"It's Not Worth It": Until We Change Work, Nothing Else Will Change

Three things that I believe are converging to change the nature of work right now are

• Women Telling the Truth
• Corporate Work Culture Revealed
• Pandemic Awareness

Here's what I mean:

Women telling the truth about their lives certainly rose as we got online and began blogging and joining Facebook groups 15 or so years ago, and the rise of mass sharing of the challenges of womanhood, work life and motherhood began. It also highlighted some frequently underdiscussed topics, including mental health challenges, household division of labor inequities, sexism at work, chronic illnesses and the illusion of work/life balance.

However, the ability to share and find ratcheted up on social media, and women were able to see both sides of how other women lived. The polished social media posts and staged-color-coordinated-professional-family photos and the illusion that everyone's life is just peachy -- increased the pressure. (Even as Martha Stewart faded as the feminine domestic omnimedia icon, others replaced her and the competitive woman/wife/mother race continued...)

But the positive part was that women found ways to connect and realize that they are not alone. They shared the anxiety of trying to get pregnant, or frustration with their work colleagues not pulling their weight, the hurdles of finding child care or not going back to work. Dealing with a school day that's not aligned with full-time work schedules and the erratic calendar of parenting. Being the default parent while trying to juggle ever-increasing workloads. These came to the surface and women began to see that it wasn't about their own personal inability to manage them, but a culture that expects women to do everything, do it well, smile and be pretty and pretend it's effortless. (It's actually quite effortFULL!)

Which leads to corporate work culture revealed, in which we see how capitalism has tricked people into believing that it's their fault they aren't succeeding. They are lazy or apathetic or stupid because they can't fit two and a half full-time jobs into one work week. The under-resourcing of white collar corporate jobs at the management and entry-level is rampant, and the "pay your dues" culture is at an end, due to both Gen X workers getting older and seeing into the top levels of management, and the Millennials' refusal to wait their turn to do meaningful work and be compensated fairly. It doesn't take long to get fed up with being punished for errors or project delays when people are understaffed, don't have the tools they need, are working under intense stress and there's no end in sight.

The concept of paying your dues now so you can be successful later is a Baby Boomer favorite, and the uncovering of how privileged this concept is happened because of questions from the generations that followed. They watched those same Boomers get laid off, get screwed out of their pensions, deal with outrageous health care costs while dealing with health conditions tied directly to the work that they sacrificed to do...so they could pay their dues. It doesn't add up to "worth it" in most cases, particularly not in the "what are you going to do with your one wild and precious life" times.

People thought they could work hard now and have a leisurely retirement later. When the veil was lifted, the rest of us worker bees took notice. Companies are currently loudly complaining about the disloyalty of employees, but many companies stopped investing in their people first. This is a natural consequence of that behavior, and tone-deaf on their part.

It's a cynical look, but I'll say that no matter the size of the company I worked, I found examples that the management doesn't care about investing in the team, they want to get as much work out of you as they can for the lowest cost. So, many of us did the logical thing and began negotiating on behalf of our own interests. I became empowered by being a consultant and negotiating everything -- because I truly believe that "other duties as assigned" is one of the great abuses of the corporate world.

The pandemic also shone a light on how much companies "cared" when there was a crisis -- who was taken care of? What did leadership look like? What did safety mean? How nimble were they? Was the organization built on trust or micromanagement? How "family friendly" was the culture for virtual learning families? Who directed from their computers and who went out in to the world, masked and ready to serve?

The Great Resignation is happening because we saw the practical ways that our work impacted our lives and had to decide whether that was working for us or not. Life is not just work, and work choices abound.

There was a time when people thought that work success would make them happy, by giving them a purpose and an identity and that they could afford the things that make them happy. People thought that having more power would earn them respect or the trappings of a good life. In the conversation about anti-goals, Andrew Wilkinson lays out how we've come to realize that how we feel on the inside matters more than we thought. If we want to avoid lives full of obligations and dealing with people we don't trust and packed calendars that destroy our health and our family relationships -- it's not worth it.

Pandemic awareness is the term I use for the realization that all of the things we may have accepted as normal were suddenly different, and that helped us see in new ways. Where were we spending our time and was that productive? How easily could systems be changed when necessary? Who had personal capital and who was a seat filler? What jobs are essential and necessary and which jobs are just people moving money around?

I've worked with health care organizations throughout the pandemic, and the tone-deafness reached remarkable peaks with emergency department staff being offered candy bars to pick up more shifts, signs about "Heroes Work Here" being posted without real help and nurses who complained about overtime getting a pizza party from management.

And throwing back to the first note -- the predominantly female workforce of nurses and teachers found out just how much people appreciate their work. (Hint: their behavior indicates that they don't.) The leveraging of the concept of vocation, and women's socialization to go the extra mile for their students or patients is hitting the end of the road. When you are asked to do extraordinary work and risk your own personal health but the people who need you cannot find the funds to pay you anything additional, you see that it might be time to be "more realistic." Brace yourself for the effects of more than 300,000 teachers leaving the workforce. And for nurses furthering their careers and becoming advanced practitioners and physicians, while the caring tasks fall to (mostly female) family members.

But also people are starting new businesses, working contracts, saying no to projects -- in large part due to their pandemic awareness. The refrain: "It's just not worth it." As a person who worked her way through college at restaurants, I explained recently to one of my children about the hours I worked for tips, with demanding people and the physical strain of long hours and being on my feet. But for me, it was worth it then, as a young person in busy places where I could make the cash I needed in a short amount of time. This is not the case now and I don't blame anyone for choosing a safer, less demanding, better paid job.

The worker shortage is going to get worse until we fundamentally change work. This can be a great asset for companies willing to change their structure. Reimagining what it looks like to be an effective company in 2022. Where you create a culture that is appealing and doesn't assume everyone's dream is to climb an imaginary corporate ladder. A great panel hosted by Rebelle featured women who made big life changes during the pandemic and one of the themes that emerged was..."it was my goal for as long as I could remember to achieve conventional success in the corporate world...but now I can't remember why I wanted that." So they stopped, they put it down, they re-imagined it and now...things are changing.

The market for talent will be increasingly competitive. This is done by earning loyalty and promoting team member's well-being and (I cannot stress this enough) fair compensation. Not lip service to women's initiatives, nor Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in words only, not forced staff conviviality -- but a complete overhaul of what it means to be a team of people working together for a meaningful goal: a company that will last.

Here's the TikTok that inspired me to write this, thanks to @clarestevens1.

*Disclaimer: I acknowledge my privilege here as a white ciswoman with a college education and know that the additional challenges faced by women of color in the situations I've named above far exceeds my own challenges.