Jeans. Almost everyone owns a pair. Many people, including me, regard them as their comfort clothes of choice. Jeans for me are like armor, allowing me to feel more competent and confident than I do in other attire. Jeans have also become a symbol of Management’s magnanimity.

Whether an office maintains business dress or has relaxed to business casual what both types of offices have in common is “casual Friday.” In most places this means staff are allowed to wear jeans which is fine in temperate weather but in any location that actually has summer weather being allowed to wear jeans on Friday becomes just another control mechanism.

While jeans are worn as the comfort clothes of choice by many they’re worn to do hard, outdoor work, and, increasingly, for a more relaxed but still dressed up look in social settings. Jeans are not cheap. The average cost of a pair of Levi’s 501s is around $50 with some designer pairs costing upwards of $1,000. Jeans are also not light.

Last Friday in DC the heat index at 7:00 was 79degF. At noon, when most people want to leave the office to get lunch, the heat index was 86degF. And if you’ve taken advantage of Management’s largess and worn jeans to the office, and if you’re me, you’re disinclined to leave your desk to get lunch and what do you do when you don’t leave your desk, and when the firewall is locked down tighter than a duck’s butt? Why you work more, of course!

I write this mostly in jest but it seems to me that if I can see the smallest of control mechanisms, which is what dictating what clothes people can wear really is, it’s going to be easier for me to see the larger control mechanisms and to subvert them.

I’ve been noodling with an essay about work, how the necessity of having to be at work instead of doing whatever it is you’d rather be doing can be made less onerous and about how we all have secret plans for ruling the work world. Right now it’s about 1,100 words and, quite frankly, I haven’t even gotten to laying out my ideal workplace. Part of the reason it’s taking so long is because I’m still trying to wrap my brain around the fact that somehow I’ve managed to land myself in the most toxic, passive-aggressive workplace I’ve ever encountered.

It’s not quite Max Barry’s Company. No, that would require that Management have some awareness of the games they’re playing with staff. As it is, Management not only actively participates but is the principle beneficiary of said games.

So far I’ve spotted the:

• “conflicting instructions” game (DeputyDirector gives one instruction while UberDirector gives the complete opposite);
• “no direction” game (You’re told Management wants to have input, you ask for that input, are given none, and then held accountable when you haven’t moved the issue forward.);
• “your schedule is irrelevant” game (Manifests in two ways: Management summons you without warning for seemingly trivial matters disrupting your work flow or Management schedules meetings then reschedules them at a whim. What these two manifestations have in common is that you have no option to refuse or control your time.);
• “endless meetings” game (Long meetings that don’t start on time the entire purpose of which is to have the group, and it’s always a group, reenforce whatever decision Management wants to make.); and, of course,
• “someone has to be a target” game (Management picks someone and decides this person can do no right. There is no rhyme or reason to why this person becomes a target and who is the target shifts without warning.)

The end result of all of these games is a staff completely constrained from any creative thinking or initiative (a cause for reprimand) which does only what it is told (also a cause for reprimand). With the added addition of “there are spies among you” not only does Management not have to do all the work itself, the possibility of the staff banding together to manage up gets eliminated altogether.

The sad part about this is that Management isn’t even very good at playing these games. Usually it takes me a few months to spot that fact that this stuff is going on. This time around, I got it in the first three weeks. And this makes my work day in some ways very amusing and in others completely frustrating: I can see the man behind the curtain but he thinks I can’t see him.

Now I just have to survive my year’s probationary period so I can move to another part of the giant company I happen to work for right now.

Yesterday was my last day on the job Floundering Non-Profit. Strangely, I feel very little relief mostly due to the fact that even at the very end Management was still trying to pull a fast one.

