In HR circles the word ‘severance’ is usually associated with enormous financial packages offered to directors who may be leaving a company under a cloud. The TV show isn’t about that.
HR circles will be intrigued by what Apple’s series Severance tells us about our working lives. This psychological sci-fi thriller, now on its second series, follows employees working on highly classified and incomprehensible projects at a fictional biotechnology corporation: Lumon Industries.
“Severance” here refers to a medical procedure that implants a device causing them to lose all memories of the outside world while working within the basement floors. Conversely they have no memories of their work while outside, not working. This creates two separate personalities for each employee: an “Innie” who works at Lumon, and their “Outie” living their personal life, interacting normally with family and friends. Obviously, there’s no lunch hour.
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The drama stems from the inevitable bleed between the severanced employees’ two lives; an event or person that somehow connects the work personality with the one after 5pm. And then all hell is let loose.
It’s a brilliant show with a lot of resonance for work-life balance, one might say.
Now a YouGov poll has shown that one in eight British people would be happy to undergo a “memory splitting procedure” as featured in the Severance in order to get a well-paid job (3% “definitely would”, 9% “perhaps would”).
It is a horrifying statistic, perhaps the result of asking people late at night when they were confused. Bizarrely, 12% didn’t know one way or the other whether they would be up for the procedure. Maybe it depended on exactly how much better off they’d be.
What would entice a person to have this procedure, which is essentially manually triggering a trauma response from your brain?” – David Rice, People Managing People
According to YouGov the “definitely would” figure rose to 5% in Wales, for some reason. But let’s park that.
There’s a gender dimension too: rather more women were strongly opposed to the idea of severance (60% as opposed to 53% of men).
In an era where AI is allegedly on the cusp of taking over jobs, running businesses and, if the pessimistic view holds, destroying mankind, Severance represents a more traditional sci-fi nightmare, akin to Brave New World. And surely only the most cold-hearted HR specialist – perhaps themselves a robot – would greet such a development, presumably on the grounds of increased productivity.
David Rice, HR expert at People Managing People, appears taken aback at the YouGov results: “I think what this shows is a really low sense of value and quality of life,” he says. “This is not to say people in Britain have a low quality of life, but how they view it may not be all that great. Because what would entice a person to have this procedure, which is essentially manually triggering a trauma response from your brain?”
It will attract some people, he says, because “they may have trouble emotionally regulating and reconciling the connections between their work and personal lives and want someone to do it for them. They likely have an inability to set boundaries between work and life and cope with the demands of modern work. This would also seem to signify that they don’t equate personal and professional growth as part of the same journey.”
It’s interesting that some people equate the separation of their personal and work lives with getting a very well paid job. Do they think that their personal life is holding back their earning potential? I was reminded of a friend who works as commercial diver.
He often spends weeks on end in an immersion tank hundreds of metres below the waves, surveying and repairing pipelines. His personal life may seem a distant memory once he’s hauled to the surface. He is extremely well paid.
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