A Real Manager Gives Lumon a Performance Review

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Severance is tailor-made for watercooler conversations. Normal jobs aren’t abusive like that, right? The Innies have a strong case for assault charges against Lumon! We’d never return to work for a company that lies so smoothly and so often to its employees — wait, would we?

To get a clearer view of Severance’s not-so-fun-house reflection of American workplace culture, we brought in the internet’s preeminent workplace advice columnist, Ask A Manager’s Alison Green, to provide her analysis. A new viewer to the series, she watched the pilot and its follow-ups, “Half-Loop” and “In Perpetuity,” and a host of clips through to this week’s “Goodbye, Mrs. Selvig.” Green could have a bright future in Macrodata Refinement, because all of Lumon’s scariest numbers jumped right out at her. The series exaggerates some of the worst aspects of typical corporate environments, but Green admires how it surfaces and interrogates “how deeply dysfunctional a lot of those dynamics are. They’re very poisonous to people’s souls, and that’s not hyperbole. Many, many things about the modern workplace are very bad for people, and I don’t think there’s a lot of conversation about that going on in the culture, in part because it’s such a huge, complex problem. What do we do about it?”

Let’s start with your overall impression of Severance. What do you make of this world, the people in it, and how they navigate working for Lumon Industries?
Based on the clips you sent me, the show felt very humorous. Then when I started watching full episodes, I realized, Oh, this is very dark. Still funny, but very dark. Coming in with very limited knowledge, it seems like a real commentary on what corporate workplaces expect of us and how odd and inauthentic much of corporate culture is. It’s asking us about what that type of workplace demands of people, and what that does to us psychologically. Severance highlights the sinisterness of corporate culture, but many of those elements exist in real life, and we’re all so used to them that we don’t think about them within an explicitly sinister framework. We’d probably be better off if we did.

Tell me more about the bizarre inauthenticity of corporate life.
There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about bringing your full authentic self to work, and it’s bullshit. We don’t actually want that in many cases! We don’t want people bringing their jerky self to work, or their racist self to work, or their sexual harasser self to work. Even when you move away from those extremes, it’s very often not politically wise or even safe for people to bring their full, authentic selves to work. Most people’s daily reality is that if they want to get promoted or get a raise or generally be appreciated at work and have a good network where they can easily find another job, in most cases, they can’t bring their full selves to work. It’s a very weird juxtaposition of stated beliefs and lived realities.

That contrast is at the heart of the show. Lumon wants to benefit from the extremely compartmentalized consciousnesses of its severed employees, but severance itself creates a different set of problems in terms of acculturation and employee behavior. 
I’m thinking about the tone and approach new hires experience there. From the opening scene of the pilot, that perky, upbeat patina put on everything coming out of corporate is super sinister and really tied to real life. When Helly wakes up on that table and she’s terrified, Mark isn’t even acknowledging her fear, he’s just delivering those survey questions in the very perky corporate tone of the script. That’s her first five minutes as a severed employee! That corporate voice is one that many companies use with their employees, and we’ve all weirdly come to accept it. I mean, we poke fun at it a lot, but it’s a pretty normal part of work life, and it’s so weird and inauthentic.

What do you make of how Severance presents at-work disciplinary measures? 
That’s probably the most out-there aspect of the show. Having to repeat the Compunction Statement over and over until they judge that you’re finally sincere is abusive, of course. There is a thread of that, though, that connects to a lot of people in real-life jobs, which is the underlying belief that it’s okay to force employees to comply with something they object to, that it’s okay to beat them down mentally until they accept it. They’re not going to make you repeat a weird statement or phrase 1,000 times, but they will steep you in a culture that, over time, degrades your spirit. That’s real.

What did you make of the new (and, Lumon seems to think, improved) Break Room and its accompanying “Lumon Is Listening” video? 
Well, it’s a complete mindfuck. In real life, we probably wouldn’t be seeing anything quite so flagrant or exaggerated as that video, but the Innies can see that their Overtime Contingency adventure, which they know wasn’t at all welcome or appreciated, is now being twisted right in front of them. They’re being told, “You’re the saviors of the company, and we’re so grateful.” They know that that’s not true. That use of double-talk happens all the time at work in real life whenever it’s in the interest of the company to smooth over some incident and move forward. Pretending that everyone’s on the same page, even though everyone knows they’re not, when it’s in the company’s interest to pretend like they’re all playing nice, happens all the time. When you’re presented with something you know isn’t sincere and you have to decide how you’re going to perform a response to that, do you let yourself have the natural Helly R. response of “What the hell? We don’t feel the way you’re portraying us!” Or do you go with a more cagey, political response of going along with whatever the company is presenting? It’s really hard to navigate.

The video almost felt like a dare on Milchick’s part. The Innies know about the Overtime Contingency, but they also know that even with the reforms he’s touting, he can still deploy that tool.
Oh, the Overtime Contingency is such a great mirror of what people are increasingly dealing with in real life. It’s so common for people to have jobs where they’re at home relaxing with their families but at any moment they could be called upon to switch into their work persona.

And the severance procedure makes it possible for the company to take advantage of treating their severed employees as subhuman. 
Yeah, we pay a lot of lip service to wanting to get everyone on the same page and building consensus at work. Sometimes that’s genuinely true, but almost always it’s only to a point, beyond which management really doesn’t care if you’ve bought in. On an awful lot of things, it’s gonna go the way they want it to go, and you’re either gonna do it that way or life at work is gonna be hard for you.

You can actually make much better decisions for yourself and be more likely to get the outcomes you want if you really understand what’s happening. Realizing, My input on this doesn’t really matter, but this ally I have in this other department who does have influence would matter, is powerful. Once you understand those dynamics, you can get a lot more done, but because everything is so shrouded in doublespeak, a lot of people have trouble getting what they want from their work lives.

That goes for un-severed employees in middle management, too.
I loved the scene at the end of the first season where Cobel is meeting with the Board and she has to smile and maintain her dignity through this humiliating treatment. There’s no transparency about what’s going on above her. She’s supposed to turn over total information about what’s going on below her, and she wants to be allied with the level of management above her, but they’re not engaging with her or even treating her respectfully.

Even after the humiliation of getting fired, then being offered an obviously insincere apology, as well as a job, Helena Eagan is making up on the spot, Cobel still wants back in. 
We’ve all worked in jobs where people’s loyalty to an organization’s bad practices or bad actors outlasts their employment with the company. Cobel has been severed from them and yet she’s still there in the middle of the night, ready to do their dirty work. It happens all the time.

How do you understand the psychology of that internal contradiction?
For a lot of people, in order to feel good about work, which accounts for a huge portion of our waking hours and identities, it’s important to feel like you’re engaged in something good, on the side of the righteous. That doesn’t just get turned off with a switch when you leave a job. In a lot of cases it should, but that mind-set is really powerful, even when no one’s paying us for it anymore.

Every episode rolls out some new-to-us illustration of Lumon’s very weird understanding of motivational perks and incentives. Have you seen trinkets like finger traps or events like a Music Dance Experience work in the real world? 
I loved how they captured the way people get so excited about crappy corporate perks. The finger traps are a bit of an overexaggeration, but the waffle party! People get very excited about free food at work, even people who can comfortably afford whatever food they might want to enjoy on any given day. There’s something very exciting about breaking up the gray doldrums of work life with something new and different. They nailed the weirdness of how enthusiastic grown adults can be for such minor treats.

The caricatures caught my eye, too. I’ve worked in offices that did things that were pretty damn close, and people would proudly display them because they made them feel valued. If you walked in as an alien with no experience of American work life, it would be super weird to you, but it doesn’t seem weird within that culture.