Under Pressure: Tech's Dehumanizing Grip on the Workplace
First people are trained like machines, then they are threatened to be replaced by machines. The solution? Refuse to act like machines.
The modern workforce can be best described with a popular Queen song: Under Pressure. Existential angst was always there, but now rapid technological developments like AI, big tech companies laying off thousands of employees and an increasing disconnection between people fueled by digital instead of in-person meetings create new fears. Like the fear of becoming obsolete or dying all alone in our deserted, lonesome office — unnoticed by anyone.
“You shouldn’t view workplace digitization so negatively”, a lady urges me in one of my future-of-work scenario workshops, where I point out the risks and pitfalls of tech’s potentially dehumanizing grip on the workplace.
She, an employee at one of Austria's largest public offices, finds it genuinely convenient that all records and documents she has to deal with are now digital.
"I understand," I respond, "and do you still have any human contact while working?" "No," she admits, "since we've digitized everything, I spend the whole day alone in my little office, and if I dropped dead during that time, I bet no one would even notice.”
If that isn’t dehumanizing, I don’t know what is.
How long will it take until someone decides this lady is not needed anymore and can be replaced entirely by a machine that doesn’t sleep or eat or complain? But as she is in denial about it and dissociated from the situation enough to not even realize the consequences, she will not do anything to prevent that from happening.
No Human Being is Disposable
If we embrace this development, we become instruments of our own destruction, complicit in our own demise.
I admit that the whole situation is very unfair. First, people are trained like machines, and then they are threatened to be replaced by machines.
As if human beings could be disposed of like a piece of garbage once they outdid their usefulness. What a terrible view of humanity.
And people are even participating in making themselves disposable by already acting like robots in anticipatory obedience. But here’s the catch: there is no reward in that. If you act like a robot, your risk of being replaced by robots increases exponentially and definitely much more and faster than necessary.
I know it’s not all people’s fault. All our systems, from kindergarten to school to big corporations are hell bent to train well functioning, fully conform worker bees.
Everything is designed to teach memorization instead of critical thinking, conformity instead of creativity, obedience instead of problem solving capacities and puzzle pieces instead of the big picture. That means, all our systems are designed to teach capacities a computer can do better than human beings.
We have to change that. There is so much human potential out there that is untapped. We need it now.
The Media Adding Fuel to the Fire
The increasing disconnection between people in the workplace is stressful for social beings like us. And the news and social media stress us out even more with their daily blast of fears and threats, like “Robots will steal your job”.
With generative AI on the rise, fear mongers are at it again, claiming that AI and robots will destroy millions of jobs. Naturally, people fear becoming obsolete when exposed to such messages 24/7. Unfortunately, many contribute to that risk by adopting machine-like behaviors themselves.
Do our glorious sources of information also provide a solution? No. Everything they present is completely out of our control and makes us feel utterly powerless if consumed without awareness of the mechanisms.
Mainstream media seem to find some kind of sadistic pleasure in bombarding us with one future shock after another. No wonder young people don’t even want to think about the future anymore.
Constant Overwhelm Fosters Robotic Behavior
The consequence? We are constantly in distress without solutions, and stress without resolve can cause us to freeze in paralyzing fright. In this state, our subconscious mind is wide open; we become highly suggestible, easily led, and manipulated. Like robots that can be programmed.
Furthermore, people become so mentally exhausted and overwhelmed that they don’t want to make decisions anymore. Though this is perfectly understandable, it is an underestimated problem that will lead us right into the abyss as a society as a whole.
This paralysis, the inability to make decisions, robs us of our humanity because decision-making is at the core of human agency.
I like savory dishes, not sweet ones. That’s a very simple choice, but it is also an example of a boundary that forms part of my identity. But when constantly overwhelmed, people resort to apathy and not wanting to make even the most basic choices anymore.
They become numb and more and more robotic.
I know that’s not entirely people’s fault, either.
Workplace systems are increasingly designed in a way that they permanently overwhelm us with thousands of things to distract us from things that are really important.
Digital workspaces play a specific role in that: they are luring us in with the promise of safety and not having to get out of our comfort zone. No risk of too much interaction with other people who could always potentially hurt us. But that’s an illusion. Without real human interaction, are we even really living?
Human Machines in Corporations: “We don’t make decisions here.”
How toxic corporate cultures can be is a topic for another column, but there is one point that ties in with the already mentioned decision fatigue and really concerns me. People in C-level positions at big corporations who should be courageous business leaders increasingly and alarmingly often tell me now: “We don’t make any decisions here.”
Then who the hell is making decisions for you? The statement isn’t even true. Each and every one of us takes thousands of decisions every day. That’s an essential part of our human agency. So is what they are telling me learned powerlessness, anticipatory obedience, apathy — or is it a nightmare that already became reality in daily work life?
Others tell me: “In this company we are advancing the people who are doing nothing. That’s basically the recipe for success in this corporation.” The consequence? No one takes responsibility and everyone makes sure they are not held accountable.
