We’ll Be Happy in the Workplace of the Future — or Else We’ll Be Forced To Be
Voluntary or not, our happiness as employees will depend on how companies use technology to get us there.
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The offices of Canon Information Technology took a step into the future of work. But not a harmless one, like a cyberpunk dress code or a gossipy, smart watercooler.
They installed cameras with AI-enabled “smile recognition” technology. Employees at Canon are not allowed in meetings and rooms unless their levels of happiness are surveilled by a webcam. Want to keep your job? Say cheese!
Fair enough, that subsidiary is in China, and they’re years ahead when it comes to recreating life in Orwell’s Brave New World. But are Western companies making better use of technology to enhance the employee’s experience?
The answer is disappointing.
Western companies use a more romantic approach
Rather than going full dystopian, ours is that of the romantic comedy.
Watch an Amazon warehouse tour to get what I mean: over-embellished commercials romanticising what is like to work in one of them.
You won’t forget the cursed 2019 edition, “Amazing technology, amazing people.” It featured cheerful workers, so full of glee and personality they could’ve teamed up to star a family sitcom.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch of reality, Amazon workers complained about not having time to go to the bathroom during their 12-hour shifts. They were getting monitored by an automated system that could, without any human input, generate warnings or terminations if their productivity rates weren’t high enough.
Amazing technology, indeed. I’ll give them that.
And for the comedy part: those warehouses of unsafe conditions and mindless, barcode-scanning tasks are called “Fulfillment Centers.” Get it?
Still, companies just want to make you happy
In the end, happiness is a metric. And since an upward spike correlates with increased revenue, companies will use every bit of tech they can to shortcut that employee satisfaction — even it’s short term; even if it’s fake.
Take Uber. While their campaigns love to romanticise the “flexibility” narrative, their app is optimized to sneakily squeeze that flexibility out of drivers.
If they are close to finishing a ride, the app will show them the next fare opportunities. If they want to log off, it will remind them of how close they are to meet their “earning goal.”
The app uses gamification techniques and dark patterns to keep them in the loop. Not to make drivers happier, but because, to shorten passenger’s waiting times, they need to have drivers idling around, even if they’re not making any money.
This is what makes employees happier
Certainly not having beanbag chairs and Happy Hour Fridays.
Companies have wasted unholy amounts of money on perks and other superficial shortcuts to try solving a deep-rooted problem: what makes employees happy has nothing to do with the workplace, but with the work itself.
Employees are disengaged because the work they do doesn’t carry any meaning or fulfilling objectives. A ping pong table is no substitute for a sense of purpose.
Companies can install massage chairs and nap rooms. They can turn the entire office into a pet-friendly Turkish bath with a loose dress code if they want. But after the dopamine hit subsides, employees still won’t have a reason to care.
The future of work could do so much better than imitating the shallow approach of employee perks. It could go past manipulative algorithms and surveillance tools and become and real aid for making work more meaningful.
It will make a lot of jobs obsolete too
I hope Amazon workers lose their jobs to robots and Uber drivers to autonomous cars.
Because that’s the point of the future of work.
The point is to move the workforce out of the mindless, repetitive jobs. The point is to focus on meaningful work, creative endeavours, and fulfilling goals. That’s what makes workers happier, not the romanticism of a PR campaign.
We’ve made these transitions before. In the past century, workers had to leave factories and accommodate themselves in cubicles. If we go far enough back in history, everyone was a farmer.
But now, the transition could be different, if companies innovate to make work more meaningful instead of tightening the surveilling grip on employees.
One way or another, the workplace will make us happier
The question is how do we achieve that happiness.
I would prefer that we don’t get there by injecting electrodes in the corners of our lips, just because some HAL 9000-looking consultant from corporate said it was “the most efficient way to ensure a smile on workers’ faces.”
Until robots can tell a traffic light from a turd in a Captcha test, I’d say we don’t put them in charge of tasks that require a minimum of emotional intelligence.
Smiling to a lens is no way of being happy at work. The future of work surely can do much better than that.
