Worth Reading – Poor mental health is driving young people out of their jobs. My own journey showed me how to help
I think young people trying to change the workplace are on to something:
The UK has the highest percentage of workers globally who say they wouldn’t work at all if money were no object, with stressful working conditions cited as the main reason. There aren’t just bad apples – something is wrong with the way we organise our places of work. Since society individualises behaviour and managers’ or bosses’ flaws, there is no collective diagnosis for what’s going wrong or how to improve workplace culture and leadership, and raise the bar to a healthier level for what’s OK.
Young people are the first cohort to push back against this. They are demanding more from their workplace.
The UK is no different than the US regarding worker stress. Maybe fewer Americans would not work at all if money were no object, but the current labor environment is where you are going to be laid off eventually, no matter how much work you do. It’s incredibly stressful to work in America today. I suspect there are many workplaces where talking about your mental health struggles would only serve to get your name on the layoff list. Getting sick, needing to take time to care for family members, trying to maintain boundaries with work and home life, or anything else that impacts you outside of work will not matter.
Then, when the labor market pendulum swings back the other way and there aren’t enough qualified workers to fill the jobs that it turns out AI can’t do, these same workplaces will come out talking about how they’ve always supported worker mental health, they even have an EAP hotline for workers!
Could you not buy it for a second? If they aren’t doing it now, they don’t care. If they don’t care, you owe them nothing more than what your wages buy them. This is what young people in the workplace understand, and many of us who have been around are starting to see as well. We owe them nothing more than what they pay for. The rest of our lives belong to us.
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