Few people are as immersed in our work anxieties and tricky office politics as Alison Green, who has been answering workplace questions for a decade now on her website Ask a Manager. In Direct reportshe highlights themes from her inbox that help explain the modern workplace and how we might better navigate it.
Since the start of the pandemic, employers have increasingly jumped on the self-care bandwagon by reminding employees to take time to care for themselves, sending them tips on incorporating yoga or mindfulness in their days, and sometimes even reserving work time for themselves. -group care practices. It’s not hard to understand why employers are suddenly so interested in the topic: stress levels skyrocketed last year, and for many people, they never came back down.
But it can be difficult to view these gestures as genuine, given that the same employers often expect their employees to work too many hours without a break, discourage them from taking real time off, and ignore stressors in the workplace. lives of their employees, such as lack of children. worry about not earning a decent salary.
This person who wrote to me describes a fairly typical experience with a deaf employer:
My toxic, dysfunctional employer hired a consultant (after making layoffs!) to come and talk to us about self-care and how to be more resilient. As if it’s our fault, we’re unhappy because we just haven’t done enough mindfulness, yoga, bubble baths, therapy or whatever to make up for the fact that our working conditions are terrible and that we are experiencing a pandemic.
Unfortunately, the need for self-care often places additional time demands on employees while preventing them from doing the work that could actually relieve some of their stress. A high school teacher describe what is happening in his school:
Everything about education has had to be radically adapted over the past year and many of us are still struggling to keep up with ever-changing expectations, combined with our own family crises. My new manager sends daily emails dripping with toxic positivity, such as pointing out the beautiful weather we should be grateful for or encouraging us to take time to take care of ourselves. These instructions start to feel more like additional responsibilities, especially when coupled with “here are three articles I thought you would all like to read before tomorrow’s staff meeting.” I kind of understand that she’s trying to keep our spirits up, but honestly, most of us would rather not receive an email like that at all. It’s just one more thing to see in the inbox and read, you know?
During staff meetings, we are spread out in Zoom breakout rooms to share ideas about self-care, while we prefer to discuss professional things like concerns about some students’ progress (face-to-face discussions with colleagues, even remote ones, are much more valuable than email for this sort of thing), so we feel like it’s wasting and disrespecting our time.
Employers also do not seem to have considered that their mental health initiatives could actually be bad For a few of the mental health of their employees:
My boss started asking us to share thoughts about mental health as an icebreaker during mandatory meetings in the name of “breaking the stigma around mental health.” …Usually I deflect by saying something relatively generic about limiting my social media use. However, it is becoming more and more common and the people who jump in first set the tone by going all-in and sharing very personal details about medications and therapy. This creates a lot of implicit pressure to share something so personal.
In addition to finding it uncomfortable, I notice that these sharing sessions are detrimental to my mental health. …Work is by far the biggest stress in my life because the organization is not well managed, roles/assignments are unclear and some staff clearly work harder than others and no one is never held responsible for its lack of production. …I have suffered a lot from insomnia which is often triggered by frustrations at work, so to protect my mental health I have worked on creating a mental wall where I ignore what everyone else is or isn’t doing, with the exception of my direct reports and focus. to do a good job on my own projects. These “mental health sharing sessions” break down that (unfortunately fragile) wall and I end up dwelling on negative thoughts and feelings again, often leading to insomnia that night, because when I really think what I need for my mental health, I re-examine all the frustrations of the office.
If you think this sounds terribly intrusive at work: it is. If you think individual managers gone rogue might be responsible… no. Some of them initiatives are at the company level:
My company recently announced that it would offer wellness benefits. They didn’t give any details in the announcement, and I assumed it would be something like discounted gym memberships or healthy office snacks.
Instead, I received a message from a consultant about scheduling a one-on-one meeting to discuss my well-being, during which we would discuss the following areas of my life:
• Physical: your health and energy
• Emotional – your mental and spiritual side
• Social – your relationships
• Career – loving what you do every day
• Financial: manage your money
• Community – engagement with the world at large
• Creative: expressing your true self
It seemed oddly invasive and a huge overstep of workplace boundaries. There is no reason why my employer needs to know anything about my emotional or spiritual well-being. I already have a doctor, therapist, and financial advisor, so I responded and politely declined the benefit.
Additionally, the drive to reflect and care for oneself is often remarkably disconnected from the realities of the world. the lives of employees:
I have a disability, I work an extremely demanding job that has only become more demanding during the pandemic (I’m a public defender), and I have a disabled 4 year old who never sleeps. Our society simply needs to accept that “self-care” (whatever that means) is simply not accessible to many people. The last thing I need is to feel guilty and ashamed for not taking care of myself enough. I already know I’m dropping balls left and right.
Perhaps what’s most frustrating about the lip service when it comes to self-care in the workplace is that employers who embrace it often don’t do the things they could actually do to improving the lives and mental health of employees, such as providing good health insurance, reasonable workloads, and plenty of vacation time. time. These are things they’re uniquely positioned to offer…but it’s easier (read: cheaper) to email about yoga or bubble. thermal baths.
