The Necessity to Pause

Wendy Ide | There Is No Job Security | Factoids | Elsewhere | Elsewhen

Photo by Michael Held on Unsplash

Work Futures explores critical themes underlying our understanding of work, ranging across the deep tectonic changes going on in our rapidly changing economy and society. A paid subscription open all the hundreds of posts behind the paywall, plus full access to future newsletter issues.

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Quote of the Moment

There is a Japanese word, “komorebi”, which was the original title of the Wim Wenders Perfect Days film. Literally translated, it means “sunlight leaking through trees”, but there’s more to it than that. It speaks of a profound connection with nature, and the necessity to pause, to take the time to absorb and appreciate the perfection of tiny, seemingly insignificant details.

| Wendy Ide, Perfect Days review – Wim Wenders’s zen Japanese drama is his best feature film in years

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There Is No Job Security

Here’s a recent barrage of stories about new threats to job security.

Being Indispensible Is No Protection

Callum Borchers suggests we should forget about indispensibility because it may be painting a bullseye on your back:

Jilted workers and others who’ve witnessed job cuts say there’s no such thing as an irreplaceable employee. Some contend striving to be untouchable at work can backfire or invite exploitation. You can naively do more than what’s required, thinking effort means job security, then get axed anyway.

He offers examples. The veterinary tech worker who had all the answers (and stashed the tech manuals in her desk drawers). Her boss, Debbie Boone, fired her:

“It was enhancing her status, but it was diminishing us as a whole,” she says.

Employees shouldn’t try to be indispensable, in Boone’s view. Being the only person with certain skills or information might feel like insurance. But it can lead to selfishness—and a surprise ouster by a boss who prefers team players.

So, Boone figured the short-term pain of canning an ‘indispensable’ worker was preferable to the long-term impacts on team performance.

Avin Kline, chief executive of the cannabis marketing agency Lucyd in Florida, goes even further:

He expects most of his 55 employees to spend two to five years with the company. Understanding that turnover is inevitable, and perhaps imminent, he guards against individuals becoming essential.

Each client account has a point person, but those employees are required to share notes and reports with colleagues so that someone else can step in if needed. The idea: No account manager should be so important that a client would take its business elsewhere if the primary contact left the agency.

“When we have to replace someone, I want to feel that we’re losing somebody that’s providing a lot of value,” Kline says. “But I don’t want my business or myself to freak out.”

The context is this: an imbalance in the parties’ desire for engagement. These managers don’t want or expect deeply engaged employees who may desire a long-term career at their companies. They’ve accepted impermanence — that workers may depart with little notice — so they do it unto others before they have it done unto them.

And workers are naturally developing thick skin:

Beth McLaughlin McDonald, 52, is a recent convert to the more cynical side.

Though she’d endured three layoffs over the years, she still believed it was possible to become bulletproof when she took a recruiting job in 2022. Working remotely in Savannah, Ga., she was promoted quickly and felt she made her team at a healthcare-technology startup better by shouldering tasks that used to bog down others.

“I truly thought I was indispensable,” McLaughlin McDonald says.

She discovered she wasn’t when the company downsized last year. In less than an hour her department was slashed from 13 employees to three, she says. Each affected person was given notice in a five-minute video call. McLaughlin McDonald now thinks nobody is ever safe, so she works several part-time jobs, believing it’s wise to have multiple income streams in case one dries up.

So everyone, workers and managers alike, wises up. Managers consider having no sense of loyalty to workers ‘savvy’, and workers—hardened by cyclical layoffs—give up on anything more than a transactional relationship at work. Both are pessimistic views.

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Outsourcing White-Collar Jobs

The pay differential between the booming US and the depressed UK economies is making the outsourcing of white-collar work across the Atlantic a serious trend.

American businesses are sending all types of work across the Atlantic, drawn by depressed U.K. salaries, tax incentives and a weak currency. This isn’t the traditional outsourcing model of the 2000s, which saw the mass relocation of American manufacturing jobs to China, or call centers to India and other parts of the developing world. 

Instead, the U.K.’s cost advantage has collided with the rise in remote work to allow high-skilled jobs—software developers, consultants, lawyers, film producers—to be done by people in Britain.

“In the old models of outsourcing you’d give the outsourcing company the boring work. But there’s the new breed of outsourcing that is cheaper but also often creative,” said Matt Buckland, who spent two decades as a tech recruiter in the U.K. for companies including Facebook. “You might still give your team in Hyderabad basic Python code. In the U.K. you might give them AI.”

[…]

Edward East runs an influencer marketing firm, Billion Dollar Boy, with 150-plus staff between offices in London, New York and New Orleans, and a client list that includes Amazon.com, Meta Platforms and L’Oreal. The company’s U.S. billings surged 88% in its last financial year and now make up nearly half of its global revenue. Its U.S. contracts are on average six times larger than those in the U.K., he said.

Despite the booming American business, he continues to focus on hiring in the U.K., where labor costs are cheaper by about half compared with New York.

“It definitely helps us offer a more cost-effective solution to clients than our U.S. peers,” he said.

Cost is just one of many factors that makes the U.K. attractive as an offshoring hub. The time zone, common language and similar education system are bonuses, business owners say.

You can’t compete with London salaries that are half of New York’s.

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Factoids

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has no official policy about wearing sandals in an office environment, a fact that has spawned its own advocacy group, Barefoot is Legal. That means that, given the opaque diktats of most dress codes, the vague label of “appropriate” applies, leaving it up to the individual to interpret the term.

| Vanessa Friedman

I have been informed that if I wear slides I must get a pedicure because of my heels showing.

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A recent report from Britain showed that a weeklong outage of all satellite signals would cost its economy nearly $9.7 billion. An earlier report put the toll on the U.S. economy at $1 billion a day, but that estimate is five years old.

| NY Times, reporting on news that Russia might be moving satellite killer weapons into space.

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A Swiss study in 2021 showed that each rotting cucumber thrown away has the equivalent environmental impact of 93 plastic cucumber wrappers.

| Kim Severson

We may be focused on the wrong things.

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A life hack from the brilliant Adam Lawrence, a master of co-creation: to prevent sticky notes from curling, tear them off gently from left to right instead of pulling from bottom to top. This keeps them straight on the wall and easy to photograph.

| Patricia Stark

Otherwise, the post-its curl up, like Dilbert’s tie.

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Elsewhere

Cheating on Personality Tests

If a job posting asks for extroverts, how are you going to answer questions on the employer’s personality test? Probably channel the extroverted side of your personality, right? A laboratory study designed to mimic the hiring environment finds that’s exactly what applicants do. “Firms should appreciate the limits of using such tests to screen applicants,” the brothers Andrew McGee of the University of Alberta in Edmonton and Peter McGee of the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville wrote last month in the journal Economic Inquiry.

The authors did find that people with high I.Q.s and people with a strong sense of control over their fate (“locus of control”) are better at cheating on personality tests. So if you’re trying to hire a person with a certain personality type, be prepared to get one of those other types instead.

| Peter Coy

Note: You may be better off with a highly intelligent person with a strong locus of control than the extrovert you thought you wanted.

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Let the past be a guide.  | Jessica Orkin, in response to ‘What principles are important when expanding beyond a legacy business?’, but could be more broadly useful, such as deciding what future direction your own adventure should take:

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