Editor’s Comment: Seeing is believing

Annie Hayes

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Editor

Editor’s Comment: Seeing is believing

By Annie Hayes

Cosseted and sheltered by bucket fulls of regulation, living in the nanny state is all rather cosy but what ever happened to trust, that binding glue of laissez-faire, intrinsic to wedding vows and plastic surgery promises; Editor’s Comment seeks out the cynics.

Signing up to the labour market no longer requires an aptitude for decision-making. We’re told how much to pay our staff, how to manage them, what to say, what not to say, even how to position our keyboard and the degree to which we ought to elevate our wrists when typing.

It’s an exact science and low-behold those that inject a little bonhomie or laissez-faire into the equation for they’ll soon be marched to the nearest court, ET1 form in hand.

We eye up candidates with suspicion, fearful that a CV fraudster is lurking, festering in the bowels of the organisation, their ‘A’ grade embellishments left undeterred while at the same time putting them through more tests then your car gets at MOT.

And when we’re let in we’re forced to sign a pre-nuptial in case our marriage only lasts a year or two. The non-disclosure or confidentiality agreement thrust upon us before we’ve located the nearest toilet block.

But if that weren’t enough we’re then stripped of any dignity by being told how we should conduct ourselves by e-mail, what ‘not’ to wear and whether or not we are permitted to try our hand at karaoke come the office bash.

Regulations, it would seem that bed-rock and very foundation of a civilized society has stripped us of any level of trust in one another to think and perform freely.

And it gets a lot worse, nerves are seriously frayed if we can’t actually see our minions or hear the rustle of their pencils sharpening and the typie, typie of their keyboards.

Research, reported recently in the Times, by the Economist Intelligence Unit and IBM suggests that the group of employees who seem, on the face of it, to have the most free reins is feeling particularly mistrusted.

Almost 40% of mobile workers say that their office-based pals don’t believe they are pulling their weight.

Seeing it would seem really is believing.

So what’s the solution? Should we throw out the rule-book and bask in a free-thinking utopia. Probably not, there’s always someone to spoil it with their selfish lawlessness but there could be room for a little more Y management then X.

Quoted in the Times, Professor Armin Falk, research director at the Institute for the Study of Labour at the University of Bonn, says: “Anyone who is suspicious of the willingness to work of their employees is punished by poor work levels; whoever is optimistic and gives [employees] free rein is rewarded.”

The study also found that employees under very strict supervision are just as motivated as those given a free hand.

We all respond differently to supervision, there are those that literally wouldn’t pull back the covers if they weren’t told to do so; while others are motivated by their own sense of self-actualisation and personal goals and would run a marathon not because someone told them to do it but because they wanted to do it for themselves.

It is true to say that it also depends on the function you perform, if you work is monotonous and repetitive, sorting widgets on an assembly line for example it probably isn’t the excitement of work that gets you up in the morning more like the pay cheque at the end of it.

If bosses could just trust a little more and instead of playing nanny become parent by invoking support, encouragement and injecting some fresh thinking surely all our lives would be a little more blessed.

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