Robin Schooling

“No White after Labor Day” and Other Authorless Rules

Nobody knows who made the rule. There’s no founding document showing us there was an etiquette board that convened in 1903 and took a vote. No one has found evidence of a memo that was circulated among the summer houses of Newport announcing that white linen would be retired on the first Monday in September. Historians have theories of course, and the most persuasive one has very little to do with fabric weight or autumn mud.

White was what you wore when you weren’t working.

You wore it when you had somewhere cooler to be for three months and no particular reason to think about what a day’s labor does to a hemline or the cuffs of your pants. This rule that ended the season became a way for the people already inside the room to sort out who shouldn’t be allowed to enter the room. You either followed the rule or you didn’t — and knowing who didn’t, or couldn’t, follow the rule was entirely the point.

The rule has now outlived its own explanation by roughly a century. Vogue has pronounced it dead more than once. Every September though, somebody’s grandma still says something about people who shouldn’t be wearing white shoes.

I think about this a lot at work. But not because of the shoes.

The Unwritten and the Unexplained

Every organization I’ve been part of has carried a set of rules whose origins were lost in the same way — not written down anywhere anyone can find, not defensible under even gentle questioning, and enforced with a gravity wildly out of proportion to anything at stake.

The expense threshold set at $25 because of an incident in 2011 concerning Rory from Facilities that nobody can describe but everybody vaguely remembers. The dress code prohibition on open-toed shoes at a corporate office where the primary hazard is the carpet. The standing rule against scheduling anything before 9:30 AM, which has now survived by five years the departure of the executive who wasn’t a morning person. The PowerPoint template with the mandated shade of blue and the very specific hex code that’s not even in the company logo.

Ask about any of them and you’ll get a pleasant answer with no defensiveness whatsoever (because nobody really feels the need to defend anything). After all… “It’s just how we do it here.” (shrug)

But… whatever these rules were originally built to do, what they do now is sort and separate people.

Who Followed and Who Didn’t

Learning these types of work rules is how you demonstrate you’ve been around long enough to have learned them, and following them without comment is how you signal that you’re one of us. Which is why the new hire who asks “why do we do this?” is being more disruptive than she realizes. She isn’t challenging the rule so much as pointing out that there’s no there there and nothing is holding it up. And no one wants to hear that.

Now HR is not an innocent bystander here; we’re frequently the ones who wrote the rule down and memorialized it. Somebody did something ill-advised and a policy got drafted in response. The policy then outlived the person, the circumstance, and eventually anyone’s memory of why it had seemed necessary. And now it continues to survive in the department SOPs or the employee handbook — seemingly forever.

The complication is that not every unexplained rule is a white shoe in November; some of them are substantive and necessary. The requirement that feels most arbitrary is occasionally the only thing standing between the organization and a regulator, or between the organization and something genuinely bad that happened once and has not happened since. The challenge is that from the outside, structural and decorative look identical. Both are inherited, both go unexplained, and telling them apart takes more effort than we often bargain for.

Because without that discernment, we keep these rules — often for the same reason the white shoes go back into the closet come Labor Day. Not because anyone can explain them, but because asking about them may cost more than complying.

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Back in My Day

I vividly recall the precise orange of aerosol cheese sprayed straight from a can. I remember the crinkle-then-release of a Ding Dong freed from its foil, the pizza bagels that lived in the freezer and tasted like a sleepover, and the tinny cheer of Saturday-morning cartoon theme music playing in the background. None of this serves any purpose beyond pleasure. I don’t especially want the spray cheese back — I’ve been told that processed dairy foods are bad for me — and I certainly don’t want to be eight again, subject to bedtimes and the tyranny of the adults.

What I do want is the memory itself, albeit held at a safe distance, since I’ve already had the pleasure (or misfortune?) of living through it.

This is, by most accounts, exactly how nostalgia is designed to work. Constantine Sedikides, the University of Southampton psychologist who has spent decades studying the phenomenon, has found that it tends to arrive precisely when we could use it — triggered by loneliness, or by a flat, unmoored present — and that it responds by connecting us back to a version of ourselves we still recognize. It restores what he calls self-continuity: the sense that the person eating a Ding Dong in front of Saturday cartoons and the person answering emails at fifty-six are, improbably, the same person. His research also links the feeling to a restored sense of purpose and greater generosity toward the people around us. Nostalgia, in other words, isn’t about the Ding Dongs and pizza bagels; it’s about the proof that one’s self has existed in a continuum both then and now.

There is, of course, also a workplace version of nostalgia, and it’s a genre all of us have heard and seen performed live. This performance is often given by someone three decades into their working life and one glass of wine into the company holiday party — “ya know Beth, back in my day…”

And we’re off.

The Sepia Toned Highlight Reel

Once upon a time, people were in the building. You could walk down the hall and get an answer. You learned the job by sitting next to someone who already knew it. The phone rang, you picked it up, and the conversation ended when one of you hung up. Meetings happened around a table. You knew who was having a rough week because you could see it.

