The New American Employment Contract

The perils of corporate culture creep

Long gone are the days of golden parachutes and cushy corporate pensions. Over the last several decades, corporations have progressively shifted more risk and expenses onto their employees.

As the coronavirus pandemic has exposed been to many Americans, most corporations really don’t have the public’s best interests in mind. From worker safety to mass layoffs, attempted hijacking of small business safety nets and leaving laid-off workers without healthcare benefits, the decisions that corporations have made reveal just how brazen they have become.

It all begs the question: Are Americans getting a raw deal?

Once upon a time, an informal worker contract existed whereby an employee would commit their whole career loyally to a single employer with the promise that the employer would acknowledge the value of that partnership by granting a wide variety of perks. Silver-plated pension benefits. Fully covered employee healthcare benefits. Club membership fees. Company cars. Employee technology.

What Do We Have Now?

If you listen to the intentionally upbeat marketing language that I helped to create during my career, “Do It Yourself” (DIY) healthcare and retirement benefits give employees more options, independence and control. Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies give employees greater choice to have the technology they really desire.

What else does this shift do?

It’s the mass offloading of employer risk and costs. It’s in companies’ interests for you to make independent contributions to and manage your 401(k). Employers want you to choose a “Consumer-Directed Health Plan,” which is just another name for a high-deductible plan.

Why do they do that? Because, again, it costs them less money, and they need to bear less of the burden of the meteoric rise of healthcare and retirement costs in the future (just take a look at what’s going on with the U.S. Postal Service).

BYOD “choice” again is another fancy word for buying your own tech so we don’t have to pay for your smartphone. In many professional services jobs, employee smartphones are connected to an employer’s network to enable email communication, which raises some concerns about employee data privacy and what information employers are allowed to access.

Corporate Culture Creep

Before I unceremoniously left my last job, I had worked in corporate America for fifteen years, a career spanning four different employers. Even within that brief time period, I noticed the subtle corporate creep, pushing more responsibility onto the employee to protect their bottom line.

This creep is not solely related to the shift of risk and costs. It’s also related to when work begins and ends, how available you need to be during your time off and even spills into ethics and morality.

While I believe in the value of technological innovation to make our lives smarter, faster, cheaper and more convenient, it often also opens up risks and challenges that were not initially intended. Just as Facebook didn’t intend to enable the mass spread of Fake News (which it still enables today), the creators of smartphones didn’t intend the world’s corporate employers to enable constant access to employees who have it in their pocket 24/7.

As an executive at major public relations agencies representing Fortune 500 brands, I experienced just how out of hand this can get. I’ve had clients who started sending me notes at 5 am every morning, and many more who continued reaching out until well after midnight. Email never stops just because you step out on vacation, and it’s up to the employee where to draw the line.

I’d argue that this is yet another shifting of responsibility to the employee that allows corporations to squeeze more out of staff while deflecting accountability.

The argument goes like this: “You just need to set up better boundaries. No one told you that you had to respond to emails that late at night.” And then the same people who make these statements later turn around and question why it’s taking you so long to get back to them, dinging your reputation for being nonresponsive.

Employees are expected to follow corporate ethics mandates and policies that dictate their behavior. While many corporations have over-the-top employee policies, like Bridgewater’s Radical Transparency, I would argue that the rise up the ladder is actually what leads to moral ambiguity and situational ethics.

As you likely well know, when you begin to rise in your career and take on managerial roles, you begin to assume responsibility over other employees, taking on accountability for their performance, development, mistakes, profitability, personal time allowances and compensation. This seems like a very natural progression — a reward for the job well done. The challenge, however, is that this is actually a lot of power, and many managers are promoted on the basis of individual performance, not their ability to actually manage staff.

It is my experience that corporate cultures which prioritize greed and the pursuit of profit at all costs tend to rub off on managers. Over time, the mistreatment and/or abuse of junior staff can become normalized in an attempt to squeeze as much work and profit as possible in the interest of short-term quarterly goals. When this normalization occurs, employees’ humanity, including needs and emotions, become an ancillary priority — one to be managed by Human Resources when burned-out employees inevitably flame out or meltdown.

I’ve experienced this in the flesh. As people rise up the ladder, their personalities can start to change. It may seem subtle at first, but, over time, corporate priorities begin to replace what were once intentionally individual decisions about friends, out-of-office behavior and even moral principles. Sure, you could buy the company line that when you rise in management you need to manage your social relationships more carefully. Or you could call a spade a spade and realize that some of their ethical boundaries have been breached and their human compassion reduced.

In “The Wisdom of Psychopaths,” Kevin Dutton interviewed Dr Robert Hare, criminal psychologist and creator of the Psychopath Checklist-Revised (PCL-R). This test is known as the gold standard for measuring psychopathy, a personality disorder characterized by antisocial behavior, impaired empathy and remorse, and bold, disinhibited and egotistical traits.

“Without a doubt, there’s a greater proportion of psychopathic big hitters in the corporate world than there is in the general population,” explains Hare. “You’ll find them in any organization where your position and status afford you power and control over others and the chance of material gain.”

Is It Worth It?

“It’s Just the Way Things Are Done Around Here”

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that line touted as a rationale for some behavior or decision that is made in opposition to reason, logic or the general practice of human decency. The problem is it’s not a reason at all. It’s nothing more than a deflection of responsibility and a resignation of personal decision making in the service of conformity to decisions made in the rarified air of corporate boardrooms.

Regardless as to what their “corporate value propositions” might say, there is one thing that is holy in the land of Corporate America, and that is the power of profit. A corporation’s sole purpose is to ensure its own survival, generate greater profit and then be accountable to shareholders (in that order). In my experience, corporate mandates and manifestos about employee engagement, cultures of inclusion and job happiness are little more than window dressing used for recruitment and to win corporate awards. When push comes to shove, the employee will be flat out on his/her ass.

So, the question remains: Is it worth it? Do the benefits outweigh the concessions?

For me, they do not. I have experienced the moral ambiguity and two-faced deception inherent in positions of corporate management. I tried to resist it for years, and all I got for that is a past full of ugly corporate battles that I was never in a position to win. The bonus is never big enough to compromise your moral integrity; it’s a raw deal 100% of the time.

If corporations can have lobbyists knocking on the doors of DC politicians to rewrite the rules of employment in their favor, then shouldn’t similar advocates exist to fight the case for corporate employees?

What about the creation of an independent third-party organization to act as ombudsmen for corporate ethics? Sure, there are government agencies set up to prevent fraud and outright criminal behavior (such as the FTC and SEC), but massive public companies need to be held to a higher standard than just “not breaking the law.”

What do you think?

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