Office Space

I’ve often wondered if the planners of the Normandy invasion had any idea that the military term “D-Day” would become synonymous in certain regions where English is spoken with “the day on which momentous, potentially hazardous things happen.” I wonder this because I also think that it’s not very often that we get advance warning that events like this are about to happen.

Sure, we plan for weddings and we get plenty of warning about most births, which are also momentous, but how often do we get a warning that our life is about to change in a major way that isn’t of our choosing? Likely we get warning more often than not, I think, but the signs are often small and we often ignore them because human beings have a large talent for self-delusion and rationalization. I’ve been thinking about this a lot for the past few days because most of the signs in my professional life point to a major change coming.

I think I’m about to get laid off.

Actually, that’s not true. Getting laid off wouldn’t be the worst case scenario of what my obsessive brain has determined are the three most likely possibilities at an organization one of my local co-workers described recently as “having a whiff of the Titanic about it.” No, getting laid off is actually second shittiest thing Management could do to me at this point. [Read more…] about L-Day

I spent most of the first week in August away at the beach. While it wasn’t perfectly relaxing, being away was relaxing enough that I managed to stem the constant, low-level flow of adrenaline that seems to be my physical reaction to the insanities and absurdities that come with working for a cash-strapped, badly managed non-profit. It wasn’t easy though.

Letting go of all that frustration required walks on the beach, lots of time sitting and reading, good food, some arcade games, and a couple of longish bike rides over flat terrain in a place gleefully accustomed to seeing bikes on the road. It also required that I remember a couple of key tactics for staying sane in a working environment not long on either communication or transparency: dealing with what is instead of what might be, and making everything as much fun as possible.

When we moved office in the summer of 2008 ostensibly the reason for the move downtown was so we could attract more workers to our field canvass and so that it would be easier for the campaign staff we were going to build to attend meetings with other groups and to lobby decision makers. I think it was mostly because one senior staff person was tired of going all the way uptown to the Metro Stop That Time Forgot where there has been virtually no commercial development over the past 30 years and longed for her “glory days” of rolling out of the office and into her favorite dive bar in Dupont Circle.

So my employer signed a 5-year lease securing a suite that takes up the entire 11th floor of an eleven story building just off McPherson Square only a couple of blocks away from the White House, an easy Metro and even easier cab ride to Capitol Hill, and very near a lot of groups with which we work in coalition. And all of that would matter if we’d had the funding to actually add staff.

Oh, we hired a Political Director in 2008 out of the ruins of the Edwards campaign supposedly because he was a super fundraiser who could help us bring in tons of money with his connections. Not only did he not bring in tons of money – in the 6 months he worked for us he did one e-mail fund raising campaign which brought in exactly $30 and the event he organized at the Eastern Shore (Maryland) home of a prominent Democratic Party gadfly cost more to produce than it brought in – he never did anything to shape our external communications to supporters and he only came to the office on pay day which is what will happen when you issue live checks and you’ve hired someone who lives about 80 miles and an hour and 45 minutes away by car.

We also hired a couple of campaign staff people, one to work on global warming and renewable energy, something my organization has a huge problem communicating with our supporters about because our campaigners can’t seem to get the quarter away from their eye long enough to realize that it isn’t the same size as the sun and just maybe everyone doesn’t understand how those issues connect with our primary area of work, and one to work extremely locally with a lot of interested but under served groups in the Anacostia watershed.

But because of the way this organization funds its work, the money eventually ran out to pay the global warming and energy person, and she got fed up with not being able to actually do anything since our national global warming and energy team is lead by someone in Connecticut who is rightfully busy with doing good work on the state level, and the campaigner working on the Anacostia issues decided after about a year that what she really wanted to do was work directly with organizations helping kids.

Since both of them left we’ve got 10 people, several of whom aren’t in the office more than 5 days per month, plus a canvass staff rattling around in space designed to hold three times that many people, space that is costing $60,000 $20,000 a month (still more than double what we were paying uptown) which we don’t always pay on time, and in fact haven’t been current on in nearly a year.

The first step Management took to try to reduce the rent bite was try to sub-let space but, typical of Management’s half-assed approach to things, instead of putting an ad on Craigslist or Idealist.org or circulating it via something like the Progressive Exchange list, they put the onus on staff to come up with potential tenant candidates. When that failed, they started seriously negotiating with the building’s owners and the property management companies (we’ve had two in the past two years) about either dividing up our space on the 11th floor or about moving to another available suite.

