Listen to enough people talk about work, and you start hearing the same ideas repeated in a chorus of different voices. One common refrain is a distaste for corporate slogans, things like “Show backbone and speak out!” adorning the walls of warehouses. Another is the sense of solidarity among those in all-consuming or dangerous jobs. As one former soldier told me, he’d happily go back to war tomorrow if it meant spending more time with his “amigos”.
Yet there’s something else, too, something you may even feel now. Let’s call it the Fear of the Great Mistake: the feeling that your career is, at any given time, seconds away from some imagined disaster. Bob Slocum, the ghoulish (mid-level) executive in Joseph Heller’s 1974 novel Something Happened, called it “this depressing sense of imminent catastrophe and public shame”. That’s about right.
Some, like the childminder I spoke to, worried about being sued. Others worried about money. “Financial worries are always on my mind,” one electrician told me, “but I just bottle them up.” Some worried that they would regret changing jobs or careers, often because they were too insecure to try. As one job centre work coach put it, they weren’t even sure if they’d get through probation. So they stayed where they were — even if that meant misery.
In fact, big career moves only ever seemed to happen in response to some crisis: a redundancy, a breakdown, or the sudden arrival of caring responsibilities. Without these shoves from God, few gave much thought to whether their labour might be more productively deployed elsewhere. Homo economicus was steadfast in his refusal to be interviewed.
Beyond the worries of individuals, the Fear of the Great Mistake has also become institutionalised. Organisations, after all, inherit and pass on the anxieties of their members. Consider the workers who spoke with despair about the growing weight of administrative work in their jobs. “There’s a saying, ‘If you don’t write it down, you might as well not have done it,’” a midwife told me. “Even things like massaging someone’s back. You write down: ‘Massage given with consent. Patient reports good relief from pain’”. A construction site manager, for his part, lamented the 1,600 unread emails in his inbox, explaining that you “can’t have a conversation with a guy on site” without getting down in writing.
Each of these is an expression of institutionalised fear. The hospital makes its midwives note down every massage because it is worried about being sued: thorough notes will help its defence. It is the same with construction companies. Afraid of litigation, main contractors ask their site managers to document every conversation with subcontractors. Headteachers, too, ask their staff to keep thorough records — lesson plans, seating plans, marking data. For them, the concern is not so much litigation as a bad Ofsted report, now published online for the world to see and judge.
When organisations fear mistakes, their instinct is to make people write things down. The more thorough the record-keeping, the better they can ward off the things that scare them. It’s sensible and pragmatic and, if taken too far, a bloody nightmare for employees. The teacher’s paperwork steals her weekend; the midwife’s notes pull her away from the woman in front of her. It is as if the paperwork is another patient, making constant demands on her time and attention. “It’s non-stop,” she told me. “I try not to make it a barrier between me and the woman.” The construction site manager, meanwhile, spends every spare hour bailing out his inbox, sometimes replying at 10pm. No wonder his wife goes mad.
“It is as if the paperwork is another patient.”
The record-keeping makes staff so miserable that they begin to leave. And what happens? Those looming Great Mistakes that each organisation sought so carefully to avoid actually become more likely: the most conscientious teachers leave and the standard of teaching falls; the midwives have less time to spend with mothers and care worsens; the site manager spends more time responding to emails than managing the construction crew, making litigation-worthy delays more likely. All that extra work for nothing.
If you’re feeling gloomy, you can take this argument about the anxious style of the British workplace and project it further, to the level of a national pathology. We are afraid of building things — what if we build the wrong thing? — so we maintain a planning system of white-knuckled control, requiring case-by-case permission for any new building.
We are also afraid of investing in shares or productive assets — what if we lose money? — so we put our capital into property and thank our lucky stars that we are also afraid of building new things, because those (now-unbuilt) new homes might well have reduced the value of our leveraged property investments. Our government, meanwhile, is afraid of doing things, because the things that it does might be wrong, or at least not as good as it promised. So instead of doing things, it instead proposes a four-year independent commission into social care. Nothing gets done, but no mistakes are made.
Yet if Fear of the Great Mistake stalks the land, perhaps the more interesting question is what should we do about it? There are, of course, policies that could dull its edges. We could take an approach to de-regulation that begins by asking people on the ground — the teachers, the nurses (and not the lobbyists) — “what is getting in your way?” The recent Ofsted changes to the Early Years Statutory Framework are a good example: inspectors no longer require nurseries or childminders to provide extensive written evidence of a child’s progress.
As for individuals, when you ask people why they stay in jobs they dislike, or why they worry so much about things going wrong at work, the answer is often housing. If your mortgage is six times your household income, you hang onto the status quo for dear life. If you’ve just received a council flat after years of waiting, why on earth would you move in pursuit of better work? The scarcity of housing seizes up the labour market as it seizes up our minds.
By this light, national renewal will only come with a housebuilding boom on the scale of the Thirties, a revolution driven not by mass house builders alone but by small developers, self-builders, and local government. Today, the state may have lost the institutional capacity for building houses, but it could at least commit itself to developing tens of thousands of so-called serviced plots — “build ready” parcels of land, pre-plugged into water and electricity, and primed for new homes.
But policy only gets you so far. The Fear of the Great Mistake is an anxious fear — one that owes more to imagination than reality. Our worst fears are rarely realised, and when they are, they’re seldom as bad as we thought. The interviewees who took risks are testament to this. Consider, for instance, the teacher, demoralised and on the cusp of leaving the profession, but who was reinvigorated after deciding to care less about paperwork. “I stopped making sure every single book was marked after every single lesson,” she explained. “I began to teach in a way that would mean I didn’t have to be sat at home marking books the entire time.”
Or else there was the labourer, £8,000 in debt with a baby at home, who struck out as a joiner, teaching himself on YouTube as he went. If he needed a tool for the job, he just delayed starting until he could afford it. For months, he says, things were touch and go, and something could easily have gone wrong. But it didn’t go wrong. The Great Mistake never showed its face — because it rarely does. Years after taking the plunge, the labourer was happy, unbothered by the fright that grips the rest of us. “Everything’s balanced nicely,” he said, from work to family to the gym. “I try,” he added, “to let life run its course.” It’s a lesson all of us, individually and collectively, would do well to remember.
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Is This Working? The Jobs We Do, Told by the People Who Do Them (Picador) is published today.
