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Suspect Workplace Initiatives : An Insight
Why are initiatives to improve my wellbeing all taking place on my time?
It’s no secret that a great number of incentives are used in order for management, and increasingly HR, to subtly, and psychologically, control the technical worker drones under their notional command.
Whether it’s the offering of the truly disappointing dangling carrot of soggy generic pizza or over-sugared flavour lacking frankly nasty doughnuts in an attempt to get employees into the office or the sending of the usual passive aggressive mass emails hinting at consequences for non-attendance — it’s a playbook that we in the game know all too well and deal with on a regular basis in modern times when we’re playing the grand game.
The modern focus of doctrine tends be on ‘creativity’ and ‘collaboration’ only being possible in person — in the workplace, naturally — with the recent addition of ‘wellbeing’ in a vane attempt to shift the focus from the company to the employees when it comes to who is actually benefiting from these exercises.
Wellbeing : Is It?
Wellbeing, I’m not denying, is a wonderful idea in principle.
It’s primarily driven by the fact that we’re all working ourselves into an early grave these days what with the increasing cost of living, draconian company policies with regard to healthcare, leave, and remuneration, and most notably the higher and higher expected amount of effort we have to make to be perceived as ‘good employees’ and get that positive performance review like performing animals in a sorry beauty contest.
Unfortunately the way in which wellbeing is framed in the modern workplace really doesn’t to the framer any particular favours when dissected.
Initially we saw a ‘return to office’, for example, framed as an employee need for social contact, a method of fostering inclusivity and creativity (as mentioned), but it’s widely known to be a thin veil thrown around getting bums back on seats to maintain that managerial degree of control that became so ingrained over time that few people, pre-pandemic, asked why it was still there.
Indeed, the aforementioned and ongoing pandemic repeatedly continues to decimate the idea that people need to be…
