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The recession has made everyone feel a lot less secure about their jobs - if they still have one. Jon Henley asks how this has affected our attitude to work in general while Alain de Botton hails the joys of office life
'In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread," said God to Adam, "till thou return unto the ground." And for much of history that's what work, for most people, was all about - pain, degradation and drudgery. Indeed ponos, the ancient Greeks' word for work, actually meant "pain".
It took centuries - until the emergence of the Protestant work ethic - for work to be seen as dignified and moral; something of a duty, even. And it took a few more, until our very own information age and the optimism of some economic good times, for the idea to emerge that a job might actually be fulfilling and enjoyable in itself.
Now, of course, assuming you are lucky enough to have a job, the relationship has changed again. By force of circumstance, as the first global recession of the 21st century really begins to bite, your job may suddenly look much more important than it has done for many years.
During the boom, there may have been years when your house earned nearly as much as you did (at least on paper, anyway). Stock options and a steadily expanding pension pot left some employees feeling that the thing they did at the office every day was secondary to their financial wellbeing.
For a certain very favoured class in the 1990s and early noughties, what mattered most was the accumulation of property and capital. And for many more, certainly if they were homeowners in areas of the country where house prices were rising fast, the future did not appear anything to be afraid of. If the worst came to the worse, we could always downsize, couldn't we? Cut down, move out, maybe commute in for a couple days a week. All things were possible: we had a cushion.
Even if your job has always been what occupational psychologists describe as a meaningful and important part of your life, you might have felt infected by a general mood of optimism, and felt a greater willingness to take risks, be flexible, consider changes mid-stream - a sense, in short, of possibility.
Not any more. Now, all of a sudden, most people's homes are worth a lot less, maybe even less than they have borrowed to pay for them (particularly if they remortgaged). Savings and pension pots have shrunk dramatically, by
up to a third. The national mood has swung, dramatically. And jobs are starting to look more precious than they have in a long time.
"For plenty of people out there, the attitude to work has been a bit like teenage boys towards their girlfriends: there are a lot of them about, I don't really need to worry, I'll be all right," says John Philpott, chief economist at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. "Now everyone is realising it's time to settle down. It's a reality check."
That check affects different people in different ways, says Neil Conway of the School of Management and Organisational Psychology at Birkbeck College, London - but it usually means our relationships with our bosses are undergoing a marked power-shift. "Many people will be putting more into their jobs now," he says. "Statistically, it's pretty well established that when unemployment starts to climb, absenteeism falls. There's a tendency towards ingratiating behaviour, too - grovelling, basically, in an attempt to make yourself indispensable."
With daily stories of huge numbers of applicants for any new job, there may also be a distinct preference for security. "You may well think twice about applying for a job with that buzzy, creative small start-up now," Conway says. "A job with the council may start to look a lot more appealing. The thing about a recession is that it makes people really experience their job insecurity. Of course, no employee is ever really safe. But in recent years, a lot of people have felt they have been."
And this, says Philpott, may lead employees to retreat into their shell. "That's the survivor syndrome - those who do keep their jobs still feel depressed by the fact that they're feeling insecure and that their colleagues are departing," he says. "Whereas some will respond by working harder, others will fall into resignation and depression, and start doing their jobs more reluctantly and half-heartedly."
Philpott also believes the oft-cited idea that a recession provides an opportunity to re-evaluate careers and attitudes is mostly "********". "For every person who thinks, yes, there might be a better life and I've never been bothered to look for it but perhaps now is the moment, there will be nine who experience a recession as deeply depressing, distressing and a nightmare. It's only a very few members of the professional classes who are likely to actually benefit from reduced working hours or unpaid sabbaticals. Book leave and all that - it's a bit of a joke, really. There'll be a lot of rubbish books coming out of this recession, you can count on that."
Conway's Birkbeck colleague, Rob Briner, says he has been surprised at the apparent quiescence of many 21st-century employees faced with the prospect of their own redundancy. "A lot of people felt safe, and now they feel unsafe," he says. "But the response isn't the same as in the mid-80s. The unions nowadays don't have the same authority, and there's a whole new generation who don't know how to represent themselves.
"People are taking it all rather passively. Over the last 20 years, they've bought into the idea of an individual deal with their employer and the notion that rewards are for performance. They seem inclined to accept a pay cut or redundancy as being in the natural order of things."
