Letter to My Boss's Boss

Dear Scott;

Thank you for scheduling this talk for our team. The SMS-Specific Circumplex in today's Corporate Culture meeting highlighted the most insidious source of unhappiness within our department, by showing that while we are rich in passive green, we are also high in aggressive red. This opposition seemed incongruous to me at first, but I believe I now have an explanation.

This email may be frank, but it is not intended to be bitter. I enjoy my job overall. I think you have probably heard from a very small sampling of people about their work experiences as SMSes, and I'd like to add my voice to theirs.

Members of our department work for an hourly rate and are expected to achieve a quantifiable product at the end of each and every day. We are not free to play video games. We are not free to attend extended informative meetings. We are not free to put people before the product. The product is King. I feel guilty just writing this email because surely I am "wasting time." The way in which we are monitored and assessed in our Portfolio performance and, newly, in our overall quarterly editorial output as well, only heightens the universal feeling that we are rats on a wheel, fighting each other for a way out.

But just as our daily work requirements can make us competitive and aggressive amongst ourselves, it also fosters a great deal of passivity. The same carrot is dangled in front of us day after day. We naturally fall into step with those around us, only doing as much as everyone else is doing, just keeping our heads above water. We don't want to do extra projects because we aren't allotted extra time for them. We don't want to elongate our meetings with questions or go to extra meetings because we have a certain number of things to do everyday and we are being monitored to make sure we do them. Such an environment does not foster creativity.

This would be all very well if everyone around us was in the same leaky boat. But they are not. We hear them playing darts and foozeball in the kitchen. There are people steps away from us who can come in at 11 and leave at 4 and make three times what we make and are intellectually engaged in their work everyday. Intellectually, we know why this is. We know we are just as smart and capable as they in our own fields. (Theater, music, literature, cuisine...) But it still rankles. I think it is this perceived inequity that is most disspiriting of all, exacerbating all the other problems and making us feel more overworked, more undervalued and less lauded than perhaps we really are.

I think our reticence as a department can make our internal politics a bit bewildering to people looking in. I hope my epistle helps in some small way to remedy this.

Sincerely,

My name