Design Is a Job

Workplaces are changing.

Workplaces have changed before, obviously. Sometimes change is a slow, steady, barely noticeable evolution. Sometimes change feels like a kick. The time we’re in right now, as I write this in August of 2022, feels like a kick. And as much as we talk about how the pandemic has changed things (and of course it has), in the case of the workplaces where folks like you and I tend to sell our labor, I think a more honest statement might be that the pandemic has exposed the rot.

And while I am loath to use the word opportunity in close proximity to the word pandemic, change in the workplace tends to come about as a response to crisis, and I would consider the pandemic, as well as our response to it, a fucking crisis. So, possibly, by the smallest sliver of margins, the pandemic is an opportunity to clean out some of that rot.

A few weeks ago, I was talking to a friend who’s been working from home during the pandemic (as have a lot of privileged people, myself included). That morning she’d gotten a message from her company’s CEO that it was time to reopen the office. They had a plan for slowly integrating back into the office a couple days every week, increasing that number over time, until eventually everyone was present in the office full-time. This is the same method we use to cook lobsters. (By the way, this is the first of two crustacean metaphors in this chapter. You’re welcome.) The message from the CEO contained words like mandatory and non-negotiable.

She was understandably anxious about returning to the office. The pandemic isn’t over (I myself tested positive just two weeks after that conversation), and the idea of being in closed conference rooms and cubicles shoulder-to-shoulder with other humans wasn’t great. The fact that the email didn’t contain any information about testing or vaccination status or any safety protocols didn’t help. Basically, it was time to go back to the office because the CEO said it was time to go back to the office.

I asked her what she was going to do and she told me she wasn’t sure. She then added that she loved her job, she was “fucking good at it” (I can vouch this is true!), and she just wanted to work.

I’m sure you’ve heard similar stories, or you will soon, as the call to “return to work” will come in waves, followed by the latest variant, followed by another call to “return to work,” and so on and so on. These stories may or may not be compounded by having children, partners, and immunocompromised folks at home.

And this is all happening because management wants a “return to normal,” back to a time that was very reassuring to them, a time where they knew how to operate, a time where signing a twenty-year lease on a huge space was fiscally sound, a time that worked out pretty fucking well for them because they understood the rules—mostly because they set them.

But like I said, workplaces are changing, and they have changed before. What I left out, however, was the most important part: every time a workplace has changed for the better, it was initiated by the workers.

You are a stakeholder in your workplace. It is your labor that generates the wealth that powers those workplaces. In this chapter we will explore ways to make your workplace better, whether you work in the office or remotely.

IT’S NOT MONDAYS YOU HATE

If you happen to scroll through Twitter (yeah, I’m not calling it X) on a Sunday evening (which I don’t recommend because it’s full of Nazis and lonely white boys trying to convince you crypto is real), you’ll see folks tweeting about how anxious they are about the upcoming work week, a feeling sometimes called the Sunday scaries. You’ll also see plenty of memes about hating Mondays, some including Garfield and some not. But the effect can be pretty chilling.

The deal that our Socialist ancestors made with the Captains of Industry was very clear: we sell you our labor Mondays through Fridays, and the weekends belong to us. Both parties have reneged on that deal. Plenty of people reading this use their Saturdays to catch up on work from the previous week and spend their Sundays stressing out about the week to come.

I once asked my therapist what the difference between anxiety and stress was, and she put it clearly: anxiety comes from within and stress comes from without. I’ll give you an example. If you’re heading on vacation and decide you need to pack ten books about design because you feel guilty about relaxing instead of getting ahead in your craft? That’s anxiety. It’s coming from within. If your backpack snaps from the weight of all those books? That’s stress. The stitching didn’t break on its own. It broke from the external weight of the books.

The Sunday scaries? That’s not anxiety. That’s stress. It’s coming from the weight of previous traumatic workweeks.

