Reflections on Workplace Infantilisation
and why we have to take ourselves seriously even if our employers do not.
"One of the things the Google effect has had is the idea that work is somehow a playground and you can infantilise your staff. (..) It's actually a very bad idea." (1)
More and more workplaces are starting to resemble playgrounds for adults, with snack baskets, ball pits and exercise hours. After years and decades of cramming desk workers into depressing, grey cubicles, these images can look appealing and optimistic. Work can be fun, guys!
But is working the same job as always, now on a bright green water bed, taking place in between Lego workshops and Twister transformation stations, really something that makes work enjoyable? Why have offices started to resemble preschools when they’re filled with adults working on adult responsibilities?
In my own working life, I’ve been active in a few traditional companies as well as some of the hipper ones, and from the inside, it becomes apparent how the ball pit office culture completely disregards the very real needs workers have, while prescribing new ones that are easier and cheaper to maintain (honestly, have any of us actually asked for an office Zumba teacher? We want time off, not more time at work). When people fail to thrive in these new workplaces, instead of listening to what it is they actually want in order to create genuine workplace satisfaction, attempts are made to get their mindsets in order.
You’re burnt out because you work too much? Let us show you how much your mental health means to us by offering a “resilience webinar” to help you stay positive. Less overtime or working hours? Higher salary or more days off? Just come to our next yoga evening, that should balance you out. Vacation happens in the mind!
Building an image as the company that cares by providing solutions for people to become a better, “healthier” employee fits perfectly into our individualistic neoliberal culture, in which performative positivity, self improvement and a focus on personal identity are on the rise. In a world in which people are made to feel exclusively responsible for all of their struggles, they seek to work on themselves before ever questioning their workplace or the system it operates within. The prevailing thought is not that the workplace just isn’t working for people, it’s that the people simply do not fit in well enough. “Cultural fit” has become a buzzword for a reason, but fitting in is in many cases carefully performed in order to remain “employable” in an age in which none of us can expect to stay in the same job for decades without being affected by a company restructuring, or whatever euphemism it is that people like to use for layoffs these days.
Ask some of the workers in these modern offices and you‘ll find that many of them will tell you that they’re dissatisfied with their workplace. Stress levels are incredibly high and so is the turnover rate. Ping-pong tables mean having to stay late to catch up on the work missed during the match, the slide ruins every piece of clothing, and while the environment visually encourages you to take part in minigolf and all the other fun stuff, you’ll quickly be judged by your fellow busy teammates for leaving them to do all the work while you dick around on Mario Kart.
Everyone hates the open office, so they go and make every possible use of their right to work at home. Micromanagers, or in the context of this post we might call them preschool teachers, now have less overseeing and managing to do, so in order to once again keep an eye on everyone to make sure they actually do their jobs, they take the perk of flexibility away from their workers and re-enforce mandatory office attendance. Lego workshops just aren’t the same on Miro, anyway. Now, thinking about how they could be sitting at their quiet desks at home, everyone hates spending their third meeting of the day in the rainbow-coloured hammock even more.
After previously resenting the stuffiness of the grey cubicle and tight supervision, people now often fondly look back on their years of working in corporations with a more formal culture, workplaces that to this day employ the more traditional forms of employee attraction and retention – higher salaries, more vacation days, retirement plans and all sorts of other actual benefits, retained from the times of strong unions that have fought to bring all these things to these half-century old companies in the past.
So why are these burnt-out hip office employees not doing more? Why is the tech-proletariat not organising their bits off to get access to the benefits that traditional companies were pressured into granting their employees 50 years ago? I would suggest that preschool-like environments, especially in the context of the new economy, breed the type of compliance that teachers expect from and nurture in their 5-year-olds.
As much as modern companies advertise their flat hierarchies, everything related to how people do their work, how they communicate with each other, which activities at work they partake in and what the general culture is like is decided top-down and tightly regulated by company owners and the consultants they employ.
It’s a need for control on the part of the employer that expresses itself in this infantilization of the worker, while the new economy requires people to be ever adaptable and open to change, which makes them unlikely to resist awkwardly childish activities for fear of being seen as conservative and troublesome. Being “disruptive” is meant to describe how the company and its products should be perceived by the outside world, never the individuals working to make this desired disruption a reality.
