Spend too long in the office and it won't be long before you start getting a bit grey around the edges. So, how do you avoid becoming a corporate drone?

Sadly, if you spend most of your waking hours confined to the office, it will get to you eventually. Anyone starting an office job expecting to escape politics and petty bureaucracy is in for a shock - you just can't remain dignified in that environment; you have to recognise your inevitable deterioration into something contemptible.

The only alternative is to join the ranks of the deluded, seek opportunities and aspire to professionalism - but that's the action plan of the trainee drone.

What we all need is a very different action plan: with suggestions on how to avoid office lunacy and management scrutiny. But they don't publish many of those. Luckily, in the coming weeks, we'll offer a strategy for those who don't want to become corporate zombies. But, first, we need to unveil the employee's alternative to the corporate mission statement: "To stay sane when your job removes all traces of your self-respect" just about sums it up.

Of course, jobs are supposed to give people self-respect, not take it away. But the typical workplace (with its authority hierarchies and miscommunication), means employees end up behaving in undignified ways: concealing things from their bosses, redirecting blame, feeling resentment over trivial matters, reporting that everything's fine when it isn't and hiding in the toilets.

This behaviour doesn't fit our beliefs about ourselves as essentially rational and well-adjusted. The result is cognitive dissonance, when our self-image is contradicted by our actions. You think you're above it all, but your actions show that you're immersed in it. Faced with the horror of your out-of-character behaviour, you rationalise and make excuses. You turn into an office drone.

According to Leon Festinger, creator of dissonance theory, the less you are paid to do stupid work, the more you will attempt to rationalise it ("Well, it was fun"), rather than admit to doing it for the money.

As an office worker, don't expect to have dignity. Don't fall for management propaganda about integrity and professionalism. In the corporate workplace, self-respect exists only in the delusions of drones.