Читать книгу Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture is Ruling Our Lives - Madeleine Bunting - Страница 11

The biggest single factor driving work intensification is information technology, argues Francis Green. It enables greater use to be made of time and ‘fills up gaps that would otherwise be natural breaks in the pattern of work’. He backs up his argument by pointing to research showing that 42 per cent of workplaces which had introduced new technology in the previous five years experienced a substantial increase in the pace of work, compared with 31 per cent of workplaces where no new technology had been introduced.¹¹ Often the introduction of information communication technologies (ICT) leads to changes in both the job process and the whole way the work and the organisation is structured. Green found that where there had been reorganisation the rates of intensification were dramatic, with 45 per cent reporting a substantial increase, compared to 29 per cent where there had been no change. If that reorganisation introduced a greater involvement of workers – i.e. they were required to take on more responsibility for tasks – the proportion of workplaces experiencing work intensification increased again, to 48 per cent compared with 30 per cent where there was no increased worker involvement.’¹² Nor is such reorganisation a one-off adjustment; it becomes a continuous process as a response to constantly evolving ICT and changing market conditions.

Information technology also increases the pressure on employees to perform, as companies themselves are subject to more exacting regulations and quality control. There is less room for shoddy work, for an absent-minded moment on the assembly line, because the technology enables tracking of products; for example, if a hair was found in one of Saltfillas’ packets, the company would be able to track, out of the thousands packed every day, who the packer was at the time the packet went through.

The technology to measure every moment of the employee’s performance has enabled the extension of Frederick Taylor’s dream into white-collar work, bringing unprecedented control and time efficiency. It transforms the traditional hierarchical structures of bureaucracy, by facilitating supervision and removing the need for layers of managerial control. Here’s how Liz, working in the mortgage department of a major bank in Yorkshire, describes how the computer has replaced the clerical supervisor:

We had a laminated sheet of barcodes representing a series of tasks on our desk, and every time we did anything we had to swipe the appropriate barcode with a laser reader pen. We had seventeen minutes to get out a mortgage offer. If the phone went, we had to answer it within two rings and all the calls were recorded and monitored to check whether we were giving out accurate information and the manner with which we dealt with the call. Every time we made a call we had to swipe the pen, and every time we answered the phone we had to swipe. You had to swipe if you were going to the toilet or to get a coffee. If you wanted to talk to a colleague you had to swipe, so that all interactions with colleagues were being monitored. When we had finished for the day, we had to log in and out. The whole thing was then downloaded to the supervisor, who could look at the log to check productivity.

It was like working for Big Brother. Some of my colleagues would say it’s for the greater good – trying to get profits up. The people I worked with came from very varied backgrounds. Some women who had worked in factories didn’t mind it because they were used to being closely monitored. It was the younger ones who resented it, or those who came from managerial backgrounds or were college-educated; they wanted more freedom and initiative.

The log Liz describes can be programmed to highlight any departure from the required routine – such as too many toilet breaks or too many ‘consultations with colleagues’. The level of supervision is superior to anything that even the most beady-eyed boss could achieve.

At the lower levels of the labour market, information technology has frequently been used to increase pressure and reduce autonomy. In professional and managerial jobs the story is rather different: it has increased both pressure and autonomy. The higher the level of the employee’s computer skills, the greater the degree of anxiety. Research on the impact of information technology on the upper end of the labour market is still in its early stages, but the indications are that it has significandy increased workloads. How do we use email, mobile phones, the internet and laptops, and why haven’t they lived up to the promise of the advertising of making our lives easier? Why do so many people say that they have in fact made their jobs more difficult?

There are two separate issues about how technology can increase the burdens of work: the volume of information it makes available to us, and the way in which it increases our own accessibility. Firstly, the volume of information to which the internet provides access is obvious within a few minutes: a Google search under almost any heading will bring up thousands of relevant items. Eighty-two per cent of managers mentioned the proliferation of the information they had to deal with as a cause of long hours.¹³ Material which would once have been kept within the company or department is now widely available on the internet or intranet. The knowledge economy has transformed the circulation of data so that anywhere on the net there could be exactly the information you’re looking for. So when do you settle for anything less?

