The secrets of showing up
Rob Long
I was having dinner last week with a young relative of mine. She had just landed a big new job in the financial sector, and she was excited to tell me all about it. “The best thing about it is,” she said, “they only expect us to be in the office three days a week.” I was surprised to hear this. I thought most big financial companies had demanded that all employees head back to the office. “No,” she said, “three days a week in the office and two days a week at home is pretty standard.”
My young relative is in her mid-20s, which means that most of her adult working life has been distorted by COVID-19. Her first post-college job, a few years ago, was entirely Zoom-based. For her specific demographic cohort, young people who entered the workforce around 2020, a “pretty standard” work experience is a combination of Zoom calls, Slack messages, and the occasional day at the office.
YOU CAN’T NIP AND TUCK YOUR EGO
What this means is there’s a mini-generation of young people who don’t know how to work in an office. They don’t know how to leave passive-aggressive sticky notes on the office refrigerator, how to let someone else straighten up the Keurig, or how to read the subtle body language of their bosses. Or, more importantly, of their bosses’ bosses.
They don’t know how to daydream in an open cubicle but still look busy. They don’t know how to read important memos on their boss’s desk upside down. They don’t know how to show up at a high-level meeting they weren’t invited to. They don’t know how to set up their workspace so it always looks like they got in early or left very late. They don’t know how to be a supportive team player but still be ready to shiv the colleague who’s in the way of the next big salary and title bump. Their entire working lives have been spent on screen, wearing sensible shirts and pajama bottoms.
And that’s given them a warped idea about how work really works. All they know is how to send Slack messages to unmet co-workers and sit attentively on Zoom calls. So in the past three years, they and all of their classmates have gone feral.
I didn’t say this, of course. What I did was offer some advice. “You know,” I said, “I think it would be a good idea for you to go to the office every day.”
She shook her head. “My supervisor told me that she’s in the office three days a week. That’s how she put it: ‘I’m in the office three days a week.’ And that’s when she expects me to be there, too.”
It’s always surprising to me that young people, who can be so cynical and snarky about culture and politics and relationships, are so idiotically naive about how to succeed in business.
“I’m sure your supervisor is only there three days a week,” I said. “But I’ll bet that her supervisor is there more often. And that that person’s boss is there nearly every day. So my advice is, show up every day and see how the whole operation works.”
“Won’t it be weird if I’m the only one in the office?”
I told her that yes, it will be weird. But weird is not always bad. There might even be days when the only people in the office are senior management … and her. And the junior employee who’s there, at her desk, in three dimensions, is going to know more about the business and how it works, and especially who runs it and how they work, than the employee who spends three days a week waiting for a Zoom meeting to begin and only knows what she reads on Slack.
“Don’t you think there’s a reason why your supervisor only wants you there for part of the week?”
She thought about this. “So that she can take it easy the other two days?” she asked. I was glad to see that she was getting it.
“Yes, and?” I replied.
“So that I don’t have a chance to build a relationship with her boss? Or with his boss?”
“Exactly,” I said.
“So I’ll never be a threat to her, no matter how good I am at my job?”
“Now you’re putting it all together,” I said.
But she wasn’t convinced. “Do you really think that the workplace is so nasty and competitive? Are people really that paranoid and terrified for their jobs?”
“Show up every day and find out,” I said.
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Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and he is the co-founder of Ricochet.com.