Pay-cut rate salaries are still in effect at Floundering Non-Profit. While I was out on vacation, using up what I thought was to be my last furlough day, some personal days, and a single vacation day, ManagingDirector announced “some good news for a change!” The pay cuts would be ending on March 12 instead of April 1 as planned. She also added,

We appreciate the incredible sacrifices made by our staff to help get the organization on a stronger financial footing…We are optimistic about our financial prospects in 2011 and hope to be able to restore other cuts later this year. In the meantime, we are pleased to be able to make this small gesture to show our appreciation for your efforts.

Really? Fifteen percent of my pay, something acknowledged as an “incredible sacrifice,” only merits a “small gesture” in return? Admittedly, I didn’t actually give up that 15%. I took furlough days which for me were adequate compensation; after all: time is really the only thing you ever run out of. But still, the patronage in this message astounded me.

Logistically the pay cuts ending early meant that my 17 furlough days was reduced to 16 and I’d have to use two vacation days plus the personal days, for which they aren’t obligated to and would not compensate me for when I left, to cover the vacation in the middle of the three weeks’ notice I gave them I was leaving. And I was fine with that, until I got the answer back about the rate at which they intended to pay out my vacation.

Floundering Non-Profit, like most U.S. employers, awards vacation and sick time on an incremental basis per pay period. You work, you earn the benefit to use later. Prior to the pay cuts, I had accrued 11.18 days of vacation. Since the pay cuts went into effect, I’d accrued 2.82 days of vacation. Fairness, and possibly legality, it seems to me dictates that since I earned the bulk of that time at the pre-pay cut rate it should be paid out at the pre-pay cut rate. Sadly, Management did not agree.

Management chose the course of paying me out for all 14 days at the lower rate. So rather than treating me fairly and paying me out as the time was earned, they chose to be cheap. They chose bad karma and ill will, which was unsurprising given their previous performance, to save $354.18.

Management can not do the math.

Instead of two vacation days, I got NewBigBoss to approve my final time sheet with two sick days and the three personal days. That means they will be paying me for 14 days of vacation at the pay cut rate and two sick days at the pay cut rate.

Now, if Management had chosen to be fair, I wouldn’t have had any problems with taking two vacation days for the time I was out. It would have been the right thing to do. But they chose to try to be clever, to try to cut a corner and get one over. They didn’t though.

Two sick days at the pay cut rate is $359.68.

There’s something ineffably wonderful about winning a game of chicken shit against the house. And it always pays to do that math.

It’s the rare event that has no upside. Right now, I’m trying really hard to see the upside of a 15% pay cut.

I sort of knew we were facing pay cuts. It’s not a surprise given the way things have been going lately. The company has moved two offices, in Minneapolis and in DC, to save money into spaces so small that staff in each location are practically sitting on top of each other. We’ve closed one office in Michigan and laid off at least two staff members that I know of, and we’ve had a highly paid member of the national staff resign and Management has chosen to spread his duties around rather than replace him.

While the pay cuts weren’t really a surprise, I was still a little bit shocked by Management’s cheek in presenting them. My boss laid out the facts: everyone making more than $30,000 a year is taking a pay cut starting November 1 for the 22 weeks. The brackets start at 10% and go up to 20% with “Senior Managers contributing more.”

And that was it. No mention of furlough days, no mention of compensating staff for lost salary after finances improve. Nothing. Just a flat we’re going to cut your pay by 15 percent. When I asked about furlough days my boss implied that people who had volunteered to take more than the five days they required us to take in spring 2009 hadn’t actually taken them. [Read more...]

I’ve often wondered if the planners of the Normandy invasion had any idea that the military term “D-Day” would become synonymous in certain regions where English is spoken with “the day on which momentous, potentially hazardous things happen.” I wonder this because I also think that it’s not very often that we get advance warning that events like this are about to happen.

Sure, we plan for weddings and we get plenty of warning about most births, which are also momentous, but how often do we get a warning that our life is about to change in a major way that isn’t of our choosing? Likely we get warning more often than not, I think, but the signs are often small and we often ignore them because human beings have a large talent for self-delusion and rationalization. I’ve been thinking about this a lot for the past few days because most of the signs in my professional life point to a major change coming.

