The World of Work 1983 style

On September 5, 1983 I entered the world of work for the first time, starting a career that has had more twists and turns than most! 40 years on, I thought it might be interesting to look back to what the office looked like in the analogue days of the early 80s. Now, this is just my experience of one firm, but, from chatting to people at the time and after, I think it is fairly representative of what we faced in those far off times. Follow me through the doors of my first office.

Lloyds of London

My first job was in the Non-marine section of the famous insurer, based in Gun Wharf in Chatham. I had left the Maths School in July of that year with huge relief, and with one final piece of bad advice from the disinterested careers officer in a school that only cared about university entrants. I had done A Levels so I should look for a job in banking or insurance. Accordingly, I applied for every bank and building society I could and it was Lloyds who were unlucky enough to employ me! I was hopeless as a non-marine insurance clerk as I had absolutely no eye for detail and made mistake after mistake during my 10 months there. Despite this, I actually enjoyed the people I worked with and the opportunities I had on the social side. My pay was the princely sum, at least to me at the time, of £3,600 a year. This kept me in the manner of most 18 year olds at the time, funding pub visits and records quite happily! Savings were not an issue for me at the time, so it was purely spending money after I paid rent to my parents. My biggest purchase was a ZX Spectrum 48K for £175, the equivalent of a whole month’s disposable income! My friends loved it, but I was rubbish at computer games so it was by any measure an irresponsible purchase as it turned out!

The Office

In 1983, the office was a very different place in many ways. First of all, there were no computers of any sort on our desks. The whole idea would have been laughable when the computer rooms were huge spaces containing giant mainframes that had less processing power than the phones we carry in our pockets today. Instead of endless emails we had the post room where letters were sorted and delivered to offices twice a day. The post room staff were extremely efficient and, for the most part, enjoyed their jobs as they were not bothered by management and could work at their own pace fuelled by tea, coffee and cigarettes! In those days you could smoke in the office, and over half of the employees did. Looking back, that seems to be the relic of another age, but at the time we thought nothing of it. Our colleagues were not the chain smoking types, and they often took the chance to go for a walk when they were smoking so there wasn’t a permanent fog of smoke in the place.

The benefits of a computer less office lay in the ability to think, plan and consult with colleagues when they were less busy. If someone had a query for your department, they didn’t expect a reply immediately even if they phoned up. These days, the instant nature of communication means the expectation of instant answers. The effect of that is to reduce the effectiveness of some of those answers and to increase the stress on the employees providing them.

My colleagues were a mix of older time served employees in their 50s and 60s, many of them with 30 or more years of service under their belts, and a large proportion of new employees, hired year after year on the basis that not all of them would stay. I sat opposite a couple of older employees who would regale us with stories of WWII and their experiences of Lloyds during the many years they spent there. They were, as a group, fascinating, caring men and women who had a clear policy of watching the backs of the younger employees. From their own experiences of being new workers, they were able to see the pitfalls way before us and often had a quiet word to help us correct our mistakes before the managers spotted them. It was very much a them and us approach in the office that gave us a bond with each other and made for a very supportive work atmosphere. They shook their heads and smiled on occasions when they saw the younger crowd walk around as if we’d got it sorted out, but were endlessly patient with us. The managers themselves were accorded respect because they had all worked their way up through the ranks. You could go to a manager for help if you needed to, safe in the knowledge that they had the skillset to help you. Our assistant manager and manager in my department had over 50 years between them in Lloyds.

What a contrast to today when being a ‘manager’ is simply a career path chosen by people who in nearly every case have no idea about the field they work in. All they care about is enriching themselves and their opportunity to get even more money in another field they are similarly clueless about. Yes, I know there are exceptions, but the general lack of understanding or interest in the management class is what has led to many of the problems we have today in terms of business stability and relations between junior and senior staff.

