Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Andrew the Arts-based trainer
Not quite what he imagined after four years training to be the next Ian McKellan – but there are worse things than standing on a chair in your socks in a Trust House Forte conference room, encouraging your audience to Discover Their Inner Corporate Clown. Apparently.
With his biggest success a Domestos advert for Taiwan, Andrew took to arts-based training with evangelical fervour. After all, he could talk the back legs off a pantomime horse (he’d had enough experience at the Bedford Corn Exchange). Training, he claims, need never be boring again. Just terribly embarrassing.
Initially the response if encouraging – even to his breathy announcement that this is a safe, non-judgemental environment where risk-taking is encouraged. What is business anyway, his trainees gamefully reason, but a farce or tragedy with frequent opportunities for melodrama?
Andrew is going to take them on a Life-Changing Journey. Whether it’s Re-discovering the Internal Communications Vision or Exploring the Values of Corporate Play, it will Burrow Deep into the Heart of Everyone’s Workplace. Twenty-six customer-care supervisors and middle managers are asked to feel their partner’s life force.
Everything is a story, it seems, and Shakespeare wrote his plays to deal with issues of call centre communication and appraisal interviewing. Who can see Hamlet and not think of the MBA’er faced with the problem of re-branding his plc? Certainly no one except Andrew, which is why he now gets groups to role-play To Be Or Not To Be (Clarifying the Mission Statement), Hamlet and the gravedigger (Dealing With Difficult People in a Customer-Care Situation) and the final banquet scene (Corporate Hospitality: the Way Ahead).
Several hours later some people are considering applying for I’d Do Anything: the rest think about doing a runner but can’t find their shoes. They wonder if anything worse can happen. It can.
Because now Andrew announces that it’s time to explore Living With Corporate Uncertainty – Human Resources has hinted at some serious downsizing – with installations and human tableaux using bubble-wrap, newspaper and toilet rolls. This is the Blue Peter from hell. By the end of the afternoon their facilitator stands victorious amid a three-year-old’s mess fest and people in Marquis de Sade positions. He asks about their new perspectives and someone proudly waves their bubblewrap Mr Blobby.
What the point of the day is nobody knows, but, at least it keeps Andrew out of the community that little bit longer. And anyway there’s no point in screaming – on a traffic island near the M25 no one can hear you scream.
He likes to say ...
‘Hands up who’s in the Zone?’
‘You know you’d like to do a dance drama to Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats’
‘Ask your partner if you can feel her aura.’
‘Please don’t all sit at the back.’
Thursday, May 8, 2008
How weird is your boss?
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Please Scuba In Your Own Think Tank
Friday, April 4, 2008
Don't wake me up, I'm in a meeting ...
What is it about meetings that always brings out the worst in people? If we’re passive, we find they last longer than Murder She Wrote on UK Gold. If we’re dominant with bad listening skills, then it’s just another ego trip with a captive audience sharing one Wagon Wheel between them.
The problem is made worse because most of us think that all meetings are the same. We go in ridiculously unprepared with no idea whether to go into a slight doze or a deep coma. If nothing else, below should give you some ideas to sleep on - preferably in a meeing.
(1) The ‘I’ve been here so long it seems like a second home to me except I don’t normally go for late 80s office furniture’ meeting
A weak chairperson and a few individuals who’ve seen Michael Douglas in Wall Street and can’t wait for red braces to come back are all that’s needed here. Everyone talks at cross-purposes and listening to others is kept to a minimum - just as well considering the number of people in the early stages of rapid eye movement.
Giveaway Phrases:‘Now we’re all here, there’s something else I’d like to say.’‘I think we’re going to need another urgent meeting.’
(2) The ‘let’s get the boring bit out of the way so that we can get down to a tea party’ meeting
In theory this should be one your favourites, especially if a gleaming trolley is temptingly parked in front of everybody with full tea service and lots of comestibles. Unfortunately if you happen to be a woman, there’s every chance that you’ll have to be ‘mother’. Centuries of conditioning mean that male drive flags at the first sign of a steaming pot and fails completely at the merest hint of passing around napkins. Total paralysis sets in with pouring - which is regarded as the next best thing to cross-dressing in front of colleagues.
Giveaway Phrases: ‘So who’s going to be mother?’‘What you need is a good J-Cloth.’
(3) The ‘people I love you all. I want to empower you so that I can delegate all the boring responsibilities on to you’ meeting
Empowerment is a popular buzz word and what an ideal opportunity to thrust the fruits of lazy corporate thinking (sic) into your innocent lap. Basically your facilitator - it sounds friendlier than incompetent manager - will attempt to offload even more dull tasks on to yours truly under the guise that this is somehow liberating your spirit.
