Don’t Give Up
I nearly didn’t bother with a newsletter this week.
Last week I was a bit ‘meh’. I put it down to post-holiday blues and perhaps a bit of a cold. This week, I’m physically OK but ‘meh, and some’. I feel more anxious, I’m not sleeping well, so I can’t do the work I want to, so I get anxious, and we’re off on the misery machine cycle.
I think this is just another dip on the emotional roller-coaster that we’ve all been on for the past two and half years. I feel like I’m just coming up to the incline. I’ll try to work on staying up on the high bit for longer and making the next swoop down shallower and shorter.
We’re all grieving after COVID, for the loved ones we lost but also all the things that never happened, the hopes and dreams that were dashed, the futures we had planned that never came to be.
A few extra things hit me this week.
The conversations about work just got to me. The pointless debates about ‘Return to Office’, about ‘Quiet Quitting’, about ‘productivity’ (apparently, UK workers need to ‘work harder’ to close out productivity gap, which is utter bollocks), about all sorts of meaningless nonsense rather than the important debates about how to make work better for people, make it an additive experience rather than a negative one, something that can be embraced instead of simply endured.
I came across a clip of a Tomorrow’s World programme talking about home working and how it was going to revolutionise the way we work and live. The programme was from 1979, the same year that I was leaving university clutching my degree. It predicted many of us would be homeworking using this technology by 1981. We weren’t, but I had joined BT and was working with some of the technology shown in the programme. And yet here we are, 40+ years later, arguing about the benefits and whether it’s a good thing (spoiler alert - yes, it is). How depressing is that? Four decades of sticking our heads up our arses instead of grasping the opportunity to liberate work and ourselves. And we’re only having the argument now because COVID forced bosses’ hands, otherwise we’d still be sitting in cubicle jails wasting our time and energy.
I also had to revisit my own career for a talk I am giving soon and I realised the scars have not yet healed, that what happened to me is still painful. And I know I am not alone, because I have met many people who have been brutalised and damaged by the corporate machine, ground down and spat out. All that pain and it’s still being added to and it’s considered ‘business as normal’. Only it’s not, is it? It’s not normal to tolerate people being consumed in this way.
And then the Queen died. I’m no royalist, I’m not mourning the loss of our monarch. I admired her whilst remaining equivocal about the institution she led. I’m sad she died and for her family, I know those sorrows. But her death has echoes of the loss of my parents, who were the same generation. And the mourning has reminded me of all the other recent losses, and the past ones, that have not been properly grieved over and are not yet reconciled.
This is where we all are right now, we’re all a bit fragile and sensitive but I don’t see much conversation about it. I know it’s human nature to put things quickly behind us and move forward but sometimes we need to stop and address the pain and grief for our own mental health. Putting our heads down and ploughing on is not a good long-term strategy. Believe me, I speak from personal experience.
So I haven’t felt like doing much this week. You might be feeling the same and I just want to say it’s normal and it will pass. Talk about how you feel, listen to others share what they are going through. Put the judgement aside, ditch the ‘shoulds’ and ‘oughts’, just be there and be kind. We’ll get off this roller-coaster one day but it’s going to take a considerable while yet.
Reach Out And Touch (Somebody’s Hand)
I was struck by this article on the ‘mental health crisis’ by Dr Sanah Ahsan, a clinical psychologist, in which she argues against the current trend to locate the problems for people’s distress as being within them; to stop seeing it as some kind of mental disorder or psychological issue but as a natural response to the challenges and crises we face in life.
As she puts it “If a plant were wilting we wouldn’t diagnose it with “wilting-plant-syndrome” – we would change its conditions. Yet when humans are suffering under unliveable conditions, we’re told something is wrong with us, and expected to keep pushing through. To keep working and producing, without acknowledging our hurt.”
She’s arguing for social change to alleviate the social and economic problems but it clearly goes beyond that to extend into the world of work. We are diagnosing people suffering ‘Burnout’ as if it’s some sort of personal issue rather than acknowledging the cause is excessive workloads, unreasonable demands, stress and lack of emotional support.
It’s a strong narrative, as people will even say “I am prone to push myself to burnout’ without acknowledging the social pressures and the unyielding corporate system they operate in that drive them that far with and don’t have any guardrails in place or systems for recovery. It’s almost worn as a badge of honour, part of the ‘busyness’ syndrome that plagues work life.
I know from personal experience that there are many, many people who end up chewed up and spat out by the corporate machine. When you have lots of broken cogs, you can blame the cogs for not being ‘resilient’ enough or you can ask if the machine is malfunctioning and putting them under undue stress.
