What Happens Here Will Only Stay Here If We Comply
It’s a curious thing. You listen to podcasts about business, politics, public policy, culture, entertainment. In any fathomable category of human endeavor there’s a shared and disputed history of how we got where we are. With one notable exception. It’s where many of us listeners spend the majority of our waking hours when we’re not tethered to our headphones. It’s the history off-limits to anyone outside our employers, and even beyond the reach of many of our peers. When we sign our employment contracts at-will, we are never more than one bad work day away from termination.
As we’ve seen in our polarized country, the behavior of our political classes breeds conformity, cowardice, and a reflective dismissal of open debate with superiors — be they elected by a board of directors or a pitchfork-waving crowd of primary voters. Under the employment laws of most states, speaking truth to power is a career-limiting move. It reduces potential counter-moves too when the fallout moves beyond the boundaries of whistle-blowers and legal protections against workplace retaliation.
There is no shared social history that lives outside the data fortress of the corporate firewall. Any one attempting to step outside it is greeted with the same studied ferocity as those greeting the hacker-invaders attempting to break-in. This false equivalency criminalizes the notion that a corporation be held externally accountable for its own internal affairs, specifically the actions taken against the collective good of its employees.
A Monopoly on Knowledge Labor
Instead we have white collar war stories told between the combatants in the knowledge worker ranks. There are the legal skirmishes around employment law that are traded between corporate legal departments and the council they retain. There are the use cases to prove out the frameworks, scoring systems, and mid-course corrections of insistent strategy consultants who bless management team acquisitions, workforce reductions, and all manner of impact on earnings reports, (i.e. many if not most knowledge worker employers).
Even annual rites of we’re-all-in-this-togetherness like employee surveys are ultimately re-calibrations for how high management can turn the screws without courting a groundswell insurgency or a grassroots rejection of newly imposed terms and conditions. Employees have much skin in the game and no place at the table. While the survey is marketed as an instrument for feedback, the ultimate goal is to isolate the first inkling of departmental simmerings and cool them down. The operative goal here is isolation before untended resentments can leap across the well-enforced boundaries of business units and organizational functions.
Whether limited to encryption keys or scripted for applause lines in town halls, all of these stories are siloed at the discretion of top management and their container-keepers. What you say here stays here. What you see here never happened if it didn’t go down as planned.
So why rock the boat now? Who was ever naive enough to suggest that corporate playbooks are open secrets? That their appetites for growth and the conflicts of interest posed by this solitary purpose should be scrutinized and confronted? We call for investigations and expect our public institutions to way transparency against the rights of shareholders to receive a fair return on their capital. Why not the workers who generate those same results behind the muffled seclusion of the firewall?
Aborted Mission Statements
Actually, many 21st Century-based tech giants have branded themselves under the banner of corporate responsibility, environmental sustainability, and ethical business practices. Are these publicly-facing aspirations reflected in the way big tech engages its knowledge workers or are they high-minded platitudes that confer no wider social benefits beyond their corporate PR value? Many of the millennial and Gen Z knowledge workers attracted to their employer’s social mission are pushing back.
Earlier this fall Google employees protested the trafficking of hate speech, the use of AI surveillance for infringing on citizen identities and digital rights, and management countermoves, including the suspension of activist employees. The protests were soon followed by calls for the workforce to try something quite alien to the U.S. economy, corporate labor practices, and employee relations — the right of knowledge workers to negotiate with management through collective bargaining.
So, who is our expert witness? Who can speak to both power and the need for open discussion? If you want extra helpings of candor and credibility, don’t ask a current employee about the employer you’re considering. Ask a former employee. Someone with no skin in a game they once played to win under the same rules you’ll soon be learning. They’re under no obligation to side-step the problem personalities, undue hardships, or plain dumb stuff that passes for standard protocol when: (1) the blame gets assigned, while (2) the underlying problems went unaddressed when your firsthand witness decided to jump ship.
My proposal is that knowledge-worker user groups foster research and communications to scale the firewalls. The tools of the trade are every bit as familiar as the barriers for its facilitation: discussion boards, virtual workshops, and collaborative platforms that veer clear of social media platforms and their own un-scalable firewalls of prying eyes and the intrusions of surveillance capitalism.
Draft Agenda
That said, here are three such expressions for elevating the concerns, goals, and ultimate demands of the U.S.-based corporate knowledge workforce:
1) War Stories Told Around a Communal Fire:
Develop success cases where channels between KMers and leaders showcase exemplary partnerships through open discourse and courageous debate.
Be those expert witnesses to the use cases we develop where collaborative know-how and process experience are undermined or compromised by leadership that fails to include the knowledge organization in its decision-making.
2) Open Knowledge Metrics for Scaling the Firewall:
Distill lessons from use cases into survey tool for benchmarking knowledge-based organizations by degree of management support, i.e. communities of practice, voice of employee, intelligent search, etc.
3) Process Guidance for the Unjaundiced:
Provide support to energized and often less seasoned colleagues who wish to leverage our guidelines in pursuit of more open knowledge communities and corporate rights for knowledge workers
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This proposition should sound familiar to anyone who’s tracked their own sense of the post COVID world to come with my 2020 Foresight musings. I remain a wary bystander of the status quo. I do harbor an active animosity towards its unquestioning return. While corporate boards and elites are ripe for channeling this, that’s not either accurate, realistic, or in keeping with any future worthy of envisioning. That place accesses a healthy capacity for dialog, an appetite for cooperation, and a bias towards a stabilizing economy for the many, not for the prosperity of a few.