Giveaway Phrases: ‘Think of me as your facilitator and friend, not your boss.’‘It’s the only way ahead …’
(4) The ‘if 20 staff go on assertiveness training courses, what do you expect?’ meeting
Assertiveness is a vital skill in today’s business world but few of us can have foreseen what happens when a group of its expert practitioners are forced to make a collective decision in a meeting. As twenty people decide what they want, state it openly, listen carefully and get in touch with their individual needs as the new departmental milk rota is discussed, all you can do is keep quiet and hope no one asks for your opinion.
Giveaway Phrases: ‘No.’‘I think yours is a brilliant idea, but I don’t agree with it.’
(5) The ‘I think this shows what conscientious employees we are by not rushing home’ evening meeting
No one will wish to attend this unless they have been given a mobile phone for partners to continually ring in and ask when they’ll be home. The meeting then has to be temporarily abandoned each time as people mouth to each other that ‘it’s in the dog’ and think they’re being screamingly original.
Giveaway Phrases: ‘There doesn’t seem much point in going home.’‘Can I have half your Polo?’
Sunday, March 30, 2008
If it's Tuesday, it must be Slough: the lows and further lows of sales conferences
Monday, March 10, 2008
Training Daze
Once Geoff or Pam have explained how to break out of your huddled group at the other side of the room, you are finally ready for business. Your trainer (who may prefer to call themselves a facilitator so that they can't be blamed for what is to happen) will spend some time 'framesetting' ie explaining what comes next. It little matters that you have already been sent course details. Given your new mental age, how can you possibly be expected to remember?And if at this stage you are not also over-provided with felt-tips, sugar paper, Pritt Sticks and other nursery stationery, complain loudly.
Whether you're doing assertiveness training, 'learning to say no in middle management', or finding out how to prioritise tasks, it'll be hard to avoid a brainstorming session. Time stands still as you're encouraged to indulge in an endless stream-of-consciousness. Who would have thought 20 adults could spend six hours on 'Making the Most of Meeting Situations' - and then decide the most important thing is to communicate? The uninitiated might feel flattered initially at the Einsteinian connotations of the exercise but soon come to realise the profound truth of the term 'a pool of ignorance'. That is your brain, that is, up there on the screen. The over-enthusiastic ask if they can possibly keep their sugar paper (the use of two or more Magic Markers is always a dead giveaway). Other people's 'ideas' are collected up for future recycling.
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Because You're Worth It
When did you last read a novel that properly described your real working world? Of course you could say when did you last want to read a novel about the fear, loathing and black comedy of the weekly grind. But when most of us spend too much of our waking (and non-waking) life at the corporate coalface, it’s odd that so few novels ever truly hit the spot.
Of course by ‘real working world’ I think we mean the kind of jobs most of us have that we’d prefer not to talk about outside our cubicle. If you’ve ever sat next to a knowledge manager at a dinner party you’ll know the problem. It’s interesting that when novelists deign to dip their toes into our murky world they always seem to make a bee-line for the glam or semi-glam occupation. Thus we had Bridget Jones as a TV researcher, a recent Marion Keyes heroine was a wedding organiser, while Jenny Turner’s The Brain Storm was set in a broadsheet newspaper office and Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End takes place in an ad agency.
It’s interesting that the first two characters are semi-peripatetic (ie don’t have to sit with dribbling colleagues in too many evening meetings) while the others probably have more autonomy than the rest of us. It has to be said that Turner and Ferris would claim to be offering a more serious examination of workplace culture. But while The Brain Storm certainly has its iconic office moments reading Then We Came to the End is quite like being stuck in an office on an endless Tuesday afternoon and thinking for this you had essay crises at university.
Perhaps The Office TV series has just raised the bar so high that no one can possibly come near it. Or perhaps the workplace is just too depressing or complex for most contemporary writers to deal with. It’s also probably the case that many writers just don’t have that kind of ‘hey, I’m going to be spending forty years of my life wondering what a quality circle is in a size-restricted work space surrounded by people who watch Bargain Hunt’ experience of most of us.
It’s hardly surprising then how often writers get things wrong when they dip their toes into our naff world. Tim Lott, for example, referred to ‘typing pools’ in a recent book and we all know these went out with Lucky Strikes. Rachel Cusk’s drippy temp in The Temporary wouldn’t have lasted a minute in a real office. Editors, who’ve probably gone straight from college into the media and publishing, often don’t get it either. An editor at Metro just couldn’t believe such a thing as a learning log existed. As someone who had to fill one in for an entire year to satisfy an obsessive line manager I had to assure her they unfortunately did.
