One of the most frustrating things about the modern world is how "work" works. I'm not sure how a lot of these conventions have come to be in place, but all of them seem counter-productive.
I have two bugbears in particular that I run into on a pretty much daily basis at my day job.
First is the matter of interminable meetings and conference calls. Thankfully, most of the time at my day job we have conference calls rather than meetings, but it's still tough to get anything useful done while someone is droning on in your ear about something you don't care about and/or which isn't relevant to you and your team. This morning I've been on Skype from 9.30am until now. It is now 11.30am. I haven't done any actual work yet.
I don't necessarily have a problem with the idea of getting together to discuss things that are important, but 90% of our conference calls involve someone just reading out the things in our project management tool, which is something we all look at on a daily basis anyway. There's really no need to waste everyone's time, energy and sanity on this nonsense, but it appears to be something that is assumed to be a "necessity" in the modern business world.
Which brings me on to my second point: business-speak. No-one writes emails like an actual human being any more (except me, apparently). It's never "Sure thing, I'll do that when I have a sec", it's always "Thank you for your email. I shall endeavour to action this at the earliest opportunity. Kind regards."
There's the argument for "politeness" here, but there's also a point where "politeness" becomes "painful insincerity". It generally crosses over with people who use the word "myself" instead of "me" or "I". I make a point of writing things in plain English, regardless of who I'm sending a message to. I'm not rude or inappropriately casual or anything, I'm just… human.
It'd be nice to be able to change these cultural things from the inside out, but I fear they're too ingrained into corporate culture these days to be able to make any sort of meaningful impact. Still, at the very least I can continue writing email messages like a human being rather than a robot.
Kind regards,
Peter J. E. Davison BA (Hons.) PGCE
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