Inequality at the intersection of corporate values and sports

Let’s now throw knives at this carnival wheel of irony, the interminable hopscotch path of meaningless platitudes called “corporate values.” What a scam, this nonsense intended to bolster the legal defense-cum-marketing ploy of corporations as relatable human entities with moral compasses and cultural ethics. In this post, I won’t go after every incarnation of the corporate value, but direct my incredulity at a specific, yet unspecified-for-this-post-company’s policy of recruiting “elite athletes” under the eyeroll-worthy assertion that athletes are more driven to perform highly than the well-fed and under-exercised mammals in the office habitat. I know, it sucks not to know who’s screwing who when you’re investing yourself in workplace gossip, but my guess is there’s more than one company out there with such a shamefacedly biased and unproven hiring credo, so feel free to apply this unnamed example liberally across the spectrum.
While the Goliath company in question has many redeeming quote-unquote values that provide its employees the pedestals and platforms on which to engage in activities for actual human benefit, it espouses an appalling hiring methodology, which seeks to attract professional, semi-professional, and hobbyist athletes to its ranks. My selection of adjectives regarding the hiring policy does not mean to imply that athletes are bad workers across the board, but you see, according to the organization’s corporate values, athletes are naturally driven to high performance, and therefore, it competes to preferentially hire and retain these earthly Hermeses with their superhuman yens for achievement.
HOWEVER — all caps — like the Greek god of sports himself, the Corporate Hermes can also be a thief; a thief of profit and proficiency, as the corporate value system, built on that most flimsy foundation of human perception, fails to recognize a crucial distinction: athletes are driven to high performance — in athletics. Not always so in work. Not even most of the time.
Athletes, as much as we deify them, are people, too. And like most people, usually take jobs in order to support themselves, their families, and their extracurricular activities, not just because they have an untamable will to succeed at all costs in all venues. Nor do the specific athletes this company prizes most highly and courts most aggressively, the executive’s latest darling in trendy kits with expensive gear: the cyclists.
Drive cannot be scattered among multitudinous minutiae throughout the tedious minutes and long hours of each day and not become diluted. Although many people, myself included, pursue careers in fields that spark our interests and allow us to use our innate talents, quite often, a passion to perform is not equally shared between our personal hobbies and our obligatory work.
What stars have blinded the eyes of executives and Human Resources so completely as to gloss over this obvious fact of human nature? Do all of these silly ideologues, perhaps devoted to athletics in their own off-hours and therefore comfortably smug in their assumptions, fail to recognize that maybe the chubs in the office are the real high performers? Maybe that’s why they’re so fat — because they’re not leaving the office for two hours each day to train for their cycling competitions, or not taking four-hour lunch breaks twice a week for team sports — and instead are devotedly making themselves available to do the best work they possibly can? What nonsensical boob thinks that having a hobby that has nothing to do with a job makes them more fit for the work?
Of course it is much appreciated when businesses recognize that all work and no play makes Jack fuzzy-minded and apathetic. It is a human right to have time away from the desk to pursue physical play and fitness or other downtime objectives. But it is a bad joke at the expense of the rest of the staff to assume that athletes are the best workers. In fact, some of the athletes at the corporation in question, so bloated on their own hubris, are among the laziest, least interested employees around. They live for their sports, they work for their time off and for money to replace their equipment, and they don’t bring their A-game to the open office, no matter how much the C-suite digs their own solipsistic jive.
So to those policy-setting execs and the HR reps inhaling their fumes, I make this suggestion: Instead of making recruiting and hiring decisions based on the subjective worth of people’s lifestyles — because make no mistake, having time and money to spare on expensive hobbies like cycling $5,000 bikes down public roads adorned with bike lanes for its wealthy citizens IS a lifestyle choice that DOES reflect economic class in most cases — try building corporate values around qualities that support human potential across all divides and reward the merits of individual work-related contributions rather than hip, rich-folk hobbies.
And let’s be honest: Even aside from financial constraints, the time it takes to develop yourself into an athlete by choice or profession requires you to have a degree of freedom that a lot of people struggle to find: people who can’t afford child or elder care, whose families can’t or couldn’t afford the fees and equipment for institutional sports, people focused on raising themselves up through public-funded academics instead of private school clubs and teams, or people who are simply plum tuckered out after taking the bus home in the dark every day.
The choices part-time athletes are able to make outside of work can be based on a relative lack of socioeconomic limitations and in no way support the theory that they are more motivated to perform high-quality work in realms outside their chosen sports. Exclusionary and elitist HR policies that court staff based on reductive conclusions about the way people spend their personal time will most certainly cause companies to miss out on bright and committed workers who do not have the same latitude as those other “elite” citizens of the workplace.
