Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

workplace

The Poet Blogs the Layoff

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Layoffs were coming. The big announcement from the CEO was circulated by email. It was a masterpiece of vagueness. It didn’t say how many people would be affected. It didn’t say when the affected people would know. It did say there would be a severance program, although it included no details. 

In short, the important things people wanted to know weren’t communicated. I’m sure management congratulated itself on communicating, but the rumors had already been circulating and people were already far beyond “layoffs are coming.” What people also knew was that the people being laid off might be the fortunate ones. Those who remained would likely be reorganized, with more work and fewer people to get it done.

Having been through this before at another company, I had a better idea of what would happen and what people really cared about that colleagues who hadn’t been through it, especially younger colleagues. A small group came to me and asked if I would consider blogging about my past experience on the company’s intranet. I said I’d think about it.

My first thought was a selfish one: would I be drawing a target on my back? My answer was, maybe. I’d certainly be drawing attention, but that could also work another way: “He helped people understand the layoff, so they got rid of him.” That wouldn’t bode well for trust in the company’s management. I talked to a few people, including my boss. The poet in me won out, and I decided to do it. 

I drafted three posts: what happened to me when I had been laid off; what kinds of questions did I get from colleagues, friends, and family; and what happened once when a close friend and colleague was laid off and I wasn’t. 

Poetry at Work

This was a big deal inside the company. It had never been done before, and HR was nervous. The lawyers wanted to approve every word, and I refused on the grounds that it had nothing to do with what was happening and going to happen, but instead talked about what happened to one person (me) at another company. 

The first post was published. The first day, more than 10 percent of the employee population read it. It had set a record for the company’s internal blog. The next two drew even bigger numbers. In the communications void before the actual storm, I told people what they could expect, what they should know, and how they should treat fellow employees who would be laid off.

I had people I’d never met come to my office to thank me. I had countless phone calls and email. A switchboard operator called to determine where to direct a news media inquiry, and she thanked me for my posts. I heard that many people printed them and brought them home to their families. (The company invariable forgets about the family, who will be as much affected by a layoff as the employee.) And the company received kudos for allowing the posts to be published.

The posts weren’t easy to write. My own experiences were still painful; you don’t forget these kinds of situations. But you do what a poet does – and take an event or experience and turn it into something universal, something that help people see the experience in a different if personal light. 

I still consider those three posts to be among some of the very best work I ever did.

From Poetry at Work: “A close friend at work learned he was losing his job. We met in the corporate cafeteria the next day. He walked over to me, lunch tray in his hands, and stood there. ‘Are you sure you want to be seen with me?’ he asked. I thought he was joking. He wasn’t. His entire department had stopped speaking to him. He had to stay in the office for the next 45 days while being shunned. I was stunned. So, I did the only thing I knew to do. I stood and hugged him. He cried. What a scene that made, right there in the cafeteria.”

This article was prepared for the Literary Life discussion group on Facebook.

Top photograph by Matt Noble via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The Poet at Work

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I was working in communications for a Fortune 500 company. A large portion of the day-to-day work was meetings. We had a team-based culture, and to our work, our teams had to meet. 

The teams, and the meetings, proliferated. We had departmental meetings. We had cross-functional meetings. We had committee and subcommittee meetings. We had telephone meetings, video meetings, and online chat session meetings. We had one-on-one meetings. We had staff meetings. We had briefing sessions, strategy discussions, and crisis planning meetings. We often had meetings to plan meeting agendas.

I often wondered if the curse placed upon Adam and his work for eating of the Tree of Knowledge possibly included meetings.

One day, sitting in yet another meeting, I heard what sounded like repetition. People around the table were having a discussion, and I realized I had heard the same discussion before, with the same arguments, the same supporting evidence, the same objections. I kept hearing the discussion as a refrain, or a chorus for a song or hymn. 

Poetry at Work

Just like that, I walked into the poetry of the workplace. I didn’t even know poetry existed in the workplace, and yet there it was. How had I not seen this before, me, a speechwriter who often read poetry while writing a speech? That question surprised me as well, because it was clear that I had been unknowingly or unwittingly employing poetry to do my work. It wasn’t a work tool; it was the actual music that made the workplace work.

Another way to say it is, the workplace has a literary life. 

I was in my 30s before I discovered the poetry in work, and in my 50s before I understood it. Others saw the poet in me long before I did; perhaps it was my habit of walking around, soundlessly mouthing words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs, as I was writing speeches. Some executives did management by walking around; I did speechwriting by walking around. More than once I was stopped and asked if I was feeling okay.

Poets at work always tend to be oddities. They’re introverts in a business culture that worships teamwork. They point out the things that everyone sees but no one else will say. They can often be politically incorrect. They see the flaw, or flaws, in the grand project the entire organization has embraced as its reason for existence (at least the one for this week). When feeling charitable, colleagues think of poets as conscientious objectors. It’s better than the terrible and career-suffocating judgment of “not a team player.”