I think I’m about to get laid off.

Actually, that’s not true. Getting laid off wouldn’t be the worst case scenario of what my obsessive brain has determined are the three most likely possibilities at an organization one of my local co-workers described recently as “having a whiff of the Titanic about it.” No, getting laid off is actually second shittiest thing Management could do to me at this point. [Read more...]

Why yes, I can have a dip and sprinkles.

I spent most of the first week in August away at the beach. While it wasn’t perfectly relaxing, being away was relaxing enough that I managed to stem the constant, low-level flow of adrenaline that seems to be my physical reaction to the insanities and absurdities that come with working for a cash-strapped, badly managed non-profit. It wasn’t easy though.

Letting go of all that frustration required walks on the beach, lots of time sitting and reading, good food, some arcade games, and a couple of longish bike rides over flat terrain in a place gleefully accustomed to seeing bikes on the road. It also required that I remember a couple of key tactics for staying sane in a working environment not long on either communication or transparency: dealing with what is instead of what might be, and making everything as much fun as possible.

When we moved office in the summer of 2008 ostensibly the reason for the move downtown was so we could attract more workers to our field canvass and so that it would be easier for the campaign staff we were going to build to attend meetings with other groups and to lobby decision makers. I think it was mostly because one senior staff person was tired of going all the way uptown to the Metro Stop That Time Forgot where there has been virtually no commercial development over the past 30 years and longed for her “glory days” of rolling out of the office and into her favorite dive bar in Dupont Circle.

So my employer signed a 5-year lease securing a suite that takes up the entire 11th floor of an eleven story building just off McPherson Square only a couple of blocks away from the White House, an easy Metro and even easier cab ride to Capitol Hill, and very near a lot of groups with which we work in coalition. And all of that would matter if we’d had the funding to actually add staff.

Oh, we hired a Political Director in 2008 out of the ruins of the Edwards campaign supposedly because he was a super fundraiser who could help us bring in tons of money with his connections. Not only did he not bring in tons of money – in the 6 months he worked for us he did one e-mail fund raising campaign which brought in exactly $30 and the event he organized at the Eastern Shore (Maryland) home of a prominent Democratic Party gadfly cost more to produce than it brought in – he never did anything to shape our external communications to supporters and he only came to the office on pay day which is what will happen when you issue live checks and you’ve hired someone who lives about 80 miles and an hour and 45 minutes away by car.

We also hired a couple of campaign staff people, one to work on global warming and renewable energy, something my organization has a huge problem communicating with our supporters about because our campaigners can’t seem to get the quarter away from their eye long enough to realize that it isn’t the same size as the sun and just maybe everyone doesn’t understand how those issues connect with our primary area of work, and one to work extremely locally with a lot of interested but under served groups in the Anacostia watershed.

But because of the way this organization funds its work, the money eventually ran out to pay the global warming and energy person, and she got fed up with not being able to actually do anything since our national global warming and energy team is lead by someone in Connecticut who is rightfully busy with doing good work on the state level, and the campaigner working on the Anacostia issues decided after about a year that what she really wanted to do was work directly with organizations helping kids.

Since both of them left we’ve got 10 people, several of whom aren’t in the office more than 5 days per month, plus a canvass staff rattling around in space designed to hold three times that many people, space that is costing $60,000 $20,000 a month (still more than double what we were paying uptown) which we don’t always pay on time, and in fact haven’t been current on in nearly a year.

The first step Management took to try to reduce the rent bite was try to sub-let space but, typical of Management’s half-assed approach to things, instead of putting an ad on Craigslist or Idealist.org or circulating it via something like the Progressive Exchange list, they put the onus on staff to come up with potential tenant candidates. When that failed, they started seriously negotiating with the building’s owners and the property management companies (we’ve had two in the past two years) about either dividing up our space on the 11th floor or about moving to another available suite.

