We had a laminated sheet of barcodes representing a series of tasks on our desk, and every time we did anything we had to swipe the appropriate barcode with a laser reader pen. We had seventeen minutes to get out a mortgage offer. If the phone went, we had to answer it within two rings and all the calls were recorded and monitored to check whether we were giving out accurate information and the manner with which we dealt with the call. Every time we made a call we had to swipe the pen, and every time we answered the phone we had to swipe. You had to swipe if you were going to the toilet or to get a coffee. If you wanted to talk to a colleague you had to swipe, so that all interactions with colleagues were being monitored. When we had finished for the day, we had to log in and out. The whole thing was then downloaded to the supervisor, who could look at the log to check productivity.
It was like working for Big Brother. Some of my colleagues would say it’s for the greater good – trying to get profits up. The people I worked with came from very varied backgrounds. Some women who had worked in factories didn’t mind it because they were used to being closely monitored. It was the younger ones who resented it, or those who came from managerial backgrounds or were college-educated; they wanted more freedom and initiative.
The log Liz describes can be programmed to highlight any departure from the required routine – such as too many toilet breaks or too many ‘consultations with colleagues’. The level of supervision is superior to anything that even the most beady-eyed boss could achieve.
At the lower levels of the labour market, information technology has frequently been used to increase pressure and reduce autonomy. In professional and managerial jobs the story is rather different: it has increased both pressure and autonomy. The higher the level of the employee’s computer skills, the greater the degree of anxiety. Research on the impact of information technology on the upper end of the labour market is still in its early stages, but the indications are that it has significandy increased workloads. How do we use email, mobile phones, the internet and laptops, and why haven’t they lived up to the promise of the advertising of making our lives easier? Why do so many people say that they have in fact made their jobs more difficult?
There are two separate issues about how technology can increase the burdens of work: the volume of information it makes available to us, and the way in which it increases our own accessibility. Firstly, the volume of information to which the internet provides access is obvious within a few minutes: a Google search under almost any heading will bring up thousands of relevant items. Eighty-two per cent of managers mentioned the proliferation of the information they had to deal with as a cause of long hours.13 Material which would once have been kept within the company or department is now widely available on the internet or intranet. The knowledge economy has transformed the circulation of data so that anywhere on the net there could be exactly the information you’re looking for. So when do you settle for anything less?
What accelerates the flow of information is that the whole balance of effort involved in its distribution has reversed: once, a request for a particular bit of information might have required typing it out or photocopying it and putting it in the post; now, it simply requires an email with an attachment. The marginal costs incurred by the sender have shrunk to a few minutes, while the costs to the receiver to read, digest and consider the information are as time-consuming as ever. Far more information is being distributed than ever before, but what has not changed is our capacity to absorb and process it. In fact there is some evidence that the increased flow of information actually hinders our mental processes, making us less productive, not more. Psychologist David Lewis described in Information Overload (1999) how the brain becomes tired trying to keep up, and loses its powers of concentration and the ability to think clearly or rationally. He cited Stephen Grossberg’s studies of mind and brain, which warned that one of the strategies the brain uses to reduce fatigue is ‘to pay attention to anything new, while taking no notice of what is unchanged’.14
Secondly, many of the new information technologies transform accessibility. The mobile phone dismantles many of the spatial boundaries of work introduced by industrialisation. It was the development of factories which bounded work spatially, separating it from the home. For the middle classes the spatial differentiation became even more clear-cut with the growth of suburbs and commuting. In the last twenty years mobile phones, laptops, company intranets and home PCs have dissolved the separation between our work and our private lives. It’s true that the spillover is both ways – children phoning their parents in the middle of meetings, for example – but we have been better at policing that intrusion of home life into work than work into home. As one civil servant emailed me: ‘I frequently get emails from colleagues sent at 2 or 3 a.m. And what’s more, copies of replies sent back around the same time. One man at a meeting recently admitted that he “snuck out of bed” in the middle of the night to do his emails, trying not to wake his partner, who “got annoyed about it”. He’ll be dead before he’s fifty.’
A manager for a software company emailed: ‘I enjoyed the rush in a way, but…I didn’t want to see friends or family in the evenings or weekends, it was just more hassle…I had a secretary organise my emails into four categories: urgent-important, not urgent but important, not important but urgent, etc., and I would only read and action the most pressing until I could face another long night at home sorting out all the others – only to find fifty new ones the next morning…The most apt metaphor to sum the experience up is to imagine yourself standing at the back end of a dumper truck full of gravel. It slowly tips out, covering you. You dig frantically to stop being buried but the gravel keeps on coming and never ceases. If you stop digging, you’ll die.’
But the frustration and resentment has not triggered any campaign or collective action to protect privacy. There have been no battles to institute ‘no calls outside office hours’ contracts, or protests against the home PC being linked up to the company intranet. On the contrary, this Trojan horse has frequently been welcomed; as one female executive explained, 24/7 accessibility is a price worth paying for greater freedom over when she works. The trade-off is privacy and boundaries in exchange for a degree of autonomy – you may work long, unpredictable hours, your leisure may never be free of the possibility of work intruding, but you have a measure of control and can take off a couple of quiet hours in the middle of the afternoon.
Technology has also transformed accessibility within organisations. That’s the appeal of email – private, quick and direct. The barriers of the bureaucratic, hierarchical organisation appear to crumble as we click on the ‘send’ box; there are no secretaries to brazen our way past, no underlings or deputies to deal with, we can reach anyone anywhere. Email has bred its own character and tone of democratic directness and informality. Of course, senior executives quickly discovered this led to overload, and put their secretaries in charge of their email, but its accessibility and privacy continues to be seductive, and reconfigures office relationships, subverting hierarchies and strengthening more egalitarian networks.
But email has some significant drawbacks. It has evolved as a means of communication very rapidly, with little etiquette or codes of conduct, and has major flaws: email correspondence is very hard to conclude satisfactorily, and because of its brevity and speed it is often very imprecise, thus leading to a much longer correspondence in order to clarify issues. One research study shows that ‘more than 65 per cent of all email messages fail to give the recipients enough information to act upon, and ambiguous and poorly-written emails can lead to misunderstandings that can cause tension within the workplace, and may lead to incorrect instructions being carried out’.15 Judy Bendis, an occupational psychologist, was called in to a major public sector organisation to help tackle the rising tide of emails. The biggest problem was that emails were distracting, she found: people were checking their email inbox two or three times an hour, which broke up their concentration; each check took at least two or three minutes, and then another minute to refocus attention. The whole process, repeated through the day, can take up 25 per cent of the employee’s time. One of the