Needless to say, our landlords aren’t making the process easy. One of my co-workers, currently on the outs with our ManagingDirector who is in charge of the DC office, told me that they are demanding a ton of fees to move to another, smaller suite. These fees include a penalty for breaking our lease on the larger suite, a moving fee, a renovation fee, and other assorted charges priced in such a way that it would take micro fine accounting to determine that moving was financially to our benefit. Yet, I’m sure that’s what Management is going to decide to do.

Monday afternoons I have a weekly, half-hour call with my direct supervisor who just happens to be in Philadelphia. Calls are pretty standard, we go through the work plan I’ve sent him earlier in the day starting with what meetings I have scheduled, progress on the project from hell, e-mails I’ve gotten requests for from our state offices, updates to the web site, data hygiene on our online supporter database, and anything else that he might have for me that I don’t know about.

It was during this “anything else” section that he mentioned that I may have “heard some scuttlebutt around the office about us moving down to the 4th floor” to which I wanted to reply that while it was no secret that we were looking to move it was unlikely that I’d heard anything specific while I was 125 miles away at the beach. Apparently it’s looking like we’re going to move at the beginning of October to a smaller suite and while the details haven’t been worked out yet, it’s firm enough for him to be relaying this information to me.

Now, there are a ton of things wrong with this plan, one of them is that half of us (including me) will be moving from the sunny front of the building  to the dark back of the building, you know, the part that overlooks the dumpsters in the alley instead of having a partial view of McPherson Square park. That change kinda makes the fact that we can open the windows in our offices sort of a moot point.

From what I have heard in the past four days, there are lots of other things about this move that suck outright. One is the fact that the “renovations” the building’s owners want to charge us for extend solely to adding a suite door in the hallway and taking out a non-bearing wall so we can have a reception desk just inside the new door. They don’t include repainting or recarpeting, and, most importantly, they don’t include adding any sort of kitchen area.

No kitchen area means no place to wash dishes which means everyone is going to be using plastic ware and disposable plates which is more than slightly hypocritical for an environmental organization. And considering that the previous property management company took 6 months (December to May) to respond to a trouble ticket about a broken heater in my office, what are the chances that this new suite is going to be anything vaguely resembling not totally gross?  I think they’re pretty freaking slim.

The other thing that sucks outright is the fact that we’re going to go from individual offices not to an open work plan, which I could totally deal with, but to shared office space for a staff used to having not only their own physical and aural space but also control over the temperature in their immediate environment.

So we’re going to from a newly renovated suite with less than two year-old paint and carpeting, a functional kitchen area, and a situation where staff have basically private offices with individual climate control to a suite with who knows what on the walls and the floors and no place to wash dishes or even a nook for a refrigerator and microwave. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised since no one who makes the decisions has to work in the space.

And I probably shouldn’t be complaining; lots of people have to work under even worse conditions. I also probably shouldn’t be upset by this because none of it actually is yet; we’re still only at the speculation stage. This is where dealing with what is instead of with what might be comes into play.

The co-worker who normally keeps me informed about these things has been cut out of any unofficial communications because she “causes drama around the office” which is just a bullshit way of our ManagingDirector saying that my co-worker actually tells people what’s going on which puts the ManagingDirector in a position of not being  in control of the information flow. This is where making everything as much fun as possible comes into play: I’m running an organizational communications experiment.

It was August 9, 2010 when my direct supervisor informed me that it was likely that we would be moving down to the fourth floor at the beginning of October. That’s 37 work days until October 1 for people who have been in offices two years to sort through and pack up not only their personal workspace but also the rest of the office.

When do you think the official announcement is going to be about a beginning of October move? My bet is on some time the week of September 20th; if they send it out that morning that will give us not quite 9 work days to sort through and pack everything up.

Given the way Management communicates, I think I’m being generous in my estimate. There’s part of me that hopes I’ve underestimated them. What I do know is that it will be interesting to watch.

It is axiomatic that the employer-employee relationship is exploitive. Employers will do everything within their power, occasionally whether those measures are legal or not, to squeeze as much work out of out of employees as possible. Sometimes they do this by constructing benefits packages that create classes of employees usually rewarding those in management with more vacation, holidays, or other valuable but non-monetary compensation than what’s offered to grunts outside the offices and conference rooms. Sometimes they do it by low-balling salary offers knowing full well that getting any sort of decent raise after being hired is nigh on impossible.

I know all this so it shouldn’t surprise me that I continually run up against variations of techniques designed to get the most possible out of me as an employee. What is unusual is that it’s not often that I get the opportunity to witness such policy being born.

