The Basecamp Dilemma Facing the Desire for Self-Expression
In the olden days when Basecamp was the only game in town for corporate offices, my supervisor used the software as a micro-managing bludgeon. While our desks were connected in the cubicle sense, she still felt the need to use Basecamp to constantly assign me tasks, communicate obsessively, and I quickly learned to hate it like a weaker kid hates the finger-poke in the chest of the schoolyard bully.
At the same workplace (a public radio station) there was a panic about employees using social media. The argument was made that, especially for an organization that strived for objectivity in news coverage, individuals using the internet to express decidedly partisan political opinions was an issue to address.
It was a thorny issue, limiting or outright forbidding employees to air personal opinions on their social media platforms, especially at a news organization. First Amendment issues being the bread and butter of the business.
In the end, management gave us more of a guideline list rather than an edict.
Years later, as Dana and I moved to Nevada without much of a plan, she secured a part-time job at an off-Strip casino bowling alley. Part of the rules of the place were that you couldn't wear jewelry, change your hair color, wear hats with logos, or pretty much act with any sort of self expression. The idea, they said, was to keep things uniform for the guests.
Of course, Dana dyed her hair blue.
Of course, she was spoken to by her manager as well as bitched at by the long-time staff she worked with in that "You can't get away with that thing I can't get away with" sort of snottiness.
Of course, she got away with it.
As an employee (and a natural contrarian) I understand the desire to practice as much self-expression as is humanly possible. In order to avoid feeling like a number or a cog within a machine, we strive for relevance, we aim for recognition. We wear our hair to be noticed. We post our memes to receive that dopamine rush that accompanies the thumbs up or heart emoji.
As the manager at the casino, I understood the requirement for anonymity, conformity, and a sense of homogeny. Corporations are liable for the things their employees do and say, so clamping down on that makes a certain amount of sense.
It's like the green M&M's clause in the riders of old school rockers. No one really cared if the staff separated enough M&Ms to create a bowl of green ones but if the manager came in and saw that bowl, he knew all the rest of the rider requests had been fulfilled.
If an employee on the casino floor was compliant to the rules of appearance and personality, it was likely that employee wasn't going to shirk while on the clock or steal when they thought no one was looking.
A few weeks ago, the founders of Basecamp sent out a memo to their employees:
Today’s social and political waters are especially choppy. Sensitivities are at 11, and every discussion remotely related to politics, advocacy, or society at large quickly spins away from pleasant. You shouldn’t have to wonder if staying out of it means you’re complicit, or wading into it means you’re a target. These are difficult enough waters to navigate in life, but significantly more so at work. It’s become too much. It’s a major distraction. It saps our energy, and redirects our dialog towards dark places. It’s not healthy, it hasn’t served us well. And we’re done with it on our company Basecamp account where the work happens. People can take the conversations with willing co-workers to Signal, Whatsapp, or even a personal Basecamp account, but it can’t happen where the work happens anymore
The source of the memo, in part, came from a long-time practice at the company: the compiling of funny names of costumers. It seems that at first they were just goofy names but as time marched on, it became a list of ethnic names and some found this racially offensive.
On Friday, employees had their chance to address these issues directly with Fried and his co-founder. What followed was a wrenching discussion that left several employees I spoke with in tears. Thirty minutes after the meeting ended, Fried announced that Basecamp’s longtime head of strategy, Ryan Singer, had been suspended and placed under investigation after he questioned the existence of white supremacy at the company. Over the weekend, Singer—who worked for the company for nearly 18 years and authored a book about product management for Basecamp called Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters—resigned.
Within a few hours of the meeting, at least 20 people—more than one-third of Basecamp’s 57 employees—had announced their intention to accept buyouts from the company. And while many of them had been leaning toward resigning in the aftermath of Fried’s original post, the meeting itself pushed several to accelerate their decisions, employees said. The response overwhelmed the founders, who extended the deadline to accept buyouts indefinitely amid an unexpected surge of interest.
In my decades of working life I've had to interview a lot of prospective candidates. One of my go-to questions is:
While recognizing that all three are important, when taking money for a job, which of these is your top priority: Recognition, Compensation, or Autonomy?
My priority has almost always been autonomy. For a few years in the '90s, most people I asked that question felt the same. In the '00s, the answer seemed to shift toward compensation—interviewees were looking for the paycheck as the primary goal instead of a sense of personal responsibility. As company's gave less in terms of loyalty, this made sense.
Recently, in interviewing for positions at my current employ, the answer across the board was recognition.
These kids wanted to be seen. To be noticed. To be recognized for a job well done and this desire for visibility and credit superseded both the money they received and the trust in their work. When I followed up with why that answer as opposed to the other two, the responses were all similar. They identified strongly with being seen and promoted. They wanted credit so they could use it for future gigs. They wanted things to put on their resumes and online CVs.
The '80s has been labeled the "Me" decade. Pursuit of selfish interest became the mantra of the day. Today is the "Look at Me" decade, when establishing a personal brand is tantamount. The concept of subsuming your brand identity (and your identifiers in sum) is off the menu. Corporations aren't loyal to the labor, why should the labor be loyal to them?
The solution is relatively simple. Large corporations spend billions of dollars creating and maintaining a specific brand identity and your MAGA hat or Black Lives Matter t-shirt are not a part of that. It is not reasonable to assume your personal brand somehow takes priority over the corporate brand. That said, smaller businesses are not as invested into brand strategy and may be open to your personal one.
If the business requires a uniform, your identity is not the lede. If the business has a dress code, a specific manner of dealing with your hair, or a policy requiring political speech off-limits in the workplace, those are the conditions of your employment. You want the ability to fully express yourself, look for work in businesses absent of these conditions.
In the case of Basecamp, the corporation decided to limit workplace expression. A third of their workforce decided to resign. There will be hundreds of people looking to fill those slots willing to accept the prohibition on political speech so Basecamp will be fine. There will be jobs available to those exiting that may allow them to express themselves freely in the workplace so they'll be fine.
One thing I hope we can all agree upon is that a business is virtually never a democracy.