What accelerates the flow of information is that the whole balance of effort involved in its distribution has reversed: once, a request for a particular bit of information might have required typing it out or photocopying it and putting it in the post; now, it simply requires an email with an attachment. The marginal costs incurred by the sender have shrunk to a few minutes, while the costs to the receiver to read, digest and consider the information are as time-consuming as ever. Far more information is being distributed than ever before, but what has not changed is our capacity to absorb and process it. In fact there is some evidence that the increased flow of information actually hinders our mental processes, making us less productive, not more. Psychologist David Lewis described in Information Overload (1999) how the brain becomes tired trying to keep up, and loses its powers of concentration and the ability to think clearly or rationally. He cited Stephen Grossberg’s studies of mind and brain, which warned that one of the strategies the brain uses to reduce fatigue is ‘to pay attention to anything new, while taking no notice of what is unchanged’.¹⁴

Secondly, many of the new information technologies transform accessibility. The mobile phone dismantles many of the spatial boundaries of work introduced by industrialisation. It was the development of factories which bounded work spatially, separating it from the home. For the middle classes the spatial differentiation became even more clear-cut with the growth of suburbs and commuting. In the last twenty years mobile phones, laptops, company intranets and home PCs have dissolved the separation between our work and our private lives. It’s true that the spillover is both ways – children phoning their parents in the middle of meetings, for example – but we have been better at policing that intrusion of home life into work than work into home. As one civil servant emailed me: ‘I frequently get emails from colleagues sent at 2 or 3 a.m. And what’s more, copies of replies sent back around the same time. One man at a meeting recently admitted that he “snuck out of bed” in the middle of the night to do his emails, trying not to wake his partner, who “got annoyed about it”. He’ll be dead before he’s fifty.’

A manager for a software company emailed: ‘I enjoyed the rush in a way, but…I didn’t want to see friends or family in the evenings or weekends, it was just more hassle…I had a secretary organise my emails into four categories: urgent-important, not urgent but important, not important but urgent, etc., and I would only read and action the most pressing until I could face another long night at home sorting out all the others – only to find fifty new ones the next morning…The most apt metaphor to sum the experience up is to imagine yourself standing at the back end of a dumper truck full of gravel. It slowly tips out, covering you. You dig frantically to stop being buried but the gravel keeps on coming and never ceases. If you stop digging, you’ll die.’

But the frustration and resentment has not triggered any campaign or collective action to protect privacy. There have been no battles to institute ‘no calls outside office hours’ contracts, or protests against the home PC being linked up to the company intranet. On the contrary, this Trojan horse has frequently been welcomed; as one female executive explained, 24/7 accessibility is a price worth paying for greater freedom over when she works. The trade-off is privacy and boundaries in exchange for a degree of autonomy – you may work long, unpredictable hours, your leisure may never be free of the possibility of work intruding, but you have a measure of control and can take off a couple of quiet hours in the middle of the afternoon.

Technology has also transformed accessibility within organisations. That’s the appeal of email – private, quick and direct. The barriers of the bureaucratic, hierarchical organisation appear to crumble as we click on the ‘send’ box; there are no secretaries to brazen our way past, no underlings or deputies to deal with, we can reach anyone anywhere. Email has bred its own character and tone of democratic directness and informality. Of course, senior executives quickly discovered this led to overload, and put their secretaries in charge of their email, but its accessibility and privacy continues to be seductive, and reconfigures office relationships, subverting hierarchies and strengthening more egalitarian networks.

But email has some significant drawbacks. It has evolved as a means of communication very rapidly, with little etiquette or codes of conduct, and has major flaws: email correspondence is very hard to conclude satisfactorily, and because of its brevity and speed it is often very imprecise, thus leading to a much longer correspondence in order to clarify issues. One research study shows that ‘more than 65 per cent of all email messages fail to give the recipients enough information to act upon, and ambiguous and poorly-written emails can lead to misunderstandings that can cause tension within the workplace, and may lead to incorrect instructions being carried out’.¹⁵ Judy Bendis, an occupational psychologist, was called in to a major public sector organisation to help tackle the rising tide of emails. The biggest problem was that emails were distracting, she found: people were checking their email inbox two or three times an hour, which broke up their concentration; each check took at least two or three minutes, and then another minute to refocus attention. The whole process, repeated through the day, can take up 25 per cent of the employee’s time. One of the chief complaints of managers is constant interruptions, and email is one of the culprits.

