The office culture industry is driving the Great Resignation with its marketing
Office culture marketing is a bounty of motivation and minefield of mistruths, fraught with conspiracy theories.
‘The Great Resignation’ is a hot phrase right now. It’s the theory that a huge number of employees are about to leave their jobs because the last two years have changed them. Businesses have a range of solutions to this, most prominently A) Check in candidly with each employee to see how they feel and what they need to stay on, B) Study this phenomenon and make a science-based move to protect the company, or C) Let the managers talk about it with friends and invent a solution based on what they hear.
The solution that companies have chosen most prominently is a combination of B and C. But did they choose it, or were they influenced by a media landscape going through the same thing?
I’ll cut to it: they were influenced. Here’s how the media and social media are directing what bosses do about the Great Resignation, and why these solutions have been ineffective at best.
There’s currently a trend in business-minded news outlets of hiring a polling company to follow a certain narrative. Take this Business Insider article that uses polling from a company called Limeade:
Wow, being outside the office caused people to burn out and quit? The solution must be to take what they’re doing and add the commute to work. This headline draws a clear causality, Work From Home (WFH) to burnout to resignation. Before we get into the meat of Business Insider’s findings, what do other polls say?
A metastudy in BMC Public Health by Oakman et al last year showed us that the WFH problem is that workers can’t get away. It implied that managers can learn how to help workers separate work from home, and that a lack of boundaries and overwhelming workloads was causing ill health. When you get into the meat of Limeade’s study, you find a similar result.
Of course, the business papers don’t lead with that. This Business Insider article starts with a few conspicuous terms that have little to nothing to do with the findings: ‘pandemic burnout’, ‘The Great Resignation’, ‘burnout from working from home’.
So that must mean Limeade is at odds with the rest of the science. Just one thing: that wasn’t what Limeade found, and the article itself says so.
So why did they put it in only to tell you the truth a few paragraphs later?
When we catch someone in a falsehood, we can assume they meant to lie or give them some slack by suggesting their psychology did it. Many business-heavy trades do this so that they don’t have to burn bridges, which is the most destructive act in business. Even comedians do it masterfully when one of their own is caught stealing jokes. You could even argue that bringing this good faith into work might hamper your own Great Resignation. And there is a good argument that confirmation bias caused this article’s writer to see the results and project ‘Work From Home bad’ onto them. After all, it’s happening to the whole managerial class.
The manager class who read business papers are surrounded by a narrative that says they need to create an office culture. They believe the only way to do that is to get everyone bonding and interacting, sometimes around a water cooler, sometimes on a weekend trip. All these ideas have been debunked, but they thrive. There’s a whole industry built around corporate team-building outings and it’s too big to fail.
But office culture is backfiring.
Office culture is radically different to what most people think it is. For example, picture the personality of a workplace. It may be where you work now, or somewhere you experienced a strong culture. You probably imagine it’s like a friend circle, the combined traits of everyone there. An ever-changing thing, especially considering almost no one you work with began there when the workplace was founded.
It’s actually the opposite. The culture of a workplace entrenches itself right away and is extremely difficult to change from then on. A workplace is the ghost of its first bosses. After all, everyone who began working there was taught how to behave and how the office expressed itself when all their other training happened. No one is bringing their leisure personality. A worker is a persona who mimics the favourite traits of the people they serve. For all its debates, the research is clear on this one point. The Harvard Business Review has some great takes (try Groysberg et al, January-February 2018 edition).
For this reason, when a workplace has to go through a major change, it turns out to be near-impossible. Think MeToo, or WFH, or cultural sensitivity training. These are all necessary movements that struggle to be taken seriously, no matter how ubiquitous they are. The struggle isn’t necessarily because of old-fashioned executives -- you could have 40 out of 40 people in a company agreeing that work from home is the right move, yet the same bosses who suggested it will call everyone into the office for a meeting that could’ve been an email. Why is that?
Senior managers aren’t just creatures of habit yoked to the eternal spirit of office culture. They’re also yoked to that managerial culture, which is a strange and incredible world that you have to see to really understand. It’s assertive, libertarian, a bounty of motivation and also a minefield of mistruths. In short, it makes you feel powerful.
You can see it in LinkedIn posts, get-rich-quick Instagram ads, bestselling business books, in Oprah and Rogan interviews. The manager class is blended with entrepreneur culture, where anything goes as long as you succeed -- or, if you’re a manager, if we succeed. And when your job is to please the executives above or stakeholders around you, who don’t see what each worker is going through, feeling successful is just as healthy for the company as the real thing. In fact enterprises such as WeWork and Uber are filled with a successful feeling while making zero profit, and that feeling brings enough investors for them to survive another year. That’s the difference between managerial office culture and actually saving your workers, actually solving a problem.
Now we take one more step back: the success industry that serves self-help consumers, the managerial class, and office culture is extremely online. That has caused it to intertwine with the most libertarian parts of the Internet, and with that has come a certain strand of politics. The Great Resignation comes within a couple years of two conspiracy theories reaching their peak:
The Great Reset: a conspiracy theory that the world markets are being wiped and started fresh with a New World Order. The Great Replacement: a conspiracy theory that nonwhite people are deliberately breeding out white people in Western nations. If you look these up, you will go on a government list. And yet someone in business culture named The Great Resignation, and that name has gone mainstream.
The lesson is to put your own discretion before what the Internet tells you about your culture. Follow the advice of all the classic pre-Internet business books and try Option A -- open the lines of communication and understand with empathy, without judgement, how the people you rely on are doing. Know yourself.