[alt text: a photo of two kids sliding down two separate playground slides (chutes) that are side-by-side but end in the same place. The left slide is captioned: “Being a slacker at work”. The right side is captioned: “Being the go-to-guy at work”. The bottom part where the slides meet is labeled: “No raises”.]
The place I work for always boasts about how we’re making millions of extra dollars each year. But raises (if any!) have not kept up with inflation. I’m able to save far less money than I could when I started in 2019 and my lifestyle hasn’t changed at all other than trying to live more frugally over time.
My workplace also keeps putting in monitoring tools that continue to get more invasive over time. The most recent addition is seeing mouse movement, clicks and scrolls, keyboard inputs and how often there are page/program changes on your screen. There’s still ways around it, but it’s annoying because it doesn’t solve the productivity/morale issues and just makes them worse lol.
It’s like…the solution is right in front of their noses. Just treat people better/not like robots
I’ve been saying this in response to a lot of things lately, but… people are emotional. It’s an emotional problem. Management feels a way, mostly contempt, and any studies about how treating people better would be cost-effective don’t matter. Studies show that a 4-day workweek is good for productivity and profits? Nope, feels wrong, can’t be true.
Essentially, people are stupid and I don’t know how to fix it. Can’t just bop a CEO on the nose with a newspaper when he’s being bad, unfortunately.
Heh, bopping them on the nose with the newspaper would be pretty sick though.
I hope the whole 4 day work week eventually takes off. That would be wonderful. A whole extra day to recharge. Amazing.
You’re probably right about it being an emotional issue. It’s probably difficult to accept that doing something like that could help produce better results.
the solution has been known for over a hundred years and is called unionizing and organizing
That would certainly help with a lot of problems, but won’t fix the underlying problem that hinders all of us. That is, that humans often weigh emotions more than they probably should.