But the poets at work are also the ones who articulate the higher aspirations we have buried within us, who speak to the everyday but lift us to the heavens. They speak to the nobility of work, why it’s important, and why it is good. The workplace becomes dreary and gray without them.

Have you met the poet at work? He or she is there, even if they’re not particularly obvious; not all of them wander around mouthing words to themselves. They are usually the people who make you realize that what you do is worthwhile and that you yourself have intrinsic value because you were made that way.

It’s right there on the table,
a piece of skunky roadkill,
and we go to great lengths
not to talk about it,
not to acknowledge it,
to act in spite of it,
to plan and decide,
pretending it’s not there.
But it is, isn’t it, safely
ignored until the poet
wanders in, mumbling,
and spots it.

From Poetry at Work: “The poetry of William Carlos Williams, for example, cannot really be separated from his work as a physician. I suspect that his work as a physician cannot be separated from his poetry, either. Both are faces of the same person, a whole person—a man who wrote poetry with a doctor’s eye and practiced medicine with the compassion of a poet.”

This article was prepared for the Literary Life group on Facebook.

Top photograph by Matthew LeJune via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Poetry at Work, Chapter 20: The Poetry of Retirement

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Poetry at Work Poetry of the Workspace

I might have retired twice from the same company.

I officially retired in 2015, and I’d had given a year’s notice. I could have continued working, but the fact was that my skills, experience, and abilities were being wasted. I could have continued for a few more years, perhaps hoping for another general downsizing and a severance package, but work had become almost painful. 

When I told the head of the department of my plan to retire, the response was surprising. He became angry. It wasn’t as if I was irreplaceable. Without really knowing, I suspect it was more a case of I was doing it on my timetable, and it wasn’t something the department was planning on its timetable.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Literary Life.

Poetry at Work, Chapter 19: The Poetry of Workplace Restoration

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Poetry at Work Poetry of the Workspace

For a long time, I had what several of colleagues called the most interesting office at work. Because I was a speechwriter, I was expected to (a) read everything the CEO did, (b) read a lot of business books, particularly popular ones, (c) study books about speechwriting, and (d) read books on current issues. All of which meant I was doing a lot of reading. And the CEO likcd to read the novels of John Updike, just about anything by Charles Dickens, and anything published on the subject of Winston Churchill.

For a reader like me, this was a great job. 

One end of my office was floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Another wall had a smaller but still sizeable bookshelf. I also had a row of books on a credenza. It’s no surprise that my office was known as the building library. 

My “frequently consulted” books included poetry. That was by design. I had several old American poetry anthologies, and my Norton’s Anthology of English Literature (college textbooks) included considerable poetry by British writers. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Literary Life.

Poetry at Work, Chapter 18: The Poetry of Electronic Work

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Poetry at Work Poetry of the Workspace

Think back 25 years (if you’re old enough). It sounds almost quaint today, but email was just beginning to come into its own. At the company where I was working, with more than 40,000 people, some 5,000 had been brought into the email system. Eventually, all would be, but 5,000 was enough to give us critical mass for a new communications venture – an email newsletter for employees. 

To show how new this was, only one other company in the United States had an employee email newsletter. I hoped we would be the second.

I had meetings with the people in charge of the email system – not only were there various departments, there was also an email council overseeing email operations. My proposal was a text-only newsletter to be sent to the 5,000 people on email.

The response was something akin to asking people to sit in a room full of rats infected with bubonic plague. I didn’t know what I was asking. There were too many hardware platforms. I didn’t understand the technical aspects of the work. The system could crash. The company was too diverse for people to care about what was happening in other divisions. To be fair, these objections came not only from IT people but also from my own communications colleagues.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Literary Life.

Poetry at Work, Chapter 17: The Poet Blogs the Layoff

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Poetry at Work Poetry of the Workspace

Layoffs were coming. The big announcement from the CEO was circulated by email. It was a masterpiece of vagueness. It didn’t say how many people would be affected. It didn’t say when the affected people would know. It did say there would be a severance program, although it included no details. 

In short, the important things people wanted to know weren’t communicated. I’m sure management congratulated itself on communicating, but the rumors had already been circulating and people were already far beyond “layoffs are coming.” What people also knew was that the people being laid off might be the fortunate ones. Those who remained would likely be reorganized, with more work and fewer people to get it done.

Having been through this before at another company, I had a better idea of what would happen and what people really cared about that colleagues who hadn’t been through it, especially younger colleagues. A small group came to me and asked if I would consider blogging about my past experience on the company’s intranet. I said I’d think about it.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Literary Life.