And they will make damn sure no one else dares to do anything great either. That might explain the reluctance of making any decisions. Because in a surrounding like that, decision-making becomes dangerous. Anyone who sticks their head out too far might be held accountable and bear the consequences.
On top of that, there is a lot of window dressing going on in companies, keeping everyone busy: “We are running 6 organizational processes parallel here — Agile, Scrum, OKR, you name it — none of them leads to anything or helps us with productive work, but it keeps the whole team busy”, explains an innovation manager at yet another big company.
The consequence? People start setting easy to achieve goals to be safe from not reaching the benchmarks. Congratulations. Now you are also safe from creating anything new.
In the long run, this will lead all these companies into their own demise. 30% of the corporations in the Fortune 500 list of five years ago are missing today and for every successful turnaround there are two declining firms that do not recover. Even whole industries emerge and vanish every 80 years.
The safest way to not be wiped out, is not to act like a machine, but to seize the full potential of humans working in your company and break through old mind patterns constantly.
Why Excessive Zooming Makes Us Feel so Bad and Can’t Replace In-person Meetings
Another topic that illustrates the effect the overuse of digital technologies in the workplace can have on human beings: The reason for Zoom fatigue is not that meetings are structured in such a boring way, as many self-proclaimed internet gurus want you to believe in order to sell their 'employee engagement' services to you.
There’s a very real neuroscientific phenomenon behind the exhaustion we feel after Zoom meetings: In conversations with other people, we do not only connect to them in our minds; we connect to them with our whole being. We release hormones to connect with the other person. When we see a person on the screen, our brain signals to the body: there's another person in the room, connect to them.
So we start firing hormones, but we're repulsed by the screen. There's nobody there. We hit the uncanny valley. Psychologists say we get the same feeling when we talk to psychopaths. It's like talking to a dark black hole. There's nothing there. It's creepy.
So when we spend the whole day glued to the screen in Zoom meetings, the body exhausts itself by trying to connect to another person who is not in the room and failing at this attempt again and again. That has very adverse neurological effects.
The solution? After an endless day of Zoom meetings, at least try and go out into nature, smell the grass, walk barefoot if you can, and connect to other people.
How to Future-Proof Your Job?
Under all this pressure, confusion, and fear, people want to know how to prevail and future-proof their job.
My best advice: Refuse to act like a robot.
Instead, fully actualize your human potential.
To do so, it is important to have mechanisms to break through old mind patterns and believes that aren’t even your own. I am very happy to help, if you like me to.
Make your (work)life a conscious choice, not something that is happening to you. This will drastically change your experience.
Go back to in-person meetings as often as possible.
Connect deeply with others.
Live variety and creativity instead of conformity.
Learn skills others might need. No one can take that away from you.
Create: Be it a business or artwork or a meal for yourself and your family. To create something connects us to the core of our human potential and helps us to get out of passive consumerism.
The Process Even Spies Use to Come Back from Torture
Because dealing with the mentioned distress and pressure and getting out of decision paralysis is so crucial for creating a workplace that doesn’t suck, here’s a mechanism to deal with it that is even used to bring spies who have been tortured back to normal: Write out your thoughts, read it to bring it to the conscious mind to understand the emotionally incomprehensible, then always force yourself to add a solution — you might be surprised what your mind comes up with when you start doing that on a regular basis.
Putting pen to paper is a mechanism that fosters critical, logical thinking. It brings things we cannot understand emotionally to the thinking mind. Like that, we can process what happened and find solutions. Thus, we become less suggestible and cannot be manipulated, not even by ourselves. And you will get to know yourself really well. An important note: Typing doesn’t do the same thing!
If you are so disconnected that you can’t think of anything to write: go into nature, eat well, exercise, and connect with other people.
Let’s Create the Future Together
We are not powerless to the future. We can co-create it with our fellow human beings. One step at a time.
If you are pessimistic about humanity: There are more good people than bad people in the world, they are just not featured in mainstream and social media where negativity prevails and conflict is favored by the algorithm.
What safes us is human interaction, human interconnection, and collaboration. The latter is what made humanity survive for hundreds of thousands of years.
Isolated we are weak.
Together we are strong.
I am happy to hear from you ♥️.
Image created by Ursula Eysin via Leonardo.ai
🫶If you now want to take the driver's seat and shape the future of work for yourself, I have a process for that: It’s called future scenario thinking, and it allows deep dives into the driving forces, root causes, and mechanisms for every decision we need to make. Similar to putting pen to paper, it brings the subconscious to the conscious mind and enables us to make confident decisions without regrets.
🎯It’s a highly effective brain trick to gain clarity, dive deep into internal and external driving forces, create a long-term vision, and shape the life you want to live. When choosing things consciously, our whole experience changes drastically.
💌 Would you like me to navigate you through the process? Or even just chat to see if it is right for you? Get in touch with me: ursula.eysin (at) redswan.at.
👉Read more the process here: The Red Swan Monthly Future Scenario Sessions.pdf
♥️I am happy to hear from you.
⚓We work with courageous business leaders, team captains, and individuals with an open mind for a different view who are brave enough to change the world by starting with themselves.
🙏Thank you for your bravery.