Nostalgic Pathos

Frederic Jameson | Wellness Programs Don’t Work | Factoids | Amazon and the 5-day Workweek

Photo by Dieter K on Unsplash

A history lesson is the best cure for nostalgic pathos.

| Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

Nostalgia, Jameson tells us, is the defining emotion of postmodernism.

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Wellness Programs Don’t Work

Ellen Barry reported in January 2024 on a critical study, led by William J. Fleming, the author of the study and a fellow at Oxford University’s Wellbeing Research Center. In a nutshell, he found that wellness programs, heavily promoted by corporations and the now multi-billion dollar wellness industry, just don’t work.

Although many companies tout their wellness programs as an indication of their commitment to employee health, it turns out that 'people that participated in them were no better off than colleagues that had not.

Trainings on resilience and stress management actually appeared to have a negative effect.

Fleming said 'if you’re seriously trying to drive employees well-being, then it has to be about working practices.' And his analysis suggests companies would be better off focusing on ‘core organizational practices’ like schedules, pay, and performance reviews.

Some practitioners disagree with Fleming’s findings, but others say his methods are sounder than pro-wellness programs’ advocates:

Dr. David Crepaz-Keay, the head of research and applied learning at the Mental Health Foundation in the United Kingdom, who has advised the World Health Organization and Public Health England on mental health initiatives, described Dr. Fleming’s data and analysis as “certainly more robust” than “most of the research that has created the consensus that employee assistance works.”

This all accords with problems known to arise from resilience programs, as reported by Caroline Murphy and Juliet McMahon:

What's behind the rise of organisational interest in resilience? From a management perspective, the answer may lie in the contemporary organisation of work. Seeking maximum productivity from workers through "time compression" has long been a feature of industrial systems. Such forms of time compression as just‐in‐time production and LEAN work systems have further helped to intensify working practices in many industries (see this piece on conditions in Amazon).

Traditionally, these represent the types of issues that would have traditionally been met with resistance from the workforce. But in the absence of strong representation at workplace level, resistance is more difficult to coordinate, leaving employees to face the challenges of intensification on an individual basis. Indeed the concept of resistance has been turned on its head with workers being convinced that any inability to deal with the challenges of more intense working patterns are in some way as a result of inherent personal failings or weakness. It's seen as a lack of resilience rather than justifiable opposition.

From an employee perspective, the wellness and resilience efforts in the workplace are a band-aid slapped on the side-effects of the intensification of work, which would be bettered handled by workers actively resisting it.

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Factoids

Africa climate spiral.

On average, African nations are losing 5 percent of their economies because of floods, droughts, and heat. Many are spending up to a tenth of their budgets just managing extreme weather disasters.

| World Meteorological Organization

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EU lacks fiscal teeth.

European fiscal rules adopted ahead of the creation of the euro stipulate that no EU country is meant to have a government-debt burden of over 60% of GDP, nor an annual deficit of over 3%. How quaint that seems these days. Over half the EU’s 27 member states exceeded the debt figure at last count.

| Charlemagne, The Economist

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A foldable world.

Handset makers will ship 25 million foldable phones this year, up nearly 40 percent from last year.

| Brian Chen

That’s what I want. A phone that opens up to a tablet.

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It’s just a theory, after all.

Among Republicans, 53 percent don’t believe in human evolution.

| Paul Krugman

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Amazon and the 5-Day Workweek

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy makes good on his threats to force workers into the office five days a week, starting in January. As Jordan Valinsky writes,

Jassy has previously advocated that employees work in the office, writing that a physical presence improves company culture.

But where's the proof? He doesn’t offer any, just vibes. And he runs counter to the beliefs or goals of other CEOs:

Just 4% of US CEOs and 4% of CEOs worldwide at the beginning of the year said they will prioritize bringing workers back to the office full time, according to a CEO survey from The Conference Board.

This all reminded me of a pair of articles from Claire Cain Miller, that grappled with the central argument behind getting people back into proximity with each other: the supposed ‘water-cooler effect’, where serendipitous creativity is supposed to happen by people bumping into each other in the hallway. The first, Do Chance Meetings at the Office Boost Innovation? There’s No Evidence of It, debunks the premise after quoting some leading CEO proponents of ‘water-cooler’ bushwa:

“Innovation isn’t always a planned activity,” said Tim Cook, chief executive of Apple, about post-pandemic work. “It’s bumping into each other over the course of the day and advancing an idea you just had.” Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, said working from home “doesn’t work for spontaneous idea generation, it doesn’t work for culture.”

People who study the issue say there is no evidence that working in person is essential for creativity and collaboration. It may even hurt innovation, they say, because the demand for doing office work at a prescribed time and place is a big reason the American workplace has been inhospitable for many people.

She quotes Ethan Bernstein, from the Harvard Business School, and a leading expert on the topic:

“There’s credibility behind the argument that if you put people in spaces where they are likely to collide with one another, they are likely to have a conversation,” said Ethan S. Bernstein, who teaches at Harvard Business School and studies the topic. “But is that conversation likely to be helpful for innovation, creativity, useful at all for what an organization hopes people would talk about? There, there is almost no data whatsoever.”

“All of this suggests to me that the idea of random serendipity being productive is more fairy tale than reality,” he said.

Bernstein points out open offices as the dark side of that fairy tale:

Yet Professor Bernstein found that contemporary open offices led to 70 percent fewer face-to-face interactions. People didn’t find it helpful to have so many spontaneous conversations, so they wore headphones and avoided one another.

Miller’s other article takes a more balanced revisiting of the research into the benefits of proximity — and hence benefits of going into the office — but they are qualified. Much of white-collar workers’ office work is project-based, and there are crucial differences between the outset and the rest of projects:

Other studies back up the importance of meeting in person at the outset of a relationship. In one, scientists examined what happened when labs at a university in Paris were temporarily moved to new locations during asbestos treatment. Working in a new building, with people who worked on different things, increased the probability of collaboration — even after the teams moved back to their original locations.

Makes me wonder: are labs different from other workplaces?

“Within a field, it’s not going to be as hard to meet people,” said Matt Clancy, who studies the economics of innovation at Iowa State University and has written about this research. “The harder part is when you don’t know they’re there, you don’t know they’re valuable to meet, you don’t know their work exists and is important.”

Meeting in person is important for strong ties, too — but again, it seems to be the initial conversations that matter, not necessarily being together 40 hours a week year-round.

Kristie McAlpine, who researches organizational behavior at Rutgers, studied 99 teams at a large tech firm, and compared teams in which people had greater flexibility — so they were in the office together less often — with those that did not. Being in different places led to less spontaneous communication, both small talk and work conversations — and consequently, to less idea generation, she found. However, when she looked at later stages of projects — after ideas had been formed, when people were carrying them out — she did not find that it mattered as much whether people were in the same place.

So, corporate CEOs are over-generalizing about proximity, based on its helpfulness in forming relationships, but they downplay the costs of too much communication and the ability of project members to maintain connections even when they are geographically distributed.

And — as in the case earlier in this post about wellness and resilience programs — this may be an issue that is going to be better resolved by resistance by the workers as a whole, not as an individual-by-individual personal negotiation with their direct supervisor.

There is no large white-collar union in the US, but perhaps demanding a ‘three-day in the office, two-day at home’ standard for many office workers might be the basis of such a union — or unions — forming.

Under the hood, Jassy and other CEOs may be using the RTO saber-rattling as a way to initiate the equivalent of layoffs since many folks might quit rather than go back to 2019.