The Corporate Crisis of Confidence
Are desk dwellers stuck in a malaise? How can they get out of it?
Multiple people sent me The Daily’s podcast episode titled “The Hybrid Worker Malaise.” In it, The Daily’s Michael Barbaro interviews NYTimes business reporter Emma Goldberg about a general disquiet afflicting today’s white-collar workers. On average they have much more flexibility in their work schedules with some kind of hybrid office model being typical, so why the long face?
To help understand the answer, we have to go back to one of the more underrated presidents of our time, Jimmy Carter. Too farsighted for a mere four-year presidency, not underhanded enough to play the game for keeps, and honestly just too nice for Washington, Carter spent a half hour scolding the American public for their “Crisis of Confidence” during the global energy crisis of the late 70s. While never actually saying the word, it’s been dubbed “the malaise speech” and a lot of it rings true today.
Just Another Malaise Monday
Emma Goldberg begins her dissection of what ails the corporate worker by introducing the theme of the podcast: uncertainty. Workers were called back to the office when the coast seemed clear on the pandemic, only to be stuck in a bit of a purgatory when variant after variant ravaged the country and we all did our best to follow overly complex CDC guidelines.
On top of this, we’re trying to navigate this new way of working where we have more flexibility, but also have seen the ties that used to bind us to work (our relationship with our coworkers) weaken significantly. As Goldberg points out, we went from spending an expected five days every week with these folks to now experiencing some weeks where we completely miss them if our RTO days don’t line up.
Part of the problem here is that we define ourselves by what we do for a living - one of the first questions during small talk in America tends to be “What do you do?” Any uncertainty or instability in the realm of work - that thing that we’ve aligned our very identity to - is going to be enhanced as we continue to figure out what “normal” is after Covid.
Hit Em With the Razzle Dazzle
Goldberg reports on The Daily that some offices are trying to become nicer places to be, so people won’t be so despondent coming back to the office.
She mentions things like yoga classes in the middle of the day. While this sounds great in theory, our meeting culture makes this impossible. I’ve had a 15-minute meditation reset on my calendar put on by a well-meaning group at work for the past two years. I think I’ve attended it (over Teams, no less) once, and it’s not for lack of wanting to. It’s just the thing that gets booked over when a meeting gets put on my already overbooked calendar.
She also mentions bar carts. This has been tried in the ad industry and let me tell you, dear reader, it is not a good idea. There was a time when alcohol was much more prevalent in agency offices. Years ago, after a particularly brutal quarter, leadership pitched in and supplied us with a bar cart. The rules were loose and overall we were respectful. Nothing bad happened, but we did drink the entire bar cart in a week. Leadership said they weren’t resupplying it because by their calculation it should have lasted a month. That was the end of the bar cart.
There is a very simple thing that executives can do to make the office more welcoming. Forget the yoga classes, forget the free booze, and forget the foosball tables. We want desks - our own desks that we don’t need to share with others. And we want some walls between these desks. In other words, in the absence of actually giving us offices, cubicles will go so much further than other efforts. Also, as Goldberg relays in the podcast, exercise and booze don’t bring larger numbers of workers back into the office.
We’re Still Languishing
In the thick of the pandemic, everyone’s favorite behavioral psychologist Adam Grant wrote a great piece in the NY Times about that feeling between being depressed and thriving. As we languished through Covid, what we really were doing was grieving our pre-Covid lives. We were uncertain about the future as we wiped down cardboard delivery boxes, worried they might bring the plague into the homes we now didn’t really leave.
We’re still languishing - with the pandemic mostly in the rear-view, that “normalcy” we so craved isn’t really here. Covid worries have been replaced by macro instability - rampant inflation causing economic anxiety, wars in Europe and the Middle East driving everyday anxiety, and hybrid work combined with open office plans causing a sense of impermanence I struggle to recall in my lifetime.
We’ve accustomed ourselves to taking in insane amounts of information; during Covid it felt like life or death at times. We’ve spun up our brains to be so attuned to everything going on around us that we no longer have the skill set to stop that on a dime and simply be. Even if every day doesn’t feel like a personal catastrophe as it did during Covid, there’s certainly enough going on around us that we don’t have to look far to find chaos - and that feeling will take time to go away.
Jimmy Peanuts Wants You to Get Out of Your Funk
Back in 1979 President Carter straight up disappeared for almost a week and talked to “the people.” He took the temperature of the nation and let me tell you, dear reader, it sucked. He came back, sat down in the White House, and went on a half-hour rant about why America’s collective attitude needed a readjustment. And the insane thing is it worked (until Carter self-sabotaged himself by firing his whole Cabinet days later.)
Where most analysts saw multiple crises converging on the nation (the energy crisis, runaway inflation, and high unemployment), Carter saw a crisis of confidence within the American people themselves, holding them back from actually mustering up the resolve to take the proper steps to solve them.
Carter cited a lot of things that are still true today and contributing to the malaise that Emma Goldberg found in her examination of corporate America of late. He said that Americans were concerned that they wouldn’t do better than their parents - millennials are the first generation who will not do better than their folks. He said Americans were losing confidence in long-standing institutions like government - we’re down almost 50% in Americans’s trust in government from when Carter held office. He said America was facing a hostile Middle East - this has never not applied to America since he made this statement.
Don’t Call It a Comeback
The malaise office workers are feeling in our new hybrid RTO environment is the symptom of a larger disease. One downside to flexible RTO is the uncertainty baked in. In a world without multiple wars, an untenably expensive housing market locking younger generations out of homeownership, and decades of real wage stagnation catching up with us, this uncertainty would not be noteworthy. But that’s not the world we live in, so it is.
Our jobs aren’t the cause of this funk and they are not going to get us out of this funk. The Covid pandemic was traumatic, and its ensuing knock-on effects - both economic and psychological - are going to take time to pass. Just like it will take time for us to feel like we’re on solid ground again and get beyond this malaise in which some of us find ourselves.
Maybe leaders need to acknowledge this and give us a bit of a reality check on our own crisis of confidence after taking a few days to hear our concerns. Just don’t fire the entire leadership team a couple days after doing it and it just might work.
Grab Bag Sections
WTF NYPD: When Mayor Adams unveiled the Knightscope K5 - a 400-pound robot meant to patrol the Times Square subway complex - he said it would “eventually…be part of the fabric of our subway system.” The robot lasted less than 5 months. Every time I passed it on my way to the office through Times Square, it was just sitting there in the station surrounded by a couple of cops - cops who actually had to be assigned to escort it around, thus defeating the purpose of what a robot is supposed to be. The Times likened it to a very large Roomba, but there is no evidence that it cleaned anything, so it sounds like it ended up being less useful than even that.
Album of the Week: One of the principals of the neo-soul movement in the late 90s brings us our album of the week. East New York’s own Maxwell dropped BLACKsummers’night in 2009 after an eight-year break from recording, and it was well worth the wait.
This album has an incredible intro track in “Bad Habits.” “Pretty Wings” had 2009 on fire, while “Love You” is an absolute bop. “Stop the World” becomes more and more prescient every year. One way to cut down on your own corporate malaise would be to throw this album on through your noise-canceling headphones.
Quote of the Week: “Larry Bird is not walking through that door, fans. Kevin McHale is not walking through that door, and Robert Parish is not walking through that door…the only thing we can do is work hard, and all the negativity that’s in this town sucks.” - Rick Pitino
See you next week!