Some organizations, particularly successful and popular ones, turn themselves into Stepford by hiring only those people who walk and talk just like the people already in the organization.

Sometimes, and this is a bit more insidious; HR people only hire people who look like themselves. Again, the organization begins to become Stepford.

Naturally enough, if there is no beneficial disruption, no influx of fresh faces and fresh thinking, the organization becomes predictable and eventually moribund. 

A Stepford organization has this unspoken rule:

Play safe and avoid variations. Hire people only if they are essentially indistinguishable from the people already working here.

Keep in mind that the people responding were willing to say that the job that paid their salary was bullshit. It is easy to speculate that many more would not admit that their job was meaningless, even if it was: “It’s very important that I monitor the hourly usage of training room A.”

You might be thinking that this could only apply to the public sector, but no, bullshit jobs are split pretty evenly across public and private. They appear in almost all industries – it turns out that even the highest tech organizations have their share of pointless work. You must have come across people in your own experience who either do so little, or so meaningless a task, that their job qualifies as bullshit.

Personal assistants reported that they have nothing to do, but their boss tells them to look busy – he wants to keep the prestige of having two PAs. Some assistants reported that they do the real work; their boss has the bullshit job of going to lunch and attending meaningless meetings. Many bullshit jobs are in administration. Process workers on the factory floor have been systematically made more and more efficient so that most of their work is real. This indicates that contrary to the popular notion, bullshit floats upwards.

Some of the unspoken rules that might apply in such a culture:

Don’t tell anyone that their job is bullshit.

Don’t tell anyone (except David Graeber) that your job is bullshit.

Don’t point out to management that bullshit jobs exist in the organization. You might be speaking with someone who has one.

I went to a new client’s main office for the very first time. I expected to spend most of my time with my contact, but he told me that his boss reported to the CIO, and that we would be attending the CIO’s 9:30 meeting. He then opened a desk drawer and pulled out a bottle of vodka, about 2/3 full. He asked if I wanted some, but I declined. He poured himself a generous shot and slugged it back. Off we went to the meeting. The CIO was joined by her six subordinates.

The meeting was…unforgettable. When one person talked the others felt the need to comment aloud or pay no attention at all. It appeared that the CIO was just fine with this. Each person gave a progress report which was greeted by laughs, and rude – as in terribly vulgar – comments. Then they turned to the topic of the day, which was whether or not to adopt a new calendar application that one manager wanted to make mandatory for everyone in the organization. Now all hell broke loose: screaming, shouting, fist-pounding.

The CIO eventually screamed the pandemonium to a halt, turned to me, and said, “What do you make of this?”

I said, “I don’t know what to make of it. I have never seen anything like this. I have no context.”

As my vodka-swilling contact and I left the conference room, he stopped us in the hall, and whispered something to me.  —Tim Lister

He was willing to confide in an outsider never to return, and had to whisper because this was the unspeakable rule that applied at their company:

If you see something good, grab it, and if you can’t grab it, kill it.

Why should this be so? There has been no significant change in the real-estate world or market to justify the new document. No, this is the work of the bureaucracy, in this case it is the French Civil Service (Fonction Publique Française) — the huge, cumbersome and opaque bureaucracy that carries out the government’s business.

The French annual copropriété form happened because someone in the vast empire of the Civil Service (the word “civil” is used from its origin of relating to ordinary citizens; it should not be mistaken as meaning polite) wanted to expand a little, and make more work, so voila!, tens of thousands of copropriété forms being filled out all over France, and hundreds more civil servants needed to process them.

Bureaucracies love to grow, which they do by creating more (sometimes completely unnecessary) work. For many of the people in a bureaucracy, the ultimate goal of their work is not to get product out the door or provide a service, but to make more work. As the work they know is bureaucracy work, they make more of that.

The same kinds of bureaucracy exist in many private companies, usually larger organizations, and parts of them that have become so far removed from the prime service or product that they have, for all intents and purposes, lost sight of the organization’s reason for existence. For most of the people in it, the bureaucracy is their universe, so understandably they desire to make it larger and more complex. Both result in more bureaucratic or administrative work:

“Let’s start monitoring the percentage of parking spaces being used by the hour.”

In addition to more work, we have the bureaucrat’s favorite extra, benefit, it makes the administration more complicated:

 “We can have everyone eating in the canteen fill in out a food allergy card, add a bar code to that, and if they go near a dish on the buffet that has their allergy, sound an alarm. Of course, the cards will have to be renewed each month.”

Any additional work is good for the bureaucracy.

Bureaucratic overreach reveals an unfortunately prevalent unspoken rule:

Never make anything simple when an unnecessarily complicated alternative can be constructed.

One of these was the weekly meeting with the business section, where they set down their priorities for the work that the support sections were to do for them. I initially thought that this was pretty cool, until a few weeks into the process I noticed that the priorities changed each week. Something that was super-hot one week would be replaced by a different super-hot item the following week, and resources pulled away from last week’s priority item.