Last week BigBoss was in the office for his regular visit and after spending about 30 minutes asking me for details about a long-term project that has been stalled for about 8 months for want of the funds to push it forward he finally asked if there was anything else I wanted to discuss. Since it’s been about two weeks since snowmaggedon and the great “let’s send canvassers out into a blizzard while we make people who can’t work from home take 4 days of vacation” debacle, I asked “Have you given any more thought to the inclement weather policy changes we discussed?”

Turns out that BigBoss had given the matter some thought and he wanted my “frank opinion” about his decision to make SeniorCampaignsWoman in charge of making the inclement weather decisions. We both agreed that it would be better than having him or having our ManagingDirector, the one who lives in Miami, in charge because SeniorCampaignsWoman would at least be able to adequately able to judge local weather conditions. Unfortunately, I said, it still left staff in the same position of not knowing whether or not the office was open or closed because SeniorCampaignsWoman isn’t the best at communicating.

BigBoss replied that ManagingDirector had this fixed idea about never closing the office because it meant closing down the canvass which meant no money coming in the door. His thinking is that the exempt employees who can work at home should and non-exempt employees who can’t work at home would just get paid days off in the case of weather emergencies.

Let me turn that around, I said, and ask the question from the other side: how is it fair that those folks get paid days off and the rest of us wouldn’t?

Well, he says, exempt employees like me, ChickCoworker, and DataBaseAdmin get paid more, have more responsibility and flexibility in our schedules than non-exempt employees, and are expected to do more than our lower paid, non-exempt colleagues.

True, I said, but most non-profits recognize that they pay under market and offer better benefits to compensate for that to keep quality employees, and, quite frankly, we pay under market even for non-profit and our benefits are shit.

And after we went around with this for a while, I pointed out to him that one of the things that bothered me about the whole situation was that SeniorCampaignsWoman had told her direct supervisee, basically, I recognize in the emergency you might have other responsibilities, use your best judgement and get the vital things done, and that the message I got was “you’re expected to do 8 hours” without any recognition that in a massive weather emergency I might have other responsibilities. Essentially, I told him, if you’re going to treat me like a thief you’ve given me no reason not to steal from you.

That is a valid point, and, he admitted, ManagingDirector didn’t really have a good grasp of what was actually going on during snowmaggedon, but he still believes that those of us who get paid more and have more flexibility in our schedules should be expected to do more than others.

Now at this point, I withdrew from the conversation with a fair amount of artistry I think but let’s unpack this for a second.

Essentially what he told me was: Your skills are worth more on the open market so we made your position exempt and higher paid but because we made your position exempt and higher paid we’re going to ask you to do more than we’re really paying you for in salary without compensating you for that in any other way. In fact, we’re going to compensate your lower paid coworkers with the one most valuable thing that no one can ever get more of while you work using your own equipment and your own access that we’re not in any way defraying the cost of or compensating you for the usage of.

And remember, this is the same organization that doesn’t give raises based on merit performance but instead gives everyone in the same “pay band” a baseline increase thereby providing no incentive for anyone to work harder than doing just enough to not get fired (after all, if I bust my ass I get the same raise as my coworker who just barely shows up).

What amazes me even more than his audacity to say to my face that he recognized that they didn’t pay me what I was worth but that he was still going to require me to do more than I am being compensated for is that he doesn’t see the moral and ethical loophole he created.

See, if I am expected to use my judgement and manage my workplan as I see fit, and if I have more flexibility in my schedule, it sounds to me like my judgement is saying that some days, based on what I have going, that maybe, just maybe there isn’t going to be a great need to work particularly hard.

^* The proverb goes: As good be hang’d for an old sheep as a young lamb.

I work for the stingiest non-profit organization on the planet. I know that sounds like hyperbole but given that during DC’s recent snowstorm, while just about everyone, except essential personnel like emergency workers and plow drivers, was home enjoying four days off I was home working 8 hours a day. And why is this?

Because unlike every other non-profit the city, we do not follow the Federal government for our inclement weather policy. No, our inclement weather policy is, effectively, we have no policy. Actually, that’s not true. Our inclement weather policy is that a 20-something man with no responsibilities outside work gets to determine if our office is open or our office is closed.

See, the non-profit I work for operates out of several of our offices, including the one in DC, what’s called a field canvass. Ostensibly we send people out door to door to educate and garner support for the issues we work on but the reality is it’s a fundraising/sales job. Full-time canvassers receive a base hourly rate, it’s true, but they also receive a bonus based on how much money they raise in a set time period (a night, a week, etc). Not only do the individual canvassers receive a bonus based on how much money they bring in, the Canvass Director also receives a bonus if they exceed their fundraising goals. If the canvass doesn’t go out, the Canvass Director only makes his base salary.