Needless to say, our landlords aren’t making the process easy. One of my co-workers, currently on the outs with our ManagingDirector who is in charge of the DC office, told me that they are demanding a ton of fees to move to another, smaller suite. These fees include a penalty for breaking our lease on the larger suite, a moving fee, a renovation fee, and other assorted charges priced in such a way that it would take micro fine accounting to determine that moving was financially to our benefit. Yet, I’m sure that’s what Management is going to decide to do.

Monday afternoons I have a weekly, half-hour call with my direct supervisor who just happens to be in Philadelphia. Calls are pretty standard, we go through the work plan I’ve sent him earlier in the day starting with what meetings I have scheduled, progress on the project from hell, e-mails I’ve gotten requests for from our state offices, updates to the web site, data hygiene on our online supporter database, and anything else that he might have for me that I don’t know about.

It was during this “anything else” section that he mentioned that I may have “heard some scuttlebutt around the office about us moving down to the 4th floor” to which I wanted to reply that while it was no secret that we were looking to move it was unlikely that I’d heard anything specific while I was 125 miles away at the beach. Apparently it’s looking like we’re going to move at the beginning of October to a smaller suite and while the details haven’t been worked out yet, it’s firm enough for him to be relaying this information to me.

Now, there are a ton of things wrong with this plan, one of them is that half of us (including me) will be moving from the sunny front of the building  to the dark back of the building, you know, the part that overlooks the dumpsters in the alley instead of having a partial view of McPherson Square park. That change kinda makes the fact that we can open the windows in our offices sort of a moot point.

From what I have heard in the past four days, there are lots of other things about this move that suck outright. One is the fact that the “renovations” the building’s owners want to charge us for extend solely to adding a suite door in the hallway and taking out a non-bearing wall so we can have a reception desk just inside the new door. They don’t include repainting or recarpeting, and, most importantly, they don’t include adding any sort of kitchen area.

No kitchen area means no place to wash dishes which means everyone is going to be using plastic ware and disposable plates which is more than slightly hypocritical for an environmental organization. And considering that the previous property management company took 6 months (December to May) to respond to a trouble ticket about a broken heater in my office, what are the chances that this new suite is going to be anything vaguely resembling not totally gross?  I think they’re pretty freaking slim.

The other thing that sucks outright is the fact that we’re going to go from individual offices not to an open work plan, which I could totally deal with, but to shared office space for a staff used to having not only their own physical and aural space but also control over the temperature in their immediate environment.

So we’re going to from a newly renovated suite with less than two year-old paint and carpeting, a functional kitchen area, and a situation where staff have basically private offices with individual climate control to a suite with who knows what on the walls and the floors and no place to wash dishes or even a nook for a refrigerator and microwave. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised since no one who makes the decisions has to work in the space.

And I probably shouldn’t be complaining; lots of people have to work under even worse conditions. I also probably shouldn’t be upset by this because none of it actually is yet; we’re still only at the speculation stage. This is where dealing with what is instead of with what might be comes into play.

The co-worker who normally keeps me informed about these things has been cut out of any unofficial communications because she “causes drama around the office” which is just a bullshit way of our ManagingDirector saying that my co-worker actually tells people what’s going on which puts the ManagingDirector in a position of not being  in control of the information flow. This is where making everything as much fun as possible comes into play: I’m running an organizational communications experiment.

It was August 9, 2010 when my direct supervisor informed me that it was likely that we would be moving down to the fourth floor at the beginning of October. That’s 37 work days until October 1 for people who have been in offices two years to sort through and pack up not only their personal workspace but also the rest of the office.

When do you think the official announcement is going to be about a beginning of October move? My bet is on some time the week of September 20th; if they send it out that morning that will give us not quite 9 work days to sort through and pack everything up.

Given the way Management communicates, I think I’m being generous in my estimate. There’s part of me that hopes I’ve underestimated them. What I do know is that it will be interesting to watch.