Office-ism
Have you heard of hospitalism?
A little over 100 years ago, doctors noticed that many children got worse during their stay in a hospital. Their physical and cognitive development slowed. They lost weight. They became withdrawn and apathetic. Investigations ruled out any kind of infection or pathogen, but doctors could not figure out the cause. All they knew was that children weren’t thriving in the hospital.
Around this same time, experts held strong views about how best to relate to children. Luther Emmett Holt, for example, was a well-respected pioneer in the science of pediatrics. In The Care and Feeding of Children, he warned parents of the adverse effects of picking up their child when it cried or handling the baby too often.
“Babies under six months should never be played with: and the less of it at anytime the better for the infant. They are made nervous and irritable, sleep badly and suffer from indigestion.”
John Watson, a noted psychologist of the 1920s, offered similar advice to parents in Psychological Care of the Infant and Child.
”Never hug and kiss them or let them sit on your lap. Shake hands with them in the morning. Give them a pat on the head if they have made an extraordinary good job of a difficult task. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say goodnight."
It wasn’t until several decades later that scientists learned how terrible this advice was—and discovered the cause of hospitalism: social deprivation. It was the lack of touch and interaction in institutional settings that caused the wide range of mental and physical impairments they were seeing in children.
Yet the quest for maintaining an efficient, germ-free environment continued to make isolation the norm. It wasn’t until the 1980s, for example, that research showed how touching babies in a neonatal unit for fifteen-minute periods would help kids grow nearly 50 percent faster, be more active and alert, mature faster behaviorally, and get released earlier from the hospital. Gradually, institutional guidelines evolved to promote the need for social interaction and play, exactly the opposite of what was prescribed 100 years ago.
What does this have to do with the office?
For me, the sentiments I hear from people my age echo the conventional wisdom from 100 years ago. There’s a sense that employees today, particularly younger ones, went to be coddled. “The kids today don’t want to work!” Traditional managers are largely contemptuous of employees expressing their needs for belonging and purpose and wellness.
We look back at the advice from pediatric experts and wonder, “What were they thinking?” Decades from now, I imagine people will look back at today’s workplace and wonder exactly the same thing.
And while we haven’t found the workplace equivalent of holding babies in hospitals, we know that human beings are not thriving at work, and they haven’t been for a very long time.
Let’s not wait 100 years to make it better.
“What were they thinking?”: When conventional wisdom prevents human beings from thriving.