Certainly, some of that is true. Proximity did make certain kinds of teaching easier and shared physical space created a kind of ambient knowledge that a chat thread will never replicate.

But something happens with this sort of memory that never happens when we reminisce about watching Scooby-Doo, Shaggy and the rest of the gang un-mask a villain. Childhood nostalgia and workplace nostalgia may appear similar on the surface, but there are important distinctions. Childhood nostalgia doesn’t ask us to change our present behavior; nobody is proposing that we install rotary phones back on our kitchen walls.

Workplace nostalgia, on the other hand, is rarely idle and undemanding. It tends to arrive, ready for an argument about what today’s employees are supposedly missing. It also brings with it some unspoken opinions about who ought to be in charge of restoring things back to their former (implied) glory. “Back in my day, people had a work ethic” is not a fond memory so much as a revisionist personnel policy from the days of Phyllis Schlafly.

What Lands on the Cutting Room Floor

There are memories we excise from the workplace highlight reel running in our mind, and we edit them the way we often edit our childhood memories: selectively, and in our favor.

Few people wax nostalgic about the ashtrays on the conference table or the dress code that banned women from wearing pants in the office. The person fondly recalling the open office door was very often the person behind the door, and the company where everyone “knew their job” was really only marvelous for whoever had assigned the roles in the first place. And the three-martini lunch sounds fun and madcap and exotic right up until you remember who wasn’t invited to tag along to the restaurant.

None of this means our fond memories and feelings are dishonest. Sedikides points out that nostalgia is not a synonym for delusion and people mostly know, on some level, that they’re looking at a highlight reel and not a minute-by-minute blow-by-blow record that’s being sworn to under oath. The trouble starts when reminiscing over the highlight reel moves us from saying “it felt simpler then” to “maybe we should just undo whatever has made it more complicated.”

What often gets lost if we move along that continuum is any evaluation of what will happen to the people standing just outside camera range on that highlight reel.

Off Camera

Much of what gets mourned as the old workplace is never really about the workplace at all. I think what we’re mourning is the version of ourselves who occupied that workplace of yesteryear — the version that was less tired, less responsible for aging parents, and much less aware of how many ways our jobs and careers can be upended.

Once upon a time that orange spray cheese tasted great because we were eight years old. And back in the day the workplace seemed simpler because we hadn’t yet learned how many ways things could get fucked up through no fault of our own. Which leaves the real question for me: can we ever replicate the feelings of awe and wonder of an eight-year-old who thought a can of spray cheese was magic?

Shifting Work: How Micro is Micro?

I have a working theory about workplace trends: assign any behavior that has persisted for decades a hyphenated descriptor, and within a year HR will be issuing formal guidance on it.

Let’s examine micro-shifting and the sudden authority with which employees now invoke it. Working parents, after all, have been negotiating lunch hours long enough to squeeze in a pediatrician appointment since long before anyone reading this was hired. What’s genuinely new isn’t the behavior – it’s the label. And a label is worth putting to the test.

Start with the obvious test: a minute spent answering a text is unambiguously micro. Fifteen minutes spent dropping something at the post office is defensibly micro. But a color, cut, and blowout runs closer to three hours, and I have yet to meet a single person who describes that as a quick break. A mani-pedi, with the requisite quarter hour for the polish to properly set, edges toward ninety minutes. Somewhere along the way, it seems, the word “micro” stopped describing duration and started describing level of permission. It’s an interruption that gets to call itself ordinary, regardless of how long it runs, provided it’s bookended by work on either side. Or so, perhaps, we assume.

Which raises some more interesting questions like what occupies the space between these work shifts? Does it matter? Provided the work still gets done?

The Full Menu

Once I began cataloguing it, the way one might if drafting an actual HR policy on the subject, the range of breaks required to keep a personal life functioning turned out to be considerably wider than the term implies. There’s going to the dentist. There’s taking Mr. Crumples to the vet whenever his ears resume doing that one thing again. There’s the grocery pickup timed to outrun the after-school scramble and the need to return my library book before I get a late charge. And then there are the larger blocks: the color and cut, the wedding-adjacent mani-pedi, the once-a-year ophthalmologist appointment that inevitably runs long. None of these qualify as a “break” in the traditional sense – the fifteen-minute variety once sanctioned by a poster in the breakroom or a clause in the employee handbook. Strung together, this resembles, instead, a second life – running concurrently with the first and held together by whatever bandwidth happens to remain.

None of this comes free, however, simply because any single instance of it is brief. The organizational behavior researcher Sophie Leroy has spent the better part of two decades documenting what she calls attention residue: the finding that when we move from one task to another, some portion of our cognitive attention remains lodged in the task we just left, regardless of how deliberately we try to leave it behind. The effect doesn’t appear to discriminate by scale, either; her research suggests it registers as readily during a brief pause for an unrelated errand as it does during a full change of major projects.

