Darth Vader. Photograph: Lucasfilm Ltd.
I would hate to be in human resources at the moment. Admittedly, as someone with no discernible people skills, I would always hate it, but I’ve been imagining the awkward HR meetings behind the scenes of the recent wave of “what is acceptable workplace behaviour” rulings from UK employment tribunals recently, and … oof!
I’m thinking, particularly, of last week’s ruling on whether younger chatty workers disturbing an older colleague constitutes age discrimination (it didn’t), but there are many more. Comparing a colleague to Darth Vader in an online personality test resulted in a £30,000 compensation award. Leaving someone out of the tea round could contribute to unfair constructive dismissal. Sighing at a colleague could be discriminatory. An air kiss wasn’t harassment and neither was telling a manager his work was messy. Allocating a senior employee a “low-status desk” can be seen as a demotion.
Of course, any acrimonious departure is about more than one thing. These are mostly cherrypicked contributory factors; easy headlines about situations that surely involved a complex brew of circumstances and personalities. But it does look like more cases considering how we should behave at work in quite granular ways are reaching tribunals. So, what’s going on?
For a start, is workplace behaviour getting worse? That old “Covid meant we forgot our manners” cliche is certainly applied to workplaces – the idea being that too much time in slippers and sweats made us ruder and more self-centred, and we are now bringing rather too much of our unpalatable “whole selves” to work. But as a veteran of a variety of office environments, 1997-2010, I doubt this is the explanation. From flying office equipment to heavy lunchtime drinking and a litany of extremely off-colour personal comments, I witnessed some truly lawless behaviour (including from lawyers). People have never needed the excuse of a global pandemic to hang their sweaty shorts on the office door knob or make each other cry – there’s a reason I was congratulated by LinkedIn recently on my many years of self-employment. (OK, the reason is I was made redundant after writing about my colleagues on my blog – I didn’t say I was immune to behaving badly – but the stuff I saw certainly made me less keen to find another office-based job.)
Actually, I suspect shifting mores (plus decades of anti-discrimination legislation) mean behaviour in most British workplaces is far better than it used to be. So, are we getting less tolerant of co-workers and the minor irritations sharing a workplace inevitably involve? These rulings are often framed as either “Gen Z are oversensitive snowflakes” or “today’s workers are lazy, cynical outrage-mongers looking for a payout”. On the former, there probably is a degree of generational friction – we have a highly intergenerational workforce (51% of businesses employ three or more generations) and surveys suggest that has meant more age-based conflicts around communication style and working methods (it’s also something you often hear anecdotally). But most of these cases don’t even involve gen Z workers. The second complaint feels like a riff on the age-old, always fallacious “nobody wants to work” discourse, rehashed back through the 19th century and beyond (surely one day we’ll discover a Mesopotamian tablet on which someone has chiselled this exact complaint).
People do want (and need) to work – just differently. Covid didn’t make us feral slobs, but it was an inflection point, showing that work need not be business as usual. Employees regularly express a desire for more work-life balance and flexibility, but instead, many employers are hustling them back on site, and an expanding culture of workplace surveillance (HSBC is the latest employer to go down this unpopular route according to a Reuters’ recent report) further erodes trust and goodwill. Meanwhile, jobs that were traditionally vocations – teaching, healing, caring – are made harder and less rewarding every year by hollowed-out budgets. When you are not particularly happy at work – only one in three workers report they’re thriving and employee wellbeing is declining according to recent Gallup research – small grievances and annoyances become harder to overlook: the microwave smells worse; being left off the team bowling invitation rankles more; the no-headphones calls in the open plan office seem louder and longer. Unless and until things change, I bet the HR headaches continue.
• Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
