I recently had a most illuminating conversation on the topic of diversity. The conversation involved a very common work problem – the employee in question had been feeling (and objectively was) overburdened for quite some time. For a while, they tried to bear this burden in silence; finally, they gathered courage to speak up when the amount of work threatened to become so utterly unmanageable as to threaten the efficacy of the company in question. After a brief interlude of uncertainty as to what to do with this new information, their work colleagues and management began to strive to reduce this amount of work by becoming more conscientious about what they could do themselves. In the past, random tasks would have landed on this employee on top of all they had to do as well; now, the rest of the office was finally recognising the way this was affecting the stricken colleague and began to consider what they should do anyhow (vs pushing it onto someone else’s shoulders), what they could pick up to help out (including learning new skills to do so, which is a win for everyone, and taking up aforementioned random tasks) and also began to consider that “busy” isn’t the same for everyone – it is complex and personal on top of the objective amount of work on any given day.
The result, initially, was good… you could say that it was a true step in the right direction.
But there was a snag. Not far down the line of this new development, the stricken employee began to feel anxious that they were no longer seen as needed.
What “busy” means varies enormously from situation to situation. We use “busy” to present our worth; people who are “good”, socially acceptable, do work, and do a lot of it – therefore, being busy is showing that we are a valuable part of our society (Cassandra Dunn explores this in the article here). And while “busy” may definitely mean simply a workload, we often define whose “busy” is more important hierarchically – either we create a pyramid of “busy” by the perceived importance of tasks, jobs or people, or we deny the importance of recognising especially too great a workload by creating a rigid, homogenous perspective that everyone is busy and all busy is equal, which not only denies the factual amounts of work per individual or group (not to mention victim blames the people who complain or get burnout), but also devalues the efforts made by those who truly do have heavier or more demanding work and/or workloads. We do this simply because this kind of hierarchy (and yes, this is still a form of hierarchy) makes it impossible for someone else to be more “busy”, ie acceptable than ourselves.
This is a pretty typical set up for those situations where mental health isn’t even secondary to everything else, but is often ignored completely; societies, businesses and people who function this way tend to ignore it because they have been systematically taught that no mental health (including their own) matters. I have even spoken with and consulted with people who genuinely believed that mental health did not exist and was made up by people as an excuse to be lazy or for crimes.
In every single instance, the people involved in this conversation/consultation were themselves in fact showing multiple issues associated with mental health problems… but as they never paid attention to them, it was easy to pretend they did not exist, and easier still to create a vicious circle of blame game with a scapegoat for when they failed, acted out because of these repressed mental health issues, or in fact simply to demonstrate their acceptability by picking on an Other.
The employee in this case already had an extant anxiety due to bad abuse related experiences, which made them more reclusive and less likely to speak up, as they tended not to want to draw attention to themselves, predominantly because they had already experienced victim blaming and disbelief before, and did not want to do so again. None of us come into any work situation without some form of life experience, and for all too many of us, if you consider stats on all kinds of interpersonal violence, this will sadly include things that will have shaped our mental health for at least a good long while, even if not for ever.
For others, the experiences may be so scarring that recovery will never be complete; this does not, however, mean that they cannot be a highly functioning individual and a brilliant asset to their workplace.
It does, however, come with the likelihood that these people will be less ready to speak up where all kinds of things are concerned, and this includes work overload. Additionally, the possibility of negative self-perception, fear of what others may think and perhaps some extant experience at the current workplace where their hesitant attempts to point out that they were being legitimately overworked were dismissed already (thus making them fret about what people think about them where acceptability is concerned), will make the steps needed to resolve the matter far less likely and far more difficult.
Even without pre-existing mental health issues, becoming worried about being considered unnecessary and expendable or interchangeable may pop up with alarming ease in situations like the one described at the start of this article. Consider this – the person in question was constantly overworked, dismissed and told “everyone was busy”. Thus, both their efforts to cope, their efforts at work in general and their concerns, which touched not only their own well-being, but also the well-being of the company in question and other co-workers, who were ultimately also affected by tasks going too slowly due to too large a workload (which in turn had the potential to affect the business flow and thus the company), were continuously dismissed and devalued.
When the change finally happened, it came more as a shock than not; and it quickly grew into an anxious feeling that they were now, in some way, excluded and devalued further, something that would not have happened in an environment willing to take these concerns seriously and make an effort to deal with the problem early on.
This story represents more than just a single case. Cases like this crop up often and are rarely fully resolved; employees may find it easier to ultimately leave, even if it seems like the matter was resolved (same can be true of reluctant approach to resolving any form of bullying). So what are the solutions? What can you do to avoid recreating this scenario?
The chief thing to consider – much like with all matters of diversity, equity, inclusion and human rights at work – is the unconscious bias. That ranks even above all kinds of observations of the work environment, because, unless we learn to truly see what we’re looking at (which, admittedly, comes easier to a trained anthropologist like myself), we may literally miss that which we really need to spot.
Diversity training in itself may not be enough, especially if it focuses too little on predictable issues, such as gender, race etc.. While these matters can definitely feature in why someone is not being heard, as well as company culture issues, the subtler, even less visible perceptions of what counts as “good” when it comes to work can be both pervasive and intersectional, and thus require special attention.
Perfect work environment doesn’t happen by accident. It requires some thought and care. The good news is we’re all capable of this, and the better news is that we can help each other learn how to spot things that need change.