Hi subscribers! Thanks for being here. Longtime readers, you’ll notice today’s post is a little different. Don’t worry, my standard newsletter will be out next week. This topical essay is just a bonus in depth dive into something that’s been on my mind. Hope you enjoy!
A few weeks ago, I presented at the headquarters of a large organization. Like many companies, they are mostly remote so when the elevator doors opened on the 18th floor, I wasn’t expecting so many people to be there. It was vaguely nostalgic to see people gathered holding coffees and leaning on desks—like peeking through the curtains into an office of a bygone era.
As I set up for my presentation, a group of young employees drifted into the conference room and we all started chatting. I asked what it was like to graduate in a pandemic, or onboard in a remote work environment.
As I listened, I took notes in my head. Belle, a 22-year-old recent graduate from the University of Minnesota, was wearing a black blazer and high heels—an accurate approximation of “business professional.” She was telling me about how most days she didn’t really interact with anyone, except over email.
“So, what’s it like then, when you come into the office?” I asked.
“Oh it’s the funniest thing,” she replied. “I woke up this morning and put on my costume.” She gestured to her outfit. “Do you like the blazer? It’s what I imagined an office worker might wear so I went with it. This whole thing just cracks me up. We put on costumes to go to a place to sit and type-type-type all day.” She emphasized her point by dramatically air-typing. “I cannot believe that people used to do this every day. It’s fun once in a while. In kind of a funny way.”
Her response was perfect, at once hilarious and profound. She put language to a feeling I think a lot of people have experienced. That moment when you first enter the workforce and begin to realize that on a certain level, the whole thing is an elaborate charade. A make-believe world with made up roles and rules.
I, for example, distinctly remember going to Banana Republic with my mom before starting my serious college internship. The whole time I kept thinking, “Okay, what does Jennifer Garner wear in 13 Going on 30?”
Because that was the goal. I was sure that would be the perfect costume for whatever workplace skit I was about to perform. Which did, in fact, involve a lot of type-type-typing.
It was Belle’s use of the word “costume” that stuck with me. The workplace envisioned as a stage while workers engage in a series of skits to prove that they deserve to charge a ticket fee for their contributions.
All The World’s A Stage
Sociologist Erving Goffman wrote The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life in 1959. In essence, his point was that all the world’s a stage, and our performances are constantly evolving and inherently never-ending. His work continues to impact the way we view individual identity, group relations, the impact of the environment, and the movement and interactive meaning of information.
The pre-pandemic workplace performances have been heavily dissected. My favorite interpretation comes in the form of “LARPing.”
LARP-Live Action Role Play- was first coined in relation to work by technology writer John Herrman in 2015 but the term was popularized by Anne Helen Petersen in a 2019 essay. Petersen describes “LARPing your job” as the way we try to show evidence that “LOOK OVER HERE, I AM WORKING!” Petersen writes:
“You can LARP your job in person (holding lots of meetings, staying late and getting there early as a show of “presentism”) and digitally (sending lots of emails, or spending a lot of time on Slack). As knowledge workers, we find ourselves doing two different jobs: the job that produces the work, and a second, shadow job of performing our labor, of making the case for our own employment.”
This was written in 2019. A few months later, the curtain closed on the in-person performance. The costumes, happy hours, meetings, early arrivals and late departures, all abruptly disappeared. Fast forward three tumultuous years and those skits feel like relics of the past.
The Curtain Call on the Office Job Performance
There are, of course, valid arguments to be made about the importance of in-person work. But the idea of putting on the costume, driving to the theater, and putting on the performance 5 days a week for 8 hours a day feels like a historical memory.
The workplace of 2019 is now viewed the way older generations might view an industrial-era factory— sub-optimal, technologically backwards, inefficient.
So what could this mean for the future of work?
First, a reevaluation around time dedicated to work is inevitable. Without the costumes, commutes, and skits there are a lot of jobs in the knowledge sector that simply can’t fill 40 hours a week. This was already the case in many organizations before the pandemic. Many office workers spent much of their time on processes and procedures (aka performances) given to them without considering their effectiveness.
As Blake Ashforth and Yitzhak Fried described in their influential 1988 article, a lot of organizational behavior is mindless. It was easier to follow the group and stick to the script than unwind and evaluate decades worth of “institutional knowledge” (which often translated to bad habits). It was easier, that is, until the pandemic forced the issue.
Today’s conversations around 4-day work weeks have a new sense of urgency, not only because of the time saving that comes with remote work, but also because we’re on the precipice of an AI revolution that will eliminate many mundane, yet time consuming tasks.
Second, a new cast of stars can rise within organizations. Charisma players are less relevant now that traditional workplace performances are stale. The pandemic and remote work created an expanded view of professionalism and provided an opportunity for overlooked people to shine in new ways.
This means that works' best performers—rather than its best workers—are facing a curtain call. But it also means that leaders who rose to the top in part through their skill in navigating the "performance of work" need to reward skills that they themselves may not have employed to get to where they are.
People who are tech savvy, quick to reply to emails, and have strong written communication skills may find themselves getting cast in bigger roles than they would have pre-pandemic.
Lastly, if trust is no longer built by the performance of work, the work must speak for itself. Workers have long craved leaders who focus more on what gets done and obsess less about how it gets done. We’ve already learned that in these environments the expectation of deliverables is extremely high and the room for error is low.
If leaders are being asked to trust that employees are putting in the time to do great work, great work must be delivered.
The way we work, our relationship to work, and the way we perform at work are constantly evolving. If we hold on too tightly to our past performances, we could lose sight of what is possible in the future.
After all, the show must go on.
As an owner of a medical spa, and certified Person-Centered Expressive Art Facilitator, I believe self-care is essential to mental health, isolation is the breeding ground of mental disease and mental health is at an all-time low since the pandemic according to many articles in Psychology Today.
I have high demand for my services but no one wanting to perform them. I litterally get nurses asking if they can do injections remotely…😳...Is that a joke? I personally feel it is sad that people want to hide away, eating Cheetos, sitting on their couch in their pjs working alone in their bedroom. As an introvert with an introverted family, I know it is unhealthy for us to isolate without human interaction on a daily basis and love that my business forces me out of that shell, that my work forces me to brush my teeth, put on some clean clothes and take care of myself. I love that I can bring that and encourage that in my community. Proclaiming “this is a costume ” ….hmmm
I ask “When are we not in costume?” As a fan of Dr. Carl Jung (I don’t claim to be an expert) I believe we are made up of a variety of things, symbols, archetypes and yes performers wearing costumes…even if that costume and performance is only for the pleasure of our own ego, watching the watcher as she wears her comfy pjs, curled up on the couch saying “Girl you deserve it, you’ve worked hard!” I am still wearing a costume. It is just that the audience is me and all of the archetypes in my head.
As human beings we were meant to be part of the herd. Sure there will be the black sheep and lone wolves…the shaman or hermit, but on the whole if everyone is a shaman or hermit there is no humanity or community. We stop “being.” This is a mental health issue brought on by a tragic trauma. I am Mother to two of these “children of the pandemic”, Aunt to two more and observer over all of their friends and acquaintances, one with his peers was shut down in college, another in middle-school. I can tell you no matter how much I tried to shield them from the damage they and their friends are all currently experiencing the panic attacks, phobias, depression and hopelssness, fear of the future, and worst of all rise suicidal thoughts, attempts and successes amongst them and their friends etc brought on by the pandemic and its isolation is on the rise.
Not something to be celebrated in my opinion.