The workplace fight worth having
Photo by Pixabay.
Please hold. Your call is important to us. We are experiencing higher-than-normal call volumes.
The muffled cellphone is counting down the calls ahead of us on line. It's been about forty minutes and, so far, we've gone from five ahead to four.
It takes about an hour to get someone on the phone and she's very sorry but she can't help. She understands the situation but there's nothing they can do. It's company policy.
Our 8-year-old needs to retake a swim session. They showed up and worked hard but for reasons outside of anyone's control, we had to pull them for the last few lessons. A family emergency. Well, technically, it was three family emergencies that happened to be remarkably well-timed.
In the midst of everything, getting to swim class every week was the ball that could drop. So it was the one that did. And while the community center understands what happened, they don't have a system to let us re-enroll the kid in the same class. We have to sign up like a brand new kid. Even though this particular pool has known this particular kiddo since they were in diapers.
Your policy stinks
We are part of what the media has been calling "the sandwich generation." Parents of kids young enough to have a significant and ongoing set of caretaking needs. And kids of parents (and extended families) with a growing set of caretaking needs. The press finds this newsworthy. Not because caring for aging parents is some new invention. It isn't. But because a post-war baby boom means the number of folks who need support has outpaced the number of relatives available to provide it.
Even outside of a sandwich structure, we're hearing from so many folks who are doing the big, heavy lift of caretaking. For partners, for chosen family, and often for themselves. We're collectively on our seventh iteration of pandemic re-emergence and all trying to figure out what feels good, what suits us. Staring down yet another round of big changes. And still trying to find solid footing where little seems to be on offer.
It's not lost on us — we're incredibly lucky to run our own business. And when concurrent crises meant we needed to drop everything, we were mostly able to. That flexibility always matters. But in the past six months, it has mattered extra much. It's not surprising that, when asked about what they want in a job, so many people point to flexibility. It's often viewed as a super-perk — one that matters more than all the others put together.
So ok. On the one hand, we can anticipate that the bulk of the workforce is about to get pulled in several emergency-prone directions at once. And on the other, we have good signal that people value flexibility, even when they're not in the midst of a crisis. If you manage large teams, these two things are about to collide. It's possible they already have.
Because it's one thing to be understanding when someone has several family emergencies come up all at once. And it's another thing entirely to have policies and structures and managers that anticipate it. One is telling people to stand in a doorway or duck under a desk when the earth rumbles. And the other is designing a building that sways.
Work makes things weird
The obvious first question you want to ask, any time a colleague is dealing with some kind of crisis, is "how can we help?" It's a normal, human instinct we have for neighbours and family and friends, and at first blush it sounds plausible that it should extend to the people we spend half our waking lives with. It's not hard, right? This is basic empathy, courtesy, decency shit and many people have it figured out by the time they turn eight.
But work can make so many things weird, if you let it.
There are power dynamics at work. Yours with your team if you have a management role, and with your own boss if you mess this up or need to escalate it. You want to be helpful but also respect boundaries. You want to understand, but not to pry. It's important to be supportive, but also to be equitable. And through it all, Jared keeps going on about how people are too woke and should leave their feelings at the door and like, obviously fuck Jared but also it's just a lot, you know? This whole disaster isn't even on your list of Q2 OKRs.
In an effort to stop this from spiralling completely, you look for consistency. "Do we already have a policy or something in place, here?" This is, in general, a good question that managers should ask more often. Life happens, and over time most orgs will tend to accrete a set of policies to give consistent treatment to those happenings. If your org is more than 20 people, there are probably policies in place that you don't even know about. If it's more than 100 people, there definitely are. Finding a person in crisis a great answer — a leave, a reduction in hours, a supplemental benefit they didn't know about — that is already pre-approved and ready to go? That's management gold. That's the good stuff.
But sometimes there won't be a policy to find. And, worse, sometimes there will be a policy that's entirely unequal to the situation your person is confronting. They are dealing with something much heavier than the policy anticipates, the freight is not proportioned to the groove. And now what do you do?
The tension between policy and grace
What we often do, what the generalized management "we" often do, is quote the policy and sort of shrug. We can only give you two days off, shrug. We don't have a program for that, frownyface. We ask our people to be transparent, tell them that we want a culture where they can feel safe to have struggles and life outside of work. But when real shit goes down, and falls outside of the supports we already have, management has a nasty habit of going fully passive.
And then things go from bad to worse. When people get upset about the piss-poor answer they receive to the transparency they were asked for, they get flagged. Uppity. Ungrateful. A developing performance issue. Disengaged. Damaged goods. This management inversion of "I am out of alignment with my values and it's your fault" is a profoundly predictable one, but that doesn't help if you're the one wearing a new PIP.
It doesn't have to be this way. We have worked in organizations whose leaders fought hard, for years, over the right rendering engine to use for a mobile app. Fights over sales collateral, fights over offsite destinations, fights over seating plans. It frankly gets a little tiring — work doesn't have to be a series of fights. But what we'd say to you is that if there's a place to fight in your organization, it's on the same side as your people who are struggling. To be the one who says, "I really don't think this is good enough." So that your person, in the midst of whatever they're dealing with, doesn't have to do that alone.
Work makes things weird but it's startling how quickly you can reactivate the 8-year-old empathy circuits, just by being a second voice arguing for grace. Most people show up wanting to do a good job, to feel proud of their work, to feel like they take care of each other. Policy can be a tool for that care when it's built thoughtfully, and when it evolves with the needs of your people. Or it can be a passive, shitty reason not to.
The building can sway or the building can crack. It's up to you.