I think another way to understand this is our cultural obsession with “what you do” being the defacto representation of “who we are,” meaning that when we stop working, it can be detrimental to our mental health. After all, if you’ve spent 35-40 years identifying yourself as a lawyer, what will you be when you stop working as a lawyer?
It’s not about creating a great product for customers, and it’s not about creating a sustainable, profitable company. It’s about jacking the stock price and getting out with your profits.
Is it any wonder employees don’t give AF?
It’s December, and the number of organizations conducting layoffs keeps growing. It’s been a never-ending cycle of layoffs. Let’s not kid ourselves and assume that everyone is feeling OK about that. Let’s not ignore the mental health elephant in the room, let alone the damage to workplace culture. And let’s also acknowledge that leaders who have conducted any layoffs do not get the benefit of the doubt regarding trust. There’s simply no reason to trust you.
We measure what people watch because it’s easy. Then we make that the stand-in for the information we need to know, why they stay subscribers. Why they subscribe is a more complicated question, but it’s the question that matters if you’re selling subscriptions.
Bosses, ask yourself the question. Is this a safe place for people to talk about their mental health? If it’s not, what can you do to change that? The article above has some advice for you. Maybe it all comes down to the kind of people who work for you and the behavior that you tolerate. If someone is honest about their mental health struggles and then you allow them to be stigmatized by others, it’s not a safe place.
And if it’s not a safe place, your wellbeing program doesn’t matter.
Imagine, if you will, your smart TV or home assistant listening in on conversations you’ve been having about layoffs in your industry, and that data is shared with a financial institution that then decides that you’re not a good credit risk. The AI took that conversation and combined it with a ton of financial information from other people who work in your industry and made that call. Is it accurate? Probably not, but when you start grabbing data from all over the place and building these huge algorithmic models, things can get a little messy. You become less of an individual and more of a conglomeration of all the people who do things like you, and when you add in a little spying, that can lead to all sorts of disastrous consequences.
Do we want governments and corporations to have that much power? No, but as Bruce rightly points out, we haven’t done much of anything to stop them from taking it so far.