But the biggest complaint of all is the sheer volume of emails. The higher you rise in an organisation, the bigger your electronic in-tray: an average of twenty-two emails a day at junior management level increases to forty-seven at the most senior, and the figure is growing all the time.¹⁶ Emails have a disproportionate impact on long and anti-social hours because they are typically dealt with either at the beginning or the end of the day. Asynchronous communication may have seemed initially like a form of liberation – you could find a moment in your own time to reply – but it is indeed often in your own time. Bendis found that: ‘For managers not at their desks for much of the day because they are in meetings, the only time to catch up is out of normal working hours. A lot of people were printing them out to read on the train or tube or picking them up at weekends.’ Those working part-time often have proportionally an even bigger email in-tray to deal with – catching up on the day or days they’ve been off. Taking a long holiday exacts a heavy price when emails pile up at the rate of fifty to a hundred a day, and many admit to checking up on them while they’re away, to prevent the build-up. Mary is a senior executive in an NHS trust:

I have an absolutely enormous electronic in-tray – usually about 250 to attend to. Of those about two hundred will include an attachment which requires my reading and commenting on it. I get about fifty emails a day, and 50 per cent of them I deal with immediately. Another 25 per cent I try and deal with at the end of the day and another 25 per cent get dealt with later. Usually I’ll be in at the weekend and have a clear-out. I had some time away recently and got back to find five hundred emails waiting. A lot of them have useful information, especially if you want to keep a breadth of knowledge of what’s going on in the organisation. In the past, managers of a particular expertise were left to deal with that but it’s all more interconnecting now.

The ‘carbon-copy’ function of email gets a big share of the blame for its volume. Senior managers are often being copied into emails just to cover the employee’s back, or in the hope of drawing attention to their work. Bendis found in her study that email was being used to seek ‘positive strokes’, particularly from a manager to an underling, the reply being the modern-day equivalent of a pat on the back,

But the carbon-copy email can also be vital. Mary explained how she has to keep abreast of a huge range of information, because she never knows at what point a particular development could impact on her responsibilities. A predecessor in her type of job twenty years ago would have kept his (it probably would have been a man) focus on his own department, she commented, but that thinking is now scorned as creating ‘silo’ organisations which can’t keep up with the speed of information flow and the pace of change. The sociologist Manuel Castells coined the phrase ‘the network society’ to describe the relationships which open up in the constantly changing and unpredictable digital society. The interconnectedness draws more and more activities into relationship with each other: the company whose stock price rises on rumours of a government initiative, the supplier whose contracts could then be hit, and so on. It’s the syndrome of the butterfly flapping its wings in the Bay of Bengal which causes storms elsewhere: small actions can have disproportionate consequences. The quality of the network is what determines the success or failure of the organisation or individual: you never know from what point will come information which may determine opportunity or disadvantage.

The network society has a very clear impact on hard work. The individual who has built up a network of useful relationships is at the nodal point of intersection where information is accurately analysed, decisions are made and power lies, but this is also where information overload is at its most acute. The more points of intersection the node bears, and thus the more flows of information, the more effective the decision-making and the potential for brilliant strategic breakthroughs – and, of course, the more work…much more work.

This makes the task of management much more complex – there are many more balls to keep juggling. And it makes the concept of professionalism, where definitions of commitment have always incorporated long hours and availability to the client, positively punishing. The interface with clients becomes more demanding; in the most skilled, lucrative parts of the labour market they want instant access throughout waking hours, while intensified competition accelerates the required turnaround times. The result is the kind of hours common in banking, corporate law, accountancy and consultancy, where seventy-hour weeks can be common and the timelessness of 24/7 global capitalism is unmediated by any reference to human well-being.