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Competitive sitting and leaving loudly

Just go.

James Stanier
5 min readJun 21, 2018
Oh, well, this person isn’t working very hard, are they?

No, you first

Does your office suffer from a competitive sitting problem?

If you’ve not heard of the phrase before, unfortunately it doesn’t have anything to do with a game of musical chairs, or rolling across the office and jousting each other with broom handles.

It’s likely that you may have experienced it yourself.

Have you ever been sat next to your manager, or your team, and have felt anxiety about going home first at the end of the day, based on what they might think of you if you were the first to leave?

Likewise, have you felt that bubbling stress when traveling into work, making you walk that extra bit faster, so that you can be the first person in your team to arrive? Have you felt that being there first signals that you work harder than everyone else?

That is competitive sitting.

It is a cultural phenomenon where employees believe they are being monitored for how long they spend at their desk, regardless of their output. It can create a workplace where an employee may not go home until their manager goes home, who in turn may not leave until their own manager leaves. Everyone feels like they need to put in more hours because they think that others are putting in more…

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James Stanier
James Stanier

Written by James Stanier

Writing things that interest me. Hopefully they'll interest you as well.

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