"Abuse of Our Employees Won’t Be Tolerated!" (Unless We Inflict It)

There are so many things left undone as part of the Human Debt? that it is not surprising that even the best-intentioned of enterprises never manage to get to them. The trouble is that while they don’t, while these things are not being picked up, thought of, and worked on, people are suffering at work.?

Yes, “suffering”, this isn’t a stretch or overly dramatic term and while yes, having a job altogether is a privilege not everyone has access to and while yes, being burned-out, anxious or depressed in the workplace is seen as a bit of a champagne-problem, nothing could be further from the truth.?

Disengaged employees cost money. They can also cost lives. This is not news to anyone and yet we live in a world where we let this slide so far behind that a simple “hello” from one’s boss makes a difference. Isn’t that outrageous?

If you read this from the UK, you would have noticed the many “do not abuse our staff” warnings that have started with public transport a couple of years ago and extended to all governmental institutions and are now even permeating private enterprise and helplines mention how we the consumers ought to be nice and not mistreat their staff.?

Such an ironic protective measure when the ones doing most of the mistreating are the enterprises themselves. It’s simply a matter of definition whether you think the low-level psychological warfare and the lack of deep care and respect are seen as abuse or not and when it comes to the workplace, they aren’t, because we don’t think we deserve more.?

In any other walk of life or relationship, if we were around people who actively did not have any real dialogue with us and largely ignored us, minimised our problems, called us “difficult”, “too emotional” or “dramatic” or who didn’t let us voice our opinions and we felt threatened and fearful around them, where we believed that if we were open there could be retribution and where our lack of emotional investment in the relationship wouldn’t matter at all, we wouldn't still be expected to show up and pretend all is well. We would not stand for it, would we??

If we wouldn’t stand for that treatment from a life partner or a friend, or group of acquaintances, why do we from our employer?

Because they pay us money and we need them.

So we don’t speak up and we don’t leave. Much like a battered spouse in a single-earner family.?

This is the sad and unpleasant truth of the matter - we allow ourselves to be in a low-key abusive relationship with our employers that don’t value us; don’t care if we feel good or not; don’t ask how we really do feel anyhow; don’t concern themselves with our emotional wellbeing and our joy and happiness; and never stop to give us what we really need. We do that because we believe that being self-respecting and demanding of what would make our lives easier, is a privilege we have traded for cash. That our remuneration pays for the dread, the occasional humiliation, for the biting of our tongue to stay silent when we disagree or see an injustice, for the burnout, the bouts of depression and the everyday hardship.?

We have come to believe that the paycheck is really for the frustration and the pain more than it is for our skills and contribution to outcomes.?

All of the instances above fall under abuse by neglect, but let’s face it, there is plenty of active abuse too. There’s ill-intentioned snickering, there’s insensitivity, there’s lack of empathy, there’s straight-up bullying.?

Plenty of those micro-aggression moments every day that employees have learned to put up with. When they are dismissed. Or silenced. Or frightened. Or made to feel small or silly. Or idealistic. So many ways in which we lower our gaze and hang our heads when really the ones making us feel this way should.?

And then there’s maybe the highest form of abuse in the knowledge economy - command and control as a way to drive business. The audacity of the fact that it was ever believed that in exchange for money, adults should take direct, unquestioned and brusque instructions and orders then be checked on and watched relentlessly and then held accountable and questioned at regular intervals with the threat of reprimand or even termination hanging over them, is absolutely shocking and yet that’s where we are. That is what countless management courses practically advised and what generations of middle managers and so-called leaders, were being asked to do and in turn, being compensated for.?

I bet many reading this have already dismissed it as overly dramatic and un-LinkedIn-like because let’s face it, we are intent to keep this place sanitised with the version of “professionalism” that keeps us away from the big and hard themes of the people work but I am pleased to see that more and more conversation on here seems to finally have moved from “let’s be human and talk about human things” to real themes of “this is who I am” whether it is to outline the experience of minorities or that of the suffering-at-work majorities too. Authenticity. The more personal and true LinkedIn gets, the blurrier the lines between “work-life” and “personal life” and removing those artificial and frankly fake barriers can only mean the beginning of true dialogue which is amazing.?

Change is truly starting to become real now that we know we have to see it happen. Just look at these leadership courses teaching future business people that the abuse isn’t ok and instead they need to do the people work and learn about their emotions and the emotions of others so that they can be happy at work themselves and therefore they can lead by inspiring not by abusing and terrorising.?

Come back tomorrow to hear us talk about what you can do to double-check you’re not adding to the Human Debt??yourself.

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The 3 “commandments of Psychological Safety” to build high performing teams are:?Understand,?Measure?and?Improve

At?PeopleNotTech?we make?software?that measures and improves Psychological Safety in teams. If you care about it- talk to us?about a demo?at?[email protected]??

To order the "People Before Tech: The Importance of Psychological Safety and Teamwork in the Digital Age" book go to this Amazon?link