Arrange meetings when there is some important work to be done; multiply paperwork; take decisions by committee…bring up irrelevant issues. There are white collar middle managers all over the world who love to clog up the working days of their employees with inane, time-wasting blether and bureaucracy.
However, these particular suggestions aren’t from the notebook of David Brent, as played by Ricky Gervais in the legendary BBC mock doc series The Office. They’re actually found in a Second World War sabotage manual put together by the OSS (the forerunner of the CIA) and distributed to resistance fighters in occupied Europe to cripple the enemy war machine.
John Webster includes the OSS references at the start of his new film The Happy Worker, a world premiere in the NORDIC:DOX section at CPH:DOX this week. The documentary, sold by CAT&Docs, explores burn-out and misery in the workplace.
Does Webster consider himself a happy filmmaker? It’s not the best question to ask the Finnish-UK filmmaker when he has been working flat out to complete a new project.
“Why does it always have to be like this? Usually, the end of a film production is so stressful…on this one particularly, we spent 11 months editing it,” Webster sighs, sounding exhausted. Nonetheless, he “doesn’t mind” the huge workload as long as he feels he has “some control over where it is going.” In this case, he had supportive colleagues and a mission he was determined to complete.
Control is something that the protagonists in the documentary lack. They’re high achieving lawyers, financial service workers and developers who all eventually hit a brick wall. They can’t deal with the absurdity and stress built into their jobs.
“I always swore that I’d never make anything set in an office just because it is so difficult to make something that seems cinematic and entertaining, if it is not fiction,” the director says, admitting that The Happy Worker – Or How Bullshit Took over the Workplace was an unlikely assignment for him to take.
The idea for the documentary took hold several years ago at a time when Webster’s wife was working for Nokia, “from the glory days through the acquisition by Microsoft.” He saw at first-hand what “can happen with bad management. I saw this wonderful, dedicated, highly skilled group of people then just sort of scatter…and then the whole Nokia thing was such a big tragedy for Finland.”
Webster knew many motivated, highly educated people who wanted to work hard but were strangely unhappy. He had also read anthropologist David Graeber’s ‘Bullshit Jobs: A Theory.’
Graeber, who features prominently in the documentary, died unexpectedly in 2020. He was one prominent figure prepared to call out employers and highlight the idiotic jargon and business practices they adopted.
During their preparation for the documentary, Webster and his collaborators (including co-writer Eveliina Kantola) spent time with burn-out support groups. “We saw that emotional toll it [work] has on people.”
White collar workers are often reluctant to acknowledge their problems. “People just don’t talk about things…they imagine they’re the only one [suffering],” the director observes of the code of silence that leads so many to bottle up their emotions.
The protagonists in the documentary are bright, articulate, highly educated – and they’re also recovering from reaching that point within their office lives where they just couldn’t cope any more.
“All of them felt that this [burn-out] was something important to talk about and address – but of course they were very wary because of the stigma associated with it. For me and all of the crew, it was very important to show them with respect – and not as victims,” Webster points out. “If people have burn-out, it is not because of weakness and personal flaws but because they’ve just been subjected to a toxic working environment.”
In most of the cases, stress led to physical reactions. The protagonists could no longer cope with their work. They needed help.
Webster himself has children who are now in their 20s. His son, who is almost 21, has recently graduated. “He and his fellow classmates are asking ‘what should I do?’ It’s exactly the same as 30 years ago. The options are lawyer, doctor, engineering, maybe commercial [work]. It’s all because that’s what society expects you to do. It doesn’t go from what the individual wants. I think that is a big systemic problem. In schools, we don’t look at the individual. We don’t train kids for the most important choice in their life, which is that career path.”
Parents and peer pressure force young people into professions for which they’re not temperamentally suited and which end up making them feel wretched.
Webster hopes his film will create a debate about work and happiness. “I do hope it encourages people to talk in the workplace about what is going on – probably half to two thirds of the people [in offices] feel the same – and to question the way things are done.”
As the documentary makes clear, many decisions still being taken in white collar businesses are illogical and self-destructive. “There is so much money wasted on this bad management. We are stuck in a last century way of thinking about work where people are operators of machines,” the director laments the rigid thinking about jobs which still risks draining almost all happiness and fulfilment from the workplace.
