If they cannot attend they phone or text or email me and say 'sorry, I can't come, maybe next time'.  This is a rarity in modern UK society where people think it is acceptable simply to ignore an invitation whether they want to attend or not.  People wonder why our society is so fragmented and it is because despite all the technology that allows us to do it, we have developed an antipathy (maybe simply an apathy) to simply communicating with people.

Gagged by My Employer for Telling the Truth

Regular readers of this blog will know that I have worked on contracts in every job I have had. Most last 2 years. In my current employment I am on my second 2-year contract. Now, under EU legislation, that means at the end of this period of work, i.e. August 2009, I should be made permanent in my post. However, when I contacted the human resources department of my employer, they said that somehow none of this work legislation applied to them, nor did a recent court case about contract workers working for a similar company. I quoted the law chapter and verse at them and they yielded a little saying I could apply for permanency in February, though they thought it was unlikely I would get it. Since then the company has been through an extended period of making redundancies, a process which has now been lengthened since the credit crunch kicked in. Thus, it seems highly unlikely that I will be employed by the company after August 2009. Given that I am now over 40 and have always found it difficult to find work (usually it takes 125 applications and 5 interviews from those before I get one), I am likely to be unemployed by September 2009, whatever the economy does, and we have all been promised a recession lasting until at least 2010 if not 2012. Now, I part bought a house last December, and it is clear that when I lose my job, I will lose my house which has fallen £25,000 (€31,000; US$39,500 - I find it difficult to believe that £1 has fallen from US$2.04 to only US$1.58) since it was bought. I cannot sustain the payments of my part of the house if I am not in employment or even if I get a job that pays less than my current one. I want to sell the house, but the market is incredibly slow, so repossession which is rocketing (11,000 houses repossessed in the UK in October alone) is the likely outcome.

Last Wednesday I was switching off my computer before being on leave and travelling to Whitby on the Thursday to help the woman in my house trade. My email system has an 'Out of Office' function which you switch on to tell people when you are not in the office and when you will be back. Now earlier in the day we had had an email from the very head of the company whining how the company cannot afford our pay rise and how it is going to have to break with national collective bargaining so it can keep our salaries down, of course he earns over £180,000 (€223,200; US$284,400). In that atmosphere I wrote on my out of office message 'I am away from my office trying to help earn enough money so that my house will not be immediately reposessed when my contract expires'. This was entirely truthful. The woman in my house was trading to earn money to pay her share of the mortgage. It is also true that the house will be repossessed after my contract expires next year.

Given the extreme reaction, you would have thought I had said something rude or damaging about the company, not the truth about my own life. While I was away messages were criss-crossing the company and my immediate manager was questioned about how could he permit me to tell the truth in this way. The IT section was contacted to remove the message from my email system and also lock me out of all my work accounts. I was hauled into see my manager the moment I got into the office and was told to write such a thing was damaging to my standing in the company. I am so angry, that actually just stating what is going to happen to me is so shocking to the bosses that it offends them and they have it removed. I was completely offended by the head of the company whining about how greedy we are. I know workers have no comeback and are free to be kicked around by employers. I have already commented on how bullying is carried on without any action against it and in fact support for bullies in senior positions. I need to cling to this job but I am going to leave it as soon as I can. The company has a vaunted policy of free speech and communication but come down heavily on a minor observation about my own life not them.

I would love them to tell me that it is a lie and that I have a permanent position or that the contract is extended, but they are not saying that at all. They have destroyed any lingering loyalty I had to them and have turned my resentment into hostility. I will have revenge on them as soon as I can and in the meantime I am going to stop doing anything more than the most obvious work. What is the point anyway if I have no idea whether I will be there any longer than 9 months? There is no point planning events that I cannot guarantee I will oversee. Who wants to work for a company that is so petty that it puts all the wheels of its machine into action over a single sentence on an email. Surely they should realise that if they cannot stomach such a simple statement and have to so over-react there is something seriously wrong with them. I have not whistle blown, I have not revealed the bullying through naming them, I have not sold secrets to a rival, I have simply said (in line with what they have told me) that I will lose my job and then my house. They want me to be grateful, to kiss their feet for being treated this way. They want to behave badly and treat me like scum and yet not be alerted to the fact of how they are behaving.

People say I am wrong when I say I am powerless, but it is clear that I am if I am unable to make such a simple statement without provoking such a harsh reaction. My only power comes in revenge and I am going to turn my efforts to that now. My intention is to wreck the company as best I can even if it takes the rest of my life.