health and fitness: Is shirking just a smarter way of working?

vendredi 5 juin 2015

Is shirking just a smarter way of working?

‘With work demanding more of us than ever, it’s not surprise to witness the rise of extreme fudgelling’

“Fudgelling”, I learned the other day, is an 18th-century word meaning “pretending to work when you’re not really working”, which goes to show it’s an age-old phenomenon. (There’s also the Italian phrase giacca civetta, or “owl jacket”, a modern coinage to describe the jacket slung over a desk chair, late at night, while its owner is enjoying la dolce vita.) Today, with work demanding more of us than ever, it’s no surprise to witness the rise of extreme fudgelling. In a recent study, the academic Erin Reid spent time at an unnamed US management consultancy that expects total devotion from employees: responding to emails at midnight, cancelling birthday plans to stay late, etc. She discovered that 31% of men and 11% of women found ways to “pass” as workaholics: they vanished from work without telling anyone, or made covert deals with colleagues so they could spend time with their families.

And here’s the thing: it worked. People who made formal arrangements to reduce their workloads – more often women – got penalised for not pulling their weight. Yet the fake workaholics, predominantly men, were seen as no less devoted to their jobs than the real ones, and were rewarded accordingly. This says something depressing about sexism, but it also shows that what was being rewarded wasn’t relentless work, but the appearance of relentless work.