And that is a considerably more elegant way of saying what most of us already suspect from experience: that returning from ninety minutes at the hair salon and dropping straight back into a budget spreadsheet asks more of the brain than the calendar notation “out of office” accounts for. The true expense of micro-shifting is never really about stepping away or heading for a walk around the block or doing the school-run; it’s the tally of how many times a day we ask our own attention to fully disengage, and then, moments later, fully re-engage somewhere else.

Is There a Limit?

I think there is, though its precise shape is fuzzy. Organizations with defined core hours – say, everyone expected to be reachable between 10 and 3, with the outer bands of the day left open for whatever life requires – seem to manage this better than the ones still operating on the fiction that everyone is equally available from 9 to 5 and equally invisible outside it.

But while core hours help considerably with coordination, they don’t really solve for energy. What happens when your best two hours of the day – the hours in which your brain is genuinely equipped for the difficult, unglamorous thinking your job requires – land squarely inside the organization’s core hours? And then those same core hours happen to contain the only available therapy appointment, the only DMV slot without a two-hour line, and the only salon opening before the holidays? Core hours don’t resolve that particular collision; they simply relocate it.

Look – I’m generally in favor of micro-shifting. I love it, in fact. I’ve also had the good fortune to work for organizations, and in roles, where it was genuinely available; not everyone in every job has that luxury. Micro-shifting promises to let the work bend around a life rather than the reverse, and I remain in favor of that.

No matter what we end up calling it next.

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photo credit: Public Health Image Library from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

What We Leave Behind

It takes a surprisingly small container to hold what a person accumulates over nineteen years at a job.

A single copy paper box will generally do it, and into that box goes the mug from a 2009 charity golf scramble, the gray cardigan that lived on the back of the desk chair since the day the building’s HVAC system was upgraded, and a collapsible umbrella. Also tossed into the box are a bottle of Tums with four left in it, 3 phone chargers, and the framed photograph of a boat that most people walking past assumed belonged to the inhabitant of the cubicle and did not.

The box, once packed, then waits – under a desk, on a credenza, or in the corner of the supply room. It waits until the owner carries it out to his car on his last day or, if he has already been ‘exited’ through no desire of his own, until somebody comes to collect it. (And, if nobody comes to collect it within 90 days or so, it ends up being dumped unceremoniously in the dumpster at the back end of the parking lot).

It’s the visible residue of employment, and it’s generated in every workplace. There are numerous desk plants that have outlived each successive person assigned to water them and drawers full of individually wrapped hard candies and Taco Bell hot sauce packets. Facilities, or sometimes HR, has amassed lots of experience clearing these things out.

Those artifacts, however, are only the surface layer.

Out of the Box

Because the same man from accounting whose windbreaker still hangs in the department closet also left behind the month-end close checklist he built in 2011 during a software conversion. It’s been reformatted twice since then and his initials have long since been scrubbed out of the footer by someone tidying up the template.

Not a single soul on the team could tell you where it came from (or that it came from anywhere at all), since it merely has the type of organizational immortality granted to any process that works well enough so that no one even thinks to question its origins.

He left a joke behind too; one about the fax machine on the third floor that was not especially funny to begin with and that fifteen years of retelling had sanded down the call and response of the punch line into a corporate liturgical response.

What Lies Beneath

Organizations are layered this way though, and once you notice the layers you find them everywhere.

The company logo was designed by a graphic designer in the marketing department who left in 2014 and now does something entirely unrelated in a different city, and yet her instinct about that specific shade of blue survives on every business card, at every trade show booth, and in every email signature.

The file naming convention that governs the shared drive belongs to an operations manager whose name has dropped out of circulation entirely – even though her system has outlived two migrations and a merger.

And the reason the leadership team convenes at 8:15 AM rather than 8 AM goes back to one executive’s commute from the other side of the river. An executive who retired in 2021 and whose traffic patterns continue to shape the calendars of people who never met him.

We tend to discuss legacy inside organizations as a somewhat deliberate exercise including succession planning, leadership development, and the orderly transfer of institutional knowledge from one generation to the next. But the inheritance that shapes the daily texture of a workplace is also there. These are the things that are procedural, linguistic, aesthetic, and largely accidental – things like a spreadsheet formula, a shorthand phrase for a customer archetype, and the particular sequence in which we route approvals because that’s how Denise preferred them – and Denise has been gone since the second Obama administration.

Knowledge management systems and process improvement initiatives will capture and refine the checklists; and do a reasonable and much needed job of helping folks fix broken processes and connect the disconnected systems. But nothing has ever been built that can capture the essence of the humans that have populated the building, created the processes and infused their personalities along the way. The people whose distinctive temperaments and idiosyncrasies have melted into the walls.

Eventually the box gets carried out to a car in the parking lot. Everything else stays exactly where it landed – sediment now – waiting for someone new to dig down far enough to notice it’s there at all.

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