The "psychological contract" that binds employer and employee is changing, Conway believes. "The explicit deal, the one that says I'll work X number of hours for you each week and you'll pay me Y number of pounds, is underpinned by a kind of implicit deal in which the employee also expects job security, respect, career opportunities, that kind of thing," says Conway. "Job insecurity makes people examine that a lot more closely."
If an employee is seen as talented and appreciated, he or she may have more clout than ever in a downturn. In the 1990s, says Philpott, "the management narrative was all about being lean and mean. So the employee response was to be lean and mean too; to offer zero commitment. The reaction to that, as we returned to full employment in the mid-90s, was for employers to concentrate far more on keeping employees engaged, interested, motivated."
That, Briner says, may make companies behave rather more circumspectly than they have in past recessions. "An organisation wants to keep its best employees," he says, "because they are the people who are going to help it pull through. But if its best employees see that organisation behaving shabbily, they're not going to want to stay around."
The crisis, some experts say, is also reviving the concept of human capital: Adam Smith's notion of the inherent value of the education, training and experience we each acquire over a working life. But that capital is no longer constituted simply of its traditional components - a good school, a good degree, many years of experience in a particular field.
"What employers want from their work-force now," says Angela Carter of Sheffield University's Institute of Work Psychology, "is employability and skills. Work is becoming more complex."
So the employees who will survive the current recession best, Carter believes, are those who succeed in escaping what she calls the "occupational work silo": people who think in terms of what they can do across an organisation, rather than what they have done in their job to date. "We're in a really interesting power balance at the moment," she says. "Employers want more for less, and employees want more control. It's all about you as a
worker taking control; if you've got what an organisation wants, you can find yourself in a very good position."
A recession-appropriate CV, Carter says, should not be a bald list of qualifications and experiences, but "all about your skills. It should be: 'This is what I can do, I solved this problem last year', not, 'I've got this qualification and I've been with that company for 15 years.'
If you're an extraordinary communicator, a manager who can talk both to the board and to your team, that's what people want to know."
Carter, who was made redundant from the NHS in 1993, suggests the ideal working pattern to see off the recession is, in theory at least, to avoid having all your eggs in one work basket by becoming what she calls a "portfolio worker". That way, no one employer has the power to put you on the dole. "Although that's not for everyone," she acknowledges.
"It all depends on your stability needs: some people need stability a lot more than others, and will seek it where they can find it."
Whatever our response at work to the deepening recession, it is still true to say that many of us are better placed to deal with its consequences than our counterparts of 20 or more years ago. According to Peter Totterdell of Sheffield's Institute of Work Psychology, "People have less expectation of lifelong employment from a single organisation than two decades ago, and may be more used to crafting their own career paths by jumping between employers. New technology also means that people have more tools at their disposal for examining alternative paths, for making new contacts."
If you are lucky enough to be wondering what your job really means to you these days, however, it's probably best, given the choice, not to try finding out just now.
For those made redundant in a recession, Totterdell concludes, the problems are "just the same as those identified a couple of decades ago: loss of daily structure, loss of purpose, loss of important relationships. For many, unemployment will be a very new experience. They will not have the necessary networks to help them navigate it."
'An unrivalled capacity to excite desire': The hidden pleasures of our office culture
As some of us clear our desks for the last time, and many more of us look around with new gratitude at our workstations, we should pause to appreciate the intense, rarely mentioned and often denigrated pleasures that are involved in going to the office.
The fashionable move is, of course, to mock the office. Artists are particularly prone, largely because they never go there and secretly envy those who do. If you went by most novels written today, the only things humans do is fall in love and, occasionally, murder one another - whereas, of course, what they really do is go to the office and sleep. The office lends us an identity: we only need to look at our business cards to confirm that we are (let's say) a marketing unit senior manager rather than a vaporous transient consciousness in an incidental universe. How satisfying it is to be held in check by the assumptions of colleagues, instead of being forced to contemplate, in the loneliness of 3am, all that one might have been and now never can be.
Watch anyone halfway competent at work and it's hard to do anything other than respect them. In our age, levels of commitment that in previous societies were devoted to military adventures and religious intoxication have been channelled into numerical, legal and managerial needlework. In the olden days, home used to be the place of kindness and refuge while the workplace was cruel and blunt. Now the equation is often reversed. How politely we tend to behave at work, next to the insults we throw at one another at home, where there is no HR department to coax us into being more civilised.