To illustrate what I mean, I’m going to use quotes from Dan Lyons’ article “Why Have Our Offices Become Like Touchy-Feely Kindergartens?” in which employees talk about their experiences doing workshops in which Legos were used to have some kind of positive psychological transformation effect.
The problem isn’t just that these exercises are pointless and silly. For a lot of people, this stuff can be really stressful. For older workers — say, people over 50 — these workshops compound the fear they already have about being pushed out of their jobs. But younger workers hate them too. “It feels like you’ve joined a cult,” says a thirtysomething software programmer whose department spent a day doing a Lego workshop. “The purpose seems to be to indoctrinate people to follow orders.”
„You find yourself being gaslighted, immersed in the kind of shared psychosis and group delusion found in cults. You know these workshops are pointless, and that no one is going to be transformed by Legos. But to keep your job, you must play along. You must deliver a performance and convince management that you are flexible, adaptable, and open to change, the kind of engaged, dynamic worker who meets the needs of the new economy.“ (2)
To make it very clear, I don’t believe that there is a nefarious plot going on in which the evil capitalists are consciously aiming to regress our mentalities to the level of children so that we’re easier to bend to their will. It’s a complex cultural dynamic emerging from our neoliberal age that is comprised of and caused by many different factors that I have yet to understand fully, and I might attempt to do so in future posts.
But it is one that is obviously convenient for employers, inconvenient for workers, and that I consider worth examining more closely because people being taught to understand themselves as their company’s children (see also: “we’re all a family here!”) is likely to slow down and hinder the working class in advocating for its interests - if you’re not being taken seriously, which people who are placed in a ball pit to play with Legos and having their conversations with coworkers prescribed by a click-through guide obviously aren’t, and this extends over a period of time, then how confident are you really going to feel when confronting your boss in a salary negotiation? If everyone around you plays along with whatever management asks for because they want to remain employable by appearing open to change, how much faith are you going to have in them being the people you can successfully organise and band with in opposition to the company to bring about better conditions for everyone?
Instead of an evil plot, one reason for the infantilising office culture becoming so popular seems to be found in every company’s natural aim for success. People look to what appears to work for others and then attempt to copy that blueprint. As far as motivation is concerned, it’s probably as simple as that. And if that doesn’t produce the desired results, additional efforts need to be made to make the expected success a reality, such as implementing and nurturing a culture that can embrace these newly implemented habits.
A look at any Google office sends your sight right to the source of treating the office as a playground. Many companies have been trying to emulate the tech giant’s success in a similar way that people attempt to change their behaviour by reading self-help books about millionaire morning routines - if one does what they do, if one adopts their habits and routines as much as possible, one has got to eventually get to where they are, right? Fake it until you make it?
Unfortunately, in the real world, wealth cannot be attained by simply looking the part, which is why people like Anna Sorokin or Elizabeth Holmes were busted. While the Google offices and the playful routines that take place in them fit perfectly into that specific company’s branding, which seems to communicate “our users are children” – or more charitably, “our products should be simple enough to be operated by a toddler” – at every turn with their primary colour blocking, simple shapes, and commercial narrators who sound as if they’re promoting the latest leak-proof diaper, they have nothing to do with Google being as huge as they are. It’s not like they started out with massive slides and camper vans in the middle of every office. It takes serious cash to build a swimming pool meeting room, the money had to come first. The source of the creative innovation that has brought the company to where it is today is much more likely to be found in the minds of the competent people they hire than anything about the furnishing of their offices. Just like every company, Google is nothing without its workers.
The harsh reality that a ball pit isn’t going to bring them from zero to Bezos hits emerging companies in the face on a regular basis. Plenty of studies objectively demonstrate this. Collaboration and creativity actually decrease in busy, colourful, open-plan offices, people seek to isolate themselves from all the audible and visual noise surrounding them and end up fixed to their screens with headphones on. Especially developers, the most frequent victims of the quirky office, work best when they’re able to get into a deep focus mode, which is nearly impossible with so many distractions around.
So employers are sitting in offices full of people in party hats who aren’t actually happy, all while capitalism is showing its lack of resilience more than most people working today have ever experienced – we’ve run into an incredible amount of crises in the past years and decades. Nothing is ever safe and certain. Companies are flailing and scrambling for control.
