Linked – Why Workplace Well-Being Programs Don’t Achieve Better Outcomes
Well-being programs place the responsibility for managing employee mental health in the hands of the employees, who have no power to change the things causing the problem.
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Shared Links (weekly) Oct. 27, 2024
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Linked – You Can’t Make Friends With The Rockstars
That seems to be what happens in the tech journalism space. We have a list of people who’ve created successful companies and made a ton of money doing it, and everyone is supposed to assume that they are so bright they can do it over and over again. Then we are surprised when Elon buys Twitter and runs it into the ground or when Meta can’t find a market for the Metaverse. Microsoft spends billions upon billions of dollars on AI without any hope of making a profit for years while conducting rounds of layoffs to offset those costs. We assume they know what they’re doing because they’ve succeeded in other markets before, and the press doesn’t challenge them when they say provably false things.
It’s the Halo Effect. We assume that successful people are smart and kind and live healthy lives, especially if they are white men. When they contradict this picture we’ve painted, we loathe to admit it, let alone call it out in an interview. It’s more cognitively comfortable for us to continue believing they are competent and will figure it out.
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Linked – Changing the eDiscovery Burnout Blueprint: Practical Solutions to Address Failing Mental Wellness in the eDiscovery Industry
It’s great that someone is putting it all in writing with research. Still, until the collective response to our stories about dropping out of a wedding to pop open our laptop is “that’s not acceptable,” we will have this issue. We should reconsider the tales of all-nighters, working from vacations, and extraordinary efforts to get eDiscovery work done in time. Instead of wearing them like badges of honor, we should think of them as exploitation. What else would you call the expectation that you are available to respond 24/7, and when you sacrifice much of your personal and family life to meet that expectation, you are rewarded with a 2% raise at the end of the year?
Because as long as that is the job, mental health is going to be an issue.
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Shared Links (weekly) Oct. 20, 2024
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Linked – Time to Talk About Emotional Labor
Words about your workplace’s great culture ring hollow when team members regularly find themselves putting up with jerks. That’s not a great culture. That’s extra emotional labor—labor that likely doesn’t come close to matching what they are paid.
We don’t talk about this in terms of emotional labor. We talk about being resilient, staying composed, etc. We don’t talk about how exhausting it is to know that every day at work, someone is likely to yell at you, let alone know that when it happens, there will be no solution to prevent it from happening again. If they take the time to complain and ask for a solution, they’ll be told it’s “just part of the job.”
