Work, like many things, appears to have become a two-camp issue. It is starting to feel like an “us vs them” battle in public spaces where team office and team field are pitted against each other in a zero-sum game.
I think this comes from one oversight by both sides: The lack of knowledge and appreciation for the complex systems we have built.
Those sitting behind desks undervalue the physical work that those in the field do and the level of experience in the tactile nature of trades require, whether it is a mechanic, plumber, construction worker, truck driver, or warehouse floor employee. Likewise, those out in the field believe the desk life is easy and don’t know anything about the monotony of data entry, the ambiguity of job descriptions and tasks, the never-ending list of system dependencies, regulation adherence hoops, and the dread of emails coming in at all hours. While there are some with a foot in both worlds, and some of the stresses transfer over for some roles, the majority remain at odds.
The funniest thing of all is that they have more in common than they know or care to admit. Most of the pay is comparable, and they both think they are underpaid (and they are probably right). Their experience makes them better at their job, their managers probably suck as well as customers, they are hoping for that raise and promotion, and they likely are a bit worried about their job being eliminated. They are held down by the same forces. The real difference, one type of job tends to exhaust physically, while the other is mentally.
A lot of the job world that we hear about online is not the blue-collar world, though; it’s all white collar. Office life woes, Sunday scarries, burnout, incompetent middle managers, the state of the online job board, sales team sycophants, and TPS reports are all the rage in internet publications and utterly unavoidable if you have a LinkedIn account. Blue-collar industries have all these too, they just aren’t as connected because their work happens away from a computer. There is another phenomenon as well that contributes to this: when a blue-collar worker leaves their job, they can’t keep doing it. There is a punctuated end to the workday. A sense of a job done.
White collar workers no longer have that punctuated end. The emails keep going, the networking starts, and their most creative ideas come before or after work. That plumbing aha moment isn’t hitting that plumber in the shower. The engine diagnostic idea, reminiscent of a House M.D. episode, isn’t coming to the mechanic on their drive into work. No, but white collar workers are expected to remain on and use their resources (their minds) endlessly to complete the ambiguous job. Furthermore, mechanics and many other blue-collar workers have realistic deadlines based on the elements of the physical world and experience. There are buffers for weather, broken bolts, unexpected interruptions, and unforeseen complications, and since their work is based in the physical world, all those reasons for delay are seen as valid. After all, working too much beyond a scheduled shift vastly increases the likelihood of things going wrong, and we wouldn’t want someone to get hurt.
This single difference drives that division. It’s easy to just answer some emails, people do that all the time, right? Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to just leave work, and none of it can follow you? Without that experience of both sides, how could you say which one is better, not generally, but for you?
This is where the white collar world needs a reality check. I do not think that there is a high level of understanding of what fieldwork actually looks like in the offices. That lack of understanding from business management and administration leaves an immense amount of context out of the conversation. Most businesses have something to do with the physical world of work, whether that is manufacturing, store sales, transportation, or installation and repair. I will go a step further and include frontline customer support in this, since they face more of the blue-collar issues while still navigating offices. This tactile work is the business, as much work as we have done to translate it into metrics for corner office types to read, it falls short of the reality of what happens out in the real world. Ask anyone who actually does the work that you sell, mark up, and commodify.
It was once commonplace the idea that someone who ran the business to know every job in the company. This offered insight and respect for every moving part of the business, from janitor to CEO. With turnover so high, private equity, and technological advancement, there has been a wave of so-called business leaders who are completely allergic to the idea of doing the work. What has that given us? It gave us a management class that had the chance to define their own skills, their own value, and exert authority while being fully divorced from the product, customers, and employees. A fully separate class of people. Worse, they are generally useless at most key functions of the business, hidden behind “vision” and “executive presence.”
We can easily see exactly where this is leading us: down a path where no one’s work or experience is valued, everyone is evaluated against AI and robots, so wages will fall or remain stagnant, replacement will happen, and the quality of goods will decrease while the prices increase. It will happen because the only thing that matters is money, not the effect that it has on the tactile world. The CEOs will never have to look employees in the eye as they let them go, or customers as the products that were once staples become luxuries they cannot afford. Those CEOs will only look into the eyes of the board of investors through a Zoom call as they renegotiate a salary package or make excuses why growth was only 3% this quarter and not more.
To fight this future that seems inevitable, I believe we have to revisit and respect the things that make tactile work successful. Reinvigorate an informed respect for the type of work that actually makes our modern world possible. That can mean simply talking to the people who do the work, expressing a desire to be cross-trained, or intimately understanding the products of your company and how it adds value for customers, not in a kitchy marketing sense, but genuine applicability. Having a respect for those who do the work can open you up to see how value is created and realized more than the money and returns. It can help you gain empathy for those who live lives that exist outside of spreadsheets and business systems. That empathy legitimately can lead to better working conditions for everyone in a company and drive real, lasting impact and growth.
Business has become only about money and growth. Not community, value, reciprocity, impact, or sustainability, just more money. Businesses have to focus on money to a great extent, you won’t hear me argue otherwise, but endless growth isn’t progress, it is cancer — Literally. There are two types of businesses that everyone will have to choose between very soon: Profit-based and people-based, and the sole metric will be the definition of enough.
When is there enough profit? Enough that you can staff up enough to offer a good customer experience. Enough that you can pay your team a wage higher than the lowest possible amount. Enough that you know you could raise the price, but don’t have to. These metrics are already here, but they will become conscious choices.
If you are on the side of people, you have to actually value them, all of them, from the janitor to the CEO. The only way to make that happen is to tap into that blue-collar mentality and focus on how you are impacting the real world and what value you bring to the whole picture, not just that profit number. My money is on the humans.