To gain back a sense of control over the company and reduce apparent dissatisfaction, consultants and coaches for office culture have made it an entire business to teach people new habits for their workplace. Sunk cost demands that the ball pit is maintained and peppy workshoppers are right here to help people adapt their mindsets and behaviours to fit in with the new environment.
Through performative positivity rituals and sponsored “health days” in which calm breathing is taught to help people cope with stressful situations, through meditation minutes, cultural awareness sessions in which people are taught in detail how to interact with their coworkers in a variety of scenarios, the employer ends up encouraging what the HRExaminer refers to as the “Stepford employee” in his article “The Infantilisation of the American Workforce”. (3)
The Stepford employee has internalised the expectations of their workplace to the extent that they would not even think of causing any of the friction that HR departments try so hard to avoid. No friction means no conflict means less to worry about for the company, no troublemakers causing a stir in any way, minimal intervention to maintain control is needed – yay, flat hierarchies!
But friction is what naturally happens when adults with different personalities and groups with opposing interests have to spend a large part of their week together. The Stepford culture is an unnatural dynamic, a symptom of the self-exploitation that is so common in today’s society. Removing friction means removing autonomous thinking, self-directed human interaction, and it soft-boils an environment to the point where it seems completely out of left field to share any objections, leading to a system that regulates itself towards an equilibrium where everything at least appears fine and harmonious at all times.
People aren’t necessarily happier than they were after sliding into the role of Stepford employee, but they sure are more likely to see issues within themselves rather than the company they work for, which makes them unlikely to complain, ask for raises, reject overtime hours, or get even crazier ideas like organising their fellow employees to stand up for their shared needs and interests. This is what I refer to when I say that the preschool culture helps companies regain a sense of control over what happens within their walls.
The incessant emphasis on “appropriate behavior” encourages workers to view one another as psychically fragile and in need of protection, hardly the best conduit to mutual respect. Even worse, employees come to see themselves as fragile. Every off-the-cuff comment or e-mail invites the question “Should I be offended by this?” and a subsequent protest to a manager. Rarely are employees trusted to work out their personal differences like mature adults. (4)
„Should I be offended by this?“
This question well demonstrates that when a company treats employees like children who cannot think for themselves, that is how they will behave. They learn to look to the employer to provide them with guidelines for what is and isn’t appropriate behaviour at work, and when they look to the company to decide what is and isn’t right, it should be obvious that the employees will not be the ones benefitting from such a culture at the end of the day. It only brings them closer to being the perfect Stepford employee.
The Stepford employee allows the company to control narratives in the way that is best for their bottom line. While this is mostly a side effect that has slowly emerged out of the playful habits of Google (the ultimate benchmark) combined with the expectations of neoliberal capitalism on the working class, some employers seem to be at least aware of the advantage it provides them. They use it against the workers who will happily step out of line and disturb the ping-pong peace if it means more time with their family or simply being able to afford the steadily rising costs of living. Those workers will start organising only to be hit by a union busting campaign such as the one started by Starbucks, where they started telling employees that financial benefits such as transgender-specific healthcare could be taken away if a union is established at their company.
Not only was this objectively untrue, messages like this ultimately boil down to one thing that employees are supposed to internalise: The company knows and cares about what’s good for you, the company looks out for your best interest at all times, and more importantly – you can’t trust your fellow workers to make the right decisions for the workplace, so don’t allow them to gain too much power.
In reality, the opposite is the case. The class that has to sell their time and labour for a living is by default in opposition to the one that employs them under an economic incentive to keep wages as low as possible while still having people do the work. What workers should remember outside of their personal differences and their unique challenges is that almost everyone in their workplace is dependent on a wage, just like them. This knowledge is more important than some people might think when it comes to improving working conditions.
You and your coworkers all want the same things when it comes down to it. You want to take as much of your money home as possible – enough to cover all expenses needed for a comfortable life, you want to spend time with your friends, with your family and on your personal interests, you want to spend more time at home or outside and less time in a sand-dusted hammock.
There is strength in numbers, there is strength in mutual solidarity and in standing up for yourselves and each other. You can make up a powerful majority if you unite and demand what you really need as a collective.
So get in the ball pit! To hide between the orbs while you make plans with your teammates to take power and create the workplace that really works for you.