Workplace Infantilisation: Incompetent Employees or Toxic Management?

Remember as a kid, having to wear that uncomfortable school uniform every single day? We were told when to sit, when to stand, when to eat, when to play, even when we were allowed to go to the toilet. Myriad rules to crush us into oppressive obedience! 

 

Now imagine a similar scenario in your workplace. Employees are given insultingly basic commands and training that even the most sheltered individual would have learned simply in the school of life. There’s a term for it: Workplace Infantilisation. Workers denied their agency and wisdom from experience in favour of child-like over-proceduralisation. And no, workplace infantilisation is not a term for child labour, pathological smuggling of employee’s children into the office, or a worker boasting an adult diaper fetish. 

 

Infantilisation in the workplace is basically when your boss treats you like a child. Explicit instructions for straightforward tasks, insinuating that you don’t have the common sense to figure it out. They make rules for things that well-adjusted adults don’t need rules for (like you’re not allowed to masturbate on someone else's desk.) Well duh. You use your own desk; we’re not animals! 

 

But is workplace infantilisation genuinely happening on a significant scale? Or is it merely a vent for worker frustrations over the minutiae of bureaucratic tape?

 

SOURCES:

• https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/288384634.pdf
• Postmortal Society: Towards a Sociology of Immortality
• The infantilization of the worker : r/antiwork
• https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6535470294486839296/
• “I deeply resent how we've infantilized the workplace”: A manager's manifesto goes viral
• Treat Employees like Adults

CHAPTERS:

• 00:00 Understanding the concept of workplace infantilisation
• 03:02 Harvard Business Review claims
• 04:37 Language, tone and building trust
• 07:41 Reality check: Is workplace infantilisation just a feeling?
• 09:21 Being an adult is understanding context
• 11:30 Defining infantilisation: Treating someone as a child
• 14:54 Controversial symptoms of workplace infantilisation
• 16:45 What does Google Scholar say?
• 20:01 Evidence of workplace infantilisation
• 23:11 Context matters

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