Gen Z should worry less about job titles and do some work for a change
She did PR for the place, so I was able to lay my plans, as it were, with the top dogs. I thanked her, via email, and then spotted her job title: senior vice-president. This was impressive. Doing my bidding was someone of serious stature. How fortunate was I to have found someone right at the top of this organisation, someone who, surely, processed through the office, assistants trailing in their wake, en route, for sure, to an audience with the president.
Then I drilled a little deeper and realised that it's been a while since I worked in an office, a few years since I troubled the hierarchy of an organisation, and these titles are a little misleading to the untrained eye.
To be labelled vice-president is as de rigueur as the pronouns that inevitably follow on the email sign-off. And while it sounds grand, the VPs are as likely to be carried around town in a sedan chair as the work experience kids. Or slaves as we used to call them – 'interns' as they must now be described.
The VP is the lowest of the low, just up from them are the senior VPs. I recall being admonished once by an American friend after I made reference to their 'receptionist'.
'Vice-President of First Impressions, thank you very much,' came the correction.
I've long been sceptical about job titles, knowing that management brandish them as alternatives to pay rises. And now, of course, it's even more complicated when tied to the geography of an office. This week, an employment tribunal ruled that senior employees can sue their company if they think the desk they've been allocated doesn't befit their status.
Nicholas Walker, 53, successfully litigated for constructive unfair dismissal when he, a senior estate agent, was assigned a desk in the middle, rather than at the back, of the office.
My heart now goes out to management everywhere. It's been hard enough getting the Gen Zs back to the office, pleading with them to attend their place of work at least three days a week, crafting an extravagant job title and bending to their demands to take time off work because they got dumped at the weekend. Now the staff-tyrants can raise their hackles about their desk location, have a good old whinge, claim mental-health issues and head for the nearest employment tribunal.
As a lonely, desperate freelance writer, I can only dream of such squabbles. Although, proudly, I do remain President of the Weston and Weedon Horticultural Society, although as an absent member of the committee – having long left the glorious county of Northamptonshire for Somerset, I'm expecting to lose that prestigious title at any moment.
At which point I'll have to enact an executive order on the home front and appoint myself chairman of our household. Although the position is unstable. Chilled from failed heating in one part of the house, I set up shop this week with my laptop on the kitchen table only to be ordered out by management, who claimed, 'You know this is where I work.'
All of which gave me some great insight into the workings of Gen Z, or rather all the entertaining flim-flam you can get enmeshed in that doesn't involve doing any actual work.
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