I was reading Don’t Let Employees Pick Their WFH Days and, like so many other articles of this kind, am struck by the use of “servitude” language when speaking of employees. Or, to use the more politically incorrect term, “master/slave” language. As Merriam-Webster defines servitude: a condition in which one lacks liberty especially to determine one’s course of action or way of life.
Examples:
How much choice should workers have in the matter?
When someone curtails the freedom of choice of another, that is control, and in the workplace, servitude.
On the one hand, many managers are passionate that their employees should determine their own schedule.
While that sentence sounds rather positive, the subtle message here is that managers have control over their employees schedule.
after talking to hundreds of organizations over the last year, have led me to change my advice from supporting to being against employees’ choosing their own WFH days.
“against employees’ choosing” – servitude.
So I have changed my mind and started advising firms that managers should decide which days their team should WFH. For example, if the manager picks WFH on Wednesday and Friday
Just amazing to me, the idea that someone else can have such control over my life.
Thankfully, there is this manager:
One manager told me “I treat my team like adults. They get to decide when and where they work, as long as they get their jobs done.”
An employer/employee relationship is an agreement that among other things usually includes an expectation of work hours. Where the work is done can be explicitly stated (and often the work must be done in “the office”, but it is also frequently ill-defined. However, in many cases, particularly in the tech industry, the requirement to work at the office is entirely arbitrary. It is often prejudiced, with managers having more flexibility to work from home than the non-manager employees. It is often arbitrary, where one manager in the organization is very flexible regarding work-from-home and another manager is a militant about his team working in the office.
I have been lured into employment in the past with a stated “very flexible work from home schedule” during the interview, only to find myself “managed” by a militant dictator who doesn’t allow any work from home.
I have worked successfully as a contractor for 20 years, where it is illegal to require the contractor to work on premise unless required by the work itself.
And I have worked for companies where the response to working from home is “no problem!”
During the pandemic, I have had the luxury (many do not) of being able to work from home. This has dramatically and ironically improved the quality of my life. I live in a very rural, artistic, community. Working from home has afforded me the luxury of meeting with people in my pod with much greater flexibility. This includes artistic presentations, outdoor gatherings, and so forth, that I would have missed if I were in the office from 8 to 5 (all of course following the guidelines of the CDC.) And simple things as well, like running an errand during lunchtime or even when I just need to take a break and think about a problem away from the computer screen.
At the other extreme, 21% tell us they never want to spend another day working from home. These are often young single employees or empty nesters in city center apartments.
Corporations and their managers need to embrace diversity, as everyone’s individual needs are different.
They [managers] often confided that home-based employees in their teams get passed over on promotions because they are out of touch with the office … given the evidence that working from home while your colleagues are in the office can be highly damaging to your career.
This isn’t the responsibility of the employee to fix. It is the responsibility of the company and the managers.
While we have laws against slavery, in many ways working for corporate America is a silent, permissible, accepted form of servitude, and like slavery, does not recognize the free human being. While often we have little or no choice regarding the employer for which we work, that does not mean that the employer should treat us with any less human dignity.
To conclude, Merriam-Webster has this to say:
Servitude is slavery or anything resembling it. The entire black population of colonial America lived in permanent servitude. And millions of the whites who populated this country arrived in “indentured servitude”, obliged to pay off the cost of their journey with several years of labor. Servitude comes in many forms, of course: in the bad old days of the British navy, it was said that the difference between going to sea and going to jail was that you were less likely to drown in jail.
So I ask, why are we so willing to pay off the cost of “our journey through life” in servitude, rather than the antonyms of servitude. freedom, liberty? What are managers so afraid of?
Marc Clifton 