Like school, only worse

Is that your office?; Absenteeism among the professional classes has risen dramatically again this year. So just why do we hate our workplaces so much? Emma Cook investigate s an epidemic of office blues

A month ago Janet, 28, told her bosses she had flu and took four days sick leave - in actual fact she visited her boyfriend. Three months before, it was a similar story; "food poisoning" to prolong her two-week holiday for another four days. Janet works for a London law firm, but her job isn't something boring in Accounts. She's a high-flier, and hopes to be an associate partner in the next two years. Her commitment to the work itself is unquestionable - it's just her feelings for the company that are less than loyal. Why? Because the prospect of a Monday morning in the office was too crushingly depressing.

"I'm not a skiver," she says defensively, momentarily embarrassed by her recent white lies. "I actually love my work - the cases I deal with and the stuff I do in court - I give everything to it and put in very long hours. But it's the atmosphere in the office that I can't stand. Nobody tells you what they think of your work; whether they're pleased with your progress or not. The atmosphere is so formal - no-one really chats to anyone else. I get a gut feeling in the pit of my stomach at the start of each week. It's really immature but often I can't face any of them."

Neither, it seems, can many of Britain's professionals who, according to a CBI report out this week, are taking, on average, 8.4 working days off sick - up from 7.8 days in 1994. In contrast, absence rates among manual staff have not increased at all. Absenteeism is costing British business pounds 12 billion, and although much is genuine, it is widely accepted that the increase in sick leave is inextricably linked to a sense of general well-being, or evident lack of it, at work.

Last month, a survey by The Industrial Society found that absence rates in the public and voluntary sector had risen by 25 per cent in the past three years. It all points to the fact that the great British office is a miserable place to be. What's clear is the work itself is less a source of angst - especially among the vocational professions - than the inevitable diet of office politics that runs alongside.

Speaking to some disillusioned employees, the Monday morning blues appears to be a universal malaise. Their stories conjure up images of austere Dickensian offices, inhabited by dour, exacting bosses who appear unable, or at least unwilling, to encourage staff and nurture talent. The reality of British office life seems a million miles away from the enlightened world of American-style management techniques that management consultants and personnel departments seem so keen to preach. Short-term contracts, downsizing and the longest working hours in Europe certainly don't help.

Sarah, 33, who used to work as an editorial assistant in a small publishing company, describes her experience as "Like school only worse". "My boss would get off on bullying younger members of staff," she says. "We all had to run around catering to her bizarre psychological needs and her enormous ego. There was no sense of her encouraging talent. She would almost not recognise talent in a wilful way. She'd obviously had a hard time getting to the top and was determined to take that out on everybody else." The same boss would never actually sack staff - just freeze them out slowly until, through sheer misery, they'd resign - a much cheaper option for the company.

Tracy, 30, and another ex-employee there, recalls, "You couldn't do anything right - if I got into work early it was treated suspiciously, as if I was planning to rifle through the boss's files," she says. "I started to get worried when people stopped talking to me. There'd be planning meetings for the whole office and I was the only one not invited. Then you'd discover your new set of cards hadn't been ordered ..." Eventually, Tracy resigned, too. "By then my confidence was completely eroded - I thought I'd never be a success. What's irritating is that it would have been so easy for her to keep us all happy. Her management style was self- indulgent, to say the least."

As well as the boss from hell, the work environment itself is often enough to strike dread into an otherwise committed employee. "It was so drab in my office - almost pre-war," says Rachel, 31, who used to work in a marketing department. "Everything was grey or brown - the furniture, the paint, even the clothes people wore. You'd age by 20 years just walking into the place."

Derek Burn, partner at MCG Consulting Group, a management consultancy which sponsored the CBI report, explains. "It's almost two extremes," he says. "On the one hand, manual workers are now in a much better environment. They've got more team working, mutual support and a lot more leadership training. There's more care for the individual on the shop floor. On the non-manual side, there's longer hours and more depersonalised environments. People aren't being recognised, and that's having an effect on absenteeism." Dr Joan Harvey, psychologist at the University Of Newcastle who researches into absenteeism, agrees. "Also, there's no trust anymore, which makes for an uncomfortable environment. It's a case of managers saying, "You'll do this now," and laying down the law."

Tony, 30, who used to be a trainee buyer for a large department store is a good example of this - he was quite shameless about taking time off for spurious illness when it suited him. Last summer he went "on a sickie" for a week and took advantage of the good weather to visit friends in the Lake District. "The only worry was coming back with such a good tan," he says. So why take the risk? "I dreaded going into work - my manager was so stressed out, he'd just bark orders at me constantly. I don't think he asked for my point of view once during the whole two years that I worked there - he succeeded in undermining any decision I ever made."

According to Cary Cooper, professor of organisational psychology at Umist, the workplace is a much grimmer place to be because interpersonal skills have deteriorated, not improved, over the past decade. "What you're getting is a more bullying management style at work because everyone's under pressure," he says. "We are creating a parent/child culture - a punitive, autocratic approach." His solution is to encourage flexibility; to manage staff like adults rather than children. "Managers have got to say, 'We trust you to work wherever you want' - even if it's at home." Beverley Stone, corporate psychologist and managing director of Group Dynamics International, agrees. "We do seem to turn our nose up at the human side of managing. Yet, it's blatantly obvious that the key to any organisation is working well together.'

This sounds wonderfully simple but idealistic, to say the least. Regardless of flexibility and sympathetic management, the workplace will always be, by definition, somewhere you have to be rather than somewhere you choose to be. As Tony says, "I find the prospect of having to be at a certain place at a certain time every week difficult to cope with. It's the inevitability of it." And no amount of American management technique can get round that.