Then we have this silliness:
If I were put in charge of a business today, probably one of the first things I would do is make the use of all “emojis” in corporate communications a cause for immediate termination — whether in internal emails or texts, and certainly in client communication.
Why? Because a business is a serious thing — there are profits to be made, customer- and client relationships to be forged, and decisions made can have long-term implications and outcomes.
And serious business requires serious communication, not fucking chat-speak shorthand (and by extension, the same goes for acronyms like “AFAIK” and “IMHO”).
There’s no excuse for using any of the above. “But it expresses what I mean much more quickly and efficiently” is the common whine in their defense, which tells me that you are a) lazy and b) unable to write / communicate properly. Neither of those shortcomings is likely to endear you to me, the boss.
I think that this foolishness is in keeping with the modern yoot’s belief that work isn’t serious, that employers have to make employees’ lives easier — safe, yes; easy, not so much — and it all feeds into the scenario that today’s workers feel that they’re entitled to a job that has few rules, few restrictions on their behavior, and few demands on their intellect (such as it is).
This “work from home” nonsense is another flea on the corporate body. I once had a job where I worked from home, but only because the (start-up) company was based in Florida and couldn’t afford to relocate me. Even so, I made a point of spending a full week each month in Florida to meet with other executives and employees, and most especially to justify my continued employment to management.
The way I see it is that if you live closer than twenty miles from the corporate office, you should come in to work every day.
“But I’m just as efficient working from home as from the office!” (which is a total lie, and everyone knows it) which carries the implication that the employee and not management can set the standard for efficiency.
“But I don’t have to be in the office to work!” comes the next wail, as though management should have to justify the company’s employment requirements to the employees. “I decide the working conditions — and if I say you have to work in an office, then you’ll work in an office. Otherwise, hit the road.” (or “FIFO” — hah!)
I think it’s the insufferable arrogance that all the above demonstrate that makes me want to walk around with a cane, lightly swatting people who offend me with their attitude and laziness. (I know, that’s assault — another fucking example of corrective action turned into a criminal misdeed, don’t get me started.)
Long ago, I interviewed a kid for a junior executive position, and was completely floored when he asked me how much access he’d have to senior management, to communicate (as he put it) his “ideas” for improvement. He was equally taken aback by my response: “What makes you think that your inexperience qualifies you for such access?” I then got the “fresh eyes” spiel, whereupon I pointed out that he shouldn’t be so arrogant as to assume that his fresh young eyes were the first such that had ever started work at the company.
Of course, he didn’t get the job — and was somewhat hurt when I told him why I’d made that decision. (In those days, one actually communicated with applicants when turning them down, instead of ghosting them. Don’t get me started on this little example of corporate / individual cowardice.)
Elephant herds tend to survive (and thrive) because the older bulls keep the adolescents in line. In today’s culture, adolescents demand that they should run the show, even though history shows that uninformed opinion and little experience ends up in disaster. One of my favorite movie storylines is that of Big (1988), where Tom Hanks is miraculously transformed into an adult, and whose idea for a toy company makes him a corporate hero. However, his next idea is terrible, and had he not reverted to childhood, catastrophic failure would have been inevitable.
Never mind history (all that old stuff); one has only to look at today’s White House and its Cabinet of lightweights like Harris, Buttigieg, Granholm and Raimondo to see the consequences of such folly.
The business world is no different, by the way, as witnessed by the ineptness and uncaring attitude of adolescent children like Zuckerberg and the twerps at Google, whose “life is just like a game, dude” perspective is equally catastrophic for society. Great ideas for a start-up, but not so good (okay, terrible) for the long term.
Unfortunately, unlike with Tom Hanks’s Big character, there’s no easy way out for the rest of us who have to live with the Bidenesque- and Metaversal catastrophes.
And while these twerps, insulated from looming catastrophe by age (Biden) and wealth (Zuckerberg), might say “BFD, dude”, the same is not true for the rest of us.
It IS a Big Fucking Deal.
A fair amount of my business (architectural design) is conducted via email and I’ll tell you right now it is downright appalling how few people out there are able to construct a basic sentence, let alone an entire email, that is coherent. Seriously, I have to break everything down to bite size pieces so that people on the receiving end can deal with it. Add in the fact that email today has become the answering machine of yesterday (where people reply when they get around to it, if at all, rather than promptly) and I can see failure written all over this thing. It wears me out man. Architecture and construction are pretty serious things and very costly so it’s imperative all people involved have their shit together otherwise costs start to mount quickly. I’m semi-retired but still work fulltime but I’m getting to the point where the aggravation is just too much. Technology was supposed to make everything faster and more efficient but I am seeing the exact opposite. FWIW, has there ever been a more annoying and inadequate OS than Windows 10? It’s like it was designed to be a failure from the beginning and thus has been a flaming success. My AutoCAD machine runs Windows XP and that’s the most reliable OS in the Windows fleet ever.
“…has there ever been a more annoying and inadequate OS than Windows 10?”
Windows ME
Windows Vista
Yes, they have no place in business correspondence. ” Emoji’s” are all about “feelings”. I want to know what you think, I don’t care about your ” Feelings”.
Most people only read the first paragraph or two of any email sent. If you haven’t made your point by then you need a rewrite. I also worked a remote job for a Florida Company. I was doing custom report development for their customers. The biggest problem was 3 layers of “Management” between the end users of the reports and the developers.