The Great American Novel. The Richard and Judy Novel. Sorry, some of us are still waiting for the Great Have You Stolen My Stapler Novel.
Friday, February 29, 2008
Talk Talk
There’s no question that so-called official channels of communication just aren’t working for us ...
· Internal Communications Team
Er, their idea of effective communication is editing a staff newspaper that makes the North Korean Information Department seem a fountain of truth in comparison. We all know that any internal communications strategy is basically to inform staff how caring, unique and deeply wonderful your company is. The hope is that if this is repeated enough times it will stick somewhere, even if it is mainly in people’s gullets.
· The Intranet
Ditto, only with fewer exclamation marks.
· The Consultant’s Report
Sorry, they earn a lot more than you, can afford Ozwald Boateng suits and make recommendations that colleagues have been talking about for years in the office kitchen, but no one could be bothered to ask them.
· Team Meeting
With most people concerned about who’s been secretly stealing their banana-flavoured Complan from the office fridge there isn’t a lot of time for much else. But when this mainly consists of new management initiatives ranging from Giving Birth Under the IT Help Desk and Work Life Strategies: Getting Married in the Atrium to Managing Your Personal Development Because Frankly No One Else is Going To, it may be a blessing in disguise.
· Your Boss
How can you seriously trust someone who wants to empower you (they feel sorry for you not being stressed enough), delegate (there’s no one else they’d rather give their lousy jobs to) and facilitate (making it easy for all their work to go straight in your direction)?
· The Men in Black and Your P.45
Obviously too late.
But everyone knows that for a really juicy piece of news most of us can rely on the Chief Executive’s PA (knows who’s had sex on blotters in the boardroom) or the receptionist (can describe the Fatal Attraction moment in detail with frequent action replays). At least there’s something to get us into the office on Monday mornings.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
What is it about the public sector and meetings?
Managing Change. Change Management. Change Innovation. During my brief sojourn in the public sector we were always being encouraged to do this. In fact hardly a day went by when a perky file headed with lots of capital letters wasn’t being delivered that would transform us all into corporate team players. Except nothing much ever changed and all senior management’s missives ever did was to move a lot of anxious and slightly autistic people up to a new level of existential anxiety.
As part of the programme our Chief Executive let us know that we were all having too many meetings. Instructions went around insisting we ask ourselves if our meeting was really necessary and if it was might we try, for example, standing up and finishing off any malingerers with some deep vein thrombosis. This was all very well in theory but in practice it was the stuff of nightmare to public sector workers. Without setting up and attending meetings what exactly was our purpose on earth? What else were we supposed to do? It didn’t take long for the anti-meeting mission to find itself lost in the deep landfills of unimportant looking paperwork. We weren’t stupid. We weren’t talking ourselves out of a job.
My colleagues knew that their purpose in life was to say something at the beginning of a meeting even if it was just their name and then earn the right to a Mars Bar-fuelled glutinous snooze. As for the impertinent suggestion that they could ever do without meetings, this could only come from twenty-three year-old consultants in Prada suits.
If there ever was a vacuum it could be quickly abhorred by endless meetings about Health and Safety, fire drill procedures and an investigation into who put purple tinsel up covering the architect’s nineteen seventies hessian statement. In fact it would be entirely possible for a public service worker to spend their entire lives having meetings about policies and procedures and never actually have to do any proper work. It’s not really surprising that we remained suspicious of anyone from outside the sector telling us what we should be doing. Because if they did, er, we could always have a meeting about it.
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Send in the Clones
How spooky is it when you find your department rapidly filling up with clones – of your boss? It’s all very well expecting us to imitate their body language during the interview but we didn’t know we needed the identical DNA before we got the job.
Bosses all know that teams are meant to be a ‘diversity of skills and personality types’ (er, you don’t want everyone crying behind their work station at the same time as there aren’t enough toilet rolls to go round). Except many managers don’t feel capable of making these subtle distinctions. They’d much rather employ staff with the same psychopathic tendencies as themselves. After all with the long hours culture wouldn’t you rather share evening meetings with someone like yourself who's quite happy to practise urinary retention and share half a Wagon Wheel?