On resilience, I heard Bruce Daisley talking about his new book, Fortitude, on a ‘Be More Cheerful’ episode on Character Education. Bruce saying that resilience is presented as an individual issue but it is actually something that emerges within groups. He argues that what we need is connection and community and it is this that enables us to get through crises and rebound from setbacks. He talks about the extraordinary resilience shown by the people of Ukraine as an example of this power, how their connection and identity as a nation has given them all a strength they did not realise they possessed.
I think they are both arguing that what we need today is greater connection, that what people really want is community, in society and in business. And I happen to agree.
It’s about time organisations started building it, for the sakes’ of their employees but also to ensure their own longevity. Community sustains us all.
The Weight
Whilst we’re on the subject of mental health, my mate Antony Malmo shared a fascinating article about workplace suicide (Antony also shared the article mentioned above and is well-worth a follow on LinkedIn if you’re interested in mental health matters).
It’s an interview with Professor Sarah Waters, a suicide researcher, in which she states
“….If we reduce suicide to a mental health problem that is located in the mind, then there is no need to question the wider social structures and power relationships in which the individual is embedded. Suicide in my view is a political and a societal problem that is shaped by the wider social forces of which the individual forms part….”
As Jeffery Pfeffer told us in his book ‘Dying For A Paycheck’, the modern work environment is killing us. It pushes people into poor physical and mental health (it’s not their fault, it’s the system, people!) and in some cases it ends with suicide. Is this the fault of neoliberalism? More from Prof. Waters
“Work-related suicides have risen globally at a time of deteriorating working conditions linked to neoliberalism. There’s something about changing conditions of work over the past 20 to 30 years which is causing people trauma and placing unprecedented pressure on people’s mental health.
There has been a rise in precarious work, work has become more unstable and no longer provides people with security and a place in society. Work has become more intense, with long hours and tougher demands. Digital work means we’re constantly switched on, we’re expected to work all the time. So, there’s a whole series of complex factors, which have placed huge pressures on mental health, which explain why work-related suicides are on the rise and why they’re on the rise now, at this particular moment in time.”
So that’s a yes, it’s not the sole factor but it’s a big one (it’s one of my ‘Forces of Crapification’, so I’m inclined to agree with her). She goes on to say
“I believe work-related suicides are a response to economic conditions that make life unbearable for some people, but they also reflect a collapse of the means to express dissent in the face of these conditions. So, yes suicides partly reflect a decline of trade unionism and of collective channels to articulate protest in my view. Suicide is a desperate last resort by someone who feels powerless and disenfranchised, where violence that might otherwise be mediated by external collective structures, is internalised by the person.”
As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, politics is very much part of the conversation about business and work. Politics is about choices and those choices directly impact our daily lives and the environments we find ourselves in. Part of the neoliberal ideology is the attacks on trade unions and the reduction in employee protections.
As this has unfolded, and partly as a consequence, we have normalised violence as part of business and work. Charles Rotjman defines four types of violence:
Mistreatment
Humiliation
Abandonment or Indifference
Guilt-tripping or Victimhood
Although he works in conflict resolution at a social and political level, we experience and observe these in the workplace on a regular, if not daily, basis. They are woven into the lived experience of many in employment.
I consider redundancy to be an everyday brutality that is inflicted on many and yet it is seen as normal business practice, sanitised with euphemisms like ‘down-sizing’ and ‘right-sizing’. In my youth, it was a rare occurrence, something businesses sought to avoid. Now it’s become an annual event, a tactic to artificially pump up results to preserve executive bonuses.
It’s doing untold, unmeasured and unjustified harm. People who have been made redundant suffer from a significant and long-term loss of trust, a loss of the belief that ‘things will work out in the end’, in the fundamental benevolence of the world and humanity.
And some pay the ultimate price.
Decrapify Work or Die. It’s not just an empty slogan. It’s time to stop the violence, for all our sakes.
Straight Down The Middle
Well, as you may have noticed, this missive didn’t get finished on Friday. I went and played golf with some friends instead. Exercise, out in nature, connection - just what I needed. I felt much better for it and I’m in a better place to engage with the coming week.
We know what’s good for us but we don’t always make sure we get it. Sometime, you just have to be a bit selfish and fill up the well again, so it’s good and full for the next time you need to draw on it to help others.
If anything in this newsletter has struck a chord and you feel like you’d like to talk about it, please get in touch. If it’s raised difficult feelings, The Samaritans are always there on 116 123 (in the UK)
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