Linked – Mental Health At Work: How To Dodge OOO Anxiety

Linked – Mental Health At Work: How To Dodge OOO Anxiety

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

More importantly, consider what you communicate in your actions when someone does take PTO. Does everyone on the team email them while they are out so they can get a response as soon as they are back? Do you cram in a bunch of meetings or work they need to do before leaving?

Do you think this helps them feel less stressed?

It’s much more likely that they’ll take PTO but not get any benefits from being away from work. That’s missing the point entirely.

Is Your Organization “Well-being Washing”?
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Is Your Organization “Well-being Washing”?

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

I’ve heard of companies “green-washing” talking a good game about their work on climate change while also continuing to be a large contributor to it, but in the area of wellbeing, this was a new one. Except, it isn’t a new idea. This study asked employees at UK companies if the public statements about mental health and employee support match what is happening within the company itself. Many said that the public supportiveness did not match the internal work culture. That’s not anything new. I think we have all worked somewhere or have heard plenty of stories about workplaces where the public face of the company or even the internal HR face talks quite a lot about how much they focus on employee wellness but apparently, no one told the middle managers about it.

Quiet Quitting isn’t New, Caregivers Have Always Had To

Quiet Quitting isn’t New, Caregivers Have Always Had To

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 3 minutes

Herein lies the problem that many of our younger employees see and refuse to play along with. Why should our choices be between making a comfortable wage and living outside of work? Why do we live in a world where we have to “quit” being engaged in our work or decide against fully engaging in our families and communities? Moms have had to make this choice for years. Be a good mom and care for your children by lessening your career opportunities, or be a bad mom and focus on your career.

Why is that the choice?

I see article after article talking about the “loss” of productivity to companies when employees are not fully engaged. Still, no one ever calculates the loss in our communities from people who contribute nothing outside of their job. We don’t put a number on the damage done when fathers are uninvolved in kids’ lives or on the missed mental health benefits of being involved in hobbies, friendships, and community groups.

Quick Thought – Work Culture is So Bad that We Use the Word Quitting to Describe Setting Boundaries.

Quick Thought – Work Culture is So Bad that We Use the Word Quitting to Describe Setting Boundaries.

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

They are setting boundaries. They are cutting back on their commitment and engagement with work because they see that work is not the most important thing in life. They make decisions based on their mental health instead of the company’s bottom line.

No one is leaving their job in this situation. No one is not doing their work. They are simply not taking on extra work and commitments that they aren’t getting paid for.

Our society’s relationship with work is so skewed that the word we have chosen for this is “quitting”. There’s something profoundly sad about that.

Linked – Hybrid Work Is Just Work. Are We Doing It Wrong?

Linked – Hybrid Work Is Just Work. Are We Doing It Wrong?

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

People want to grow. They want to learn, and they want to develop the skills necessary to remain relevant in industries that are going through constant change. You can provide them with opportunities, or they will go somewhere else to do those things. Those are genuinely your only options. Change happens way too fast now for you to sit back and not help your people change with the times. Career stagnation is career death.

Linked – Why public chats are better than direct messages

Linked – Why public chats are better than direct messages

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

But, here it the real world, this doesn’t always work out very well. You really need the culture to be one where everyone is used to working asynchronously and checking the public channel for chances to help out the team. It sounds like that is both the expectation and the reality at this company but for a lot of us the reality is very different. Posting something in a public channel where no one gets a notification that a message is being posted generally means no one sees it. So we go back to using private channels or tagging people in the public channel in order so that we purposefully interrupt them. We haven’t developed a culture where asynchronous communication works and I suspect it’s because we don’t really want it. We want people to respond to us now. We don’t trust them to get back later and, to be fair, we don’t give our peers reason to trust us because we spend all of our time putting out fires and frequently forget to get back to people.

In many cases, it’s a humblebrag. “Oh I saw your message but then I got involved in important things because I’m an important person and never got back to you”.