In one recent job my line manager saw it as her mission to clone herself lest a tragic accident made her incapable of holding any of her eighty-six ring binders. Admittedly no one quite shared her dress sense, although a tendency to look as if you were attending a wedding reception circa 1987 was slowly becoming de-rigeur. But when it came to being perfectly humourless and to facing off colleagues with meaningless processes and procedures she must have felt great pride in her recruits. And many of them, I slowly became aware, had developed a penchant for cat calendars and soft toy kittens and would often be found together enjoying the latest cat diary. Needless to say those of us not of a feline inclination were glad to feel ostracised and soon found ourselves working elsewhere.
On the other hand I once worked with a colleague I had a great deal – too much – in common with. We would spend whole afternoons rapping about films and literature rather than devising ad campaigns for Southern Gas. It wasn’t good for either of us and he was sacked shortly afterwards.
Just another lose-lose corporate situation. Though, quite honestly, are any of us still counting?
Sunday, February 3, 2008
Do You Really Want to Work from Home Part 3?
Umbilical Cord
It's exhausting being the repository of all your ex-colleagues' hopes, fears and dreams - don't even get them started on your dreadful pension situation - and keeping up the required level of perkiness. But don't worry, many of them will have a chance to experience your exciting new lifestyle firsthand at the next takeoever.
Vision
It's funny, you might have acquired a cottage in Suffolk, a vegetable plot and a bad broadband connection so that no one can get at you, but they still find ways of suggesting that you should be attending Investors in People networking sessions until you're sixty-five. Don't listen to them.
Workaholic
See how your work-rate will soar, without interruptions. Can you actually be 'over-productive' and are you getting paid for it?
'X' Files, The
Reserved for all the boring administration you'll keep putting off.
Yuletide
A lonely time for the home-aloner - even the dreaded office Christmas party takes on a Pickwickensian glamour. All you can do is display the card from the dog shampooist and hope he doesn't want to 'touch base' in the New Year.
Zing
The highs and lows are like nothing you'll ever experience working 9-to-5. But will you ever really want to go back to five-hour 'brainstorming' (sic) sessions called 'Making the Most of Meeting Situations' - only to decide that 'communication is the key to success'? Think about it carefully.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Would You Really Prefer Working From Home?
New Age
Working from home is hyped as the New Age working routine: no carbon miles, saving companies' money, etc - actually it just gives a new lease of life to Jehovah's Witnesses and Bettaware reps who want to be your friend.
Online
You have a PC and fax that has funny turns, but it's automatically assumed you'll be bristling with technology - you'll feel marginalized because you can't even have a proper systems breakdown.
Phone
In the office you know when someone is 'in a meeting', but when you call from your home office you'll always seem to ring people at the wrong moment. Of course, they can ring you anytime, but saying 'sorry, I'm just dealing with the cat's litter tray' doesn't have quite that same ring of self-importance.
Quest
Even if your small business is deeply unsuccessful, you must still look on it as a Journey of Self-Transformation - although your bank manager may find it difficult to see this as a reason for extending your loan.
Real Office
Always try to pretend that you've got one and that there's not really a giant Cabbage Patch doll staring at you from the spare bed.
Small Businessman's Club (sic)
Not always what you'd expect - not if you don't happen to be a dog shampooist, burglar alarm salesman or a trainee aromatherapist, that is.
Training
Look back with yearning at all those useless training courses you attended. But just think of all the extra time you'll be able to spend, yes, overworking.
Monday, January 14, 2008
Would You Really Prefer Working from Home?
Friday, January 4, 2008
The Corporate Bullshit Detector: L
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
Corporate art: weird or just oxymoronic?
Corporate art always seems a bit weird and oxymoronic. Did the artist really sit down with the brief to produce something that matched beige and wouldn’t put people off their BlackBerrying? Or was it just a bit of luck that they had something lying around that didn’t involve any body fluids? Or is it just seen as another expensive outlay that may, like the rest of us, one day be worth the investment?
But, whatever the reason, most of us are unlikely to have a Rothko hanging outside our office, like David Rockefeller, whose White Center was recently sold for $72.8 million. At best we’re more likely to be given inoffensive (we all know we’re talking a Monet print here with enlarged lily). At worst we’ll sit in the same meeting room for years and wonder what kind of mind could produce a grotesque leather clock with drooping handles, a view of the Essex countryside with wonky steeple and a Breton woman in costume on melamine? And, no, we’re not talking post-modern, post-ironic Hoxton gallery here.
Only such is the noxious effect of yet another four hour ‘speed’ meeting that perhaps we’d hate it even if it was a Picasso. Sad, but true.
Win a Great Getaways holiday break www.ihatetheoffice.co.uk