Nowadays workers have to be "motivated", meaning they have - more or less - to like their work. So long as workers had only to retrieve stray ears of corn from the threshing-room floor or heave quarried stones up a slope, they could be struck hard and often, with impunity and benefit. But the rules had to be rewritten with the emergence of tasks whose adequate performance required their protagonists to be, to a significant degree, content, rather than simply terrified or resigned. Once it became evident that someone who was expected to draw up legal documents or sell insurance with convincing energy could not be sullen or resentful, the mental wellbeing of employees began to be a supreme object of managerial concern.
The new figures of authority must involve themselves with childcare centres and, at monthly get-togethers, animatedly ask their subordinates how they are enjoying their jobs so far. Responsible for wrapping the iron fist of authority in a velvet glove is, of course, the human resources department. Thanks to these unusual bodies, many offices now have in place a zero-tolerance policy towards bullying, a hotline for distressed employees, forums in which complaints may be lodged against colleagues and (I know of one office) tactful procedures by which managers can let a team member know his breath smells.
Contrived as these rituals may seem, it is the very artificiality that guarantees their success, for the laboured tone of group exercises and away-day seminars allows workers to protest that they have nothing whatsoever to learn from submitting to such disciplines. Then, like guests at a house party who at first mock their host's suggestion of a round of Pictionary, they may be surprised to find themselves, as the game gets under way, able to channel their hostilities, identify their affections and escape the agony of insincere chatter. Power has not disappeared entirely in modern offices; it has merely been reconfigured. It has become matey. It is by posing as regular employees that executives stand their best chances of preserving their seniority.
The period after lunch is always a strange and dreamy time in offices, as if an ancestral memory of the siesta were muffling the normal energies of the day. Workers sit at their desks, concentrated over keyboards and documents. Printers occasionally whirr into life, ejecting pages that give off the preternaturally intense and lingering heat of newly toasted bagels. Crouching on the floor, one can see how many people have removed their shoes and are rubbing their stockinged feet back and forth on the carpet, a motion that produces not only the intriguing friction of nylon-rich fibres felt through cotton, but also the impression of having brought a hint of the intimacy of home into the working realm. Office veterans are adept at domesticating their environments: they know where to hide their food in the communal kitchens, and how to time their bathroom visits so as to reduce the risk of being forced into conversation over the sink with a colleague beside whom they have lately been seated in the tense atmosphere of a cubicle. Bursts of productive activity are punctuated by arrangements for dinner, updates on love affairs and trenchant analyses of the antics of film stars and murderers. How few are the moments of the day when money is truly being made, and how many are on either side given over to daydreams and recuperation.
Not least, offices are full of desire. They are sexy. No wonder there are so many rules against relationships at work detailed in company handbooks. Feelings of lust at work are incendiary because they threaten to subvert the entire rationale of firms. They risk bringing to light an awkward truth: how much more interesting we might find it to have sex than to work. There is nothing surprising about corporations' jealousy. Every society historically has had to regulate the sexual impulse in order to get anything done.
Yet such repression has disproportionately sexual consequences, for it is an essential feature of the erotic that it thrives most fully precisely where it is most forbidden. There were few places in the 14th century as sexually charged as the convents of the Mother of God, just as there are few settings today as libidinous as the laminated open-plan spaces of our corporations. The office is to the modern world what the cloister was to medieval Christendom: a chaste arena with an unrivalled capacity to excite desire.
Though we think of the point of work as being primarily about money, these dark economic times only emphasise the extent to which generating money is an excuse to do other things, to rise from bed in the morning, to talk authoritatively in front of overhead projectors, to plug in laptops in hotel rooms and to chat in the office kitchen. Long before we ever earned any money, we were aware of the necessity of keeping busy: we knew the satisfaction of stacking bricks, pouring water into and out of containers and moving sand from one pit to another, untroubled by the greater purpose of our actions. To view our upcoming meetings as being of overwhelming significance, to make our way through conference agendas marked "11am to 11.15am: coffee break" and not think too much about the wider purpose - maybe all of this, in the end, is the particular wisdom of the office.
Office work distracts us, it focuses our immeasurable anxieties on a few relatively small-scale and achievable goals, it gives us a sense of mastery, it makes us respectably tired, it puts food on the table. It keeps us out of greater trouble.
Alain de Botton
• Alain de Botton's new book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, is published by Penguin (rrp £18.99). To order a copy for £17.99 with free UK p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846. alaindebotton.com
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