Most problems came down to ” The system wasn’t designed to be used in the manner that you imagine that it should work.”
Even though the work I did could easily be done remotely, to do what I did meant that I had full and complete administrator access to sensitive corporate databases Including the ability modify data and software routines. They quite reasonably insisted I be ” on Location” in the office inside the firewall even though the technology for secure tunnels was readily available. ( But remote access on ” snow days ” was OK somehow. Thier company — thier Rules. )
… and FIFO always meant First In – First Out in my worlds. Another acronym co-opeted by the Snowflakes?
Fit In or Fuck Off… screw the accountants.
corporate culture simply isn’t cultured anymore
JQ
Well, mostly I would agree, right up until senior management spouts “diversity, inclusivity, and equity” (DIE, right?), then all the greenie bullshit, then all the “we are a family” bullshit, so forth and so on. Then work just becomes some place I sit for 9 hours a day, do about 2 hours of work (and still out-perform 90% of my dept), and get paid. Whether the company is profitable or not doesn’t really matter as long as the corpse of the company can coast along another 3 or 4 years until I lump-sum my pension and say Sayanora.
If senior management ain’t serious, why should I be?
And when we were allowed to work from home, I’d get my 2 hours of work complete in 2 hours and then have the rest of the day to fuck off. It was great, except for the asshats that scheduled TEAMS meetings all day long in an effort to prove they were actually working. Damn them bastards. Damn them to hell, as I adjust my laptop camera to just miss the glass of bourbon keeping me sane through the Covid days.
Emojis for the most part should be banned completely in the workplace, but for informal correspondence between colleagues I’m not averse to the simple ASCII smile 🙂 if used sparingly. Picture emojis can just go right the hell away.
With regard to work from home, my wife’s office went 100% remote in March 2020 and the department she works in had it’s productivity go up by over 40%. Meetings are now mostly emails, and workflow processes were streamlined. Now if the Boss Man says you work in the office, then you work in the office or GTFO; I’m fine with that.
If a team leader is able to find top-notch employees and knows that they’ll work their asses off if they can do so from home then bend over backwards to keep them happy. Do whatever you have to do to keep productivity high and turnover low. Cutting out 4 hours of daily commuting, saving thousands of dollars in commuting, is a good motivator for a lot of people.
Emoji’s? Shit, I would be happy if they could just get “lose” and “loose” correct.
I’m retired now, so I don’t really have a dog in this fight, but I’ve lost count of the number of supposedly educated people at work who couldn’t construct a complete sentence. And don’t get me started on its opposite – the 400 word run-on sentence that ultimately says nothing.
I’ve been (mostly) working from home since 2015, and *most* people in my line of work (unix/linux administration, internet and cloud security) *are* more productive from home. We tend to work better in environments where we can close out the rest of the world and focus on what’s going on in our heads and on the monitor.
When we are in offices IF we are lucky we’re stuff 2-3 to an office. More likely in some sort of low-walled cube farm. At my last in-office job I sat in a 1/2 height cube FACING THE DOOR. All day long people in and out (the toilet was on the other side of the door). Then there was the sales guy who sat in the next cube over. The one on the phone all day (annoying, but he was doing his job).
And when I needed a break from whatever I was working on the same temptations–your blog, instapundit, the rest of the internet) are still there, and I can still sit there in my cube quietly f*king off. And I get 2 hours of my life (the commute) back. Well, the same temptations minus one. My wife also works from home. Her company has employees all over the world and *never* had any central office. They are profitable and growing, and have figured out how to measure productivity in useful ways without having micromanagers standing over people’s shoulders.
If I did go back into the office I *still* wouldn’t sit with my coworkers, all but 1 of them are in timezones, and the one that IS here in Colorado lives 70 miles south of me over a 7200 foot pass that gets some bad weather (and the office is 15 miles north of me).
Of course, the thing about my job is that it tends to attract people who like to do it, and who believe in the job their doing to the point where they’ll be available/working after hours without raising a fuss, and if there’s a problem we sit there until we know we can’t help, or the problem is fixed.
It’s probably different for the people in HR, but HR became useless when it was renamed from Personnel.
As to emojis, until this job I never used them in *emails* other than the *very* sparing 🙂 in an informal email.
But much of group communication is in a “instant message” format, and we have some custom emojis that carry meaning. Like :gcp:, which refers to Google Compute Platform and renders as a rainbow turd. The younger employees tend to use a lot of thank you, and similar emojis, and like you say “fit in or f*k off”.
> that employers have to make employees’ lives easier —
> safe, yes; easy, not so much
I think there’s a balance *and* a dichotomy here.
For many people in today’s economy (at least the people for whom “work from home” is reasonable) we get hired because of a combination of talent, education, knowledge, wisdom and skill, almost all of which is in our heads. Our value to the company is being able to express those things in code, process and/or communication. To the extent that the employer “makes our lives easier” by getting rid if the cr*p that generally surrounds any given job (for example, eliminating a useless, annoying and occasionally stressful commute, or automating a lot of HR interactions so I don’t have to talk to idiots), or by giving us better equipment (a good keyboard makes my life easier, as does a reasonable sized monitor etc.) they allow me to focus on how I bring value to the company.
Foosball tables and yoga mats? No.