Nobody finished anything. Everybody was switching from one task to another, and the organization had almost zero continuity. This didn’t affect me too badly — I was there to do something that did not fall under the auspices of the fluctuating business section — but colleagues around me were decidedly unhappy. Why shouldn’t they be? They were rarely able to experience the satisfaction of finishing something, and more or less began each task knowing they probably wouldn’t finish it.

Was anybody doing long-term strategic planning? If they were, I failed to notice it. Was the inconsistent re-prioritization playing havoc with the culture? My colleagues certainly thought so.”  – James Robertson

The unspoken rule at this company was:

Only what is urgent today matters . Yesterday’s urgency is not so urgent anymore .

Somebody other than you knows better how to do your work.

Sometimes work procedures are designed by “specialists” who don’t themselves do the work requiring the procedures, and in the worst case, have never seen the work being done.  This often results in the people doing the work finding that the procedure does not fit the task – an insult to the people who know better but were left out.

First the fuss-makers:  You don’t have to work for a high-flier company to become aware that some of them have elaborate cafeterias, multiple serving stations with different menu options: Chinese, Thai, barbecue, made-to-order sandwich and burger stations, carveries and elaborate desserts. Some have free food and optional table service, outdoor lunch spots, and espresso bars.  Do an internet search for “best companies for lunch” to see some mouth-watering possibilities, and not just in Silicon Valley.   The message these companies are sending is that lunch with your colleagues is clearly something to be encouraged, that it’s completely consistent with the organizations’ goals.

The other side of the coin is organizations where lunch is most times taken alone at a desk.  The cover story for this varies, but the end result is the same. Sometimes people say they are too busy to take a lunch break; sometimes people feel guilty if they take a lunch break and their colleagues don’t; some people feel that doing menial tasks while eating lunch at their desks is the same as taking a break.

Whatever the thinking, the result is people eat at their desks and keep on working. This despite laws in most countries that mandate that employees take a break, and despite most managers understanding the benefit of employees taking a break with their colleagues. And yet they don’t, even in organizations that aren’t busy at all. 

The unspoken rule in these companies is:

Lunch with colleagues is a luxury to be indulged in only when time permits (and time never permits).

What’s saddest about this is that lunch with colleagues is a culture-building experience.  It’s over lunch that you learn that Arlene’s son has just won a scholarship, that Larry has a quirky sense of humor, or that others (not just you) are uneasy about the coming expansion plan.  If there’s a difficult relationship with a peer organization, you learn who the players are and how to deal with each one. None of this happens in a lunchless culture. Whatever the willingness to trust was before lunch it may be higher after. Teams that take lunch together are much more likely to be trusting and familial.

To end on an optimistic note: the trend toward lunchlessness has been successfully resisted in both France and Italy.

Hotdesking may sometimes be justified. A firm of consultants, for example, would want their consultants to spend most, preferably all of their time racking up billable hours at their client’s office. We must also allow for organizations that make use of rented shared workspace.

But consider the permanent on-site employees. The message hot desking sends them is that they are simply not valuable enough for the organization to give them their own desks.

They must, each morning, find, not be given, a place to work. This apparently takes on average 18 minutes. And then, when they do find a desk, there is an even bigger problem: since there is no adjacency of co-workers, they have almost no direct contact with any other human. Everything is done by email or message. You might well be asking why these people are in the office at all. If they wear headphones and have nothing but electronic contact with co-workers, then they would be better off working from home.

The unspoken rule for hotdesking organizations is:

Real estate outranks employees.

What’s going on here? The answer is simple: people have come to the cafeteria because there is nowhere else in the building that is quiet enough to have a sane meeting, or their desks are so close together that they cannot meet without disturbing their uninvolved workmates. 

In such companies, management has an unspoken rule:

Why bother with proper workspace when we have empty tables in the cafeteria?

Ben’s boss responds:

“Ben, let me be clear about this: our number-one priority here at Suchard Logistics (not it’s real name) is customer satisfaction. It is our mission to fulfill the dreams of the people who ship with us, and our passion is happy customers. We are also 100% dedicated to providing shareholder value and the bottom line is part of the sacred journey. We pride ourselves on the efficiency and effectiveness of our carefully crafted business solutions. They are there to make our employees happy employees. I think I have answered your question. If there is anything else, anything at all, my door is always open.”

Why is the cliché such a culture killer? Two reasons: first is that clichés cover up incompetence or ignorance. The second is that the cliché is mostly a lie: “Our thoughts and prayers” is a lie. “We are passionate about” is a lie. “Win-win situation” is a lie. “Let me be clear about this” is a lie.

Clichés and good culture rarely are found in the same place because the cliché culture is governed by this culture-damaging unspoken rule:

Clichés are great: you can use them to avoid answering awkward questions.