Ordinary Gweilo

There has been a lot written about the book “Bonjour Paresse” (Hello Laziness – The Art and the Importance of Doing the Least Possible at the Workplace) that has recently been published in France. It follows in the fine tradition set by Scott Adams and others in satirising life in the workplace, and has tips on how to keep your job without working very hard.

Whilst I was walking around the office this morning, I was reminded of one excellent piece of advice in this book. It is vital to look busy, and so you should walk around looking purposeful and carrying papers or a file. This way your boss will assume that you are working hard, regardless of what you actually do. Very true.

Most bosses do watch what their staff are doing, though some hide away in their offices most of the time. I worked in one office where the staff had a great time doing whatever they pleased whilst the boss sat next door apparently not interested. I really don’t see how you can manage a team like that! Unsurprisingly, that guy got fired before too long, but some do survive.

Sometimes bosses seem to give up on particularly team members and leave them to their own devices. If it was me, I’d be worried, because in the longer term it normally has only one outcome, but people often seem quite unconcerned. Perhaps they don’t notice or don’t care, or they just expect that it will take a long time before anything happens. In larger companies it can often work out that way, perhaps because the manager wants to preserve the headcount or can’t be bothered to fire someone – more so in the UK, where it is quite difficult to get rid of people (not a problem we have in Hong Kong).

The author of the book, Corinne Maier, works part-time at Electricite de France (EDF). Surprise, surprise, this is a state-run enterprise, though the French government are talking about privatisation. I had a very brief spelling working in the civil service in the UK many years ago, and that was quite a revelation. There were many people who worked very hard, but others who really had nothing to do, or at least had managed to arrange things that way. Mostly they didn’t even try to look busy, so they wouldn’t have any need for this book. My guess is that they would have carried on that way until retirement, though I suspect that these days it is not to easy to get away with it.

Personally, what worries me is that, once you get into the habit of being lazy at work, it is very difficult to get out of it. I have come across many people who seemed to achieve little or nothing at work even though they turned up every day. When a new boss came along they struggled to change, and were usually gone before too long. Interestingly, most of them did manage change their ways when they started a new job, so it wasn’t incompetence that was causing the problem. In some ways, I don’t blame them – it’s largely the boss’s fault for allowing them to get away with it for so long.

Going back to the point about walking around looking purposeful, I think it has a more general application. Many years ago I worked in a large department store that had very lax security, and I was convinced that if you looked as if you knew where you were going, no-one would challenge you and you could easily get access to any part of the building.

People are very easily fooled – one local manifestation of this is that building security guards rarely challenge someone who walks into a building looking confident, but if you hang around outside and then follow someone else in they will probably do something about it. Obviously it helps if you look fairly smart and things are more difficult if you are wearing an ill-fitting suit and white socks and have dodgy facial hair, but confidence is also important.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I just need to walk across the office with a few sheets of paper. Back soon.