Zombie identification for beginners
25 February 2016 by Catherine Holdsworth in Business and finance, Entertainment, Working With The Walking Dead
By now you should have had enough time to settle in to watching the rest of season 6 of The Walking Dead and you may have noticed a few parallels between the show and your work life. However, if you’re wondering what on earth we’re on about, then perhaps you need some help identifying the zombies of your office. It may surprise you to learn that the office joker is a walker underneath all the bravado and banter. And did you know that what you have for lunch can indicate whether you or your colleague are also walkers? It can be difficult to tell who is and who is not a zombie in large offices but here are some helpful tips to help you be on the lookout and hopefully help you avoid the pitfalls of becoming one yourself.
They’re followers. Watch a herd of walkers and you will note that they all move in the same direction at the same speed, only changing course in response to noise or movement. There’s no independent thinking, no courage or daring. Thus it is with the walkers in your workplace – they do the job as prescribed, and no more.
They arrive on the stroke of 9 and leave at exactly 5. They go to lunch at the same time every day, refuse to stray outside the bounds of the system (‘More than my job’s worth’) and are careful to avoid doing anything not in their job description. Their job is just something they have to do 35 hours a week in order that they can collect a pay cheque every month. It’s something to be got through and survived. They slow down projects by insisting they can only do the work within their fixed systems and schedules.
They’re the office joker. Office jokers may seem happy but this is just a way of getting through the day – it’s the only way they get meaning from being at work. They carve out a niche for themselves – everybody knows who they are – but they are never going to be taken seriously. Which means their career progress within a particular organization is going to be limited. They distract colleagues from their work and disrupt company culture.
They resist change. Regardless of whether it’s moving the coffee machine, changing the invoicing system or a complete departmental restructure they don’t like it and it’s not going to work. In fact they’ll do all they can to ensure it doesn’t. You’ll never see the resistors put as much effort or creative energy into anything as they put into trying to keep things the way they’ve always been. Not all changes are good and some have huge implications for the business and the individuals working within it but these people haven’t thought deeply about the changes – they just dislike them because they are not what went before.
They’re always right but they’re never willing to put their money where their mouth is. This kind of workplace walker could spend the whole day telling colleagues why management is doing everything wrong, and will bore you for an entire lunch hour if you’re unlucky enough to encounter them in the canteen. They particularly love introducing new recruits to all the flaws of the department or organization – it gives them a sense of power. They create a bad atmosphere in a team, making their manager’s job a lot harder.
It’s not their fault. Zombies never own up to their mistakes, not even to themselves, which means they can never learn from them. With the workplace walker there’s always a reason for an error but it’s because of some failing in the system or a problem created by one of their co-workers: ‘I wasn’t given the figures from accounts in good time’, ‘I only did what the project manager told me’, ‘that’s the answer the system gave when I put the information in’. They can become aggressive if any suggestion is made that they could have done something to mitigate the situation and make more work for their manager and colleagues because somebody else has to sort out their errors.
They don’t stand out, or they stand out for the wrong reasons. A typical office zombie just won’t get noticed by management outside their department. If they do catch somebody’s eye it’s likely to be for the wrong reasons: ‘Oh yeah, the guy who’s always playing practical jokes’, ‘Is she the one that really kicked up a fuss when we moved the coffee machine?’ This is not the route to promotion.
They eat the same lunch every day. In 2015 research undertaken for butter manufacturer Lurpak into the eating habits of 2,000 office workers revealed that 32 per cent of UK workers eat exactly the same lunch each day – a cheese sandwich. The average worker has been doing this for almost four and a half years and despite the monotony, 40 per cent of respondents said that lunch is usually the highlight of their working day. That’s just depressing, and seems to be further evidence of a lack of care about work, that it is something routine, just to be got through. In order to work at your best you need to be in good health; nutritionists advise that to help achieve that goal we should eat a wide variety of foods; just one reason to shake up your lunch habits.
Just as the humans in the series all carry the virus and are capable of becoming walkers, we all have the facility to fall into workplace zombie habits. But now you know what to look out for you’ll be able to catch yourself if you ever seem to be behaving like a walker and pull yourself back onto the path to career success.
