Angerland

There’s nothing like the satisfaction of being completely right in the face of a complete wrong so I can recommend a few hours watching the select committee hearings on the current management of Royal Mail. Andy McDonald MP asks Simon Thompson CEO of Royal Mail why he hasn't instructed his organisation to remove the performance management system at the heart of the conflict with CWU because it sets up everyone for failure under a system of impossible targets enforced through a command and control management system. This constellation of informed and experienced politicians pedantically challenging the gaming of corporate performance by senior management is indeed rare. A thing of undiluted beauty that we can only dream of in the Higher Education sector.

The link between new public management techniques introduced in the 1980s as part of the neoliberal economic shift and its regime of performance management and algorithmic control is both well researched and just very obvious from the perspective of frontline workers. Many of us understand well the link between marketization, commodification of our work and standardisation in order to make those of us with a public sector ethos more efficient and the subsequent impact on our mental health.

Then came uberization, centred around a downgrade by design to devalue both public services and its servants, to sell them off to the lowest bidder and open the doors to the technocratic market of digital and AI solutions. And then as if by magic we find ourselves ranked by an algorithm and nudged by machine learning into literal obsolescence . No longer about delivering education or post, just random acts of standardised production not in the interests of either the worker or the consumer.

Hundreds of years ago when even I thought I had a place in the world of digital health I tried to get fresh startup funding for an App called Angerland: punching & spitting your way to wellbeing at work. Just yeah.

Genuinely, there was a year or so when I believed the radical potential of smartphones in finding a progressive and protected space for mental health at work. As someone who bought into the early years of cyber campaigning for international solidarity and came out the other side I do know that money goes to money. That nobody really wants to get their hands dirty with pain and poverty least not the magical world of AI technologies. But at the time I did not understand the drive to self-reproduction of AI. That built in to the technology is the drive to self-replicate itself such that the system behind it is only ever reinforced. Ultimately it is never radicalised. 

Comforting as it is to have done the painful work on myself to know and accept the nature of the matrix in which I’m working it is surprisingly unhelpful in dealing with it in the flesh. 

Challenges to the system of algorithmic control are met with walls of incomprehension, denial and managerial distancing. As the trade unionists blacklisted by undercover #spycops are testimony, despite the decades of judicial denial it remains the case that just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. The only difference now is that part of the armoury of surveillance is made by pure and invisible design. And this reality means that as our collective consciousness is raised in the current industrial disputes, many of us are stepping out of the management matrix with an understandable degree of fear as we stare blink-blink at the awful realities of algorithmic control.

At the moment my academic research focuses on the impact of performance management on the therapeutic services and the emergence of a system of ‘ubertherapy’. Researching therapists over the last decade I’ve heard repeated heavy stories of despair and anxiety combined with impossible targets and command and control management in the sector. People are scared and not often cognisant of the industrial relations systems they operate within such that across the mental health sector the linking of these two things is systematically underplayed. So I’ll admit that in a survey for NHS Talking Therapy workers - the NHS’s flagship IAPT programme renamed hurriedly in December to evade the paper chain of governance and NAO inquiry - I was a bit disappointed that only 57% didn’t think their service was well managed. I’m all for empathy, but why so kind people?

In Higher Education, the 2020 Senior Management Survey reported a number of universities where 100% of their staff rated their senior managers as inadequate, but with 38% of universities saying their managers were doing OK. Since HE and healthcare are subject to the same crushing consequences of an increasingly algorithmically driven performance management system it got me thinking about why it is that so many frontline workers are able to see their own crises from a management perspective.

Right now I’m being managed (yes dear reader, I am manageable) by the best manager I’ve ever had in my entire working life. A rare creature in Higher Education who walks the cliff face of institutional blindness and toxicity on our behalf. He is a person of colour and a parent of young children. He is kind and has experienced hopelessness to such a degree that he understands the long game. As the research shows, the attitudes of our line managers are key to our occupational survival as well as our states of mind and for this reason I would sacrifice a great deal to support his managerial endeavours.

Writ large in this is the complexity in the employment relationship. As you would hope from a group of grown up research led people, there’s a level of reflection and understanding shown towards front-line managers often squeezed between politically set targets and front line fatigue. Tucked away in the cash cow business schools,  many of us come from senior management backgrounds and research the borderlines of organisational politics in a way that makes it hard to divide the social partners into good people and bad. 

In vocational professions though there are also the blurred lines of identification, the love of what we do and the over-rated stuff of self-sacrifice. And here’s where we seal our own fate - the problem with professional heroics is that they can easily slip into masochism and a collective letting-off-the-hook of the people paid to manage. Deadening our anger and seducing us into giving in to the invisible algorithmic systems at play which self-reproduce the usual suspects into leadership using a combination of AI recruitment software wo-manned by teenage HR specialists. 

This is potentially the professional equivalent of punching kittens, but there is a sense in which this identification allows us to evade our responsibility for using our agency. An omnipotence trap where the failings of the system become personal failings, if I just work harder/ game harder I can make it/you better. Tragically untrue, tragically limiting to finding a collective response to the crisis and just tragic for the professional casualties increasingly evident in health and education sectors. 

There are points in our working day when it would be better to lose some of the nuance and let ourselves know on which side of the algorithm we fall. And just choose our side. 

This week the UCU ballot for continued strike action is out #VoteYES

To support a strike near you go to Strikemap.