According to our Managing Director, who I should mention is based in Miami, FL, if the field canvass is open, the office is open which means office staff are expected to work. So, we’ve given responsibility for determining whether or not our office is open or closed to someone who benefits financially from us never closing. There is an inherent conflict of interest here. And I’m not the only one who sees it.

After exchanging several e-mails via our local staff list with said Canvass Director about how it was completely insane to send canvassers out last Wednesday while DC was under a blizzard warning, a blizzard warning that was so bad that local government was telling people to say inside because the weather was “life threatening,” BigBoss, who is also on the local staff list, recommended that we continue our discussion with just each other and that if either of us had concerns we could contact him directly. So, I did.

BigBoss,

To be honest with you, I’m completely and utterly livid over the fact that our inclement weather policy is, effectively, “we never close.” When I asked ManagingDirector about this on Monday, and why we don’t follow the Fed, the sane, reliable thing that most other non-profits do, her response was: “I know the weather is bad and I lived in DC for 20 years and did have a few snow days. But you know the government should not be the benchmark – they close for 1 inch of snow.” Quite frankly, this is a knee jerk, inaccurate reaction.

First, In the 8 years GW Bush was President the Fed closed maybe half a dozen times for weather related reasons and had maybe half again as many “liberal leave” days. In eight years.

Second, no, you aren’t here. Neither is ManagingDirector. This city is paralyzed. Our public transportation isn’t running, and won’t be running right probably until the end of next week, if then. Most of the streets downtown haven’t been adequately plowed enough for Metro to deem them safe to run buses on, and most neighborhood streets, at least in wards (like mine) that aren’t predominently white, which means most of the city, haven’t seen a plow at all. We haven’t had mail delivery since last Friday and as of last night there were still from last Saturday nearly 6,000 people without electricity.

It does not make any sense to have someone who is not here who can not accurately assess the conditions making the decision about whether or not we should be open.

Third, to have a policy which is, effectively, that a 20-something with very few responsibilities outside work gets to decide whether or not the office is open – according to ManagingDirector if the Canvass is working, the office is open – leaves staff members subject to unecessary anxiety.

We have no idea whether or not we should be working, are expected to be working, are going to be penalized if we don’t work, or what. There is no reliable yardstick, like following the Fed, that we can use. And since our internal communication is so poor, people are left to do nothing but wonder.

There is also the issue of the position this puts employees, like DudeCoworker, who simply can not work from home. I, and others like ChickCoworker and DataBaseAdmin, have been working this whole week while the DC office has, ostensibly, been open; DudeCoworker has been home with no way to get into the office, assuming of course it was safe for him to do so. So he’s supposed to burn a week’s vacation, or more, because we have no snow closing policy while I can elect not to? Somehow that just doesn’t seem fair.

Lastly, while I recognize and appreciate that working from home is a benefit, it feels more than slightly exploitive to be required to work from home. I can’t describe it more accurately than to say that it feels very Victorian in nature (if you can work, you must!).

The canvass already has a separate pay schedule from office staff, and a separate leave, work, and holiday schedule so it doesn’t seem reasonable to tie our open or closed policy to whether or not they are working. If MouthBreather, et al. deem it safe for the FCV to be out, and I heartily disagree, obviously, that it is, then that is their call, but when all our other processes are separate, why tie these two together?

I strongly recommend that you put in place a policy that for inclement weather the DC office follows the Federal government for closings and “liberal leave” status. It makes bad weather a “set it and forget it” situtation.

Thank you for your time.

It took him exactly 15 minutes to send me back a one line response.

You are right and I’m concerned about the lack of on-site decision making by a senior staff person. I am going to fix this. Stay tuned.
BigBoss

The thing of it is: I’d mind this mismanagement less if they’d just admit they are the cheapest people on the planet – most non-profits recognize that they pay below market rate and compensate for it by providing better benefits (more time off, better insurance, a full slate of public holidays and then some); mine does none of these things – and that they will never, ever give time off they think they can get away with not giving and, most off all, will never turn down an opportunity to get cash in the door.

We’re expecting more snow starting Monday afternoon. Admittedly, the predicted 2-6 inches of accumulation is nothing compared to the 40 inches we’ve gotten since February 3rd but I have to wonder: how long should I wait before I poke him about instituting an actual policy?

And, of course, I’m resisting the urge to ask if the Miami office will be open during the next hurricane warning.