This post was inspired in large part by Mike Pope’s April 14 “Friday words” post, a big roundup of words “about the changing face of the office”—words like Great Resignation and quiet quitting and everyone’s favorite, bullshit jobs. Within days after I read that post, three other work-focused publications landed in my mailbox: the New York Times Sunday Magazine’s “Future of Work” issue; the May issue of Harper’s, with two stories about “the crisis of work”; and the spring issue of Berkeley Haas, the publication of the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, whose cover story is headlined “How Will Work Evolve?” (I don’t know why I receive Berkeley Haas; I attended UC Berkeley but was never enrolled in the business school.)
And lo, it turns out there are even more new work-related words to write about! Here are some of the words that have caught my attention.
New York Times Sunday magazine. Illustration by Brian Rea.
Presenteeism, also known more prosaically as “working while sick,” isn’t new—it’s been around since at least 1998, when management professor Ruth Simpson wrote a paper about it for the British Journal of Management. I was reminded of it because of Mike’s discussion of resenteeism: “the idea of staying in a job you are fundamentally unhappy in due to concerns of job security or a lack of better options, but then start to actively resent it and make everyone aware of that fact” (Glamour, January 2023). There may be a touch of resentment in presenteeism, which can be defined as showing up at work and suffering in silence: the opposite of absenteeism. Covid sort of put a stop to that sort of thing, didn’t it?
(I thought I’d already written about presenteeism, and whaddya know—I had, in a footnote to a 2011 post about presentism, which is a very different thing.)
Berkeley Haas Spring 2023. Cover illustration by Pete Ryan.
Stigmergic coordination appears in the Times “Future of Work” issue in an article titled “The 24-Hour Workday.” One of the workers profiled lives in Sri Lanka—one of the 12 countries she’s lived in since April 2020—and works for a company in San Francisco. A caption defines stigmergic coordination as “working across time and space through shared tools rather than through direct real-time communication.” Stigmergy was coined in 1959 by a French biologist studying termite behavior; its Greek roots are στίγμα stigma (mark, sign) and ἔργον ergon (work, action). Before you get too depressed about being equated with a wood-chewing insect, stigmergy is also used to describe collaborative projects such as Wikipedia and open-source software development.
Another “Future of Work” profile is of a hospital nurse who works alongside a four-and-a-half-foot-tall robot that “fetches equipment and supplies for the nurses and meals for patients, navigating crowded hallways and returning to its dock to charge when it’s running out of power.” This type of machine is known as a cobot, a portmanteau of “collaborative robot.” Cobots were invented by two Northwestern University professors; their application for a “Cobots” patent was filed in 1997.
“The Age of the Crisis of Work,” by Erik Baker, Harper’s May 2023.
A career coach profiled in the “24-Hour Workday” article starts her remote work in the early morning, takes a break for dinner, then gets back on the job, often working till midnight. “Workers used to be most productive before and after lunch,” reads the caption, “but doing a third spring in the evening became more common during Covid, according to a 2022 study by Microsoft researchers, who called this pattern the ‘triple peak’ day.” Read the Microsoft paper about triple peak.
Finally, you may know about UX—user experience—but have you heard of EX?
Sometimes EX is spelled Ex, but don’t confuse it with this. Image via Liquid Agency.
EX is “employee experience,” which used to be called “going to work.” One definition of EX goes like this: “Employee experience is a worker’s perceptions about his or her journey through all the touchpoints at a particular company, starting with job candidacy through to the exit from the company. The company’s physical workspace, culture and technology are all important components of the employee experience, which is often abbreviated as EX.”
That’s right, it’s another journey! Isn’t that EX-tra special?
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And yes, the title of this post is a reversal of my business name, Wordworking.
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