Lloyds, in common with many other places at the time, had a system called flexitime. This involved employees being treated as responsible adults, which was probably not ideal in my case! You had to work a set number of hours each month, and at the end of the month you were required to have a surplus or to have ‘broken even’ by working that required amount of time. In my case, I treated myself as a part-timer for the first 2 or 3 weeks of my first few months and then worked 8 – 6 with 15 minutes for lunch in order to play catch up! This was not the ideal strategy, and one month I was sick for the last two days and ended up with a deficit for which I was rightly taken to task. After that, I was much more responsible and came to enjoy a system that allowed you time to recover from a bad morning or a ‘heavy night’ and, if you built up enough time, take the odd day off. It was a system that both employees and employers benefitted from and a system that would be significantly better for morale than the enforced or zero hours we have now. Holidays in those days meant someone else doing your job for two weeks and no inbox with hundreds of emails to return to. It gave you the opportunity to really relax for two weeks and pick up the work when you returned with no backlog.

Lunch time

Lloyds, in common with many other places had a subsidised canteen. If you just had a main course it was 9p, but if you pushed the boat out and had 3 courses it was the princely sum of 27p – less than the price of a half pint of beer! There was no sitting at your desks eating, you had to leave the office for a minimum of 15 minutes at lunchtime as that was considered essential to maintain concentration. In practice most lunches were 30 – 45 minutes long. Steve Reid, my inseparable work buddy, and I used to spend lunchtimes chatting, playing snooker on the 6 by 3 table downstairs, or occasionally taking part in indoor bowls (More of that later)! On Fridays, however, we went to the Command House nearby and, unless I was playing catch up on my hours, spent sometimes up to an hour and a half drinking and eating with the many of our younger colleagues. Friday afternoon saw very little useful work being done by most of us as we struggled to stay awake, let alone read insurance forms through our self-induced alcoholic hazes! Occasionally, our senior colleagues joined us, or went out with their compatriots to toast the upcoming weekend. It was an accepted part of work behaviour pretty much everywhere as long as you didn’t overdo things, although if my friend Gavin’s drunken Friday afternoon phone calls were anything to go by, the London banks seemed to be a free for all! Yes, it could be one of those privileges that was abused, but we knew what the limits were and for the most part kept within them.

Social Life and your employer

Back in the 80s, we were probably in the last decade or so of the expectation of jobs for life. Many of the post-war generation were reaching the end of their careers and had dedicated their working lives to Lloyds. In return, they were treated very well by the company both inside and outside work. Those of us who were just passing through were also beneficiaries of this approach and probably didn’t really appreciate how lucky we were until later on in our careers.

Lloyds had sports grounds in the Medway Towns and in London with a number of cricket teams in the summer, football, rugby and hockey in the winter and well used clubhouses in both venues. They were not unusual in this respect as other companies such as Lloyds Bank, Barclays Bank and Cuaco (Commercial Union Assurance Company) ran 5 or 6 teams in each sport whilst smaller companies commonly ran at least one team in many sports. This fostered a sense of belonging and gave employees an outlet for their interests that cost very little and was well supported. We had games evenings against other companies which were great fun and definitely competitive! Steve and I played indoor bowls in a Lloyds league organised by a couple of the employees. The combination of Steve’s skill and my brute force occasionally paid dividends, but I definitely wasn’t the most reliable partner, that’s for sure! All of the above examples compare very favourably with today’s employers who, in the vast majority of cases, expect full loyalty from employees without acknowledging a duty of care, mental or social, to those they expect so much from.

Education and training

Finally, all first year employees were working a four day week during college terms as it was considered essential to have a workforce with as much training as possible. We went to the nearby Mid Kent College every Friday to study for our Introduction to Insurance qualifications. At the end of the course, we had to take exams, and, as our part of the deal, needed to pass two out of the three subjects to protect our college day. If anyone didn’t pass two exams, they were allowed to resit them the following year, but they had to study on their own time as they went back to a full 5 day week. Ironically, given that I didn’t last a full year, I was the only one eligible to keep my study day after the exams! It was the perfect combination of incentives, and if you went back the following year and passed the missing subjects you could move on to Stage 2 and get your study day back. Now, that’s what i call professional development!

Final Thoughts

So there you have it, work 1983 style. I know I have painted it in a very positive light, but at the time it didn’t seem that positive. It’s only in retrospect that you realise it was a very much better time to be a common or garden worker in an office than pretty much any era that followed it. Did I enjoy it much at the time? No way. Work is work, particularly in a job you are completely unsuited for, and I hated the feeling of not being up to the job. However, even at the time I appreciated my colleagues and my employer for making it significantly more comfortable than it otherwise would have been. These days, I doubt that many modern firms would have the patience or understanding required to do anything to smooth my path.