Alive HR

I haven’t posted much lately. I’ve been getting ready for the holidays, plus I got caught up in watching previous seasons of The Office.

When the show first came out, I saw snippets of a few episodes but couldn’t bring myself to watch more, mortified by Michael Scott’s continuous stream of clueless and exuberantly inappropriate antics. In the beginning, it was too close for comfort to be funny, I guess. When I thought about the realities of being an HR person in Michael Scott’s outfit, I cringed, I just couldn’t watch it.  It was too nightmarish. After all, real HR is hard enough…

But recently my teenage son started watching Office  reruns on Netflix, and before you know it, I was hooked despite myself. I seem to have a morbid fascination to witness each gaffe, each office faux pas. So, since I’m addicted, some quick thoughts about The Office.

• Teenagers love it. Whenever I mention the series to friends, I hear the refrain,  “My kids love that show!!”   Why? Why do kids like The Office? Outrageous pranks, the “that’s what she said” jokes and bathroom humor aside, it’s an OFFICE, for crying out loud. They sell paper (yawn).  Why are kids even interested?  I hope they don’t think work is really like this?
• Despite being totally inept in expressing his concerns, Michael Scott is quite well-meaning and genuinely cares about all (*but one of) his employees.
• *Michael hates the HR person, Toby, the antithesis to all his fun and high-jinks. He treats him with unabashed scorn and incivility. If you work in HR, what do you think of Toby? Is he a sympathetic character? Or do you just feel sorry for him? What would you do, in his place?
• When Toby leaves and is replaced with Holly, Michael is instantly smitten and within weeks, they are having after-hours sex at the office, and soon after that, are officially dating.
• And by the way, why do they even need an HR person in a 15 person operation? Except to accept grievances about Michael and Dwight, of course. But that can’t take more than two hours a day. What does HR do the rest of the time? They don’t appear to handle recruitment or benefits or much else except occasional mandatory training, which Michael consistently derails.
• Michael’s always coming up with gems like, “I just don’t want my employees to think that their performance has anything to do with their jobs.” Huh? How did he get this job, and how does he hang on to it?
• Speaking of retention, despite all his offenses, his employees stay. He has virtually no turnover. And on top of that, and despite the fact that you almost never witness his employees working, it appears his branch is quite successful in terms of sales. How does he do this?

All joking aside, what I take from all this is the idea of the Shadow Self, those negative aspects of ourselves to which we are blind.  Michael will say, “A great boss cares more about the happiness of his employees than anything else,” or “The way I manage people is I touch their hearts and souls with humor and love and a touch of razzle-dazzle,” then turn around and insult his staff with flagrant sexist and racial slurs. He’s clueless and he just doesn’t see it. Is there a little piece of Michael in all of us, I wonder? As much as we’d all love to think that we are  all astutely emotionally intelligent, have our fingers on the pulse and are acutely attuned to our boss and employees–or as much as we’d like to think we’re the best HR pro/husband/wife/parent/friend ever–we’re probably not as perfect as we’d like to think. Do you agree? What do you think the message of the Office is?

I’ll just leave you with a collection of Michael Scottisms.