Published December 2003

Today’s workplace is
a volatile mixture
of loneliness, intimacy

The effects of the recession and 9/11 caused some firms to make substantial adjustments — wrenching reorganizations in some cases. This was especially so for the apparel industry, and businesses in the Puget Sound region were no exception.

Most of the downsizing and refocusing experiences were simply painful and best forgotten. There were some management decisions, though, that provide us with some lessons we can bring forward into better times.

In one of the small, local apparel firms, for example, the specialty sales portion of the business declined so dramatically that the two-person team that handled that market was scheduled to be broken up and reassigned. The two women on the team had worked together very well, with the junior member actually having specific, on-the-job knowledge that complemented the manager’s broader experience.

Despite the pending reassignment, they both realized that things could have been worse, of course. They still had jobs. But what was particularly interesting was that the manager of the team expressed concern to the CEO that her subordinate would resign if they were split up “… because she had personally bonded to me.”

The potential loss of an especially valuable worker — although quite young, she was one of the most capable staff members in the firm — was serious, but the economic pressures were so strong that the CEO decided to ignore the manager’s warning and go ahead with the new assignments. The manager would be sent out on the road to develop a new market, while the other young woman would be responsible for customer service in retail sales.

As it turned out, the CEO had made exactly the right decision. Splitting up the team didn’t result in the subordinate’s resignation. In fact, she seemed quite pleased with her new responsibilities.

What happened to the “personal bonding”? Actually, it never existed. The manager had simply misread the situation. And there is a lesson in that for all of us.

Even though the manager was still young herself, and even though she had successfully held down management positions in the past, she had been out of the business workplace for a few years while she concentrated on raising her two children. And in that time things had changed a lot. Even though today’s workplaces often look pretty much the same, from a management standpoint they are fundamentally different from those of a decade ago.

Some of the differences are attitudinal and come from the reshaping of the implicit contract between employer and worker. Other differences are cultural and come from changes in the way people interact with each other. In a sense, our young manager was blindsided by both kinds of change.

Employment in the United States has always been volatile, but as an unintended consequence of increasingly common layoffs and downsizings, the concept of job security largely vanished from our minds, leaving us with very different ideas of job loyalty and self-interest.

The rapid erosion of job security created, and then reinforced, two ideas in the minds of workers.

The first was a shift in relative emphasis from the future to the present. Workplace uncertainties have increased the value of now at the expense of later.

The second idea is that the worker is very much on his or her own. Jobs exist or disappear at the whim of the wind and tide of technology and economics, and no one can do much to help you when your job is being eliminated.

These attitudinal changes in the implicit employment contract are the coldly rational side of today’s workplace. Accompanying them, though, has been an emotional difference, showing up, for example, as an increase in the level of workplace intimacy — in terms of sharing of life experiences.

In today’s workplace, people will matter-of-factly exchange intimate details of their personal lives, information that used to be limited to close family members — and this can be baffling to managers not used to such things. This is precisely what happened to our young woman manager, who mistook intimacies shared in the office and “on the road” with a deeper, genuine friendship.

The new workplace, then, is often a volatile mixture of loneliness and intimacy — aren’t we humans great? — and, of course, it is the manager’s job to bring everyone together to work as a team.

It is a challenge, certainly, but the key is to focus on the present and to build a team by acknowledging our loneliness and reinforcing the shared intimacies. Today’s successful workplace teams leverage our lowered expectations of job security into a greater intensity of enjoyment in working together in the here and now. Teams are by nature as impermanent and as seasonal as life itself. Perhaps that is what makes our experiences with them so worthwhile, and so memorable.

James McCusker, a Bothell economist, educator and small-business consultant, writes “Your Business” in The Herald each Sunday. He can be reached by sending e-mail to otisrep@aol.com.

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