The greatest trick capitalism ever pulled was convincing you that the trauma it was causing you was a problem inside your own head. It’s a problem born from dealing with bullshit in toxic workplaces. And if you’re thinking that you’ve never worked in a toxic workplace, you might be part of what’s making it toxic, Chad.

I mention this because the first part of solving a problem is to adequately call it what it is. And with every newspaper article I see lamenting “the problem with today’s workers” or “why doesn’t anyone want to work anymore,” we’re being actively gaslit. The problem isn’t us.

If we are going to create better workplaces, we need agency. The first part is to acknowledge what is actually broken. It ain’t us, it’s the workplace. The second part is to understand our role within that workplace. We are what makes it possible. The third part is understanding that, for the people in charge, it’s already a great workplace. It works well for them, so they’re not in a hurry to change shit. No one is looking out for us but us.

It’s not Mondays you hate—it’s capitalism.

THE MYTH OF INDIVIDUALS

The modern workplace is generally divided into two classes of people: management, and what management calls individual contributors (or ICs).

You’ll notice that the term management contains multitudes. It can be as big or as small as any situation requires. If Manager Bob is taking the team out to lunch, he is expected to foot the bill because he is Management, and he would like to be thanked for footing the bill. If a new unpopular policy is handed down, it will come from Management, only this time the term will include as many people as possible so no one has to carry the burden of blame individually.

You, dear reader, have accepted the role of individual contributor. The word individual isn’t there by accident; it’s a reminder that management would prefer that you see yourself as having exactly as much agency as one person can have: responsible for the actions of one, doing the work of one. (Except when they give you the work of three.) And, most importantly, yielding the influence of exactly one.

The singular you is very manageable. If one singular individual contributor turns into a problem, or starts asking questions that management doesn’t want to answer (such as “Why are there no people of color in management?”), well, it’s very easy to replace individuals.

Your power in the workplace is derived from the plural you and not the singular you. Look around. Look at the other workers. See yourselves as the collective you are. 

Crabs in a bucket

My grandfather was a man of questionable ideas carried out under the guise of learning experiences. Among these were the ideas that anything worth knowing could be learned at a county fair, a child should know how to siphon gas, and—for our purposes today—the only way to buy fish was at a small town coastal fish market at 5 a.m. as it came off the boats. Mind you, I’m not saying he was wrong about any of these things, just that you don’t tend to fully appreciate them as a child. It was during one of these trips to the fish market that I stumbled onto a large industrial-sized bucket of crabs. I watched for a while as the crabs climbed over one another trying to escape the bucket. Just as it looked like one was about to make it to freedom, a crab below would reach out and drag it back into the bucket. “Grandpa, why don’t they put a lid on the crab bucket?”

“Don’t have to. The crabs pull one another down. In fact, the easier you make it look for them, the more vicious they get about pulling one another down.”

“Is this a metaphor?”

Fast forward a few decades and I’m talking to a friend of mine who works in tech. We’re about a year into the pandemic. She’s telling me how exhausted she is and that she really needs some time off.

“Don’t you have unlimited paid time off?”

“Yeah, but if you take any everyone looks at you funny.” Crabs in a bucket.

When vacations were doled out as a set amount of time people took them. Two weeks, three weeks, a month for our European friends, it was easy. Everyone scheduled theirs, and when it popped up on your calendar the man took his foot off your neck and off you went on a modest little trip to the coast to look at crabs. There was a lid on the bucket, and you knew exactly when it opened and for how long.

At some point, capitalism visited a fish market, spotted the bucket of crabs, and invented unlimited PTO. Now management doesn’t have to track anyone’s vacation time because everyone’s afraid to take it so they don’t get side-eyed by the other workers.

Don’t get played like that. If someone hands you unlimited PTO you take it. And if your coworker says they’re taking a long weekend, the only acceptable reply is “That sounds amazing. I’m going to take one, too!” Beware of policies that pit workers against one another. Work together and you can all make it out of the bucket.